Tennessee Williams' "Baby Doll" Makes its American Premiere at McCarter Theatre

It was one of the most polarizing films of its time.

In 1956, the black comedy “Baby Doll” — a tale of feuding cotton gin owners and a teenage virgin bride in the Mississippi Delta — drew controversy for its sexualized themes and images.  The Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency even launched a campaign to get it banned.

At the same time, the film — written by iconic playwright Tennessee Williams and directed by the legendary Elia Kazan — drew critical acclaim, garnering four Academy Award nominations.

Now, nearly six decades after its release, the movie has come to life as something else: a new play at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.

“I’m a great lover of Tennessee Williams,” explains playwright Emily Mann, McCarter’s artistic director. “I’ve directed a number of his plays. I knew him, actually. And I always felt that this particular film didn’t quite come off or have its due. I felt there was a play trapped inside this movie.”

The show — running through Oct. 11 — features television star Dylan McDermott as a Scilian man named Silva Vacarro, who accuses a fellow cotton gin owner, Archie Lee Meighan, of burning down his operation. Soon, Silva forges a sexually tinged bond with Meighan’s19-year-old wife, Baby Doll — played by newcomer Susannah Hoffman.

Mann adapted the film with French playwright Pierre Laville, whose own adaptation debuted in France in 2009. The one playing at McCarter is the American premiere.

“I read his adaptation and said, ‘Yeah, it’s really interesting, but I don’t think it’s quite right for America yet,’” Mann says. “There were some things that felt rather dated. So, I went back to the original screenplay that (Williams) had written for Kazan and found some other material and started to work on it and fell in love with it and just discovered a play. It’s like finding a new Tennessee Williams play.”

Mann — a two-time Tony Award nominee — says she was drawn to the themes Williams was exploring in the film: “race and caste and color in the South.” And not just between black and white residents, but also between whites and foreigners like Vacarro. They are themes, she says, that continue to rear their heads today — especially in the wake of the church shooting in Charleston, S.C., earlier this year.

“If you look at what’s going on with the shooting in South Carolina and you see that kid, we have the grown-up version of that in this play in the character of Baby Doll’s husband,” Mann says. “He’s a born and bred ‘peckerwood,’ as he calls himself.

“So, you have all of these themes in play — the desire and the passion and the humor and the South,” she continues. “All of the legacy of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow, all the way up to what now resonates in a very present tense, that we see why we are dealing with what we’re dealing with, because we see what people came up and out of.”

Mann says the story is less risqué now, but it does include one of the most erotic scenes she’s ever staged:  when Baby Doll begins to awaken sexually. However, when it was released, it was the film’s sexuality that drew the most attention — especially the image of Carroll Baker as Baby Doll, dressed in a nightgown and sucking her thumb while lying in a crib. (The movie has been credited with naming and popularizing the babydoll nightgown.)

“That’s pretty risqué no matter how you do it,” Mann explains. “It takes your breath away to see a young girl feel herself aroused to a level where she can barely stand up. It’s not pornographic. It’s just watching a man genuinely know how to touch a woman and get her to places she’s never been and she’s never felt before in her life. It’s transporting. “

Technically, Mann wrote none of the play herself. She pieced the stage version together from Williams’ finished screenplay, his early drafts and other pieces that the playwright had written using these characters — including the one-act play “27 Wagons Full Of Cotton.”

“He was always trying to figure out how to begin and how to end it,” Mann says “Which characters were in, which characters were out. Whether it was a girl’s awakening, or whether it was a rape. …So I was able to be in 2015 and see all of his drafts and see what he might want to construct now. I laced it with those things.”

The show is also a homecoming of sorts for McDermott, an Emmy nominee for the TV drama “The Practice.” In 1991, McDermott played Tom in a production of Williams’ classic “The Glass Menagerie” at McCarter — the first play Mann helmed for the theater.

“I finally got him in a moment when he’s not on film or television,” Mann says. “And he was dying to get back together and do Tennessee again.  He’s just amazing as Silva Vacarro. He just understands the soul of this man and the South. And, of course, he’s so charismatic, which is what the character needs.”

As for Baby Doll herself? Mann says she was worried early on that she wasn’t going to be able to stage the production because none of the actresses who auditioned fit the role that earned Baker an Oscar nomination 60 years ago. But then she saw Susannah Hoffman.

“She walked in and just blew my mind,” Mann recalls. “It was like she was born to play the role. She’s a young lady just recently out of school. She’s going to be a star, I think.”

Mann is now in her 26th year at McCarter, a Tony-winning regional theater that she calls her “artistic home.”

“I love the community. I love the audience. I love this whole area,” she says. “And I love the ability to produce some of the most cutting-edge pieces and some of the classics of our time for this community. They’ve been challenging to me, and I hope I’ve been challenging to them. It’s just been a great, long run.”

And now Mann is continuing it by staging another piece featuring the words of Tennessee Williams, a man she was happy to call a friend.

”Oh, he was such a darling man,” she remembers. “Funny, irreverent, emotional. He was just like his plays. He called me ‘Miss Emily.’ We just had a lovely relationship. We just got on like a house on fire. He was just an amazing spirit.

“I just wish he were here to see this.”

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“Baby Doll” is on stage now at McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton, NJ 08540, and runs through October 11.