The Tennessee Williams Annual Review
Book Review:
Recent Releases
Tiffany Gilbert
Tennessee Williams and Italy: A Transcultural Perspective.
By Alessandro Clericuzio. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016,
xv + 225 pages, 6 black-and-white illustrations.Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America.
By Jacqueline O’Connor. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016, xii + 228 pages.Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer. By Annette J. Saddik, Cambridge UP, 2015, xi + 194 pages, 5 black-and-white illustrations
In the last two decades of his career, after the success of The Night of the Iguana in 1961, Tennessee Williams became a kind of critical piñata, battered ruthlessly by the theater press, who, rejecting his new, experimental dramaturgy, were determined to shake out of him another Streetcar or Cat. Audiences, too, were struck by what must have seemed a kind of betrayal, a violation of his side of the bargain in the production of art that was not only critically substantial and scintillating but also accessible. In his 1975 Memoirs, he defended the new directions staked out in his dramaturgy, which contained themes more confrontational and decadent:
Actually my own theatre is also in a state of revolution: I am quite through with the kind of play that established my early and popular reputation. I am doing a different thing which is altogether my own, not influenced at all by other playwrights at home or abroad or by other schools of theatre. My thing is what it always was: to express my world and my experience of it in whatever form seems suitable to the material. (qtd. in Saddik 41)
Though speaking about his divergence in focus, he points to a priority that remained constant in his writing: the suitability of form to its material. Indeed, throughout Williams’s long career, the pursuit of suitable forms took him deep into the heart of the United States South and abroad to Italy. The three titles under review here consider the evolution of his dramatic audacity: his fearless engagement with themes that anticipated cultural change and challenged the legal realities of his day, as well as the transatlantic encounters that shaped a cosmopolitan sensibility permeating even his most southern works. The order in which I examine these texts follows the trajectory of Williams’s life and career, rather than publication date.
¶2
Beginning with Williams’s first trip to Italy in 1938, Alessandro Clericuzio’s Tennessee Williams and Italy traces the affinities that bound writer and nation for nearly forty-five years. Elaborating on John S. Bak’s claim that “Europe often served as the muse through which [Williams’s] Southern thesis was given a voice” (qtd. in Clericuzio 14), the author writes in his introduction:
The transnational aspect of his plots was further enhanced by the artistic form chosen by Williams: no other literary genre is as cross-cultural in its border passages as dramatic theater. Whereas poetry and fiction undergo a translation and virtually no further changes in their foreign adaptations, theater entails an almost endless variety of metamorphoses[. . . . Moreover,] Tennessee Williams started writing at a time when, after the direct—or indirect—trauma of dictatorships and of the war, all of the Western world was looking to US culture in search of new, wider, more democratic artistic horizons. (14–15)
The book situates Williams’s progress as an author amid the postwar restoration of order in Europe, as Western, democratic-leaning nations and Eastern Bloc countries relaxed censorship rules and permitted the staging of his plays. Clericuzio’s opening chapter discusses late-1945 editions of Il dramma, which introduced Williams as one of the world’s foremost creative minds. Readers of this theater journal would have encountered an excited young American artist convinced of the redemptive power of language. Promoting The Glass Menagerie in a radio interview, Williams digresses to share his grand vision for theater:
I am deeply convinced of the future possibilities of theater. Theater will surely be a great strength for international comprehension. [. . .] Through mutual understanding we can fight fundamentalisms, suspicion, hatred and all that creates barriers between people in the world. The war has made us all feel closer together: we should stay as close as that. I wish we could move towards a world theater, and I think that we might not be far from it, now. We must make this dream come true in all the countries of the world. (qtd. in Clericuzio 12–13)
Williams was not content to plug his play only on Italian airwaves; he envisioned a more sympathetic, connected world after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and argued for theater’s place in it. Clericuzio’s rendering of the interview reveals a writer on the rise, confident in his abilities and in the elevating, unifying power of language.
