The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays
of Tennessee Williams. Edited
by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter
Lang, 2002. 223 pages. $32.95 paper.
With unnerving
dialogue, exaggerated
Amused and confused by
the blend of
vaudeville with Sophoclean drama, the
audience appreciated the rare opportunity
offered by director Michele Cuomo and
the University’s Theatre Arts students.
The playwright died in 1983; but, as the
well-known Williams scholar Philip C.
Kolin emphasizes at the start of his new
essay collection: "The post-Night of the
Iguana (1961) canon still remains largely
undiscovered country, elusively difficult to
edit, classify, and interpret" (1). Until
very
recently, critics and producers alike have
avoided these unconventional works. And
in "The Gnädiges Fräulein:
Tennessee
Williams’s Clown Show," Allean Hale
observes that this play is "perhaps the
most
unusual and most difficult" of Williams’s
many later dramas (40).
A striking pair of
illustrations
accompanies Hale’s essay: a photo of the
bloodied, blinded title character in a
University of Illinois production,
juxtaposed with a painting by Williams
titled Self-portrait as Clown. Both
figures
have wild wigs, bold lips, and painted
tears. In the sacred clown tradition familiar
to Williams, says Hale, white makeup is a
death symbol. She concludes that the play
is not absurdist (as critics have suggested)
but existentialist: "It reminds us of
Brecht’s
Mother Courage, eternally pulling her
wagon, or Camus’s Sisyphus, daily pushing
his rock up the hill even though he knows
it will roll down again. ‘En avant!’ was
Williams’ battle cry" (52).
"En avant!" could be the cry of the 15
contributors who explore the undiscovered
country in Kolin’s volume. These essays
are original in both senses: never before
published, and highly imaginative as well.
Illuminating Williams’s obscurity, essayists
develop many contexts for the plays,
including theology (Kolin on Small Craft
Warnings); the Gnostic politics of space
(Robert F. Gross on The Red Devil Battery
Sign); Japanese No theatre (Michael
Paller
on The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here
Anymore); and a postmodern
"resurgent
romanticism" (Norma Jenckes on Camino
Real and Clothes for a Summer Hotel).
Una Chaudhuri takes a particularly
unusual approach in "‘AWK!’: Extremity,
Animality, and the Aesthetic of
Awkwardness in Tennessee Williams’s The
Gnädiges Fräulein." Alert to the
cries of
Williams’s grotesque cocaloony bird,
Chaudhuri proposes that the theory of
"the animalizing imagination" is
"one of
the more progressive and promising
resources of postmodernism" (60). The
difficulty of Chaudhuri’s critical language
(though often playful) mirrors the playful
difficulty of the drama itself; but her
conclusion is straightforward and much
like Allean Hale’s. "The slapstick
tragedy,"
says Chaudhuri, "ends not with death or
defeat but with perseverance. Though
blood-soaked and blinded, the Fräulein
keeps flapping her skinny arms like wings,
awkwardly performing the awkwardness of
survival on ‘this risky planet’" (65).
The Gnädiges Fräulein is also a central
text for Annette J. Saddik in "‘The
Inexpressible Regret of All Her Regrets’:
Tennessee Williams’s Later Plays as
Artaudian Theater of Cruelty." Author of
The Politics of Reputation: The Critical
Reception of Tennessee Williams’s Late Plays
(1999), Saddik compares the play to
Kingdom of Earth, Now the Cats with
Jewelled Claws, and This Is the
Peaceable
Kingdom—all of which reflect Antonin
Artaud’s stress on "ideological elements
of
the presentation of ritualistic spectacle, a
moral reversal in the primacy of nature
over culture, and a revelation of inevitable
metaphysical cruelty" (22-23).
Gene D. Phillips, S.J., discusses one of
these plays, Kingdom of Earth, in
"Tennessee Williams’s Forgotten Film: The
Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots as a Screen
Version of The Seven Descents of Myrtle."
