The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights (review)

{ 275 } Book Reviews playwrights and artists mentioned, sweeping quickly through Lorraine Hans­ berry, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, and others before focusing more closely on “four playwrights who stand out in this crowded Ameri­ can landscape . . . Edward Albee, David Mamet, Suzan-­ Lori Parks, and Wallace Shawn” (324). For Robinson, each of these authors pursues a kind of neutrality that displaces the author’s traditional obsession with engaging or manipulating the spectator’s attention. Throughout this voluminous work, Robinson engages with an impressive and imaginative array of materials that shape his persuasive arguments about the transformations of both the Ameri­ can theatre and its audience. He offers students of both theatre and dramatic literature new ways to interpret language, staging practices, and spectacle in the playhouse. His dynamic study will doubtless provide a strong foundation for scholars across a range of disciplines. Heather S. Nathans — University of Maryland, College Park \ \ The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen Ameri­ can Playwrights. Edited and with an introduction by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. 229 pp. $39.95 paperback. Unquestionably, Tennessee Williams is one of the great Ameri­ can playwrights. Spanning five decades, his dramatic works have served as foundational texts for the development of Ameri­ can theatre. His use of language and metaphor, depth of character, powerful themes, and rejection of kitchen-­ sink realism have inspired and incensed audiences, critics, and playwrights for decades, and will likely continue to do so in the future. In The Influence of Tennessee Williams, Philip Kolin and his contributors explore the myriad ways in which Williams touched Ameri­ can theatre. Kolin’s introduction nicely grounds the volume, explaining that the fifteen essays “investigate the complex relationships between Williams’s canon and the works of other major playwrights—male and female, white and black, heterosexual and gay, popular and radical”(6). Each essay examines the relationship between Williams and another Ameri­ can writer, including William Inge, Neil Simon, Edward Albee,A.R.Gurney,Lorraine Hansberry,Adrienne Kennedy,John Guare, Sam Shepard,August Wilson, David Mamet, Beth Henley, Christopher Durang, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-­ Lori Parks. { 276 } Book Reviews Many of these playwrights owe Williams a clear debt, which, Kolin notes, is either largely unexplored or deserving of further inquiry. Michael Greenwald ’s “‘[Our] Little Company of the Odd and Lonely’: Tennessee Williams’s ‘Personality’ in the Plays of William Inge” delves into the complex mentoring relationship between the two midcentury giants and notes many parallels in their work. In “Image, Myth, and Movement in the Plays of Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams,” Annette Saddik investigates the “intersection of theme and style” and persuasively argues that Williams and Shepard “are concerned with the postmodern question of essence versus appearance and the slipperiness of ‘authentic’ identity as it relates to image” (110–11). David Crespy paints a convincing picture of a “fundamental subtextual structure of non-­ realistic, non-­ linear plasticity in real action” (43), building on Williams’s notions of a new, plastic theatre in “‘Inconspicuous Osmosis and the Plasticity of Doing’: The Influence of Tennessee Williams on the Plays of Edward Albee” (supplemented by an interview with Albee, also published in this collection). While some of the connections to Williams are straightforward, Kolin also explores Williams’s subtler influences, emphasizing the importance of showing “how Williams’s plays have been radicalized in the works of several Afri­ can Ameri­ can playwrights” (11). A good example of this is Harvey Young’s “Twilight in Tennessee: The Similar Styles of Anna Deavere Smith and ­ Tennessee Williams,”which reads Williams through a“contemporary, critical lens . . . with the aim of locating those moments when his poststructuralist and social activist voice appears” (188). Similarly, Sandra Shannon’s discussion of August Wilson provides a comprehensive history of Wilson as well as thoughtful comparison of the two writers’ “deep disregard for the strait jacket effect of traditional realism” (126). Harry Elam Jr.’s “Theatre of the Gut: Tennessee Williams and Suzan-­ Lori Parks” provides a fascinating analysis of race, sexuality, and theatre “from the gut” functioning as “forms of social resistance attacking the status quo and social complacency” (201–2). Although it is not possible...