Guided Tour Centre Stage, Greenville through By George Kanzler Critic at Large Published: Friday, June 12, 2007 in The Beat Peter Snoad's Guided Tour, the winner of Centre Stage's 2006 New Play Festival, is set in Rhode Island, but it is redolent of magnolias, i.e., of themes found in southern writers such as Faulkner and, especially, playwright Tennessee Williams. Like Williams's plays (notably Suddenly Last Summer) this one is about excavating memories of the past, uncovering motives of the psyche. It is a memory play, set in the past, in the remembrances of Joe Bell, as well as in the present, where Bell has resided in prison for 14 years after what seems an inexplicable crime, and is presently being interviewed by Susanna Hatch, who claims to be writing a doctoral dissertation, with Bell as her "primary source." Bell was a tour guide at a Newport "cottage," a Gilded Age summer mansion on the millionaire's row known as Cliff Walk along the sea side of Newport Island, where families like the Vanderbilts and Carnegies outdid themselves building "cottages" with 80 foot-long ballrooms and dozens of bedrooms, only to use them during a brief "summer social season." We first meet him as he is conducting a tour, vividly conjuring up images of the privileged life lived in the Pettigrew cottage at the turn of the century (19th to 20th). As portrayed by Clark Nesbitt, Bell is an exuberant, charming guide whose descriptions manage to encapsulate the frivolous, ostentatious life of the Gilded Age rich while subtly, tongue ever so delicately in cheek, also sending them up with wicked hyperbole. The scene shifts to a prison interview room, where Bell, decades later, is incarcerated for having destroyed, by burning down, the very mansion that was his livelihood and that he so poetically described as a tour guide. Hatch, played with the trepidation of a Tennessee Williams' spinster by Tiffany Nave, is interviewing Bell about his life and the fire, convinced that he did not commit the arson. We only find out much later that Hatch has a personal stake in the outcome of her queries, and it doesn't have anything to do with a dissertation. In another flashback, Bell is seen returned from the war and jobless, being interviewed for the tour guide position by Victoria "Livie" Pettigrew, the heiress who inherited the cottage and now administers it as a historic mansion. Victoria Chance plays the heiress as socially entitled and condescending to Bell, although clever enough to realize that he's smart enough, and witty enough, to be a successful guide, even though he is Afro-American and lacks much formal education (he is quick with quotes from James Baldwin and other black writers). In the next flashback, Bell and Livie are in the ballroom, dancing a waltz as they step, at first tentatively, then more determinedly as the waltz morphs into an Afro-Latin dance, into the realization that they have fallen in love with each other. Nesbitt and Chance wonderfully convey all the ambiguities inherent in this scene of incongruous love blooming between black employee and white socialite employer. Playwright Snoad tries a little too hard to load metaphorical and psycho-social significance onto the plot in the melodramatic denouement. "We had to clear the slate," Bell tells Hatch, who is by now revealed as the granddaughter of Livie, "we planned it together. How many people died for this place?" While she was "mad as only rich white folks can be," he tells Hatch "it made sense at the time. Livie said if I didn't do it we were through." So a historical past of white privilege must be destroyed, at least symbolically by fire, for a love across racial and social barriers to prevail? A dubious proposition at best, but very Southern Gothic, like Tennessee Williams. But there's even more, an ending as ironic as in any Southern Gothic tale. Guided Tour may end in dramatic conflagration, like that cottage, but it is, also like that cottage, splendid. The playwright definitely has a way with words, a distinctly poetic way, and in Nesbitt, Nave and Chance (Connie Lanz is also affective in the brief role of a ditzy prison psychiatrist), director Peter Jaye gives us three of Greenville's finest actors working at the top of their game. This is a Guided Tour theater fans in Greenville shouldn't miss.