TENNESSEE WILLIAMS'S RESTRAINT

1 3 1 R T E N N E S S E E W I L L I A M S ’ S R E S T R A I N T M A R C R O B I N S O N In his preface to The Rose Tattoo (1951), Tennessee Williams identified a fundamental if underappreciated principle of all his plays: ‘‘Facing a person is not the best way to see him.’’ The idea runs counter to the popular impression made by this most undeterred of playwrights. As a fledgling writer in 1939, he declared that his ‘‘next play . . . will be myself without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life that will leave no room for trepidation.’’ It’s easy to imagine that he succeeded in that ambition six years later with The Glass Menagerie, his most overtly autobiographical work. Easy, too, to join Gore Vidal and others in recognizing Williams in his many shambling heroines at the mercy of their desire. ‘‘Concealment’’ there seemed, to these observers, hardly worth the trouble. But a subtler, more poised Williams was always active, and at least as strong – and he is possibly of even more interest now, in an era when characters prone to exhibitionism have become commonplace . (As Tony Kushner said of the Williams of the 1970s, ‘‘The Te n n e s s e e W i l l i a m s : M a d P i l g r i m a g e o f t h e F l e s h , b y J o h n L a h r ( N o r t o n , 7 6 5 p p . , $ 3 9 . 9 5 ) 1 3 2 R O B I N S O N Y permission that [he] helped create . . . robbed him of a platform. He found himself a revolutionary in a post-revolutionary era.’’) This other, latent Williams declined to make an ‘‘assault,’’ ‘‘frontal’’ or otherwise, on his protagonists – or, rather, he allowed them to evade his pursuit. He saw the value in their diffidence, in their shame and fear, and heard the revelations in their euphemisms – behavior and speech that a less patient writer would treat as mere preamble to the supposedly more honest moments when repression cracks. Despite his characters’ eloquence during epiphanies or at their most romantic, Williams never trusted candor. In his theater, it is more often a tactic than a release. His own sideways approach, refusing prosecutorial ardor or aggressive pity, brought him closer to his skittish subjects. John Lahr’s absorbing new biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, may be most valuable for reminding us that his mercurial subject was capable of this discretion. The tabloid sloppiness of Williams’s personal life (at least in his later years) has distracted us from his equally passionate commitment to austerity in the theater. This control is most pronounced when least expected. His best-known characters may teeter on the edge of psychological collapse, surrender to phobias and superstition, plunge into engulfing memory, erupt in rage, or simply unfurl their sails and glide onstage in full narcissistic splendor – but they all, in their excess, still submit to the playwright’s strict command of form. Typical of this contradiction is Kingdom of Earth (1968), one of Williams’s most outrageous, albeit minor, works. In this contest between two brothers, one brutal and the other wilting, Williams forestalls the typical pleasures of camp by lingering over its mechanics. An actor’s temptation to exaggerate the weaker man’s transformation from improbable husband to transvestite simulacrum of his mother is held in check by the final laborious sequence of his undressing, re-costuming, and slow, stately descent from an upstairs bedroom. To Williams, the procedures of impersonation – the moments before the grand entrance – are far more mesmerizing than the performance itself. No less captivating, in other plays, is the period after the spotlight goes off. ‘‘All at once her power is exhausted, her fury gone,’’ writes Williams in a stage direction about the Princess Kosmonop- T E N N E S S E E W I L L I A M...