Small Craft Warnings
By Albert Williams
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A two-act rewrite of the 1970 one-act Confessional, Small Craft Warnings is a collection of character sketches–dialogue and soliloquies involving the denizens of a run-down bar on the California coast. Like the “small craft” alluded to in the title, they’re isolated vessels lost in a foggy night, drifters seeking temporary refuge in the hazy harbor that is Monk’s saloon. As burly but gentle Monk serves up the drinks, each character in his or her turn speaks of the “sadness and sickness” of life; the lucky ones also ruminate on the “one beautiful thing” that gives them the strength to continue. Leona, the blowsy beautician who emerges as the play’s protagonist, mourns the anniversary of the death of her brother, a sensitive violinist fatally afflicted by “pernicious anemia”; roused to chair-throwing fury by her feckless lover Bill, an oily stud who sneers that Leona’s brother was a “faggot,” Leona resolves to dump the lug and head off in search of new moorings. The rejected Bill, who proudly calls his penis “Junior,” finds comfort with Violet, a wan drifter who literally gropes for connection, giving hand jobs to chance acquaintances under the tavern’s tables in her endless search for “temporary arrangements”; later Violet pairs off with Monk, leading Leona to observe that her onetime rival is “worshiping her idea of God Almighty in her personal church.” Meanwhile, Monk’s steadiest–and unsteadiest–customer, the barstool philosopher Doc, ruminates on life, death, and the nature of God (“He moves in the dark like…a Negro miner in the pit of a lightless coal mine”) before setting out to deliver a baby at the nearby Treasure Island Trailer Court: “I’ll have a shot of brandy to wash down a Benzedrine tablet to steady my hands,” he declares before setting off to perform the inevitably, fatally botched operation.
This speech, perhaps the play’s most famous, treats with unusual candor a subject Williams veiled in mystery or mystification in such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer. It’s often interpreted as a confessional pronouncement by Williams on homosexuality–in general and his own in particular–but that reading misses the conflict that drives not only the Quentin-Bobby interlude but the play as a whole. Though Quentin represents one perspective on gay life, Bobby represents another–edgy and confused, but also optimistic, engaged, and defiant toward both social oppression and the internalized homophobia of Quentin and his kind. Similar contrasts fuel the play’s other key relationships, such as Leona’s battered but loving compassion versus Bill’s brutish selfishness, as played out in their differing attitudes toward pathetic Violet: Leona finds in her a strange holiness, while Bill merely uses her.
Now David’s back, sort of, in Fraser’s Poor Super Man, which received its world premiere at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in 1994. (Mark Mocahbee, who directed that production, executes the same task here.) He’s not actually the same character–that David was an actor-turned-waiter, while the new play’s David is a painter-turned-waiter–but he’s a variation on his predecessor, with the same hang-ups: he’s selfish, bitchy, and attracted to straight-appearing younger men. Unidentified Human Remains’s Kane was a restaurant busboy; here Fraser has elevated David’s victim to restaurant owner, which I guess is progress. In Poor Super Man the wealthy and well-known David alleviates his artistic block and midlife crisis by going to work at a brand-new cafe owned by Matt and Violet, a twentysomething couple whose marriage is wrecked when David draws Matt into an affair. Then he abuses and dumps him, which Matt would have known would happen if only he’d seen Unidentified Human Remains.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo from “Small Craft Warnings”, by Daniel Guidara.
