The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

Front matter

CRITICAL COMPANIONS

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

Brenda Murphy

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations x

Introduction 1 The 1930s’ Plays (1936-1940) 9 2 Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending

Introduction

As she tries to explain her son Sebastian's life to Dr Cukrowicz in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Violet Venable says, “his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet... . I mean you can't separate them” (P2: 102). This was famously true of Tennessee Williams. From the time when he made the decision to be a playwright and entered the University of Iowa's playwriting program in 1937, his life was arranged around writing. His intimate relationships were either short-term liaisons that did not interfere with his work or, as with Frank Merlo and Amado Rodriguez y Gonzales, arrangements in which his partner also served as his “secretary,” or what would now be known as his personal assistant. This is the way he generally referred to Merlo, with whom he shared an intimate 14-year relationship, outside his close circle of friends, and it was not simply a cover for a gay relationship in the homophobic 1950s. He paid him a salary, and it was well known in Williams's circle that Merlo not only helped with his work, but also ran the household, made the travel arrangements, and generally removed the burdens of everyday life from Williams so he would be free to write without annoyance.

The home in Key West, Florida that Williams shared with Merlo, with its little studio built to his specifications for writing, was his favorite and most productive place to work, but his house in New Orleans and the many apartments and hotel suites he occupied after he could afford something more comfortable than a room at the YMCA were also arranged around his writing. Williams traveled often, sometimes by himself, but most often with Merlo or, after Merlo’s death in 1963, with a paid “travel companion” who took care of the details. Besides escape from whatever demands were pressing at the moment, what he was seeking in his travels was a place where he could write, which meant access to a swimming pool where he could get the self-prescribed therapy for his nerves that he found so necessary, as well as both new scenes, sensations and experiences, which stimulated his creative juices, and a quiet place where he could be alone with his typewriter in the mornings.

As described by many observers, Williams's daily writing was obsessive. His longtime friend, director Elia Kazan, remarked that, every morning, no matter where he found himself, what condition he was in from the night before, or whom he was with, he would get out of bed, roll a sheet of paper into his portable typewriter, and become Tennessee Williams. This was his life. During the few periods when he experienced writer’s block, he suffered from terrible bouts of anxiety which did not subside until he was able to write again. When Dr Lawrence Kubie, with whom he was in analysis in 1957 and 1958, prescribed a hiatus from writing as a way to “lie fallow” and recharge his creative power, he wrote to Kazan that without his work, he was “unbearably lonely” and his life “unbearably empty” (N: 711). He was soon writing again.

The extent to which Williams’s life was his writing and vice versa has emerged even more clearly since 2000, with the publication of primary texts such as the two volumes of selected letters edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy Tischler and the prodigious edition of his “notebooks,” or journals, by Margaret Bradham Thornton. The publication of these primary texts and a number of previously unpublished plays by Williams’s longtime publisher, New Directions, volumes that normally would have appeared immediately after the writers death, was delayed for nearly 20 years because of the circumstances of Williams's will, which appointed his friend Maria Britneva, the Lady St Just, as his executor. Since her death in 1994, when the University of the South took over as executor, permission to publish manuscript materials, and for scholars to quote from them, has been more forthcoming, and a good deal of basic scholarship has been done.

With this new wealth of information, the standard narrative of Williams’s life, essentially beginning with the failure of Battle of Angels (1940) and the triumph of The Glass Menagerie (1945), and ending with the 20-year decline after The Night of the Iguana (1961), is gradually being revised. Once New Directions published the plays

Introduction from the 1930s, we were able to see Williams in the context of his roots in a theatre of social engagement. And thanks to the work of critics like Annette Saddik, Linda Dorff, Felicia Londré, Philip C. Kolin, and William Prosser, as well as the publication by New Directions of many of the previously unpublished plays that were written after 1961, the later part of Williams's career is undergoing a major reassessment. One of the aims of this book is to place the familiar narrative of Williams's career in this new context, and to consider his better-known plays in the context of his earlier and later work. In addition to the individual chapters on the 1930s and the later plays, these works occupy a good deal of attention in the critical perspectives section from John Bak, Annette Saddik, and Felicia Londré.

