Tennessee Williams & Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre by Brenda Murphy (review)

540 Book Reviews And while the old guilt, now focused on Agnes, returns with that play's successor, Days Without End, suggests Alexander, the strong presence of a literal "father" fig-:ure , the priest Father Baird, provides the basis for the renewed affirmation. But the play, she adds, is not so much one of religious conversion as of forgiveness and search. Alexander does·a thorough job of investigating the various revisions the play went through. While one can quibble about Alexander's .autobiographical parallels, her research is enormous and the basis of her approach sound. But the work has problems, beginning with her attempt to include too much in the assessment of each play. Her treatment of past and present autobiography along with both O'Neill's intellectual and theatrical. lives leads to discussion. that is often fragmentary. Inherent in her approach, too, is a tendency to "level" the plays. To discuss Marco Millions and Dynamo in the' same terms and detail as Mourning Becomes Electra is to downplay the gargantuan differ~ ences in the artistic merit of these works. In addition, the arbitrary limits she places on the "decade" she selects, 1924-1933, de-emphasizes important earlier works; and while she touches on some of these in the contexts of the plays she concentrates on, the total omission of a play so redolent of autobiographical parallels as Beyond the Horizon does not make sense. Finally, the problem with Alexander's book is that it looks insufficiently at dialogue , the chief arena where the autobiographical conflicts take shape. She has missed what Jean Chothia's Forging a Language (Cambridge, UP, 1979), which does not deal directly with autobiographical issues, nevertheless lucidly implies: that so long as O'Neill was theprisoner of unresolved autobiographical agonies, his dialogue (like the plays themselves) tended to be both melodramatic and enigmatic, while as he sputteringly came to grips with those agonies, he gained control of his dialogue - and of his art. In the forthcoming work on O'Neill's later plays Alexander hints at, one hopes she will consider conclusions like Chothia's. MICHAEL MANHEIM, UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO BRENDA MURPHY. Tennessee Williams & Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992. Pp. 201, illustrated. $37.95. Brenda Murphy has provided a fascinating casebook of the collaborative process between two of the most important figures in mid-twentieth century American theatre in Tennessee Williams & Elia Kazan. The study of the director's and playwright's work on Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roofand Sweet Bird of Youth illustrates the inner workings of a partnership which helped shape theatre as we know it. Murphy provides a useful framework for this study in her first chapter. by distinguishing between the "reading version" and "acting version" of the scripts. both of which are available in print. The "reading version" generally represents Williams's playas he wanted it to be remembered. The "acting version" more or less records the Book Reviews 541 first production: cuts, additions and physical layout result from collaboration with Kazan and his design team. With this basis for her sources clearly laid out, Murphy examines each play's original production in minute detail, from William's first draft of each script to reviews of the Broadway opening. This is an excellent way to view the evolving artistic partnership between Williams and Kazan resulting in a unique theatre language which Murphy calls "subjective realism." A vivid picture of the artistic interaction between these two men first appears in Murphy's well written narrative of Camino Real, the full length version inspired by Kazan's 1949 Actors Studio production of a scene from the one-act script. Williams asked Kazan for suggestions and received in response a 3,50o-word letter with ideas for revision and thoughts about thematic statement, style, and placement of act breaks. Kazan's letter sparked conflict: "Several times, he used 'we' when referring to the need to express the play's meaning clearly. By this time, the play was in his mind a joint artistic property that would express the feelings of both men about the fate of the romantic in the repressive world of the...