Target Margin Theater is in the midst of a three-week festival called The Unknown Williams, with twelve plays that many people have probably never seen, staged at a cozy Brooklyn space called The Bushwick Starr. Last Friday I saw The Purification (c. 1940), Williams's only play written in verse, about a murder trial set in rural New Mexico. Here the creative spark was Kathleen Kennedy Tobin, who last year did a fascinating version (also for Target Margin) of e.e. cummings's Tom, based on Uncle Tom's Cabin (below).
For the Williams play, Tobin created an entire array of roughly a dozen puppets, including one made of sea salt, as well as one fashioned of ice, which had to be refrozen for every performance. For the set, she devised an unusually effective trio of playing areas: a tabletop for the main courtroom drama, a backlit panel with cut-out figures recalling some of Kara Walker's silhouettes, and on the table's curtain below, animated video images of New Mexico landscapes and additional characters. Aside from the pleasure of the great playwright's language, Tobin's concept illuminated a script that actually might be more difficult to convey with live actors.
The companion play for the evening was Thank You, Kind Spirit (1941), which had its world premiere in New Orleans in 2005. Actress Sharon Hope gave a mournful resonance to the role of Mother Duclos, a Creole spiritualist who is a possible fraud, in a minimal yet involving staging directed by Alisa Matlovsky.
[Photo: Kathleen Kennedy Tobin and the cast of Tom, photographed in 2009 by Yi Zhao]