¶3
Williams’s introduction to the international scene in Italy in the late 1940s, as intimated in his radio epiphany, coincided with evolving cultural tastes and America’s ascendancy as a dominant player in the global political and cultural arenas. Indeed, he rose to fame when arts and entertainment were becoming effective tools of public diplomacy: “The US government and its diplomatic representatives in Europe were aware of the power of cultural artifacts in the process of exportation of the American Way of Life, under the rubric of Western Democracy” (16). Whereas film “was a field of intervention and in some cases of competition between Italy and the USA” (16), the theater industry was less scrutinized and even less cosmopolitan. When The Glass Menagerie—or Lo zoo di vetro, as it was known—premiered in 1946, Williams was able to take advantage of theater’s “provincialism,” or, rather, a very limited artistic scope (17).
¶4
But his debut was not without problems, as skeptics and downright hostile forces rejected the playwright as an American interloper who trafficked in disruptive themes and profited economically at the expense of the Italian theater and film industry. Global restructuring after the end of World War II, coupled with the rise of Williams’s popularity, made artistic and cross-cultural collaboration more desirable: “Intellectuals and artists all over the world were eager to appropriate his controversial works, mingling their own innovative ideas with his: Japanese born Seki Sano in Mexico, Jean Cocteau in France, Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Luchino Visconti in Italy, Laurence Olivier in Great Britain [. . .] soon signaled the transcultural potential of Williams’ properties” (15). Despite the possibilities an intellectual or creative venture with Williams presented, Italian audiences treated the staging of Lo zoo di vetro as a threat, fearing that American artists would supplant national theater and cinematic enterprises. Clericuzio reports, “When Lo zoo di vetro, Williams’ first work to be presented to Italians, did reach the stage in Rome on December 13, 1946, some members of the audience felt the need to hiss and boo the performance, shouting that instead of that foreign play, the company should have put up an Italian work” (17). If some theatergoers denounced the production of American plays on principle, some felt the plot of Menagerie was evanescent, that it lacked heft. One critic, Vito Pandolfi, rooted the audience’s misunderstanding and detachment from Menagerie in national anxiety and wounded pride:
No wonder our audience missed the pathos of the play, for it is peculiar to that big country, a nation that, like very few others, runs no risk of being colonized. A country like ours, instead, because of its profound weakness and lack of energies, because of its material and spiritual poverty, feels doomed to become a colony and therefore suffers from other complexes, other resentments and other quixotisms. . . . Great countries like the USSR and the United States not only have a social and economic structure of their own, completely different from ours, but they also have developed a new mental structure, and The Glass Menagerie is a typical specimen of the American one. (qtd. in 20)
¶5
Cultural and aesthetic differences also awaited Streetcar’s arrival. When Streetcar debuted three years later in 1949, critics decried the play’s vulgar subplots and characterizations; incredibly, some took more offense at Blanche’s sexual appetites and her dead husband’s attraction to men than at Stanley’s adulterous act of rape at the end of the play (22). Decades after Streetcar’s Italian premiere, critics continued to lambaste what they perceived as Williams’s predilection for scandalous themes. After 1961’s The Night of the Iguana, many considered Williams an empty vessel, long out of fresh ideas. Clericuzio reports that, at the premiere of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore at Spoleto in 1962, one reviewer did not pull any punches, writing, “The play is not totally bad [. . .] if we consider it as part of the tradition of sensational and putrefying female portraits to which we have been accustomed by Williams’ necrophiliac imagination” (qtd. in 42). Even John Huston’s 1964 film adaptation of Iguana failed to attract interest from Italian audiences, initiating a period of decline that lasted until Williams’s death, in 1983. By the end of chapter 2, Clericuzio’s principal emphasis on critical and audience opinion is clear.