The new depth of knowledge about Williams and his oeuvre opened up at a time when scholarly and critical analysis of his work, and of literature in general, was benefitting from the perspectives of Gay and Queer Studies. Beginning with studies by John Clum and David Savran, the last two decades have seen an explosion of interest in Williams’s treatment of sexuality, gender, and sexual identity, subjects that are central to much of his writing, especially beginning in the mid-1950s, when he was actively considering his identity as a gay man in the homophobic culture of mid-twentieth-century America.

While his sexual identity, and his sex life generally, were very important to Williams, it is also important to see these elements in the larger perspective of his self-declared identity as an artist and bohemian. From a Queer Studies perspective, the queer identity—marginalized, transgressive, destabilizing—that he recognized as his own was very much tied up in the particular nexus of things implied by the phrase “gay bohemian artist.” He considered all three facets fundamental to his identity and his marginalized place in the world, and also the source for his rebellion against the standard American middle-class culture in which he had grown up, whose limits and strictures he was constantly testing. Yet at the same time, it was vital to him that his plays be successful. At first that meant success in the Broadway theatre, with both critical accolades and monetary rewards, but as the accolades and the money diminished in the 1960s and 1970s, he began to redefine success largely in terms of rebuilding an audience for his work. His desire to épater le bourgeois existed simultaneously with his desire to win his love.

Williams's other creative obsession has long been recognized. If his life after 1937 might be seen as a staging ground for his writing, his life before that was the source of much of its material. In his imaginative and creative life, Williams returned again and again to the early life with his family. The presence of his sister Rose pervades his work, and he sought to dramatize some aspect of her in the very different characters Laura Wingfield, Alma Winemiller, Blanche DuBois, Catherine Holly, and Clare in The Two-Character Play/Out Cry (1967, 1971). In his Memoirs, he wrote that “some perceptive critic of the theatre made the observation that the true theme of my work is “incest,” and that, while “my sister and I had a close relationship, quite unsullied by any carnal knowledge... our love was, and is, the deepest in our lives and was, perhaps, very pertinent to our withdrawal from extrafamilial attachments” (M: 119-20). Williams’s parents and maternal grandparents and his brother Dakin also provided significant material for his characters. The publication of Williams’s Notebooks has helped to deepen our understanding of his imaginative use of his family and early life, and I think the broad look at his work that this volume affords helps to show its evolution.

An important subtext in Williams’s work that has received less attention from critics is what Violet Venable calls “looking for God, I mean for a clear image of Him” (P2: 107). The grandson of a beloved Episcopal minister, Williams described himself throughout his life as a Christian and a believer, although the images of God and religion that he presents are mostly dark ones: the hysterical practice of atonement by the evangelical congregation in the story “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1948); the Darwinian cruelty of Sebastian Venable’s image of God in Suddenly Last Summer; the angry, petulant “senile delinquent” of a God that the Rev T. Lawrence Shannon describes in The Night of the Iguana (1961). But he also created the comforting images of the “Angel in the Alcove” (1943) and the vision of the Blessed Virgin who watches over the misfits

Introduction and the marginalized in The Mutilated (1966). Williams saw a deity that encompassed all of these elements, and his sometimes desperate search for religious truth and faith underlies a good deal of his work.

Literary engagement also emerges often in this book as an important subtext in Williams's plays. The imaginative sources of his work were in his voluminous reading as well as in his lived experience. This is of course most evident in the “literary” characters who appear in his plays—D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Lord Byron, Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway—but it is much more significant in the literary images, symbolism, and language that pervade his work. It is impossible in the scope of a broad study like this one to do justice to the literary subtexts of the plays, but I have tried to point it out where it is most important.

