Stephen Bottoms - A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams

A Student Handbook to the
Plays of Tennessee Williams

A Student Handbook to the
Plays of Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie

A Streetcar Named Desire

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Sweet Bird of Youth

STEPHEN J. BOTTOMS

PATRICIA HERN AND MICHAEL HOOPER

PHILIP C. KOLIN

KATHERINE WEISS

Edited by

KATHERINE WEISS

Contents

Stephen J. Bottoms

PatriciaHern and Michael Hooper

Philip C.Kolin

Katherine Weiss

Speaking in a slow southern drawl, an aged Tennessee Williams eloquently told interviewer Bill Boggs, I have never cared whether I shocked people. People who are shocked by the truth are not deserving of the truth. And the truth is something you need to deserve. This carefully crafted statement by a man whose plays so often shocked and intrigued audiences for his representation of taboo subjects seems to fly in the face of the imaginary worlds so many of his characters create. It is tempting to align the illusions that the Wingfields of The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, Margaret and Brick Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth create with lies. Although they create fantasies to survive their brutal realities and the past disappointments haunting them, his characters are not liars. It is Laura, Amanda and Tom (not Jim), Blanche (not Stanley), Maggie (not Sister Woman), and Chance and Del Lago (not Tom Junior), whom audiences empathise with, perhaps even living with them in those make-believe worlds. Williams, himself, has more in common with his frail characters than, for example, Stanley or Mitch in Streetcar, who tear down the Chinese lanterns to bring ugly realities to light. He is, as C. W. Bigsby argues, the protagonist of all his plays, fleeing his own guilt and trauma, and in doing so, is a truer, more vulnerable creature. In his magical dramatic works, Williams gives voice to the weak by having them create imaginary worlds that are not untruthful. The illusions belonging to his characters, after all, do not offer the escape they desire. Their pasts, as did Williamss, haunt their imagination.

As children, Williams and his sister Rose lived on their imagination. Williams recalled that their fantasies were a form of escape, especially after having moved with his family to St Louis, Missouri, where Williams and Rose felt like fugitives.be admitted into the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and being fired from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) movie studio, before Williams became Americas leading playwright, shocking his critics and drawing large crowds to his plays.

Despite some success with writing leftist plays for a St Louis theatre company called the Mummers and winning literary awards including the National Institute for Arts and Letters Award for his play Battle of Angels, it was not until the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945 that Williamss talent was confirmed, opening stage doors for him. On Broadway, Menagerie ran for 561 performances and won several accolades, including the New York Critics Circle Award. The years 1945 to 1963 were productive and successful for Williams. Two years after the success of Menagerie, Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire opened, running for an incredible 855 performances and winning Williams more awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama. With Streetcar, Williams dared to break more taboos than any other serious playwright of his time, and in doing so, he created Blanche DuBois, one of the most memorable female protagonists in American drama. Blanche is a figure that to this day inspires directors. Woody Allens 2013 film, Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche in the 2009 Sydney Theatre Company and Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Streetcar, is a less violent rewriting of Williamss masterpiece. In 1955, Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drew the praise of critics and audiences, alike, running for 694 performances. This remarkable play won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize. Breaking social barriers, the curtain rises, revealing a bedroom occupied by Maggie and Brick. During this opening act, the audience learns of their troubled marriage. In a daring move, Williams also incorporates another off-stage homosexual couple, but unlike the condemnation Blanches husband, Allan Grey, receives, Big Daddy accepts the love that Jack Straw and Peter Ochello shared. Like Cat, Sweet Bird of Youth confronts the audience with their desire to look into the bedrooms of others. The voyeuristic pleasure gained in Cat and Sweet Bird resembles that of the pleasure one gains from watching Alfred Hitchcocks 1954 classic film, Rear Window. Wanting to gawk at the dirty laundry of others, crowds flocked to the play when it debuted in 1959 even though New York theatre critics received the play coolly. Sweet Bird ran for 375 performances.

Williamss plays reveal his preoccupation with the South of his early childhood. Although Tennessee loved the South and admired much about the gentility he associated with it, the South he portrays in his plays is far from idyllic. It is a place where the outsider, whether a man of colour, a homosexual, a sex worker or a promiscuous woman can lose his or her life through cruelty, violence or neglect. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella tells her husband Stanley that Blanche has been destroyed by her marriage to a degenerate who, when caught with a lover, committed suicide. Later, Blanche suffers a mental breakdown after losing Mitch and being raped by Stanley. In Sweet Bird of Youth, the fate of Chance Wayne, a gigolo, is paralleled to that of a black man who, before the play begins, has been castrated for allegedly being with a white woman. The Southern small towns in Williamss plays are bigoted, dangerous spaces. The Mississippi of Williamss youth was wrought with racism. When not set in the Deep South, Williamss plays include traces of his familys move to St Louis, Missouri, where the young Tom felt overwhelmed by feelings of being uprooted. The move, for Williams, was more than a disorienting relocation. It meant living in a small cramped space, cut off from his extended family. While the small Southern towns in Williamss plays represent danger, the Midwest urban spaces in his plays, as seen in Menagerie, are suffocating while simultaneously being isolating.

Other biographical elements that appear in Williamss plays are his attempts to cope with his overbearing mother, his distant and often cruel father, his homosexuality and his sisters mental illness, which eventually led to her lobotomy. Being taunted by his father as a sissy was a life event that became symbolic for Williams. He utilises memories of his family to explore the weak when faced with the dominant and often unjust masses. In Cats conclusion, Maggie says it best when she finds a way to entice her husband to sleep with her, Oh, you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! This statement is present in all Williamss plays. Those who the dominant in society see as weak, frail and sick are to him beautiful people. Those who are considered strong in his plays are often violent and crude. They lack the beauty of those who are fragile like Laura with her glass unicorn. But what we see repeatedly in his plays is also the destruction of beauty. The weak, beautiful people of his plays are abandoned (as is Laura), raped (as is Blanche), crippled (as are Laura and Brick), and castrated (as is Chance). The weak, too, are always alone even when accompanied by others. They are lonely, as was Williams. Having been in a committed relationship with Frank Merlo from 1947 to 1963, Williams suffered greatly when Merlo died, turning once again to alcohol and drugs to fight off his loneliness. Ultimately, however, he died alone in a prestigious New York hotel room.