¶6
Still, Williams found an artistically kindred spirit in the director Luchino Visconti. Clericuzio establishes their collaboration in chapter 3 by contextualizing Visconti’s privileged life in relation to the themes over which Williams obsessed in his work:
[Visconti] was a collector of fine fabrics, of antique furniture, and even of china animal figures, which filled, together with unique Art Nouveau glass pieces, the Roman villa in which he went to live in 1941. Many of these objects were used as props by Visconti on his sets. He was indeed turning physical pieces of personal and family memory into publicly evocative art, a process that was running parallel to Tennessee Williams’ own processing of personal, family, and national past into drama. This is one of the reasons why the Italian director was drawn towards The Glass Menagerie and was able to give it an appealing personal interpretation. (56)
Memory, then, united playwright and director. Under Visconti’s eye, Lo zoo di vetro became a star vehicle for the actor Rina Morelli as Laura, for whom the menagerie serves as a comforting, alternative universe, and Tatiana Pavlova as Amanda, her overbearing mother; ironically, in some of the initial reviews, Williams failed to earn even a perfunctory mention, overshadowed by Visconti and the two female stars. Their partnership nonetheless continued in 1949, when Visconti, drawn to Williams’s depiction of family strife and salvation, mounted a production of Streetcar, known in Italy as Un tram che si chiama desiderio. Clericuzio notes that, during rehearsals, Williams would erupt with his signature cackle anytime he was sought out for clarification or advice, forcing Visconti to disinvite him from rehearsals.
¶7
While Clericuzio goes on to discuss the casting, production, and reception of Un tram—one critic exclaimed that “[t]he text has nothing interesting” (qtd. in 74)—its sexual themes warrant significant attention in this study. Producing the play was no easy matter for Visconti because of censorship rules and restrictions; even after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, the government and church monitored the kinds of material circulating in the public square. Visconti submitted the script to the Ufficio di revisione (75). Though the script was approved, the director refused to comply with all of the office’s recommendations, resulting in long-lasting critical and governmental suspicion of Williams’s work.
¶8
The passive-aggressive power of the censors—they took more than three months to refuse the script for The Rose Tattoo—was such that Visconti moved away from theater productions and engaged Williams to write the script for the film adaptation of the Italian novella Senso. Clericuzio’s discussion of Senso is brief, making for an awkward coda to a chapter that otherwise capably discusses two like-minded visionaries. Clericuzio reports but does not substantively analyze the fact that Visconti, dissatisfied with the script Williams’s friend Paul Bowles had written, appealed to Williams to take over duties. Clericuzio gestures to other scholars’ examination of Senso’sjoint authorship, then offers this summary: “If full evidence of Williams’ and Bowles’ authorship has been presented by recent criticism [. . .] what seems of greater import for the evaluation of the transcultural dynamics in which the US playwright was involved is his overall influence on such an artist as Luchino Visconti” (80). Less discussed, unfortunately, is the reverse dynamic: Visconti’s influence on the American.
¶9
Clericuzio’s discussion of the playwright’s close association with Anna Magnani, their films together, and the origins of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is not without its share of interpretive issues. Analysis cedes ground to coverage, as what begins as a focused examination of the affinities between Williams and Italy dissolves into generalized discussion of Williams’s Mediterranean influences. Clericuzio devotes some of chapter 5 to Williams’s pursuit of Magnani to ask her to star in his upcoming play, The Rose Tattoo; Magnani refused the Broadway option but traveled to the United States to appear in the 1955 film adaptation. Yet, instead of elaborating on Magnani and Williams’s personal and professional relationship, Clericuzio pivots to a review of sources that may have shaped Williams’s conception of Tattoo, such as Eduardo De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano and Salvatore Di Giacomo’s Assunta Spina.