This book is arranged roughly chronologically, and although the subtexts of Williams's perennial concerns run through it from beginning to end, the greatest attention is given to the plays that have proven most significant to the theatre and to critics. I have tried to present the plays as creations of the theatre as well as the imagination and the typewriter of Tennessee Williams, and to present them in the context of the theatre and the culture of his time.

In his essay in the Critical Perspectives section, John Bak makes use of primary materials like Williams's unpublished essays and his letters to critics responding to their criticism of his plays in his detailed analysis of the theatrical culture of Williams's time and his evolving role within it. Each of the other essays in the Critical Perspectives section offers a different point of departure from which to consider Williams and his work. Bruce McConachie’s analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire illustrates the value of approaching Williams with a fresh critical eye and new theoretical tools, in this case applying the theory of cognitive science to the reception by audiences of the play in 1947 and the film in 1951. The remaining essays, by two critics who have already contributed a great deal to our understanding of the later plays, shed more light on these neglected works. Felcia Londré uses the poem “Cyclops Eye,” which first appeared in Williams's novel Moise and the World of Reason (1975), to illuminate three of his later plays, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), The Two-Character Play/Outcry, and Vieux Carré (1977), and Annette Saddik provides a rich context for Kingdom of Earth (1968), A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976), and A House Not Meant to Stand (1982) in the theory of the grotesque.

Despite the eclipse of his reputation during his lifetime, in the 30 years since his death, Williams has continued to occupy his place as one of the three or four great playwrights the United States has produced. If my students at the University of Connecticut are a good measure, he holds a fascination for a new generation who approach his work within a new cultural context in which theatrical experimentation is expected and it is homophobia rather than homosexuality that is seen as unacceptable. Scholarly interest in Williams is at a high point as well. In 2011, the centennial of his birth sparked a good deal of activity. Centennial conferences and celebrations were held at the University of Perugia in Italy, the Université Nancy in France, Georgetown University and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, and a centennial festival in his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Many revivals assure Williams’s constant presence on the stage. The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire receive multiple revivals in theatres throughout the world every year. The ongoing activity in a variety of venues testifies to the vitality of Williams’s work, early and late, well known and unknown in the theatre. In 2010, for example, besides the acclaimed Cate Blanchett production of Streetcar, which was done in Australia, Britain, and the United States, there were several revivals of both this play and Menagerie, as well as productions of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), The Night of the Iguana, Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In addition, the early play, Spring Storm, which had never been produced in New York or London, was produced at London's Cottesloe Theatre; New York’s Wooster Group did an experimental adaptation of Vieux Carré at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (1981) was done at the venerable Off-Off Broadway Club at La MaMa. Popular revivals

Introduction with bankable stars, such as Emily Mann’s multiracial production of Streetcar with Blair Underwood in 2012 and the 2013 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Scarlett Johansson, testify to Williams's continued presence in the Broadway theatre 30 years after his death.

A Note on Texts

Tennessee Williams revised his plays many times before, during, and after their productions, often making changes in the scripts for revivals, or for new editions of the published plays. In cases like Summer and Smoke and Battle of Angels, he reworked the scripts so drastically that he considered them new plays, and had them produced and published under new titles. In other words, in the case of Tennessee Williams, the text of a play is a protean thing, and deciding which of the published versions to use can be as vexing for scholars as for directors. In most cases there are at least three published versions of a Williams play: the “acting version,” published by Dramatists Play Service, which is the script based on the original production, with stage directions, property lists, etc., for those who want to produce the play; the “reading version,” usually published in a single volume by New Directions, Williams’s longtime publisher; and later New Directions versions, including the eight-volume edition of his collected plays, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, published between 1971 and 1992.

