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5. Bedroom Ballet in the Delta
- The University of Alabama Press
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5 Bedroom Ballet in the Delta But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark— that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant. —Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire Lillian Hellman charges the action in The Children’s Hour by setting the scene in a public space (a living room, a schoolroom) and stirring the imagination of the audience about what goes on in private parts unseen. The desire to see what cannot be seen concludes with Martha’s despairing self-analysis regarding her latent attraction to Karen. The visibility of the relationship threatens Martha and prompts her suicide. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)—rife, too, with homosexuality—takes a radically opposite tack to explore life-anddeath terrain. All the action occurs in Brick and Maggie’s upstairs bed-sitting room at Big Daddy Pollitt’s old plantation home. One interior door and French doors leading to a balcony that runs around the entire perimeter of the second floor allow for constant spying and frequent intrusions into a private space. Instead of wondering about what goes on elsewhere in the great house, throughout the play the audience stares at a large double bed, which serves as a constant reminder of the play’s meanings. Despite the fact that the MGM trailer billed Elizabeth Taylor’s title character as “a girl too hungry for love to care about how she goes about getting it,” the 1958 film downplays sex, in comparison to the play, and features a rather small bed tucked into an alcove in the bedroom as just one element in the overall production scheme. The movie version creates quite a different experience for the viewer by moving out of the bedroom and into different rooms of the house and the surrounding grounds. The relative expansiveness of the film emphasizes the material possessions of the family and the idea that money can’t buy love or everlasting life. In the stage play, on the other hand, the bed makes an explicit, if silent , comment about the commitment to love and the facts of life. It’s not a thematic statement; it’s a material presence, visible at every moment and vital to an understanding of the imminence and eminence of death, but also of the possibility for redemption and regeneration. The image of the large bed embraces Bedroom Ballet in the Delta / 65 both the living and the dead and captures the profound ambivalence and contradictions in what I think is Williams’s finest play. The life-affirming aspects of the play, sparked by Maggie the Cat, offer a flip side of experience to Williams’s great but certainly more depressing works, such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.1 In the film, the bedroom shown is not even Brick and Maggie’s, but just another guest room in the large house. Brick and Maggie live in New Orleans and have only come up to Mississippi to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday and to welcome him home from the cancer clinic up north. At one point, Brick packs a suitcase to return home; later he escapes to his car as if to drive away. The room, then, reflects nothing of the former occupants, the homosexual lovers Straw and Ochello, the two progenitors of the estate, and nothing of Maggie and Brick either . It suggests only a certain taste and wealth that might just as well belong to a hotel room. It reveals no blemish of history. Likewise, the heterosexual couples turn out wrinkle-free in the film’s action as well. Father and son reconcile and help each other up the stairs arm in arm. Before making his final exit, Big Daddy invites Big Mama to survey his kingdom with him (in the play he goes alone and Big Mama runs after him). Brick ascends the stairs to the bedroom and calls down for Maggie to follow him. Their kiss ends the play as Brick tosses his pillow from the couch back to the bed, signaling that they will soon sleep together in the same bed. Even Gooper, the son who stands to lose everything to Brick and has lost his father’s love to Brick ages ago, nods approval over all these final couplings and silences Mae’s pecuniary objections with a final thundering admonition to “[s]hut up!” The final arrangements of the picture are decidedly happy in that traditional Hollywood ever...