After Maggie Siff’s husband died of brain cancer in 2021, the last thing she wanted to do was a play about a woman whose husband died of cancer.
But then, after initially contemplating whether to commit to the show in 2019, she reread the script — and reconsidered her hesitation.
“I was like, ‘Oh, no, I have to do it,'” Siff, 49, said of starring in the Theater for a New Audience’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Now in previews, the play is scheduled to open July 18 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.
Williams’s play – a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which a man has the chance to get back the woman he loves if he can follow just one simple rule – is set in a small town in the deep south. . The writing was revealing for Siff, especially after spending a year nursing her own ailing husband, Paul Ratliff.
“It has that quality of life on the border of what’s real and realistic, and what’s mysterious and beyond our comprehension,” she said.
Best known for starring as the strong-willed psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades on the Showtime series “Billions,” Siff plays Lady Torrance, the wife of a middle-aged shopkeeper who falls in love with a wandering young guitarist, Val, as her elderly , bigoted husband is dying in an upstairs room. As the two lovers navigate their doomed rendezvous, they face the ecstasy of passion reawakened, the racism of an insular community, and the gradual erosion of sensuality into newfound resilience.
“It’s like sitting at the deathbed of a loved one,” said the play’s director, Erica Schmidt, who directed a New Group production of “Cyrano” for the stage in 2019 and then the screen in 2021, both of which her starring husband, the actor Peter Dinklage.
The show, which is a rewrite of Williams’ 1940 play “Battle of Angels,” was first performed on Broadway in 1957. It was a flop, running for just 68 performances. (DailyExpertNews theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a “second-rate play” by Williams, though he praised the “lyrical intensity” of the dialogue and “tender writing that recalls the delicacy of ‘The Glass Menagerie.'”)
“Orpheus Descending” has rarely been revived, but Schmidt, who saw the 1989 Broadway revival and a 2019 production at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, as well as the 1959 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” said she was attracted to its exploration. how outsiders are treated in the United States. She felt the theme would resonate in 2020, when the play was originally set to be performed before the pandemic forced a postponement — and even more so now, amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment across the country.
“That may be why it hasn’t been as successful in the past,” said the 48-year-old Schmidt during a sweltering Wednesday rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month. “It’s struggling with these issues that maybe we don’t want from our Williams.”
In a conversation during their lunch break, Siff and Schmidt – unintentionally a twin brother in black – discussed the appeal of the piece, how it speaks to the modern moment and what has surprised them in their years of struggle with the work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you want to do this play?
ERICA SCHMIDT The piece is permeated with desire; this need to really live life and hold on to what matters to you with both hands until your fingers snap, like Carol [an eccentric aristocrat character] say. It reminds me of when Thornton Wilder in “Our Town” says, “Are there ever people who realize life while living it?”
MAGGIE SIFF I was drawn to it because of the magnitude of life and the dark, liminal space of the world. I was also incredibly afraid of it. It felt like an undeniable piece of work that you should throw yourself into. And then a lot happened in life – my husband died, and I didn’t think I could play this play, but I picked it up again, and these are people who live right on that line. It is heaven and hell, life and death. Alive but dead inside. And then be alive, but come alive.
What surprised you about the text?
SCHMIDT Williams is very prescriptive in his stage directions and his punctuation, but there is an emotional scope or participation that is necessitated at certain points throughout this piece. The question is how do you get there without being dramatic just for the sake of being dramatic.
SIFF What always frightened me most about the piece was the hysteria. For the longest time, whenever I read it, the third act, I just thought, “I don’t know how this happens.” And the surprise for me working on it is how organically it happens. While it’s very hard to earn those states of being that are so elevated and so great, it’s really masterfully built into the piece.
The other surprise is that while the play is very grim, dark and tragic, there is so much in it that is truly life-affirming and joyful to perform.
SCHMIDT The subtext of the piece is live, live, live.
The original was a flop. What do you do differently in this production?
SCHMIDT Williams talks a lot about the vast darkness outside the door. If you watch “Battle of Angels,” the hanging tree and cotton fields are described as being right outside your door. So this is the hell that Orpheus – Val – descends into, Two Rivers County, Mississippi, this huge, racist, sexist hell from the 1950s. And so, working with set designer Amy Rubin, we decided to place the store in the center of the stage so we could create the vast expanse. And that’s not something I’ve seen in other stagings.
Why is now the right time to revive this?
SCHMIDT The play requires you to pay attention to how complicit and complacent you are. Lady essentially sleeps next to the man who wears a white hood at night. And the legacy in the play of the Choctaw Indians being driven out of Mississippi in the Trail of Tears and the crimes of the slave trade and the legacy of all that blood on the ground. In our current cultural moment, it feels like only by looking at the past – by actually looking at it – can we understand it and hopefully move on. We can’t pretend there’s no blood on the floor.
SIFF The play has a mythical framework placed on top of a highly political set-up.
SCHMIDT How do we get out of hell?
SIFF What is Hell? What is the nature of heaven?
SCHMIDT Can one save the other?
SIFF Can people change? What does it mean to be corrupt in your soul? Is love redeeming?
SCHMIDT Is love real?
SIFF These are the questions that pique the play, and they are questions that we have been asking ourselves for centuries. And he’s not afraid to say, “Yeah, I’m going to take this one,” and he throws all those things against the wall. Maybe too much!
Maggie, what do you admire about Lady Torrance? And what frustrates you about her?
SIFF She reminds me of some women in my family. She’s such a survivor – I want to say pull, is that the right word? It’s also the thing that is her downfall – her pride.
SCHMIDT [Reading from a dictionary app on her phone] Pulling force, related to tension, able to be pulled out. A pull rod.
SIFF I think of it as the thing that supports bridges, right? She’s been through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which I think is quite an achievement.
SCHMIDT Oh, it’s an achievement.
She is reminiscent of Williams’ other strong female characters who try to bring about change in a male-dominated society, but fail. Or even your “Billions” character, Maggie, who also looks like a shark.
SIFF She would be mean – I don’t know, what would she be in this day and age?
SCHMIDT The proprietor and proprietor of a very posh club, a kind of hugely successful Italian wine garden.
SIFF She could also be a singer.
SCHMIDT Yes, and a mandolin player.
SIFF She would be some kind of fabulous diva.
What do you hope people think when they walk out of the theater?
SIFF Like all great theatrical plays with a tragic ending, I hope an audience will be able to walk out and still feel somehow more expansive, rather than “Oh, why did I put myself there three and a spent half an hour?”
SCHMIDT Oh no! It’s not three and a half. It will be two and a half, with intermission. And it’s funny.
SIFF There is a lot in it that is very life-affirming.