In most cases, the eight-volume edition is the standard edition that scholars use in discussing the text. This does not include all of Williams’s plays, but it usually contains the last version of the text approved by Williams during his lifetime. In addition, the readily available Library of America volumes, Tennessee Williams Plays, edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch in 2000, contain by design the first editions of the plays in book form. I have mostly used the Library of America volumes in my overview of Williams's career because my discussion of the plays is in the context of the original productions, and these are the closest reading versions to the original scripts. The essays in the Critical Perspective sections mostly use the Theatre of

Tennessee Williams volumes in discussing the text. Single-volume New Directions versions are used throughout the book for plays that do not appear in either of these collections. These are rules of thumb, however, and it is important to remember that, when dealing with Williams texts, no rule is hard and fast.

CHAPTER THE 1930s’ PLAYS (1936-1940)

Williams in the Thirties

Much of Williams’s early playwriting was shaped by the social, economic, and artistic environment of the 1930s. His most important theatrical relationship at the time was with director Willard Holland and The Mummers of St Louis, a group dedicated to the drama of social action that was vital to American theatrical culture in the 1930s. Candles to the Sun (1937), based on a coal mining strike, and Fugitive Kind (1937), about the denizens of a seedy urban hotel, were both produced by The Mummers, and Not About Nightingales (1938), about brutal abuses in the American prison system, was intended for them, although they disbanded before the play was produced.

The other major influence on Williams's early development as a playwright was the playwriting program at the University of Iowa, which he attended in 1937-38. Its director, E. C. Mabie, had worked for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the only federally subsidized theatre in American history, which existed briefly from 1935 until 1939, when its funding was cut by a Congress that objected to its leftist leanings. In the FTP, Mabie had worked with agit prop and other social action techniques in the Living Newspaper, a theatrical form that he brought to Iowa. As part of a Living Newspaper, Williams wrote a one-act dramatization of a prison hunger strike, called Quit Eating!, which became the basis for Not About Nightingales. Williams’s other instructor in playwriting at Iowa was E. P. Conkle, who had had a successful Broadway production of his play about Abraham Lincoln, Prologue to Glory, just the year before Williams came to Iowa.

With this background, it is not surprising that Williams worked hard during the 1930s to produce drama of political and social significance. At the same time, the perennial themes and tropes that make a Tennessee Williams play recognizable were beginning to be established during these early years. The misfit, the marginalized, and the “fugitive kind” who need to escape from the trap of confinement by middle-class mores are evident from the beginning, as well as the artist, who often is also the misfit, and the bohemian lifestyle that he seeks as escape. Williams’s interest in the representation of sexuality, particularly the divergence from, or the transgression of, the heteronormative, is there as well. And permeating all his work is his lifelong obsession with his mother, his father, his grandparents, and especially his sister Rose, which would fuel much of his art. These themes are particularly evident in Spring Storm, written in 1937-38, and Stairs to the Roof, written in 1940, neither of which was produced during his lifetime. Both dramatize concerns that were immediate to Williams at the time: sexual conflict and confusion, the situation of the artist, and the necessity of escaping the trap of a mechanical, dehumanizing job and a joyless, drearily conventional middle-class life.

A Literary Bohemia: The Magic Tower

The Magic Tower was Williams's first produced play, staged on 13 October 1936 by an amateur theatre company in Webster Groves, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St Louis. In a playwriting contest sponsored by the Webster Groves Theatre Guild, the play won first prize, which included production of the play. Perhaps because it was not a play written for The Mummers or for the seminars at Iowa, there is no striving for social significance in this one-act play about a bohemian artist, Jim, and his wife, Linda, a former vaudevillian.

Williams's depiction of the bohemian lifestyle is straight out of the traditional literature of bohemia deriving from Henri Murger’s La vie bohème (1849) and Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème (1896), a bohemia that was popularized in the United States by the writers and artists of the Greenwich Village Little Renaissance that flourished before World War I. Williams’s play could easily be one of the one-act plays of the Provincetown Players, which often indulged in the self-depiction of the bohemian community of Greenwich Village. Williams was to alter his view of the bohemian lifestyle as he gained in experience and broadened his views, embracing particularly the gay element in the bohemian subcultures of New Orleans, New York, Key West, Southern California, and Puerto Vallarta. But at this stage in his life, Williams clearly took his view of bohemia from literature.