Broadway producer David Merrick
convinced Williams to change the title
Kingdom of Earth to Seven Descents of
Myrtle, a work that is not "front
rank,"
according to Phillips, yet nonetheless
deserving of study, as is the movie version.
Phillips spoke with Williams at the 1976
Cannes International Film Festival, and
he records the playwright’s insistence that
the drama is a comedy, a fact that is not
always stressed in productions. In lively
detail, the essayist demonstrates that
Sidney Lumet’s screen version had its own
set of problems, including British actress
Lynn Redgrave’s struggle with Southern
intonation.
Like Phillips, several other contributors
to The Undiscovered Country make
excellent use of biographical material,
offsetting the "antagonistic biographical
criticism" that Kolin outlines in his
introduction (1-2). Especially intriguing is
Terri Smith Ruckel’s exploration of the
"painterly texture" of In the Bar
of a Tokyo
Hotel in light of Williams’s dozens of
artworks (his oil painting Many
Moons Ago
is
reproduced in the essay). James Fisher
presents Something
Cloudy, Something
Clear as
"both a triumph of autobiographical
confession and a culmination
of prevalent themes in Williams’s
plays" (194). In an outstanding study
of A
House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic
Comedy,
Thomas Keith compares this
1982 drama to other late works that reveal
"the rigors and fears Williams faced—physical,
mental, and emotional— during
the last ten years of his life and career"
(207). Similarly, Felicia Hardison Londré
relates the themes of The
Two-Character Play
and
Out
Cry to
Williams’s fear
of confinement (bodily and artistic confinement,
but also the dread of being trapped
in any single role or identity).
Robert
Bray suggests that, in Vieux
Carré—despite
Williams’s "genius for experimentation"
(142)—the playwright did
not fully escape the trap of his own early
successes.
Theatre critics at the 1977 premiere
accused him of recycling character types
and places for which he had become famous,
and Bray acknowledges that Williams
set dozens of works in New Orleans.
"None, however," the critic emphasizes,
"is more atmospherically charged
with French Quarter charm and decadence
than the play that bears its name"
(147). Moreover, the city’s uniqueness
"provided Williams with an entirely
new sense of ‘local color’" (148).
Like
Bray, Verna Foster and George W. Crandell
carefully distinguish apparent repetition
from new developments in the late
works. Quoting Williams’s comment that
A
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is
"almost
a different genre," Foster sums up the
difference as a blend of the early "psychological
realism" with the late "grotesque
style" (155). Comparing the
1978 play with a version from
the late 1950s, she sees definite advances
in Williams’s dramaturgy and characterization.
Crandell
examines Williams’s changing treatment
of time and memory, with special
attention to Clothes
for a Summer Hotel,
a little-known play with well-known characters:
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
"More than its later counterparts,"
says Crandell, this Dantesque
work "dramatizes something unique
in the Williams canon: a lack of faith
in the future to transform the present"
(170). In
Zelda’s asylum setting, "performance"
is the single therapy that might
"mitigate the effects of exile from wholeness"
(177); and, whether in life
or in drama, Crandell concludes, performance
is also "the only stay against the
‘enemy’ time" (178).
The
tragic vision of Clothes
for a Summer
Hotel is
far from the slapstick tragedy
of The
Gnädiges Fräulein or
the lusty
humor of The
Seven Descents of Myrtle.
As Philip Kolin suggests in his introduction
to The
Undiscovered Country,
"Not
even the convoluted classification system
of Polonius—‘pastoral, comical, historical
pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-
historical-pastoral’—can do
justice to the highly experimental plays of
Williams’s last three decades" (3). For
Hamlet,
who killed the foolish Polonius, death
itself was "the undiscovered country,"
from which no traveler returns. In
his final years, however, Tennessee Williams
was able to work that miracle. " Ghosts,
in one form or another, are a recurring
element in five of Williams’s later
plays" (211), notes Thomas Keith. Williams
never stayed in one place for long.
JOAN WYLIE HALL