The eccentricities of a nightingale

The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale

Alma Winemiller, the primary character of this Tennessee Williams play, is a young woman and a singer who has acquired the nickname "The Nightingale of the Delta". Williams wrote and revised this play, "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale", over a lengthy period of time before its publication in 1965 and first performance in New York City in 1976. Edwin Sherin directed the production which starred Betsy Palmer as Alma and David Selby as Dr. John Buchanan, Jr. Each of the three acts of the play bears an evocative title:"The Feeling of a Singer", "The Tenderness of a Mother", and "A Cavalier's Plume".

This fragile play focuses on the development of Alma's character including her eccentricities. The play is set in Glorious Hill, a small fictitious Mississippi town of about 5,000 people, in the years just before WW I. Alma, the daughter of the town's Episcopalian minister and his delusional wife, has been trained as a singer and gives lessons in voice. Since childhood, Alma has been in love with the boy next door, John Buchanan. The son of a town physician, John has himself just graduated from medical school and faces a promising future. John returns to Glorious Hill for brief holidays on the Fourth of July and on Christmas. John's mother is clingingly protective of her son. She does not want him to become involved with Alma, whose feelings for John are all-too-apparent, due to the eccentricities of her character and due to certain unhappy events in Alma's family background developed during the course of the drama.

It is not only Mrs. Buchanan who has concerns over Alma's eccentricities. Alma's aging father, the Reverend Winemiller, has a long serious talk with his daughter about her emotional mannerisms when singing in public, about her intellectual and cultural interests, which separate her from most of the other people in Glorious Hill, and about her habit of feeding the birds daily in the town square. Alma also suffers from hysteria for which she takes medication. Reverend Winemiller tries to persuade his daughter to conform to the extent she is able to the mores of the small Southern town.

Alma's relationship with John is at the center of the play with many of the scenes consisting of intense dialogues between the two young people and failed lovers. They talk while celebrating Independence Day and on Christmas Eve in the minister's home. John is aware of the intensity of Alma's feelings, which he finds himself unable to return. Late Christmas Eve, Alma suffers from hysterical symptoms and seeks medical assistance from John. The couple attend a movie on New Year's Eve and have further intense conversations on a cold, snowy public square and in a hotel which rents rooms by the hour as Alma makes a passionate attempt to seduce John. The play concludes some years later as Alma returns to the hotel which rents rooms by the hour with a traveling salesman who pays for her services.

Williams' writing is full of lyricism and the settings are replete with symbolism as the play explores the frustrated, failed love of its protagonist and her subsequent fall and acceptance of life. Young Dr. Buchanan comes and goes from the scene to allow Williams to concentrate on his heroine, a frail, artistic, and creative woman destined to the life of an outsider and eccentric. In one of many important moments in the play, John says to Alma: "You should be proud of yourself. You know, you know, it's surprising how few people there are that dare in this world to say what is in their hearts." This poignantly romantic story of a lonely, failed woman has a lasting emotional appeal independent of both the specific circumstances in which Williams placed it and the specific details of Williams' own life which may be transformed imaginatively in the play.

"The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" is a rewrite of Williams' play "Summer and Smoke" which was first produced in 1948. I thought it valuable to discuss "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" on its own in the body of this review without comparing it to its predecessor. The plays share the same two primary characters and the same setting but are otherwise two separate works. The latter play concentrates on Alma and develops her as a person while Williams saw the earlier work as more abstract and as showing the tension between body and soul -- flesh and spirit. Williams preferred the later play. I have always loved "Summer and Smoke" and I am glad at last to get to know "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale."

Robin Friedman