“Let’s leave at interval.”
“Can’t we leave now?”
Just five minutes into a performance of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train doesn’t stop here anymore, the couple in front of me began to plan their escape. Maybe it was the Japanese music or the two shirtless actors raking the “beach” on the stage as though it were a giant Zen garden. Perhaps it was the male stage hand doubling as one of the supporting female characters in the play that prompted the couple to make a hasty getaway during interval.
I’m well aware that this very introduction could be dissuading potential audience members from booking to see the next show. And if you are one of those people who has just exited the Computicket website without paying for your tickets, you’re proving my point.
Tennessee Williams is not for everyone.
And perhaps this is the very reason everyone should try and sit through a performance of The Milk Train doesn’t stop here anymore instead of passively accepting another Broadway production at the Artscape like Mama Mia or the Phantom of the Opera. Milk Train is not the kind of play you take in; it’s the kind of play that encourages its audience to engage, interpret and respond. I mean, you can’t watch a play about death and what happens after without reflecting on your own fears, or lack thereof, at least a little bit.
Milk Train has been described as one of the plays that deal most poignantly, most convincingly, with death. The other play that has achieved this feat is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Williams uses the characters of Sissy Goforth (played by Jennifer Steyn), an aged (but incredibly vain) widow, and Christopher Flanders (Marcel Meyer), a young man whose vocation is to help people deal with death, to coax audiences into a discussion on the dreaded D word. Before you realise it, the cobwebbed corners of your mind that think on death are being aired.
You’ll find yourself captivated by Steyn’s interpretation of an aging Southern showgirl, and Roelof Storm, who plays a female character, is so convincing you’ll be surprised when he takes off his wig to play a male stage hand.
So where does the Japanese music fit in, you may ask? When Williams wrote his play about a widow dictating her memoirs while denying her imminent death he met Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima. The two writers swapped ideas and watched Japanese theatre together (1960s hipsters?), and from this special relationship came several plays, including The Day on Which A Man Dies, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and The Milk Train doesn’t stop here anymore.
Milk Train was also the play that Williams wrote when his lover of fifteen years was dying of cancer. If you don’t go and watch for the shirtless (and sometimes pantsless!) actors, go for the poetry that is a play written for a dying loved one.
I hope that by now, if you were one of those people who exited Computicket before purchasing your ticket, you’ve logged back on to purchase those tickets to engage with a little bit of Tennessee Williams. I hope that you step into the Arena theatre at the Artscape with an open mind – and a show programme to help you interpret things when you get stuck. I hope that you leave the theatre with your mind abuzz and your tongue ready for conversation.
I hope that Milk Train inspires you to say more than “Well, that was nice”; and I certainly hope that you watch the whole thing – don’t be the couple that doesn’t come back for Act II.
The Milk train doesn’t stop here anymore is on at the Artscape Theatre until the 20th of October. Ticket price: R120.
This contribution was produced as part of a collaboration between LitNet and the University of Stellenbosch's Department of Journalism in 2013.