Tennessee waltz

On an episode of the animated TV series “King of the Hill,” the white-bread Hill family of Texas find themselves on a road trip that brings them to a dilapidated bayou mansion occupied by a domineering matriarch, three comely, libidinous sisters and a boozing dandy prone to remarks like, “These muggy Novembers give me the horribles!”
You needn’t be in on the joke to enjoy the episode titled “A Beer Can Named Desire,” and Peggy Hill misses the literary reference completely, exclaiming, “This is just like a play by William Shakespeare!” That Tennessee Williams is familiar enough to be injected into a prime-time cartoon reveals the strange persistence of the writer’s reputation. The hothouse decadence that is his signature may make him more recognizable than any other American playwright’s voice, even more than Neil Simon’s automatic one-liners or David Mamet’s staccato machismo.
Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and every other artistic honor short of the Nobel, Williams’ work nevertheless can seem at the brink of self-parody even under the best circumstances. Shrouded with Spanish moss, Williams’ world is populated by faded Southern belles, dope friends, the neglected elderly and cruel seducers. When his roles turn into over-the-top caricatures, they give me the horribles, too. Tennessee Williams can seem simultaneously America’s greatest playwright and its most hysterical, and it can be a close call to see which one wins.
For a sign of his enduring popularity and flexibility, just look around Atlanta this year. It’s the 21st century, and yet this year we’ll see at least three Glass Menageries, at Village Playhouses of Roswell, PushPush Theater and ART Station; two Streetcars Named Desire, at Theatre in the Square and the New American Shakespeare Tavern; and one Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Soul-stice Repertory.
The past decade also has seen stellar productions of Menagerie at the Alliance Theatre, Cat at Theatre in the Square and Summer and Smoke at Actor’s Express, to name a few. It’s difficult to identify any other single playwright, other than Shakespeare himself, who can be staged so comfortably at such diverse theaters, from the Alliance’s lavish main stage to comforting community theaters to edgy, guerrilla troupes.
Williams’ standing extends to the rest of the English speaking theater world and beyond. Just last year, a production of A Streetcar Named Desire was staged at Teatre Romea in Rome, and in 1998, he posthumously packed Britain’s Royal National Theatre with the premiere of Not About Nightingales, a never-produced play penned in 1938 at the age of 27, and reportedly the first to which he signed “Tennessee.” The playwright continues to give A-list movie and TV stars credibility: currently “Sex and the City’s” Kim Cattrall is negotiating to play Blanche Dubois in Streetcar on Broadway, just as Jessica Lange did in 1992 opposite Alec Baldwin.
The playwright lived to see comparably high-profile revivals in his own lifetime. In fact, his greatest competitor proved not to be theatrical ancestors like Eugene O’Neill or contemporaries such as Arthur Miller or William Inge, but his younger self. His classics — generally the plays ranging from the delicate nocturne of Glass Menagerie in 1944 to the already problematic Night of the Iguana in 1961 — retained their popularity, while his later work had trouble finding financial backers or favorable notices. Bedeviled by pills, alcohol, hypochondria and genuine health problems, Williams’ craft declined until his death in 1983.
Always prolific but increasingly marginalized, Williams remained in the limelight in the 1970s by proclaiming his homosexuality and exaggerating his personality, until he resembled one of his own creations. But even before then, Williams’ work embodied the Southern Gothic style, offering a vision of Dixie plagued with neuralgia, palpitations and hot flashes. That mode put him in such good company as Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Williams’ friend Carson McCullers.
Nevertheless, the South was never the same kind of capital-T Theme for Williams as it was for, say, William Faulkner, and his relationship to it could be tenuous. His birthplace was Columbus, Miss., in 1911 and he spent his early childhood in the Southern climes. The sobriquet “Tennessee” comes from his beloved grandparents’ home state. In 1918, his family settled in the industrial streets of St. Louis, a city he despised, and in an introduction to Sweet Bird of Youth, he claims that he started writing at 14 to escape the derision of his father and schoolmates.
William’s friend Gore Vidal (who referred to him as “Glorious Bird”) once recalled that “Tennessee was the product of that Southern puritan environment where all sex was sin and unnatural sex was peculiarly horrible.” The South of Williams’ drama and fiction draws from both nostalgia, resentment and desires unleashed, such as the plantations of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or the 1956 film Baby Doll (which saw a stage version called Tiger’s Tail that debuted at the Alliance Theatre in the late 1970s). But he rarely lived in such rural settings, and his adult life was marked by compulsive traveling, although he kept a residence in Key West and was a gentleman caller to favorite cities like New Orleans.
