Review: 'Baby Doll' heats up the McCarter Theatre

PRINCETON - If you think it's been hot and humid outside, just wait until you step inside McCarter Theatre. Emily Mann's production of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll will show you what steamy really means.

We're in the Mississippi Delta, where the accents are thick, the summers are hot, and the livin' isn't so easy; cotton is still king but the old white plantation owners, the "Dixiecrats," are struggling to keep their world as it was. Archie Lee (Robert Joy), broke, drunk, desperate, lives with his childlike wife, Baby Doll (Susannah Hoffman), in a dilapidated mansion. Their marriage is unconsummated, but her 20th birthday is tomorrow, and the deal is that she will finally yield to his sexual demands.

"I am," she drawls, "too lazy to think." Only Williams could get away with such a setup.

The owner of a successful cotton gin nearby, handsome Silva Vacarro (Dylan McDermott), swaggers in, suspecting Archie Lee is the arsonist who destroyed his plantation the night before. He is Sicilian ("we are an ancient people"), and although McDermott isn't swarthy enough to make his outsider status apparent, his slow, sexy entrance, strutting down to the stage from the back of the theater, makes the hide-and-seek game he plays, first with Baby Doll and then with her disgusting husband, inevitable.

Deaf Aunt Rose (Patricia Conolly) provides some pathos as well as comic relief as she scoops up the chicken that keeps wandering into the kitchen and as she tries to put dinner on the table.

McCarter, as always, gives us a lavish set (designed by Edward Pierce, who also designed the effect of drenching sunshine that makes Baby Doll's beautiful skin gleam): three dusty floors of many rooms, plus a garbage-strewn porch with some busted-up furniture, a sweet-water well, and a big red rosebush.

Based on the award-winning 1956 movie that the Legion of Decency tried to have banned, Williams' screenplay was based on two of his one-acts, "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and "The Long Stay Cut Short, or The Unsatisfactory Supper." A few years ago, the screenplay was adapted for the stage and into French by Pierre Laville, who then collaborated with Mann to create this stage play: "Every word is Tennessee's . . . [we] simply freed the play within the screenplay to allow the four main characters to live on stage."

And this excellent cast does, indeed, make them live, showing us the way "evil spirits take possession of a human heart."

Baby Doll

Through Oct. 11 at McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton.

Tickets: $25-$68.

Information: 609-258-2787 or www.mccarter.org