THIS PROPERTY IS COMDEMNED

(bron: http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=3961)

This Property is Condemned is also probably one of his most difficult pieces to stage, for various reasons, the first being: the lead girl is 13 years old. Finding a child actor who can act is difficult enough – but to find one who can play this lead part?? It would require a Jodie Foster level of child actor talent. A child actress who can also convey a world-weary sense of knowingness. This is a damaged young girl. A Blanche DuBois in training. She is sexually knowing. She is a child. A tough mix. Other child actresses who could do it … Anna Paquin would have been great … maybe a young Claire Danes … And the other character, Tom, has to be a 16 year old boy. So again – there are casting struggles here. If the characters are not in their teens, the play doesn’t really work.

Also – it’s only 9 or 10 pages long, but it is an entire WORLD created. This is why it’s so famous, I think. The two characters – Willie and Tom – are complete individuals, three-dimensional … Williams is amazing how he just tosses you right into their world.

It takes place in Mississippi – in the middle of nowhere. A nowhere town with train tracks running through it.

Willie is a 13 year old girl. Listen to how Williams describes her to us. Makes me think he also could have written novels:

She is a remarkable apparition — thin as a beanpole and dressed in outrageous cast-off finery. She wears a long blue velvet party dress with a filthy cream lace collar and sparkling rhinestone beads. On her feet are battered silver kid slippers with large ornamental buckles. Her wrists and her fingers are resplendent with dimestone jewelry. She has applied rouge to her childish face in artless crimson daubs and her lips are made up in a preposterous Cupid’s bow. She is about thirteen and there is something ineluctably childlike and innocent in her appearance despite the makeup. She laughs frequently and wildly and with a sort of precocious, tragic abandon.

The curtain goes up and we see her balancing herself precariously on a railroad track, walking along, trying to keep steady – it is a game, she tries to go further and further every day, starting at the water tank – in one hand she holds a doll, in the other she holds a rotten banana. Tom strolls along, he is holding a kite … he strikes up a conversation with Willie. He has heard about her, in the town, through gossip, but hasn’t met her before. She dropped out of school years ago.

Her story is this: She and her parents and her older sister Alva ran a boarding house right next to the train tracks. The main clientele were railroad men – and most of them continued to stop over there because of the attraction of Alva. All of this comes out in Willie’s conversation with Tom. We can read between the lines of Willie’s tale – Alva was sleeping with these men for money, and for things. They gave her chocolates, “jewels”, they took her out … But make no mistake – “they” took her out, not just one of the guys. Alva was sleeping with the entire staff of the railroad. The boarding house was a sort of one-girl whorehouse. Willie, a child, witnessed all of this and knew that the only thing she wanted to be when she ‘grew up’ was to be just like Alva. Meanwhile, Alva was probably 16 years old while all this was going on … so the entire story is sordid, depressing, and awful.
Then, Willie informs Tom, her mother died … her father disappeared … and for a while it was just Willie and Alva. Then Alva got sick in the lungs, and after a brief illness, she died. Willie is now on her own, orphaned, and still living in the old boarding house – which now has a big sign outside saying: THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED. Willie hides upstairs when the inspectors come. She rummages through garbage pails for food. And she dresses up in her dead sister’s whorish clothes. She puts makeup on her face. She is a garish little whore-in-training.