Tennessee Williams and Italy: A Transcultural Perspective by Alessandro Clericuzio (review)

Italy and Italian culture held special allure for Tennessee Williams, as attested by his Memoirs, his published letters and notebooks, and some of his literary work. His close friendship with actress Anna Magnani, his liaison with Sicilian American Frank Merlo, and his working relationship with director Luchino Visconti all profoundly impacted his outlook and even directly stimulated his novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and play The Rose Tattoo. Alessandro Clericuzio's transcultural study not only fills gaps in our knowledge about the particulars of Williams's affinity for Italy, but also explores the chequered history of reception of Williams's work by Italian directors, audiences, critics, and censors.

Clericuzio's transcultural approach takes the analysis beyond simple cross-fertilization of cultures; he shows how various forces in the evolving cultural climate—from lingering fascist elements in the wake of World War II, to the cold war, to the new freedoms of the 1960s, and so on—factored into the relentless ups and downs of Williams's reputation in Italy. Clericuzio's second chapter surveys these vicissitudes, tracing awareness of the young playwright back to the December 1945 and January 1946 issues of the monthly theatre journal Il dramma; the latter issue included an Italian transcription of an otherwise unavailable radio interview, which Clericuzio renders back into English, in which Williams segues from comments on The Glass Menagerie to his vision for theatre as a basis for "international comprehension" (12). Yet, the first Italian production of a Williams play, Visconti's Lo zoo di vetro (The Glass Menagerie) in Rome in December 1946, was hissed and booed by audiences resentful of an American presence on the Italian stage (17). For one critic, The Glass Menagerie exemplified the "new mental structure" of a nation that had no fear of being colonized (20); others were confused as they tried to reconcile the apparent symbolism of the play with their expectation of the neo-realism that had made Visconti's reputation as a film director. But most critics ignored the author as they focused on the celebrity director's stage work.

The critical survey chapter shows that even during the golden years of Williams's reputation in Italy, roughly 1957 to 1964, there were some harsh assessments. The negative responses to his experimental plays of the later 1960s in Italy paralleled criticisms in the United States and elsewhere. Then the playwright's death in 1983 brought a new wave of appreciation for the canon as a whole, for his great female characters, and for his willingness to represent the underside of American culture. This chapter, the longest in the book, is a heroic effort, as Clericuzio waded through hundreds of reviews to cull and translate the pithiest or most revealing observations; it is also the toughest going for the reader, with its complicated interweaving of ideas from so many reviewers and publications. An appendix listing of major Italian productions partially compensates for the lack of play titles in the people-names-only index.

In the chapter on Visconti's productions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Clericuzio deftly pulls together biographical details about the director and the playwright and information on leading Italian stage artists, as well as accounts of Visconti's directorial approach to the plays and of the major impact that Italian censorship had on their collaboration. Unfortunately, Visconti's attempt to skirt censorship by slipping some vulgar words back into the opening-night performance of his 1949 Streetcar had an adverse effect on subsequent dealings with censors and may have thwarted not only the director's hope of directing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Hollywood's distribution of Williams films in Italy as well. Questions of censorship, including inconsistent treatment of allusions to homosexuality, crop up also in the chapters on subsequent productions of Streetcar, The Rose Tattoo, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and on the plays of the "golden years."

In the final two chapters, Clericuzio...