Tennessee Williams meets Hitchcock

When the Tennessee Williams drama "Suddenly, Last Summer" opens Friday at Lord Leebrick Theatre, movie buffs in the audience may recognize a whiff of Alfred Hitchcock amid the Southern Gothic atmosphere of the play.

That's in large part because visiting director Rob Urbinati cut his dramatic teeth on film, not theater.

Urbinati loved movies so much as a teenager growing up in Framingham, Mass., that he used to run away from home to see first- run movies in New York, telling his parents he was staying at a friend's house while he actually slept on a bench in a city park after the show.

He's written screenplays - optioned, though not produced - and he worked for years at HBO in New York.

So it's no surprise he's bringing a cinematic touch to "Suddenly."

A fan of film noir and movie thrillers of all kinds, Urbinati is using music by American composer Bernard Herrmann - best known as the composer of the scores for such Hitchcock movies as "Psycho" and "North by Northwest" - to heighten the dramatic intensity of the show.

"I am a big movie fan," he admits. "A fanatic. I tend to direct very cinematically. I actually moved to New York so I could see movies quicker when they came out."

Urbinati got his doctorate in theater at the University of Oregon, where he became friends with playwright Jeff Whitty, a Coos Bay native who was also a student here in those days.

But before that, Urbinati worked as a theater consultant at HBO. He had been living in New York and going to more and more plays as well as enjoying the movies, and a friend helped him get an unusual job. It was to see new shows night after night and write reports on whether the plays might be suitable for development as HBO film projects.

"They weren't interested in the production. I was reviewing the script, by seeing the production. I had to separate what the writing was from what the director and the actors and the designers did," Urbinati says. "I saw like 2,000 plays. I did this for six years. I saw everything. Everything! After a while you get tired of it. It stopped being fun. But I got as good as you can get in terms of understanding what a director does to a script."

That led him to try his hand at directing. In the beginning, Urbinati says, he was terrible. He knew what directors did, he says, but not how.

"I had a vision but didn't know how to communicate it. I did all those things you're not supposed to do with actors. Like tell them results."

But gradually he got the hang of it. He works today as director of new play development at Queens Theatre In the Park in New York, a job he enjoys because it gives him freedom to work on shows with other theaters throughout the country.

"Suddenly, Last Summer," which opened off-Broadway in 1958, is seldom performed compared to Williams' other works such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire." That's in part because of its challenging subject matter - read "homosexuality" - which frightened off audiences and producers in the '50s.

The story, set in New Orleans, is about events that follow the mysterious death of a young man on vacation with his cousin. Exactly what the girl saw when her cousin died apparently has driven her insane, and the boy's mother actually wants her niece lobotomized to make sure the girl never tells the truth.

The play was made into a movie, with a screenplay written by Gore Vidal, in 1959. It starred Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. That movie version tread very lightly on the core subject matter of the play and left out any explicit reference to sexual orientation.

In the Eugene production, Lord Leebrick veteran Sharon Sless plays the boy's mother, Mrs. Venable, and newcomer Amy Wray is her defiant niece, Catherine.

Bruce McArthur is the doctor who attempts to uncover the truth behind the family's recent tragic events.

The supporting cast includes Ian Armstrong, Kathy LaMontagne, Sharon Wetterling and Eileen Peterson.

The scenic designer is Kathy Thomas. Lighting designer is Rachel Steck. Sound designer is Danny Thomas. Properties designer is Stoffi Saunders. And costume designer is Sarah Gahagan.

Bob Keefer, The Register-Guard
Mar 16, 2006