Truman Capote – Memphis Flyer

Things are seldom about the things they seem to be about. Take Tru, for example. This solo performance by the mighty and all-powerful Mark Chambers, would appear to be a dramatic portrait of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s author, Truman Capote, but it’s not really. While Capote is clearly the subject, this brief, intimate and fantly gonzo encounter, brought to us courtesy of Cloud9 Theatre, is a fully developed play about the slippery multifaceted nature of addiction.

Tru introduces us to a man keenly aware of expiration dates. He’s planning a comeback built on weight loss, plastic surgery, and fine hats to hide an expansive forehead where shaggy locks had hung. This is Capote at his lowest; he was more famous for being famous than for the extraordinary sentences he used to spin out of dust and memory and diamonds and horror. Now he’s just a drunk and an A-list gossip who’s been delisted for telling tales and naming (a few) names.

Tru’s still giving Tiffany for Christmas, but he’s getting flowers in aluminum buckets. Hard candy for a naughty boy who’s grown accustomed to spending his nights at Studio 54 and his days with folks able to produce $50-million, “ready money.” He knows there’s meaning here, but chooses to drink it away, chasing booze with pot and pills.

The real addiction, though, is celebrity. It’s no good for Capote the writer and artist , but he craves it. He wants it for himself and he wants to be near it. In Tru, celebrity is the lens through which Capote’s addictions are most clearly viewed. If the play’s primary struggle isn’t about this, transcending the tropes of Capote’s own fame, what’s left is mere tribute artistry.

Ann Marie Hall (seated) and Mark Chambers in The Mystery of Irma Vep

Thankfully, Mark Chambers is every inch the actor I remember from our overlapping time in Memphis. He is no mere mimic. He’s revived this show four times now, and it’s evident in this revival at The Evergreen Theatre, that he is very comfortable in Capote’s uncomfortable skin. Tru could still stand fine tuning to tease out narrative threads, connect the dots of conflict and addiction, and make it drama-forward, but all the raw material is all there, and hardly insufficient.

Chambers, who longtime Memphis theater fans may remember as the sweet transvestite in two separate Playhouse on the Square productions of The Rocky Horror Show, is a professional member of Actor’s Equity. But it’s probably more important to point out that Cloud9 is community theater. I don’t say that to trigger memories of Waiting for Guffman, but as a reminder that this, and other companies exist to correct for institutional deficiencies. Cloud9, for example, helps to account for the limited number of great roles available to older actors in Memphis. That’s exactly how community theater should work and Chambers has often described Tru as “a good show for this time in [his] life.” I don’t disagree and won’t complain a bit about how Cloud9 does its thing, but as I watched Chambers do his thing, I kept thinking there would be a lot more great roles available to older actors if more people thought Dr. Frank-N-Furter would still be a good part for him, “at this time in life.”

Truman Show

I sure do like watching Voices of the South do that special thing they do. The theater company does lots of stuff, of course — running festivals, hosting forums for writers, staging original plays, cabarets, comedy, improv, etc. But Voices was born in a narrative theater tradition and inspired by U of M professor (and company member) Gloria Baxter, a real pioneer in the form. It sometimes seems that the small, enduring troupe is its truest self when it’s digging into literary content and giving descriptive writing a dramatic shape.

Holiday Memories at Theatre South isn’t the most cheerful of recollections, though it speaks to the sweetness and small comforts that sustain us when the world turns icy and mean. I was instantly reminded of grad school, when this style of performance was still new to me and also to the undergrad students who would go on to found Voices of the South. It’s where I saw most of the faces in this cast and crew for the first time: Alice Berry, Jenny Madden, Todd Berry, Brian Helm. So, for me, this straightforward Truman Capote anthology evoked a kind of holiday nostalgia before anybody on stage ever mentioned food, or dogs, or kites, or Christmas trees. And that’s just the tip of things.

Grad school was long ago. Alice and Todd’s son Reese has since grown into an accomplished young actor, and now he too joins actual and extended family on stage in a show about actual and extended family, set against the backdrop of Thanksgiving and what Dolly Parton dubbed a hard candy Christmas.

Holiday Memories collects a pair of richly described short stories inspired by scenes from Capote’s early life growing up in rural Alabama during the Great Depression. “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory” chronicle the relationship between a young boy called Buddy and his elderly but childlike cousin Sook as they make fruitcakes, drink whiskey, swat flies for pennies, chop down secret Christmas trees, break each other’s hearts, fly handmade kites, and take care of one another when nobody else can or will.

Todd Berry narrates, Alice plays Sook, while Reese takes on the younger Buddy, trying to make sense of his makeshift world. Helm stands in as a variety of characters, but makes his most lasting impression as Queenie, the family dog. Gail Black finds some very funny moments as the ancient, but still enthusiastic family matriarch, and the group coalesces, as only people who’ve worked this closely for this long ever really can. Even Helm, who’s been away in California for many years, slides back into the fold like he’d never been away.

Holiday Memories was still a little rough at the edges on opening night, but the kind of rough that tends to smooth quickly when a show is up and running. It’s not exactly a feel-good experience, but it’s a feel-something experience, free from all the usual seasonal platitudes. There’s no “God bless us every one” and not much “peace on earth” or “good will toward men.” But there is goodness and innocence; affection, comfort, and fruitcake. And for better, worse, and all things in between, there’s family — or whatever passes for family.

I love the holidays, and many of the annual rituals that go along with them. But I also admit to being true Grinch when it comes to so many sentimental holiday entertainments, trotted out year after year to stress ideals, and teach lessons that seldom stick past the new year. I worry, sometimes, that all this seasonal artifact — this Hallmark humanity — is worse for us than all the sugarplums combined. Even Holiday Memories seems like empty calories in the abstract, but less so when I’m watching it unfold. See, I sure do like watching Voices of the South do that that special thing they do. As their latest show builds to its conclusion and both the younger and older Buddies reflect on the loss of their elderly friend, I was confronted by similar moments from the past year and was reminded of all the irreplaceable parts of myself I’ve let loose “like a kite on a broken string.” And again, I’m reminded of my school days, when I first met so many of these actors.

“Walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky,” Buddy says in the script’s closing moments. “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven.”

Quiet, unflashy, and built out of imagination, light, and a love of language, Holiday Memories is as chilling as first frost, as filling as cornbread dressing, and far more likely to haunt you than any Christmas ghosts.

Don’t let it float away.