¶10
What follows this segue is a lengthy analysis of Tattoo’s critical reception in Italy and the United States. Williams is on record as having instructed that The Rose Tattoo be produced “with that poetically expressive treatment of realistic detail which has been called the ‘New Realism’ as it is portrayed in the Italian films of Di Sica [sic] and Rossellini” (qtd. in Brian Parker, “The Rose Tattoo as Comedy of the Grotesque,” Tennessee Williams Annual Review, no. 6, 2003, par. 8). Nevertheless, Clericuzio appears to agree with reviewers who took exception to Williams and the director Daniel Mann’s incorporation of neorealist elements that draw from and augment Magnani’s cinematic presence. Clericuzio finds fault with the aesthetic choice and blames its failure on temperamental differences:
[T]he film had the fault of having been conceived within a Neo-realist aesthetics not substantially shared by Williams, who was melodramatic at the core and did not really know, let alone share, the moral and political assumptions underlying the Italian cinematographic style of the previous decade. [. . .] Indeed, the Italian character that Williams addressed in the Rome of Karen Stone was closer to his own aesthetic temperament. (129)
His assertion of this affinity between author and character notwithstanding, Clericuzio devotes little more than five pages to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. In fact, Magnani’s performance in The Fugitive Kind, the film version of Orpheus Descending, which Williams wrote with her in mind, receives only a passing reference at this point in the book, which is surprising considering how Clericuzio sets up the expectation of more engaged analysis in chapter 1. He cites one damning review that claimed, “[Williams’s] hallucinatory characters, with their speech, which is elaborate even when it sounds essential . . . find their exact dimension on the stage alone. . . . On film they jar with the screen, they belie flaws they originally didn’t have, . . . they taste of dust even when they exude tears and blood” (qtd. in 34). One wishes such poetic condemnation of The Fugitive Kind / Pelle di serpente had prompted some counterargument or pushback in this volume.
¶11
Instead, Clericuzio detours to show the Mediterranean region’s influence on other aspects of Williams’s dramaturgy, such as gender fluidity in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer and the queer transformation of Summer and Smoke into The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. The chapter concludes with an inventory of Williams’s “Neapolitan Connection”: “Italian writers and artists most influenced by Tennessee Williams were from the South themselves, though obviously not from the South of the USA but the South of Italy. To be more exact, they were all from the Neapolitan area” (140–41). With no summative statement about The Rose Tattoo or The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, the argumentative thread that initiated the chapter simply frays.
¶12
Clericuzio returns to Pelle di serpente in chapter 4, which focuses on Williams’s so-called golden years, 1957 to 1964, the years during which plays and films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Sweet Bird of Youth; Suddenly Last Summer; and The Night of the Iguana were released. Again, he presents a litany of reviews, strung together with little analysis of the individual plays. One section on Cat’s global reception, for example, references no fewer than eight critics in roughly four paragraphs; critics’ names appear only within parenthetical citations to minimize clutter in Clericuzio’s text (161). This strategy is minimally effective, as it produces a chorus of anonymous voices that overwhelms any other commentary.
¶13
And so goes Clericuzio’s analysis of the playwright’s late career and plays. From the start of Williams’s Italian experiment, Clericuzio concludes,
[N]ot only at the level of reception, but also at that of production his work is a testimony of the connections offered an artist in the US first and then in the actual geographical encounters that his success soon allowed him. As such, Williams’ oeuvre is an evident specimen of world American literature, a transnational formation forged by hybridizations and reverberations of two or more cultures. (201)
Despite Clericuzio’s optimism, Williams’s fascination with controversial subjects—however subtly incorporated into his material—irritated both ends of the political spectrum, as adherents of the Left and Right objected to his work for different reasons. “If the first were irked by his portrayal of the decadent side of a capitalist society that was notoriously anti-communist,” Clericuzio acknowledges, “the moralism of the latter could not agree with what they considered to be the ‘deviant’ behavior of his characters” (200).
¶14
In his foreword to Clericuzio’s volume, John S. Bak quotes from Williams’s essay “The Evenings of Magnani” and a letter to Brooks Atkinson about Williams’s impressions of Italy “to whet the appetite of this volume’s readers” (vii). At the close of the volume, Clericuzio (quoting the critic Sieglinde Lemke) writes, “I have attempted to produce an original mapping of the many points of contact he had with Italian culture, believing that a ‘transnational framework implies a number of methodological shifts, including a special interest and critical focus on, intersections and a preference for comparative approaches’” (203). While Tennessee Williams and Italy offers an important survey of a significant period in the author’s life, the romance, panache, and sybaritic thrill of Williams’s life and observations struggle to emerge through thickets of digressions, detours, and a surfeit of critical invective.
