Sweet Bird of Youth had one of the most gorgeous sets I’ve ever seen, especially for a straight play. The downside, however, is that the sets made the show really awkward. It was three hours with two intermissions, the first following the opening scene between Chance Wayne and Princess Kosmonopolis, the second following a twenty-minute scene. The intermissions were weirdly placed and obviously necessary because of the two major set changes. The third act (calling it as such based solely on the intermissions), which featured a very long scene with the entire cast on a revolving stage, was also very weird and terribly lit (the lighting design was probably the worst I had ever seen). The text itself is kind of a mess—there are two major plots when only one is actually interesting—and the production seemed only to accentuate how loose and awkward the whole thing is. Even the curtain call was uncomfortable, as the cast seemed unable to maneuver around the set pieces left on stage. The saving graces of the production were the performances of Finn Wittrock and Diane Lane, the latter only having three scenes, two of which made up about a third of the play. Lane was amazing; she’s possibly one of those actors who really shine on stage rather than on film because she has more chances to actually put her craft to work. As much as I love Tennessee Williams, this show was kind of a clunker. I can only imagine how rough it would have been had it actually been staged in New York with Nicole Kidman and James Franco as originally planned.
