In ‘The Tall Boy,’ Tandy Cronyn gives voice to the children of WWII displacement camps

Tandy Cronyn has had a long and varied career on stage performing classical and contemporary roles on Broadway and in theaters across the country. Among these many performances was one solo show, a 1996 production at Missouri Repertory Theatre of William Luce’s play “The Belle of Amherst,” in which she portrayed poet Emily Dickinson.

“I loved doing that show,” she reminisced in a recent phone conversation. “For one thing Emily and I were a good fit instinctively. I love her poetry and there’s a lot of it in that piece. Plus I loved the solo experience of playing directly to the audience.”

Inspired by this, Cronyn began looking for material for a solo show that she could make her own. Looking back now, she says she didn’t know what she was getting herself into as the search “went on forever.”

First she thought of doing something on English explorer Mary Kinglsey, an ethnographer who traveled through West Africa in the late 1800s. Then there was the idea of adapting “Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled,” “a wonderful novel by Romulus Linney told in the form of a woman’s diary.” The search then led to the interesting life of imagist poet-novelist Hilda Doolittle. For one reason or another, none of these came to fruition.

By this time a friend, playwright Jeffrey Sweet, encouraged Cronyn to look into the lives of women war correspondents during World War II, which led her to poet-novelist-short story writer Kay Boyle, who lived in Germany after the war and covered the Nuremburg trials for the New Yorker.

As Cronyn began to sift through Boyle’s life and work, she came across her 1951 collection of short stories, “The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany.” One particular story jumped out at her: “The Lost,” narrated by the matron at a displaced person’s camp for unaccompanied children, tells of three young boys — an Italian, a Czech and a Pole — who are sent there after the world they knew is destroyed by war.

Justin Curtin

Boyle’s “perfect short story” is the one that stuck. Cronyn worked with British playwright Simon Bent to adapt it into the solo piece “The Tall Boy,” which is making its Chicago premiere at Stage 773 in a limited engagement under the direction of David Hammond. Cronyn portrays the matron as well as the three boys and other ancillary characters.

“The adaptability of children alongside their fragility is what first attracted me to the piece and tugged at my heart,” says Cronyn adding, “These kids have turned themselves into mini-American soldiers and they keep trying to move forward. They are resilient; they adapt.”

Before landing at the camp, the boys were each taken under the wing of a different American Army unit and imprinted on the men, learning English in the accent of the soldiers. Now they hope for a future in America and to be reunited with their Army buddies.

“One has an accent from the Deep South, one has a strong Bronx-Brooklyn accent and one seems to have modeled himself after Jimmy Cagney,” Cronyn says. “I thought I could do that they sound like Americans but I had no idea how complicated it was going to be to play scenes where you have to snap in and out of these characters very quickly.”

If you haven’t already figured it out, Cronyn, 74, is the daughter of renowned actors Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. Growing up among theater royalty, acting was bred in the bone.

“From the age of 12 or so, I wanted to be an actress. Before that I was only interested in horses and wanted to be an equestrian,” she recalls with a laugh. She says she saw a continuous stream of great theater and heard “extraordinary theater talk around the dinner table.”

But it was the summer when she was 17 when Cronyn spent the summer observing at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre where here parents were performing in rotating repertory that helped seal the deal.

“I was allowed to sit in rehearsals run by Tyrone Guthrie and watch him direct, which was an extraordinary experience,” she says. “These actors were doing Moliere one night, Shakespeare the next and a contemporary play after that. They were stepping into a different skin every night and I thought that’s the kind of actor I want to be.”

Now, as Cronyn returns to Chicago (she last performed here in a 2005 production of Jeffrey Sweet’s “Berlin ‘45”), she notes that she has performed “The Tall Boy” on and off since its debut in 2012 and it has become more and more relevant. She noticed something new when she performed it at the United Solo Festival in September.

“You could feel everybody’s ears just prick up the minute I said ‘unaccompanied children’ which is a phrase we hear often now in reference to the Mexican border. As history has moved on, the show has unfortunately become more and more relevant.”

Mary Houlihan is a local freelance writer.