¶15
At the same time that Williams’s transatlantic encounters were acquainting him with other creative individuals and vernaculars and expanding the reach of his celebrity, in the United States his work was critiquing the slippery boundaries between public, private, and legal identities. Well aware of the era’s statutory reality and brewing hostility toward anyone considered suspicious or deviant, Williams knew that, as a gay writer, he was in a position to trouble the status quo. In Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America, Jacqueline O’Connor investigates the playwright as an “illegal body” (2). Her study of the legal developments surrounding and circulating through some of the most iconic works in American theater begins with Williams’s recognition of his outsider status. When he moved to New Orleans in 1938—away from the suffocating devotion of his mother, Edwina, and the ruthless shaming by his father, Cornelius—Williams discovered a place that, despite its deep southern roots, thrived on the commingling of different races, cultures, and desires. There, the young artist felt free to pursue his attraction to men and often recounted the fervid details of his one-night stands in memoirs and letters. An excerpt from a letter to Lawrence Langer written in Key West in 1941 illustrates Williams’s enthusiasm: “I lead an exciting double life here, writing all morning, spending my afternoons in an English widow’s cabana on the beach where I associate with people like John Dewey, James Farrell and Elizabeth Bishop and in the evening consorting, in dungarees, with B-girls, transients and sailors at Sloppy Joe’s or the Starlight Gambling Casino” (qtd. in 14). Cruising not only became a gateway to pleasure but also provided material and themes with which to experiment in writing, such as homosexuality, cannibalism, promiscuity, and prostitution.
¶16
That said, toggling between sexual curiosity and fear of censure, Williams was aware of the risks to his personal freedom and professional reputation; as an “illegal body,” he lived and loved outside the acceptable norms and laws of American life. For her investigation, O’Connor mines the playwright’s rich store of correspondence, memoirs, and literary output to tap an understudied vein in Williams scholarship:
His early adulthood was spent living along law’s edge and taking regular excursions over the lines drawn by a variety of local, state, and federal statutes regulating sexual behavior, and he was aware that a determination of suspiciousness was subject to individual interpretation. [. . .] The ambiguity of language served the government by allowing considerable latitude about new applications of restrictive laws that existed to control behavior [. . .] to direct citizens toward seemly lives. (2–3)
Williams countered this legal hypervigilance with his own poetic language in plays that titillated US audiences on Broadway and in movie theaters for almost two decades. In her first chapter, O’Connor analyzes the way privacy shapes identity in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and The Night of the Iguana (1961), the two plays that anchored the rise and fall of his career. With Streetcar, Williams consolidated his reputation as an audacious playwright at a critical juncture in American law and culture: in 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights “recognized privacy as a fundamental human right,” affirming Louis D. Brandeis’s two-decades-old dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States that “the right to be let alone”—“the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men”—should be protected under the law (qtd. in 33). Privacy becomes a paramount concern for Blanche in Streetcar when, entering Stanley and Stella’s apartment, she notices the lack of separate spaces. “[W]ill it be decent?” she inquires (Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1, New Directions, 1971, p. 256). General concerns about propriety intensify into full-blown anxiety over Stanley’s vulgar insistence to know the contents of her steamer trunk, especially the love letters from her dead, gay husband, Allan Grey. So, when we hear Blanche singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon” in the steamy bathroom she shares with Stanley and Stella, observe Stanley tear open the curtain that separates Blanche’s collapsible cot from his own marital bed, or track the movements of all principals in and out of the common spaces, we witness Williams’s calculated engagement with one of the most pressing constitutional debates of his day.
