The Grotesque Children of The Rose Tattoo

THE GROTESQUE CHILDREN OF rHE ROSETA'TrOO -THAT REALISM SHOULD BE THE CONVENTION fundamental to the work of Tennessee Williams is altogether logical. Until his late adole~cence, Williams had little opportunity to see any form of theater other than the American cinema, and this form, of course, is firmly grounded in the realistic approach. Even the external shape of Williams's theater shows especially clear evidence of this cinematic influence:1 a succession of episodes, Hfade-outs" and "fade:..ins," background music, gauze scrims, and expressive lights focussed to simulate "close-ups"-all devices immediately recognizable as· film technique, itself a more poetic kind of realism. Often clearly aspiring to the conditions of poetry, Williams creates for himself an advantage which is not always available to other dramatists who start from the realistic or naturalistic base: like Synge and o'Casey, he puts his words into the mouths of an essentially imaginative people who speak in the rhythms and colorful imagery of a region favorable to poetry. Even more to the point for our present subject, by staging his dramas in a realm just so much apart from "average" American life as the deep South and by having his characters speak in the distinctive language of that realm apart, Williams succeeds in distancing his plays from the purely- realistic mode to a degree suflicientto justify and disguise a certain characteristic exaggeration and distortion of reality which permeates his entire canon. Under the speech of most of his characters there runs the faint but unmistakable thorough bass of grotesque folk comedy. The tone provided by this suggestion of the comic folk tale varies according to \Villiams's intention, an