The Magic Tower has many of the tropes of traditional bohemian literature. The penniless artist and his wife are living a life of poverty devoted to art and love in an attic apartment they call their “enchanted tower” while they dodge the landlady and wonder where their next meal will come from. But like many of the Provincetown plays, it engages in an ironic self-criticism by dashing the cold water of reality on the bohemian fantasy. Jim, a very young artist, pins his future hopes on a meeting with an art dealer who is looking for fresh new talent to invest in, while his wife Linda is tempted back to her show business career by two former colleagues who try to convince her that she is just a drag on her husband’s artistic ambitions. They nearly succeed until Jim returns, revealing he has failed to impress the art dealer, and Linda feels the need to stay and take care of him.

In a final twist, though, Jim reveals that he is not as dedicated to the “enchanted tower fantasy” as Linda is, exploding with “magic tower, boloney! Its Mrs. O’Fallon’s attic that were up in, Linda! Mrs. O’Fallon’s lousy, leaking attic! And we're five weeks behind on the rent! Do you know what’s going to happen to us, Linda? We're going to get kicked out on our ears, that’s what!” (Williams 2011: 36). When he responds to her statement that in “this state of enchantment—in which we lived—nothing ever happened—nothing ever mattered except our having each other” (36-7) with the flat “those were pretty words” (37), Linda decides to leave him after all, assuring him that it will be “much healthier to live in a dry, bright attic-than a magic tower with a leaking roof!” (38). For Williams, who was living in his parents’ attic in 1936, this notion of combining the artist’s garret with the regular meals, clean laundry and other comforts of middle-class life was an attractive compromise. It would be 2 years until he finally broke out of the parental nest and made his first foray into the authentic bohemian lifestyle of the New Orleans French Quarter.

“Group consciousness”: Candles to the Sun

Candles to the Sun was the first full-length play by Williams to see production. It was actually his development of a one-act play, The Lamp, by Joseph Phelan Hollifield, a writer who was a friend of his grandparents in Memphis. The two had worked together on the play in 1935 when Williams was in Memphis, and Hollifield eventually turned it over to Williams to do what he could with it (N: 52, n. 81). As Dan Isaac notes in his Introduction to the play, Williams wrote a note on a draft of the play that he submitted to Holland, explaining that Hollifield had written the original one-act play, and he was “doing the writing on the present manuscript” while Hollifield was contributing material about the Red Hills section of Alabama where the play is set (Williams 2004: xxv).

‘The play, which dramatizes the brutal living conditions in a mining camp and the efforts to improve them with a labor strike, culminates in the miner’s widow Fern’s choice to spend her savings to sustain the strikers rather than to save it for the college tuition that will free her son from the mine. The play was tailor-made for the Mummers, and Williams worked with Willard Holland in a close collaboration that was the first of several such partnerships between playwright and director during his career. William Jay Smith, one of Williams’s close friends in St Louis, says in the play’s Foreword that Holland “had almost singlehandedly helped to shape the final version of the play from the more than 400 unnumbered typewritten pages of various drafts that now repose at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas” (ix).

As shaped by Williams and Holland for The Mummers’ 1937 production, Candles to the Sun certainly fulfills the group’s mission of social engagement. Set pieces establish the economic conditions and labor abuses the play is meant to combat. For example, when John, the oldest son of the family, dies in a coal mine, his wife Fern writes to his parents, Hester and Bram, about the conditions they had been up against in trying to save money to get him out of the mines and into a better job:

The company stopped paying cash. Instead they paid us paper money called scrip that you couldnt use anywhere but the company store so we had to buy everything there and prices went up so high it was all we could do to keep living, and then sometimes we couldn't even get any scrip. We got behind on the rent and the company took all John’s pay ’cause the house we lived in was theirs. Everything was theirs, it all belonged to the company. And for weeks at a time the mines would be shut down and there wouldn't be food in the house and the rent way behind till it got so we owed so much that we couldn't ever catch up. (19)

Familiar stages of the drama of social action are marked with equally clear monologues. The moment of rebellion against these impossible conditions comes with Hester’s declaration that “I’m gonna give ’em back as good as I git frum now on. I dont care what happens. I’m gonna start fightin’. It’s time somebody started fightin’. Bram won't, he’s too dumb. He’s a natcheral bo’n slave. But me, I’m gittin tired of it all... . It’s time somebody did something round here besides dig in the dirt and eat it. Jim fed up! (31-2).

