HELLO FROM BERTHA
Bertha and Willie may not have the depth of the heroines of Williams’s longer, dramatically fuller, more heavily plotted plays–A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche, for example, or Summer and Smoke’s Miss Alma, or The Night of the Iguana’s Hannah–but all these Williams women are sisters under the skin, and the skin they’re under is Williams’s. The demons that drove the writer–his obsessions with the conflict between spirit and flesh, his terror of disease, madness, desertion, and death–motor the subjects of these two brief character studies. What makes Williams continuously fascinating is the way he takes the lives of these oddball outsiders and, through the power of his poetry and the investment of his own passion, makes them convincing portraits of the general human condition.
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Nothing in Hello From Bertha is this well played, so the poetic and black-comic dimensions of this play don’t register with the same fevered force. In a run-down bordello in East Saint Louis, with the sound of scratchy blues records and sexy laughter creeping through the walls, big blond Bertha lies in bed, destitute, physically deteriorated, and spiritually paralyzed. Goldie, the wan madam, tries to prod Bertha out of the bed so it can be used by other girls. “Where you goin’ from here?” says Goldie, asking the question that tormented Williams and that ultimately lies at the core of every one of his plays. Disoriented and slightly demented from illness, Bertha rants that Goldie has robbed her, then asks a young whore named Lena to take down her letter to Charlie, the probably imaginary boyfriend who, Bertha says, will come to take her to safety. As Bertha dictates a long, heartrending letter, Lena sits still, not writing down a single word; could a playwright have imagined a more terrifying ending to a life? Then, rallying in her final moments, Bertha tells Lena to destroy the unwritten letter and instead take down her simple, gallant message: “Love from Bertha . . . ”
