The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

530 REVIEWS chronicle ends by describing the receding camera shot in the final moments of the 1996 Canadian film version, reminding us that the play's essential voyeurism cannot be separated from that of the electronic media that have shaped our perceptions of O'Neill's drama. PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays ofTennessee Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. 223, illustrated. $32.95 (Pb). Reviewed by D. Dean Shackelford, Southeast Missouri State University Critics have traditionally viewed the later works of Tennessee Williams as artistic and dramatic failures. Philip Kolin's new collection of critical essays entitled The Undiscovered Country calls into question the devaluation of Williams 's works produced after The Night ofthe Iguana. The book contains sixteen essays, many of which were written by well-known scholars of Williams. In the introduction, Kolin laments the marginalization and neglect of Williams 's later plays, which he defines as those written and produced after the playwright's last critical success on Broadway in 1961. All too often, Williams was expected to write the same kind of play he had written during the period of his major successes in the '940S and 1950s, but that was exactly what Williams did not want to do. Kolin's edited volume clearly demonstrates that the problem with the later plays may have been more with the audience and the critical establishment than with the works themselves. An ambitious, perhaps even quixotic undertaking, The Undiscovered Country makes a strong case for rereading, performing. and reassessing the American playwright's late works. The book is generally organized around essays dealing with the same or similar plays, and it proceeds in a roughly chronological presentation of the plays and their perfonnances, ending with the posthumuusly published Something Cloudy, Something Clear and A House Not Meant to Stand. What is refreshing about the col1ection is that there are no essays devoted to the canonical works and there are a number focused on one-act and shorter plays. Most essays center on one particular piece, though a number of them discuss several plays and attempt to contextualize them within the entire Williams canon. Reading the later Williams in light of Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty, Annette J. Saddik's opening essay provides a theoretical framework for much in the volume. "In the later plays," she writes, "[thel moral split [of Williams 's earlier plays [ virtually disappears as he committed to a more starkly anti-realistic, physical, and morally inverted theater characteristic of Artaud and Genet" (9). Analyzing plays dating from the I 960s through to 1981 - The Gniidiges Friiulein, Kingdom ofEarth, and Now the Cats with .Iewelled Claws Reviews 531 - Saddik notes an "anti-realistic marginalization of language and an emphasis on the physicality of the theater" (22), "a nonlinear Artaudian lens of spectacle and inverted moral logic" (19)· Other essays deal almost exclusively with The GnadiRes Fraulein. Arguing that the play is "about theatre itself' (52), Al1ean Hale focuses on Wil1iams's existentialist stance and his use of slapstick and the "sacred clown" tradition. The fact that Wil1iams endorsed producing this play and another one-act, The Mutilated, under the title A Slapstick Tragedy reinforces the al1egorical nature of each drama. In what is probably the most difficult contribution to the collection , Una Chaudhuri analyzes the postmodern portrayal of animality in The GniidiRes Fraulein and calls for an "aesthetic of awkwardness" to reread this and other later Wil1iams works. Chaudhuri provocatively considers the play "a rare dramatic space within which to explore and express the human experience of animality in alld of itself, not as a metaphor for something else but as an extreme condition of humanity" (63). Michael Pal1er's essay "The Day on Which a Woman Dies" offers a convincing revisionist reading of The Milk Train Doesn't SlOp Here Anymore through the lens of Japanese No theatre. Tracing the innuence of the No tradition to Williams's friendship with Yukio Mishima, Paller indicates that critics often misread the late Wil1iams because they are unaware of the playwright's unique blend of Western and Eastern art. In another selection, Gene D. Phillips , a well-known critic of Wil1iams and...