The conversion of the family to leftist ideas by the aptly named Birmingham Red comes gradually, as Fern’s son Luke realizes, “he ain’t in it for what he can get out of it like everybody else seems to be. He talks about-society. You know—you and me and everybody else that makes up the whole world. It’s too big to understand all at once. It’s one of those things that you have to lay in the dark and think about a long time” (41). His aunt Star, a pariah in the mining camp because of her loose morals, becomes intrigued with Red and his “screwy ideas” like “Justice. Equality. Freedom” (42), and both falls in love with him and is converted to his politics, expressing her disgust with the men who resist the strike because they are afraid of the company: “the damn fools! Red tries to make them see things but they won't! Theyd rather go on as they are, the life being poisoned out of them with coal dust, over-worked and underpaid, cheated, bought and sold” (66). And her conversion to the leftist agenda has transformed her as well: “It seems Ive changed into somebody else and everything that I done before I look back at and wonder how it could have really been me that done those things” (66).

‘The major transformation takes place in Fern, who has devoted her life to earning the money to free her son Luke from the coal mines so that he will not die as his father did. Red’s argument with her anticipates Arthur Millers A// My Sons, which would be a Broadway success in 1947. When Red tells her that her money could sustain the 1500 people in the camp, she says, “only one of them’s my son!” His response is, “why not the others?” (93). Red’s major monologue makes the argument that using the money for all the strikers would be a more fitting monument to her husband than using it to free Luke from the mine:

Do you think he'd be proud of the choices youve made? He wasnt the first to die in the mines. There was lots of others. Death after death. And some of them not so quick. They could write starvation on pretty near every death ticket they filled out around here and it wouldn't be very far off. And now these people are fighting for a chance to live. Isnt that a big enough monument for John-to give 1500 of his own people their last fightin’ chance on earth? (95)

After Fern gives up the money and Red is shot by the company men, the strike is successful, and as Star says, “He didn’t get killed for nothing! More quietly. And you didn't give your money for nothing, neither. The work’ll be safe now an’ I guess they'll have to pay fair wages” (107). The argument is certainly simple and straightforward, but in an interview for the St Louis Star-Times, Williams claimed that the play transcends propaganda, calling it “an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set out in human and dramatic terms” (xv). He also provided a gloss on its theme, noting that “the candles

[in the title of the] play represent the individual lives of the people. The sun represents group consciousness. The play ends as a tragedy for the individuals, for in the end they realize they cannot achieve success and happiness apart from the group but must sacrifice for the common good” (xvi).

The play also has a literary element apart from its social agenda. The influence of the Irish playwright J. M. Synge is evident in Williams’s framing of the family’s tragedy. Like the mother in Riders to the Sea, whose sons are drowned one after the other, leaving her alone with her two daughters and her grief in the end, the Pilcher women see their men lost one after another to the mines. The audience only hears about the death of John, Hester’s son and Fern’s husband, but it sees the corpse of the second son Joel being brought back from the mines on a plank and the shooting of Red by the company men. It also hears about Hester’s death from pellagra and witnesses the father Bram’s growing blindness after his long years in the mines and Star’s departure to work as a prostitute in Birmingham, the only means of survival open to her after Red’s death. In the end, only Luke and Fern are left, with Luke confined to the mines now that Fern’s money is gone. The shadow of D. H. Lawrence, a major influence on Williams during the 1930s, is also evident in the strong primal bond between mother and son and the depiction of the domestic lives of the miners.