Milk Run

Cissy Goforth is 60 years old but she dresses like a teenager in tight, white Capri pants and high heels. She lives in a stupendous villa on the Italian coast. Like the Wife of Bath, she has had a spray of husbands and she boasts that she keeps her splendid body in shape through "plenty of exercise--in bed."

Cissy, who may become one of the theater's great all-time bitches, is the heroine of Tennessee Williams' newest play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More, which opened last week at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Feeling the approach of death, Cissy, played by Britain's Hermione Baddeley, is hurriedly assembling her coarse, maudlin, bawdy memoirs, and confiding them to a tape recorder. She yearns for a young and therapeutic companion. "There is nothing more stimulating than a lover to every nerve and gland and cell in the body," she says.

When one comes along he is a beautiful fellow who has worked as a male prostitute but feels "used up." Cissy purrs, snarls, wheedles, begs, and eventually strips to induce him. "Don't you think I've got a beautiful body?" she says. It reminds him of a stone statue in a fountain in St. Louis.

The boy will not bring her to life. Instead, there is another kind of climax. He tells her that he has come to bring God to her in her final days.

On opening night, Tennessee Williams sat in a box above the Spoleto stage, sipping scotch, now and again crying out gleefully, relishing the repugnance of his new creations. Lest anyone misunderstand them, he contributed a program note: "If the play achieves even partially its artistic intention, you will find it possible to pity this female clown even while her absurd pretentions and her panicky last effort to hide from her final destruction make you laugh at her."

The conversion of Cissy Goforth is a bizarre jape, an eccentric and perhaps sophomoric joke. In the fall (if all goes as planned), Broadway audiences will be able to see for themselves whether they find it possible to pity, or to laugh.

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