In the wrong hands, “Small Craft Warnings” could be one of America’s dreariest plays. Luckily, it’s in the hands of The Williams Project, which finds a mangled and awkward kind of tenderness among its battered characters — and ends the play with an extra-theatrical gesture so unexpected, so transcendently gorgeous, it casts an unexpectedly warm, backward glow across the previous two hours.
That sounds like hyperbole, but I’m serious — and hesitate to even mention that extraordinary moment. Surprise is part of its power.
Written by Tennessee Williams during the middle of the Vietnam War, “Small Craft Warnings” happens in a dive bar called Monk’s Place, lodged on the coast somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego. Lights up on Violet (Madeleine Lambert), a grime-streaked and dazed young woman with the delicate pathos of a bruised flower, slumping at the bar. She’s got a beaten-up suitcase at her feet and keens softly into her lap. Doc (Max Rosenak), a doctor whose addictions cost him his license, but who still practices under the table, sizes her up in a clinical way.
“She’s got a not-quite-with-it appearance,” he tells Monk (Lee LeBreton). “Amorphous, that’s the word … Does she think she’s in the waiting room of a depot?”
“I think she thinks she’s moved in here,” Monk answers, with his signature soft deadpan. Things pretty much go downhill from there.
“This is almost a dramatic essay rather than a play,” critic Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times when the play premiered in 1972. “A temperature reading of a time and place.”