A drawling Dionysian writer, Williams proved less interested in the antebellum than the cerebellum, returning again and again to themes of madness, sexuality, violence and the inability to escape past sins. Williams’ plays forever reflect the image of his sister Rose, who suffered from a nervous condition until their mother had her lobotomized according to a medical recommendation. His sister comes to life on the stage as Menagerie’s fragile Laura, associated with “blue roses.”
Not all of Williams’ plays involve the South, but he has trouble shaking the Southern Goth image perhaps because, by writing hit plays and films, he provided images and accents for the screen and stage that prove more indelible than the printed page. And the Gothic aspects became even more conspicuous as he aged, from Streetcar’s sexual assault and nervous breakdown to Sweet Bird of Youth’s venereal disease and threat of castration. Suddenly, Last Summer touches on sexual exploitation, cannibalism and lobotomy.
A soap operatic plot summary doesn’t do justice to Williams at his best. I’ve chuckled at spoofs like the parody musical “Streetcar!” on “The Simpsons” but didn’t grow to appreciate Williams until I began reviewing theater and regularly seeing his work in the flesh.
Though he may have a sordid reputation, many of the taboos he attacked were worth challenging, particular those involving sexuality. Baby Doll is sultry but tame by today’s standards, yet it provoked one of those condemned-in-the-pulpit outcries. His violence can be more restrained than you expect, with bloodshed or atrocities kept off-stage or revealed second-hand by unreliable narrators. The impending castration of Sweet Bird proves far less preposterous than the play’s weird entreaties to the audience.
The playwright might be remembered for the kinks in his work, but he always conveyed a robust attitude toward the pleasures of sexuality. Maggie in her slip and Stanley in his T-shirt offered post-war emblems of female and male sexuality, and Williams carefully showed how people find and express their mutual attractions. It’s probably no coincidence that perhaps the single most influential performance of the 20th century was Marlon Brando’s Kowalski, the point where method acting and American playwriting intersect. Stanley bellowing “Stella!” in his torn shirt is as enduring an image as Hamlet intoning “To be” with his bare bodkin.
Williams began as a poet, and his plays always have a note of lyricism, for good or ill. Critic Harold Bloom declared him “the most literary of our major dramatists.” That element can, paradoxically, make him seem fresher and less dated than writers of his time who tried to echo the tongue of the “common” man. And his dialogue remains realistic enough to support either naturalistic stagings or more experimental ones. PushPush will be staging an all African-American version of Glass Menagerie with Carol Mitchell as Amanda Wingfield, while ART Station plans an expressionistic take for that play in September.
Williams’ most enduring aspect remains his humanity. Watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you may childishly snicker at names like “Big Daddy” and “Brick,” or obsessively look for parallels between those characters and King Lear and Achilles. But the truth of their relationship is what endures, particularly their second-act heart-to-heart. Williams never shirked from holding a mirror to our darkest nature, and of the many awful things that befall Blanche Dubois, none may be as painful as Mitch’s words of rejection, “You’re not clean enough.” Yet Williams can be merciful as well, giving Blanche a kind of second chance in the guise of Summer and Smoke’s Alma Winemiller.
Critics and theater people can and will forever argue whether Williams outstrips Eugene O’Neill, or if The Glass Menagerie trumps Our Town or Death of a Salesman. But the ultimate proof is in performance, and his plays, found everywhere from basement stages to sprawling arts centers, consistently prove more charged, more exciting and more relevant than other playwrights of the American canon. He may go to extremes, but Tennessee Williams still works. And just as the curtain won’t fall on the writer, so will his South rise again.
PushPush Theater presents The Glass Menagerie March 16-April 8, 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 7 p.m. Sun., and “The Gnadiges Fraulein” March 12-27, 8 p.m. Mon.-Tues. 1123 Zonolite Road, 404-892-7876. Soul-stice Repertory presents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in repertory through March 18 at Backstage Theatre, 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. 770-591-3036. Theatre in the Square presents A Streetcare Named Desire March 21-April 29, Tues.-Sun., 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369.