Late Tennessee Williams

Late Tennessee Williams RUBY COHN Sex, South, and violence brought Tennessee Williams to a Broadway which then allowed him no deviations. From A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) set in New Orleans to Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) set in Florida, Williams usually wrote true to type. Even though The Night of the Iguana (1961) garnered his fourth (and final) New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Williams was edged out for the Pulitzer Prize, a more responsive barometerto current climate. Night started his descent from popularity, as his Lord Byron had prophesied in Camino Real (1953): "There is a passion for declivity in this world!" New York reviewers are imbued with this passion, but even a serious critic in a serious journal took Williams's declivity as axiomatic: "What is the significance of the large body of work which Williams has contributed to our national literature, and why has his effectiveness as a playwright suffered a marked decline in the last two decades?"I (my emphasis). The correct critical question seems to me: "Has Williams's effectiveness as a playwright suffered a recent decline?" Williams is an untrustworthy chronicler of his creations, since he cannot resist puns, jokes, or good stories. He has often summarized the 1960s as his "Stoned Age." Stoned or sober, however, he continued each morning to fill demanding blank pages which grew into plays, stories, and even novels. In the 1960s Williams began to stray from the triad that endeared him to Broadway. Although many ofhis characters continue to be Southerners, his settings are not necessarily in the South. Although sex continues to be frankly discussed and dramatized, it often goes unconsummated. Violence is muted or even absent; the explosive scenes of his earlier plays simmer down to an atmosphere of resignation. Never one to rest on his laurels - or magnolia - Williams during the 1960s and 1970S moves into new territories, fashions new kinds of characters, experiments with new forms. Despite unfavorable reviews and imperceptive criticism, Williams continues to work - "Work!! - the loveliest of all four-letter words.... "2 Several projects were under way when he died on Late Tennessee Williams 337 February 25, 1983. Opposing most viewpoints in print, I think that three major Williams plays date from the last decade of his life; perhaps he sometimes worked simultaneously on The Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, and Clothes for a Summer Hote!, which were produced in that order. The final version ofThe Two-Character Play was published in 1976, and two earlier versions were published in 1969 and 1973. Other, unpublished revisions may exist among Williams's scattered papers, but the three printed versions show a movement toward economy of language within an increasingly ambiguous and inclusive context. From the first, The Two-Character Play is cast in the old baroque form of a play within the play - Williams's only venture in that form. The play within Williams's play is called "The Two-Character Play,"3 and it contains major elements of Williams's drama when he was Broadway's golden boy. It is set in a small town in the American South. Its two characters, brother and sister, Felice and Clare Devoto, are perhaps incestuous lovers. Violence accounts for the deaths of the siblings' parents; their father, having been threatened by their mother with commitment to an insane asylum, has shot first her and then himself. The siblings are not only orphaned, but also destitute because suicide voids collection of life insurance. And the siblings are not only destitute, but also ostracized by the townspeople, like such earlier Williams characters as Blanche Dubois, Chance Wayne, Val Xavier. In this play within the play, with its family resemblance to earlier Williams plays, brother and sister are so introverted and fearful that they do not dare to leave their Victorian home, which is bordered by sunflowers as high as the house. During the course of the play within the play, the two characters dramatize their isolation as a fugitive kind - to use an old Williams phrase - or as unnatural creatures - to use the phrase of this play. Fantasy is their heritage - in the form of iridescent soap bubbles - and fantasy may be their fate - if...