Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their attempt to escape from a Southern Hell. Set in a small town dry-goods store in the Deep South, Orpheus Descending is a toxic brew of racist violence, bigotry, misogyny, sexual passion and longing for liberation.
Maggie Siff (Billions, Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy) plays Lady Torrance and Pico Alexander (Catch 22, Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock and A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer) is Valentine Xavier. Erica Schmidt, who adapted and directed Shakespeare’s Macbeth for seven schoolgirls entitled Mac Beth and wrote and directed this season’s Lucy, stages, in her Theatre for a New Audience debut, this seldom-seen Williams masterpiece.
