Steve Noll
Carl Cawthorne (left) and Amy Welk in "A House Not Meant to Stand."
Carl Cawthorne (left) and Amy Welk in "A House Not Meant to Stand," Madison Public Theatre, 2025.
Tennessee Williams is well known for works from his early career, with hit plays and screen adaptations that brought him to the forefront of mid-century American theater. Williams’ work is such a cultural touchstone that even if you haven’t ever seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you likely can picture young movie star Elizabeth Taylor in her slip desperately trying to win the love of the football hero played by Paul Newman.
You’ve probably never heard of Williams’ play A House Not Meant to Stand. Staged for the first time just a year before the playwright’s 1983 death, and fewer than 15 times since, the play revisits some of the same character sketches and themes that haunted Williams for his entire life: the difficulties of living amid a stifling and dysfunctional southern family (and by extension, American society itself). There’s an overbearing father, a shrinking violet of a mother, a do-nothing adult son, a twisty family story of mental illness, and the echo of a transgender brother whose funeral has just occurred. There are secrets, threats, and judgment. So, why are Cat and Streetcar works of genius while this play languishes in obscurity?
At the end of Williams’ life, he was severely depressed and drug-addicted. Though he was still writing, his earlier spark of genius had waned. Madison Public Theatre is clearly proud to have been given the opportunity to stage this work, which is playing at the Bartell Theater through May 24.
The play opens with Cornelius (Carl Cawthorne) and Bella (Stephanie Monday) McCorkle returning home late at night from a trip to their son’s funeral. They are tired from the journey and it is pouring rain outside. Their home, formerly gracious, is now decaying. It is difficult to watch Cornelius’ blustering abuse of Bella and cruel judgement of their dead son’s life. As the play was written and set in the early 1980s, Cornelius claims that the son died of alcoholism, but perhaps Williams was making an early statement on the growing AIDS crisis.
All of the action occurs in the McCorkle home, its living room decorated (by scenic designer Dillon Sheehan and props designer Michelle Dayton) with aging and outdated decor. The fact that there are no fewer than 10 clocks among the furnishings in the small living and dining room at first seemed to a metaphor for the passage of time, but eventually a plot-based meaning to the timepieces is revealed.
We learn that the McCorkles' other son, Charlie (Michael Kelley), is already at home, upstairs entertaining his girlfriend Stacey (Megan Tennessen). (Why didn’t Charlie go to his brother’s funeral? We never find out.) Charlie is a layabout, a perennial disappointment to his parents. We also meet the neighbors, Jessie (Amy Welk) and Emerson (Erich Evered) Sykes, each classic Tennessee Williams archetypes: the aging sex-starved southern belle and her husband, who is not really a complete character but mostly just an old man led around by his primal urges.
All plays require some exposition. But this play contained so much that the characters often turn to the audience and break the fourth wall in long monologues, in order to tell us in detail what the playwright wanted us to know. It would have been helpful if the production design had used lighting or other effects to mark these episodes and distinguish them from the action of the play. Many of the characters’ essential personality traits also included long speechifying, making it even more difficult to distinguish when we were supposed to be suspending our disbelief.
The actors of A House Not Meant to Stand are clearly hard-working and take their craft seriously. Cawthorne as Cornelius is unlikable as he scratches for money and makes a desperate last bid for power in his life. Monday, as Bella, is hunched and browbeaten by a life with her loathsome husband. Tennessen, as Stacey, has a raucous soliloquy in Act II which is a delight to watch.
Director Julia Houck has a deep understanding of Tennessee Williams and has given us an opportunity to understand this great American playwright, who like a beautiful piece of stone, is not perfect but shot through with flaws that nevertheless contribute to the beauty.