¶17
Whereas Williams confines the privacy debate largely within the amorphous domestic sphere of Stella and Stanley’s Elysian Fields apartment in Streetcar, he confronts America’s cultural dissonance between its prurience and disgust in The Night of the Iguana, when the artist, Hannah, tells the recently defrocked minister, Shannon, about two separate incidents in which men masturbated in and because of her presence. Shannon, whose own sexual proclivities have resulted in suspension from his church, recoils in “disgust,” a word and sentiment invoked by many characters in the Williams canon. Hannah succinctly responds with a statement that perhaps encapsulates Williams’s approach to both the physical and emotional: “nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent” (qtd. in O’Connor 30). He championed the notion that “[w]hen individual choice is possible without harm to others [. . .] compassion and acceptance ought to be valued above judgment, and that humanity’s diversity ought to be honored [. . .]. The upholding of human rights demands a wide-ranging acceptance of difference and the freedom to reveal such differences without censure” (34). Privacy and disgust become entangled in the dramas, frequently intersecting in relation to sexuality. This nexus originates, O’Connor maintains, from Williams’s “career-long documentation and interrogation of the connections between sexual transgression and disgust” (51). But Williams was not simply determined to present unorthodox sexual content; he was also interested in critiquing both legal and extralegal forms of punishment: “[H]is texts feature characters who have contracted tuberculosis or venereal disease, or who are threatened with castration or cannibalism, and these ‘punishments’ are often suffered by those who have committed illegal sexual acts. Their fates are tied to their ‘unnatural’ and ‘disgusting’ behavior” (51). O’Connor’s description of the characters who occupy Williams’s pantheon is not new, of course; contextualizing his work vis-à-vis American jurisprudence reveals yet another dimension of Williams’s subversiveness.
¶18
O’Connor’s second chapter offers more detail on Williams’s preoccupation with disgust. Following major developments in the discourse of sexual desire and autonomy in the mid-twentieth century, she aligns her examination of Williams’s 1948 collection “One Arm” and Other Stories with the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which appeared the same year. Here, O’Connor concentrates extensively on the reception of Williams’s story “One Arm” and on what she perceives as a “critical blind spot” in the scholarly evaluations of his prose (58). While some critics dismissed his prose as practice runs or merely as material for the plays, she recognizes a maverick impulse to represent other experiences of love and life: “Williams’s first prose collection, with its titular story’s interrogation of same sex desire and prostitution, made visible to an American readership that he was not afraid of depicting transgressive behavior, and that he was willing to risk doing so at a time when cultural constructions of homosexuality were being debated, openly and covertly” (59). Indeed, Williams risked arrest at a border crossing in Laredo, Texas, when customs agents confiscated his possessions. He conveyed his trepidations over the potential discovery of “One Arm” in a letter to a friend, Donald Windham. The story was not discovered, fortunately, as Williams had forgotten it in his hotel. Williams’s narration of events to Windham confirms, however, “fears that his materials might be seized because of their illicit content” (74). Search and seizure at the border represented one kind of legal penalty, but the proliferation of vice squads ordered to expose homosexual activity represented a ratcheting up of surveillance and punishment by law enforcement and government agencies (74). O’Connor also references the Comstock Act of 1873, which, if invoked, threatened the distribution of his publications, even as his plays enjoyed success in the theater.
¶19
Though the chapter primarily examines “One Arm,” O’Connor devotes some attention to another story, “Hard Candy,” to reiterate Williams’s literary and sociocultural agenda. Through his “One Arm” protagonist, Oliver, an amputee ex-sailor turned hustler who later kills a john, Williams stacked the narrative deck against prohibitions, customs, and laws in favor of open, provocative storytelling. Oliver’s identity is both marked and fluid; he is at once empowered and disgusted by his difference. Focusing on the screenplay version of Williams’s story, O’Connor comments,
The challenges he faces in this regard are tied to identity, for the accident and the loss of the arm took suddenly from him his occupation (sailor) and passion (boxing), and he is left to forge not only a new life but a new self-conception. [. . . H]is body, now visibly different, has cut him off from normalcy while opening to him an outlaw life that provides him a very different kind of existence, one that is also tied to physicality but that admits him into a dark world of conflicting emotions. (86)
True, Oliver murders his pickup and is sentenced to death row, but prosecution liberates him from self-persecution. Letters from men he hustled on the street console him as he awaits execution, confirming a connection he assumed was no longer possible after the loss of his arm. O’Connor is persuasive in arguing at the end of the chapter that Williams was aware of the dangers to his person, art, and reputation by publishing stories like “One Arm” and “Hard Candy.” He brought these hidden life experiences out of the closet and into the public consciousness, even as he confronted the legal machinery arrayed against privacy and individual freedom.
