Love and death in the Mississippi Delta. Tennessee Williams puts three Southern characters under the microscope in Kingdom of Earth, which is a rewrite of his 1963 play The Seven Descents of Myrtle. The latter work premiered on Broadway and was something of a flop. Kingdom was produced in Princeton, NJ, in 1975 and won some plaudits but has rarely been produced since then. Thanks to the team behind the current production at the Odyssey, we now have a chance to see that forgotten play in a small-theater space that suits it well. Kingdom of Earth is an intimate play – a glorified one-act about three blighted souls trapped in a run-down Mississippi farmhouse during a hurricane that threatens to destroy the levees and wash away all life in its path (shades of Katrina). Living in the farmhouse is Chicken (Brian Burke), a crude, hulking man of the soil who, in the racist south (the time is the early 1960s), was considered something of an outcast because his mother, the late Miz Lottie, was suspected of being part Negro. Chicken is hyper-possessive about the farm, which is the only thing of value he had in life. Challenging his claim to the property is his half-brother Lot (Daniel Felix de Weldon), who arrives in the middle of the storm with an ex-showgirl Myrtle (Susan Priver) who purports to be his wife of two days. Lot is about as different from Chicken as a sibling can be: a mama’s boy, outrageously campy and spoiled. He’s also dying of a lung disease . . . and determined to wrest ownership of the farm away from Chicken. Caught up in this internecine battle is Myrtle, a garrulous, fleshy blonde who seems at first to be a clueless bimbo, then becomes more and more complex — and deeply human — as the story unfolds. The same can be said for the two brothers. While working the love triangle set-up, Williams keeps going deeper and deeper into Chicken and Lot’s character, coming up with insights and revelations that turn them from caricatures into fully dimensional figures, people we care about. That is Williams’s special gift as a playwright: redeeming people from their dead hearts, showing how love can change and revive them, save them. That’s what happens in Kingdom of Earth -- to at least two of the characters, anyway, and it’s what lifts the play out of the prosaic and into the magical realm. Williams is helped in that regard by his actors at the Odyssey. Their good work, along with that of the director, is what makes this production so unexpectedly moving and successful.
