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  • The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights
  • Michael Paller
Philip C. Kolin , ed. The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. $39.95

As Tennessee Williams's centenary approaches, scholars have been opening new lines of enquiry into a playwright who is most associated in the public mind with the plays he wrote before 1960—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and particularly Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The later plays are being [End Page 416] explored and championed for their radical experimentation and alleged embrace of poststructuralist or postmodernist methods; New Directions, Williams's authorized publisher, is systematically bringing out previously unpublished work, new editions of the familiar plays, and volumes of his letters; Yale has published a scrupulously edited edition of his notebooks. It makes sense, therefore, that a volume that examines his influence on fifteen American playwrights of subsequent generations, paying special attention to those who would seem on the surface to have been influenced the least, including Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Anna Deavere Smith would appear.

What is influence? How is it measured? What is the difference between being influenced by an artist and simply being aware of referencing him? Does one writer need to know the work of another in order to be influenced? If there's a drawback to this volume, it is that these questions often go unanswered, and that many of the essayists settle for comparisons and similarities rather than uncovering deep connections that allow us to say, "Yes, without Williams, this writer's work would lack a significant quality," as one can say about D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Chekhov, three writers who influenced Williams. Many of the essayists catalogue correspondences between Williams's biography and their particular playwright, and while this may suggest broad, cultural influence, it does not advance the book's argument. However, the authors of almost every essay detail the ways in which these playwrights have benefited from Williams's pioneering sexual frankness; they have adopted, in varying degrees, his notion of a "plastic theater" that rejects the Bellasco-like realism of the Broadway that preceded The Glass Menagerie. Indeed, thanks to Williams these influences are so ubiquitous in American theater as to be almost invisible. In this sense, knowingly or not, all of the playwrights represented owe Williams a debt. Yet, at the same time, the essayists writing in this volume barely mention his groundbreaking use of heightened prose, an odd oversight for a volume that discusses, among others, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, John Guare, and Tony Kushner, not to mention Parks and Kennedy, whose remarkable, non-naturalistic use of language is inseparable from their dramaturgy.

The book begins with William Inge and proceeds chronologically, examining fifteen American playwrights of various importance, skill, and subject matter, and ends with Parks. Williams's influence on Inge, both personal and professional, is well known; Michael Greenwald deftly suggests the possibility of reverse influence: following Inge biographer Ralph Voss, he speculates that Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth borrowed from the plot of Inge's one-act "Bus Riley's Back in Town," and that while Inge appropriated the basic situation of Battle of Angels for Picnic, Williams, in response, revised that early play into Orpheus Descending. Their relationship is the one among the playwrights covered here that was intimate; the fact that the influence was mutual is not surprising given Inge's neediness [End Page 417] and William's emotional complexity, which combined genuine caring, professional jealousy (he was always happy to assist the younger playwright until Inge had four Broadway hits in a row), and a cagey eye for the main chance. That he was thrilled to have snagged Warren Beatty, the young star of Inge's Splendor in the Grass, for his own The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is quite likely. It is true, as Greenwald says, that Williams wrote a moving homage to Inge on the latter's death and Williams's sentiments were certainly authentic. So is the fact that they were the first kind words that Williams had written about...

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