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Tennessee Williams: The Master Playwright with a Poet s Sout

Chelsea Bowles, OP Contributor

_ ¢ hoever you are—I have
always depended on the
kindness of strangers.”
This is one of the theatre’s most famous
lines, delivered by Tennessee Williams’
character Blanche DuBois in A Svreetcar
Named Desire. Set in steamy New Orleans,
Louisiana, this play is quintessential
Williams—depicting flawed characters,
turbulent desires, sultry settings, painful
regrets, and the intricacies of lust and
love. Williams, the man who called New
Orleans his spiritual home, was pegged as
a Southern writer who depicted human
experience through sensitive characters
tied to a fading, changing South.

At 34, Williams gained critical atten-
tion when The Glass Menagerie hit
Broadway in 1945. When A Svreetcar
Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955) followed, Williams became
known as a playwright who excelled in
portraying vulnerable, emotionally fragile
characters and faded Southern belles.
Williams won Pulitzer Prizes for Streetcar
and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and theatre crit-
ability to
powerfully about loneliness and madness.

When the 1951 movie A S*reetcar
Named Desire won four Academy Awards,

ics applauded his write

non-theatre goers became aware of
Williams. Despite being the only S/reetcar
lead actor who didn’t take home an
Oscar, let alone be nominated, Marlon
Brando gave one of the best performanc-
es of his career in the movie. He played
“common” brute Stanley Kowalski who
disgusts and intrigues sensitive Blanche
DuBois, and is responsible for her mental
collapse. The movie is slightly different
from the play, but the essence remains—
destroyed dreams, mounting delusions,
hard realities, blinding love, and family
obligations.

Fifteen of Williams’ plays have been
turned into movies, including some of his
most revered. Many of the movies star
renowned actors, such as Paul Newman
and Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1958), Natalie Wood in This Property
Is Condemned (1966), John Malkovich in
The Glass Menagerie (1987), and Helen
Mirren in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(2003).

Williams’ plays are often in produc-
tion. In 2004, Vancouver theatre group
In The Company Of
the Williams
(www.twilliamsfestival.com) with produc-
tions of Summer and Smoke and The Night of
the Iguana. The festival will be an annual
event showcasing Williams’ work.

started

Tennessee Festival

March 16/2005

On a larger scale is the annual

Williams /New
Festival
liams.net). This March marks the 19th
year of the festival, which celebrates

Tennessee Orleans

Literary (www.tennesseewil-

Williams and Southern _ literature.
Coinciding with this festival is the tenth-
annual Tennessee Williams Scholars’
Conference (www.tennesseewilliamsstud-
ies.org), which is dedicated to analyzing,
discovering, and promoting Williams’
work.

 

Twenty-two years after his death,
movie and theatre lovers are still enjoying
Williams’ plays and studying his themes
and characters. Blanche DuBois, Streetcar’
faded belle, has been one of the theatre’s
favourite crazy women since she first
awed audiences in 1947. About his dam-
aged characters, Williams said, “I have
always been more interested in creating a
character that contains something crip-
pled. I think nearly all of us have some
kind of defect. [...| I have found it easier

to identify with the characters who
verged on hysteria, who were frightened
of life, who were desperate to reach out
to another person.”

Like his characters, Williams lived
with intense emotion, haunted by his
past. Dead lovers, a beloved, institution-
alized sister, and a domineering mother
inspired him to write his life into his
plays. Indeed, his life was as colourful
and complicated as any of his charac-
ters’, and he wrote to exercise his
demons and explore the human heart.
He wrote constantly, sometime revising
old plays or starting different versions.
On the topic of writing he once said, “I
have no choice, it is so deeply rooted as
a way of existence.”

When Williams’ long-time partner,
Frank Merlo, died in 1963, Williams fell
into despair and drinking. Though
Williams continued to be a prolific
writer, his plays became more poetic and
abstract, with darker themes of death
and identity. Critics were unhappy with
Williams’ new direction, wanting the
return of the Southern themes that had
made him famous. They didn’t want him
experimenting with his writing, even if
the results were sometimes intriguing,
As a result of Williams’ creative tangent
to idea-driven, rather than character-
driven, plays, his reputation declined.

Williams scholar Allean Hale wrote,
“The plays following The Night of the
Iguana in 1961, usually referred to as ‘the
late plays, were generally considered
failures. The Night of the Iguana found
Williams enshrined on the cover of the
Match 9, 1962, Time magazine as the
‘world’s greatest living playwright’ By
1969, after In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,
Time’s affiliate Life was describing him as
a burned-out cinder.”

Williams kept writing, despite alco-
hol abuse, a battle with depression, and
doubts of his playwriting ability. Right
up until his death in 1983, which was
just as dramatic as one of his plays—he
accidentally choked on a plastic bottle
cap in New York’s Elysée Hotel.

Williams scholars continue to discover
new works and fragments of his writing.
Broadway is still home to Williams’
famous plays, including A Streetcar Named
Desire, which opens in April starring
Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly.
Despite a decline in critical acclaim for his
later plays, Williams is still revered as one
of the best playwrights of all time. Two
Pulitzer Prizes don’t lie.

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