¶20
O’Connor’s volume offers a valuable perspective on the playwright’s life and canon by placing it in a context minimally explored by other critics. It is not, however, without its structural idiosyncrasies. O’Connor acknowledges midway through the penultimate chapter, “The Fugitive Kind,” that Battle of Angels and its subsequent revision, Orpheus Descending, are critical to her project:
[T]here is perhaps no better text (collection of texts) than Battle/Orpheus for considering [Williams’s] complex viewpoint on sexual transgression and the law. It is, most significantly for my purposes, one that features treatment of and discussions of the law quite prominently, and doing so primarily through representations of heterosexual but nonetheless transgressive sex. Its drafts exist in such volume and over such a long span of time, not to mention that it was a span of great flux in the formation of American sexual identities. An in-depth examination of this narrative with the focus on law contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the play while demonstrating the impossibility of settling on a single definitive interpretation. (119)
I quote this passage at length because, chronologically and substantively, her discussion of Battle/Orpheus seems better suited for the beginning of her study. Battle of Angels may have failed when it debuted in Boston in 1940 after audiences found its subject matter offensive; nevertheless, it introduced many of the themes that energized and were eventually perfected in the two decades during which Williams reimagined his play as Orpheus Descending and constructed a dramatic universe that challenged Cold War assumptions. She draws on Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (Columbia UP, 2001), in which Nelson, following Hannah Arendt, explores the destruction of the “public realm of life” and the end of privacy that “created a rationale for surveillance that was infinitely expandable” (qtd. in O’Connor 144–45). Yet instead of concluding the chapter with a final summation of Battle/Orpheus’s significance to Williams’s maturation as a social commentator, O’Connor cycles back to the fragment of Hart Crane’s poem “The Broken Tower” that opens Streetcar, citing it as more evidence of Williams’s fixation on transgressive bodies and private spaces.
¶21
O’Connor spends the remainder of her book discussing the reception and legal implications of late entries in Williams’s canon, such as Small Craft Warnings—his “first openly homosexual work” (168)—and Slapstick Tragedy, a diptych comprising The Mutilated and The Gnädiges Fräulein. She observes that his “creative production during the 1960s and 1970s aptly reflected the fractured nature of a society that could no longer cling to the solid structure of the past, which had been built on illusion and repression, and did so in texts that were themselves incoherent and therefore difficult to understand and interpret” (170). The late plays, while far less successful than the postwar productions, confirm Williams’s lifelong dedication to normalizing illegal bodies as well as inducing empathy rather than revulsion by showcasing their desires and anxieties.
¶22
In Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer, Annette J. Saddik discovers a Williams who—finally, completely—has had enough. She detects an uptick in incident and degree of violence in the late plays, but Williams leavens the grimness with ribald humor. She observes, “Extreme, excessive, grotesque, carnivalesque, tragicomic, campy, cartoonish, pop art, burlesque, slapstick, Grand Guignol—these are just some terms that begin to describe the sensibility of Williams’ late work. His late plays reflect the freedom to finally be ‘too much,’ to laugh at the absurdity of life and its inevitable suffering with a laughter that surpasses tears” (10). If Williams’s early plays embrace outsiders and cast a light into the dark corners of experience, the works after Iguana reveal an author determined to remain relevant, committed to shaking off the coil of his former creative self and to live as honest a life in public as possible. Indeed, Williams, whose homosexuality was an open secret, and whose treatment of homosexual themes was no longer veiled by innuendo or euphemism as the Cold War and Vietnam era ushered in uncertainty, became the prime target of uncharitable, biased theater critics. Saddik cites as an example the critic Stanley Kauffmann’s exceptionally harsh 1966 review in the New York Times: “By adulation of sheer style [i.e., camp], this group [homosexuals] tends to deride the whole culture and the society that produced it, tends to reduce art to a clever game which even that society cannot keep them from playing” (qtd. in 14). In six chapters, she covers the span from Williams’s last great play, The Night of the Iguana, to his cooptation of “in-yer-face” theater (138). Saddik views these experimental dramas not as the last gasps of a played-out artist but as the extension of Williams’s revolutionary vision.
