The Elusive Tennessee

Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. By Philip C. Kolin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 222 pp. $54.95.

Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. By Robert Gross. New York: Routledge, 2001. 160 pp. $75.00.

The Plays in Production series of Cambridge University Press provides a great professional service by studying in detail the production history of major Western plays. No one would dispute A Streetcar Named Desire's place among them. Philip Kolin, a noted Williams scholar, discusses the premiere of the play and its later adaptations into a film. In fact, Kolin meticulously records information of all the play's national premieres. Another chapter is devoted to revivals. A fine bibliography is provided and Kolin offers his own sophisticated interpretations of the play's characters and actions. This book will become an instant resource for teachers of this American masterwork.

While Kolin's book is an invaluable record of the production history of a major play, Tennessee Williams: A Casebook by Robert Gross offers a series of perceptive essays about one of the great dramatists of the twentieth century. A plethora of books and articles on Williams focus on biographical parallels of events in the playwright's life with scenes and images underscored in his plays, or they explore canonical works, such as The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, sometimes at the expense of less well known masterpieces, like Out Cry, Vieux Carré, or Spring Storm. Furthermore, critics have been identified as Tennessee Williams scholars when, in fact, Williams' oeuvre and influence are an inescapable legacy in all contemporary theatrical history. The editor of Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, Gross has contributed individual essays to a dozen other volumes and has also written a casebook on Christopher Hampton. In 1996, he published a research and production sourcebook on S. N. Behrman, an appropriate book topic for a professor of drama and a theatre director at Hobart William & Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Many of the essays in Gross's volume assert that the chaos and disorder that some critics have objected to in Williams' work as excessive or even melodramatic are essential ingredients of his worldview. The "messiness" of life is highlighted in painful but moving analyses of modern existence. Throughout the Casebook, a "new" Williams is uncovered in unlikely pairings of famous plays with nearly forgotten ones, in gender studies, and in the exploration of death as a force that moulds his dramaturgy. Both of these recent books on Williams locate and elucidate areas of interest in the playwright's oeuvre that command our attention.

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