"More than Just a Little Chekhovian": The Sea Gull as a Source for the Characters in The Glass Menagerie

"More than Just a Little Chekhovian": The Sea Gull as a Source for the Characters in The Glass Menagerie DREWEY W'A YNE GUNN For nearly fifty years one of Tennessee Williams's abiding passions was his love for Chekhov. In 1979 he claimed, " I have not been subjected to any influence but that of Chekhov in my profession." Above all, he consistently praised The Sea Gull. In a letter to a friend in 1950 he called it "the greatest of all modern plays." And in his 1972 Memoirs he was willing to admit only a play of Brecht's into the same august company.' Williams's infatuation began in the summer of [935 when he first read The Sea Gull, as well as The Cherry Orchard and some of Chekhov's short stories and letters.' For the plays he probably read the translations of Constance Garnett available .in Modern Library. Although he did not see it, the spring [938 Theatre Guild production of The Sea Gull, using a translation by fellow Mississippian Stark Young and starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, undoubtedly drew his attention.' At the time, Williams was finishing his studies at the University of Iowa and was immersed in all aspects of theatre. Towards the end of his life Williams tried to absorb The Sea Gull completely into his own corpus by adapting it according to his own vision. The result, the unpublished Notebook ofTrigorin, was presented in Vancouver in 1981 and in Los ' Angeles the following year. One reviewer of the American production, wrote, "Williams has pared down the play and quickened the sluggish ebb and flow of life on afin de siede Russian country estate. He has abbreviated Chekhov's cadences and augmented the poetry with his own choices." Most significantly, the reviewer felt that the portrait of Trigorin "reflects much of Williams's own person," particularly since Williams depicted the writer as homosexual or at least bisexual.' But Williams in a sense had already injected his life into The Sea Gull, for he used the Russian playas early as [944, I am convinced, in order to create and shape his first and perhaps still greatest success, The Glass Menagerie. The reviewer Louis Kronenberger, two days after its New York opening, 314 DREWEY WAYNE GUNN wrote that " in its mingled pathos and comedy, its mingled naturalistic detail and gauzy atmosphere, its preoccupation with 'memory,' its tissue of forlorn hopes and backward looks and languishing self-pities, The Glass Menagerie is more than just a linle Chekhovian." Twenty years later Francis Donahue, in a brief discussion of Chekhov's influence on Williams, quoted the reviewer's observations with approval. But neither Kronenberger nor Donahue - nor for that matter Young in his review of Williams's play - noted the specific, close similarities between the four characters in The Glass Menagerie and the four principals in The Sea Gull.' The fact that Williams's play is so undeniably autobiographical has obscured how much these characters resemble one another. To describe the four in one play is to describe those in the other. There is a frustrated son who wants to be a writer but who feels trapped by circumstances . There is a silly and vain mother who, living in her own world of artificial dreams, largely ignores her son's needs. There is a frail young girl who also is trapped by her weaknesses and by her own unrealistic dreams. Finally, there is a seemingly practical but somewhat crass outsider who wreaks havoc on the dreams of the others. In neither play is there a father. Other similarities besides character relationships exist. They seem altogether too close to be entirely coincidental. Just as The Cherry Orchard probably provided Williams clues for developing A Streetcar Named Desire,' almost surely - though the evidence must remain circumstantial - The Sea Gull was indispensable for his realization of The Glass Menagerie. It was not, of course. a source in the same sense that Look Homeward, Angel was the source for Keni Frings's play or even that Finnegans Wake was a source for The Skin of Our Teeth. But it would seem that Williams, probably subconsciously, saw that significant configurations in his...