This fall, Emmy-nominee Dylan McDermott (“The Practice”) will star in New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre production of “Baby Doll,” based on the 1956 movie that caused the writer Tennessee Williams to be denounced from pulpits across America and for Time Magazine to anoint the film as “the dirtiest American-made motion picture that had every been legally exhibited.”Tame by today’s standards, “Baby Doll” tells the story of a kittenish virgin on the cusp of her 20th birthday on a decaying plantation in the Mississippi Delta. The date is significant because her much older husband Archie Lee Meighan, a failed cotton gin owner, promised Baby Doll’s father that the marriage would not be consummated until then. What sets the explosive drama in motion, however, is a devastating fire at a neighbor’s rival cotton gin, which leads its owner, Sicilian immigrant Silva Vacarro, to suspect Archie as the culprit. His revenge? The seduction of Baby Doll.Emily Mann, the artistic director of the McCarter, will direct as well as co-write with Pierre Laville the adaptation, which is a mash-up of two one-acts — “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” and “The Long Stay Cut Short.” It is likely to tamp down the blatant mindlessness of Baby Doll in “27 Wagons.” At one point in that one-act, the misogynistic Archie Lee warns his bride, “Don’t get any ideas. A woman like you is made to be hugged and squeezed but not for ideas.” He also tells her that there is a government conspiracy, named “UW,” which is a plan to do away with “useless women.” Tennessee Williams dubbed his play and film a “Mississippi Delta comedy.” And even though “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” is widely considered one of his minor works, the one-act has been revived from time to time, most notably in a 1976 Phoenix Theatre production that starred a young and relatively unknown Meryl Streep as Flora “Baby Doll” Meighan. The 1956 movie, which was directed by Elia Kazan, was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for the star-making turn of Carroll Baker. It also cleaned up at the box-office — perhaps because it was so taboo — earning an unprecedented “Condemned” rating from the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency. (The faithful saw the movie under the pain of mortal sin.) Oddly, the movie was also banned in Sweden, of all places, the country that would give the world the sexually explicit “I Am Curious, Yellow” 11 years later. In the McCarter production, McDermott will play Silva opposite Robert Joy’s Archie Lee and Susannah Hoffman’s Baby Doll. Also in the cast is Patricia Conolly as Aunt Rose Comfort, who lives in the joyless mansion.The limited engagement will be from September 11-October 11 at the McCarter in Princeton, New Jersey.
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