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Drama
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi to Edwina Dakin
Williams, the daughter of an Episcopal cleric, and Cornelius Coffin Williams,
a Spanish-American War veteran who worked for a time at a telephone company
and then, later, as a shoe salesman and manager. Columbus in the early 1900s,
as Williams's biographer Donald Spoto describes it, was a town "proud of its
Confederate tradition" and wary of Northern ideas of progress. Residents
of Columbus, "invested considerable energy. . .in sustaining the values of
a cherished and (it was thought) gentler era." Such an era agreed with Edwina
who, not long after marrying Cornelius in 1907 and moving away with him, left
her husband and returned to her father's rectory. Cornelius or "C.C." visited
her regularly in Columbus, and there she gave birth to two children: Rose
in 1910 and Thomas in 1911. Their last child, Walter Dakin (abbreviated later
to just Dakin), was born in 1919.
The family moved to other locales
in the South as Edwina's father accepted pastoral positions before settling
in Clarksdale, Mississippi. By 1918, Cornelius had been appointed to a managerial
position in a branch of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, and the
reunited family moved there that July, with Cornelius pledging to abandon
his rambling past of drinking and womanizing. With the new baby born in 1919
and Cornelius's shrewd business successes, all seemed well for the young family.
But not for long. Cornelius's
old habits returned, causing tensions in the home. His drinking and gambling
were one thing—or two things that placed a strain on family finances—but his
contraction of a venereal disease from a prostitute in 1922 was quite another.
The marriage of the proper southern Belle—the product of an exclusive boarding
school and a religious family—and her at times reckless husband would founder
from this time on. The arguments between the two tore the family apart and
most biographers agree that it had a particularly devastating effect on Rose,
young Tom's older sister and constant playmate. Fortunately, Tom had a $10
typewriter his mother had given him for his eleventh birthday, and writing
became a refuge from his loneliness and despair. Like Laura Wingfield in
The Glass Menagerie, Rose was not so fortunate. Painfully shy, she
withdrew from the world and its pain, consoled somewhat by the glass figurines
she collected. She would ultimately be diagnosed as a schizophrenic and undergo
a lobotomy. These unhappy facts underlie the sentiment—and accuracy—of the
opening sentence of Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams: "Throughout his
life, Tennessee Williams had two overriding devotions: his career as a writer
and his sister, Rose."
Upon graduation from high school,
Williams enrolled at the University of Missouri, which he attended for three
years before his father withdrew him after he had failed ROTC. He took a
position with the shoe company as a clerk, but grew to despise the job. In
the fall of 1934, he enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, but although
he continued to write while attending the university, he left before graduating.
He eventually enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he studied drama and
from which he graduated in 1938.
He traveled for a time living
in Chicago, then in New Orleans, where he continued to write, and California.
He toured Mexico and mailed plays for a competition sponsored by the Group
Theatre in New York. He enrolled to study play writing in New York and submitted
Battle of Angels to the Theatre Guild, which eventually produced the
play with controversial, even volatile results in the winter of 1940. The
play opened first in Boston, with the result that one city official called
the production "putrid" and recommended that "the police should arrest the
persons responsible for bringing shows of that type" into the city. Williams
struggled for a time after this initial setback, but returning to California
began work on a screenplay originally entitled The Gentleman Caller
based on a story he had written. Moreover, the form of the play was to be
innovative: it was a "memory play," a heavily autobiographical one that exploited
the visual and technical capacities of the modern theater. It was also a
poetic play, a specimen of the new "plastic theater" that Williams advocated.
It would later be re-titled The Glass Menagerie and propel Williams
to a position of preeminence in the American—and world—theater.
He would go on to win the Pulitzer
Prize twice—for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
receive the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play three times
(for these two and The Night of the Iguana in 1962), write a number
of distinguished poetic and experimental dramas, write or co-write some thirteen
screenplays, and become one of the greatest playwrights of the modern stage.
His plays challenged social values
and prevalent aesthetic conventions. Just as Boston theatergoers responded
violently to Battle of Angels in 1940, Irish police responded similarly
to productions of Williams's plays in Dublin in the 1950s, stopping a production
of The Rose Tattoo. Production codes in Hollywood meant that Williams's
representations of sexuality—straight and gay—had to be revised or edited
out for the movies. And when it wasn't sufficiently subdued, religious groups
condemned Williams's screenplays, as the Catholic legion of Decency did in
the case of Baby Doll in 1956. Throughout all of this turmoil, Williams's
life was marred by sadness, especially during the 1960s when he suffered from
a variety of maladies including alcoholism, depression, and the death of his
longtime companion, Frank Merlo in 1963. Williams rebounded in the 1970s,
continuing to write productively until the time of his death in 1983.
Textual Note
The
Glass Menagerie exists in two distinct
forms: one that Williams preferred complete with screens, "gauzy" scenic effects,
lighting at times replicating that of religious iconography and so on; another,
more realistic version stripped of many of these effects also exists, providing
a very different kind of representation of life in a later 1930s big-city.
The former version exhibits the kind of poetic drama Williams wrote and the
so-called "plastic theater" he endorsed.
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Selected Bibliography of Williams' Work
Plays
Battle of Angels (1940)
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Your Touched Me! (With Donald Windham, 1945)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Summer and Smoke (1948)
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950)
The Rose Tattoo (1951)
Camino Real (1953)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton (1955)
Orpheus Descending (1957)
Garden District (1958)
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
Period of Adjustment (1960)
The Night of the Iguana (1961)
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
Kingdom of Earth (first title, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, 1968)
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)
Dragon Country (collection of one-acts, 1970)
Small Craft Warnings (1972)
Two-Character Play (Out Cry) (1973)
The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976)
Vieux Carré (1977)
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979)
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981)
A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
Not About Nightingales (written, 1938; world premiere, 1998)
Prose and Poetry
One Arm and Other Stories (fiction, 1939, 1945)
Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954)
Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: A Book of Stories (1974)
Memoirs (autobiography, 1975)
Moise and the World of Reason (novel, 1975)
Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977)
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Further Reading About Williams' Life
Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1886.
Leavitt, Richard F., ed. The World of Tennessee Williams. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978. [This is largely a pictorial biography with excellent photographs of Williams and productions of his plays.]
Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995.
Maxwell, Gilbert. Tennessee Williams and Friends. Cleveland: World Publishers, 1965.
Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
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Further Reading About Williams' Work
Bauer-Briski, Senata Karolina. The Role of Sexuality in the Major Plays of Tennessee Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Crandell, George W., ed. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Gross, Robert F., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Kolin, Philip C. "The Black and Multi-Racial Productions of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9.2 (1995): 96-128.
Levy, Eric P. "Through Soundpoof Glass: The Prison of Self-Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie." Modern Drama 36.4 (1993): 529-37.
Martin, Robert A., ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997.
Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Roudané, Matthew C. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Savran, David. Communists. Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Tischler, Nancy M. Student Companion to Tennessee Williams. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Voss, Ralph F., ed. Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
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