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  • Happy Birthday, Tom
  • Gerald Weales (bio)

During the 1944–1945 theater season a number and variety of well-received plays opened on Broadway. They included Paul Osborn's A Bell for Adano, John Van Druten's I Remember Mama, and Mary Chase's Harvey, which won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize. Yet the real news at that time in American theater was being made in Chicago. On the day after Christmas 1944, after a predictable number of complications, Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie opened in the Second City. According to Williams in his Memoirs, audiences did not at first know what to make of it because "it was something of an innovation"; but the enthusiasm of Claudia Cassidy, the critic at the Chicago Tribune, brought them around, and it became a success. It opened in New York on March 31, 1945, and ran for more than a year. Tennessee Williams had arrived.

There was news of a much graver kind during the years of Williams's initial theatrical triumph, which explains why at the time I knew nothing about the man who was to be a major presence on the postwar American stage. Tom admits as much at the end of The Glass Menagerie: "Nowadays the world is lit by lightning!" A month after the Chicago opening, I, along with the rest of the 66th Regiment, 7lst Division, embarked for Europe and the war. Ironically, while I was waiting for embarkation at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, I saw a uso production of Ruth Gordon's Over 21 starring Erin O'Brien-Moore and, on a day's pass to Manhattan, two acts of Diana Barrymore in Rebecca, about which the incipient drama critic in me was particularly scathing. By the time Menagerie opened in New York, our regiment had moved across the German border and had our first taste of enemy action. The war in Europe ended in May; its brother in the Pacific ended in August. After almost a year of duty in occupied Germany and several months learning to be a civilian again, I found myself at Columbia University in New York in time for the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire. I have seen almost every major Williams play since then.

In 1947 Williams published in the New York Times (November 30) an essay entitled "The Catastrophe of Success," which he used later as the introduction to The Glass Menagerie (New Directions, 1949). He says that, after the success of Menagerie, he found himself suddenly well-off, living in a fashionable hotel, being lionized, and coming to suspect all his old friends and new acquaintances of falseness: "Security is a kind of death, I think." An eye operation gave him time to hide behind his bandages, to think, and to [End Page 269] come out recognizing the need to struggle to live, and off he went to Mexico to work on Streetcar. A variation of this piece appears in the essay collection Where I Live (1978) as "On a Streetcar Named Success." He insists that he has never wanted to write for popular success, although at times he has suggested otherwise—but then we cannot embrace every casual comment of his as revelatory. What, for instance, can you do with "All my plays are comedies"—a remark he made in an interview in the Philadelphia Bulletin (February 25, 1968)?

Before he suffered the titular casualty of his essay, there was a decade of physical and artistic wanderings, of attempts and setbacks, of baby steps and strides toward the Chicago moment. His first play, written in 1934, was Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!, which he describes in Memoirs as "a farcical but rather touching little comedy about two sailors on a date with a couple of 'light ladies.'" He told Robert Rice, who wrote a twelve-part series on him for the New York Post in 1958, "I'd never met a sailor then." Cairo! was written for and performed at the Rose Arbor Playhouse in Memphis, but the theater group with which he had the greatest connection at the time was the Mummers in St. Louis, who presented many of his 1930s plays. His work was often much...

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