The Strangest Kind of Romance October 17, 2010

'The Strangest Kind of Romance,' a tender and heartfelt play by Tennessee Williams takes place in a desolate rooming house in an industrial town. The play opens with an outspoken landlady, played by Christine Baranski, showing a room to a potential tenant, a nervous sickly man, who shakes uncontrollably, played by Matthew Cowles. He hopes to get a job at the factory. She shows him the room - all the men who have stayed there before have written their names on the wall. One of them left a cat behind. The nervous man ends up taking the room basically because he feels a bond with the cat. The landlady is a talkative blowsy woman who accepts whatever male tenant comes her way as her love, because her husband is ill. The nervous man, who falls into a desperate kind of fling with the landlady, has never loved anyone or anything, until he discovers the cat. It is indeed the strangest kind of romance!