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  • Tennessee's End
  • Brian Parker (bio)
Tennessee Williams . A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Thomas Keith and a Preface by Gregory Mosher. New York: New Directions 2008. xxx, 95. $14.95
Tennessee Williams . The Traveling Companion and Other Plays. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Annette J. Sadik. New York: New Directions 2008. xxxvi, 311. $17.95.

I

The plays Tennessee Williams wrote in the twenty-two years between his last great success The Night of the Iguana (1961) and his death in 1983 far outnumber those he created in the sixteen years between Iguana and The Glass Menagerie, the play that made him famous in 1945. Yet none of these later plays was very successful: reviewers and critics combined to belittle those that were staged, and many never reached production or publication at all. The usual explanation for so steep a decline is the spiral of depression, booze, barbiturates, and indiscriminate sex into which Williams fell in 1962 after the death of his long-time lover Frank Merlo.

A counterattack was mounted in the late 1990s, however, by a young scholar named Linda Dorff. She argued that Williams's late plays should be understood not in relation to his earlier work nor even to his biography, but rather as experiments in the 'comic grotesque,' influenced by — but not dependent on — other avant-garde playwrights and theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. This certainly agrees with Williams's own [End Page 108] comments during this period, such as his 1972 claim that, 'I think I am growing into a more direct form [of theatre], one that fits people and societies going a bit mad, you know?. . .I'm very interested in the presentational form of theatre, where everything is free and different, where you have a total license' — a non-traditional approach whose seeds can be seen as early as Camino Real (1953).

Linda Dorff died early, before she could complete her book-length study of Williams's experimental plays, but her approach has been taken up by other critics since, and there is now a wave of interest in these plays in criticism, performance, and, perhaps most importantly, publishing. Volumes 7 and 8 of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams bring together plays from the late period, and these have now been supplemented by the two texts under review.

II

A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy (1982) is the last new play by Williams to be staged in his lifetime. After an earlier one-act version called Some Problems for the Moose Lodge (1980) and a studio draft of the full-length play (1981), the current version was directed by André Ernotte in April 1982 for the main stage of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. It received 'mixed but respectful reviews' (to quote the introduction), and was still under revision when Williams died nine months later. As epigraph he had chosen Yeats's sombre comment on contemporary society and life in general, 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.'

The action takes place in a nearly derelict house in Pascagoula, Mississippi, an 'architectural metaphor' (like Poe's House of Usher) whose significance is explained in the first stage direction:

The set must establish the genre of the play, which is my kind of Southern Gothic spook sonata. The dilapidation of this house is a metaphor for the state of society.

To this near-wreck Cornelius and Bella McCorkle return one stormy Christmas night from the funeral of their elder son Chips, an alcoholic homosexual who has died in Memphis at the age of thirty-one. Both parents are in their seventies, Cornelius suffering irritably from bouts of osteoarthritis and pancreatitis, and the dangerously overweight Bella from 'cardiac asthma,' deafness, memory loss, and a blood pressure so high it causes a 'stawm' in her mind to parallel the torrential rain outside. Their daughter Joanie is a nymphomaniac committed to a public asylum; and as the elder McCorkles enter, their chronically unemployed younger son Charlie is 'orgasmically rutting' upstairs with the [End Page 109] more-than-seven-month pregnant-Stacey, his 'bawn again' girlfriend from Yahzoo City.

The...

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