¶23
To this end, Saddik relies upon Mikhail Bakhtin, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, and Wolfgang Kayser in her exploration of Williams’s embrace of the grotesque. She describes in chapter 1 how a brief episode in Iguana involving German tourists bridges the narrative and generic gap between the first and second halves of his career: “While they are realistic characters in the most basic sense, their function is more symbolic; they are larger than life [. . .]. These characters have very few lines in the play, but they do not rely on language for their effect. Instead, their physical presence and the great detail of the stage directions devoted to their actions make them important dramatic figures” (24). She goes on to observe that Williams invokes myth and other fantastical sources in his descriptions of their appearance, movements, and behavior. Their laughter, according to the stage directions, is “Rabelaisian” (qtd. in 27), which, for Bakhtin, emanates from the grotesque body: “[I]ndulgent and excessive in its physicality; it revels in bodily fluids and scatological functions, and celebrates the physical pleasures of eating, drinking, and sexuality” (28). This laughter originated from the Gothic or Romantic grotesque, which, as Bakhtin notes, was “cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum” (qtd. in Saddik 31). Saddik acknowledges too that German expressionism influenced Williams’s grotesqueries in Iguana.
¶24
German characters in The Gnädiges Fräulein, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, and Kirche, Küche, Kinder similarly embody contradiction and excess—the carnivalesque in high, absurd relief. In The Gnädiges Fräulein, the Fräulein, for one, is a kind of freak—blind, bloodied, “in between” (50). Saddik quotes Williams’s description, which is marvelously over the top: She is dressed in “‘a curious costume which would not be out of place at the Moulin Rouge in the time of Toulouse-Lautrec. One eye is covered by a large blood-stained bandage. Her hair is an aureole of bright orange curls, very fuzzy.’ She sits in a pool of her own blood ‘and opens a big scrapbook,’ a remnant of her former glory” (34). Through the Fräulein, we glimpse distorted shades of past heroines—Blanche DuBois, Alexandra Del Lago—worn out and discarded. Williams’s fascination with the Rabelaisian grotesque is evident in the characterization of another German dowager, Fräulein Haussmitzenschlogger (“Hotsy”) in Kirche, Küche, Kinder. To contextualize Williams’s ninety-nine-year-old pregnant hag and to understand the contradictions this character embodies, Saddik invokes Bakhtin’s description of the famed Kerch terracotta figurines representing elderly, pregnant, laughing women: “It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed” (qtd. in Saddik 40).
¶25
In these plays, Williams turns the conventional binary of life and death inside out. Saddik explains later in a chapter on the plays The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, and The Pronoun “I” that these and other outrageous female characters of this period derive from Williams’s own rage against the bigoted press and his ambition to express his artistic vision in alternative vernaculars. She declares, “These women are unstable in the most celebratory sense, and they maintain their power through leading an unapologetic life that allows room for the complex coexistence of contradictions, defeating those who seek to exploit their instability in order to take advantage of them and living passionately in the face of death.” Mrs. Goforth in Milk Train, for example, is unabashedly “monstrous,” or, in other words, powerful and resistant (87). With characters like this and the impulse to amplify the grotesque, Williams’s art, as Saddik elaborates in chapter 6, anticipated “in-yer-face” theater, a moniker applied to a later generation of dramatists and a sensibility prevalent in British theater after Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister:
Williams saw himself as a social and artistic revolutionary, one whose politics was born more out of his own observations of human suffering than on more formal or organized political ideologies, and his late plays share the spirit and tone of the courageous, rebellious drama on the fringes that would soon be presented by young British artists. Both tend to expose the violence and cruelty that are masked by polite, civilized discourse and organized codes of social behavior in order to challenge hypocrisy and resensitize us to the daily onslaught of emotional and physical violence we live with in our personal and social relationships. (141)
¶26
If the plays of his heyday in the 1940s and 1950s exhibit the sublime power of language, the plays of his last two decades extol the power of performance. At the same time, he still craved the limelight. He embodied as many contradictions as imagined in the late plays and was no longer inhibited by convention to repress them. In Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess, Saddik demonstrates how the playwright leveraged the materials at his disposal to reset the public’s expectations and to liberate himself from the critics’ jealous, spiteful clutches.
