Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Disaster and blackout - the long farewell of the playwright

It reads like a synopsis from a Tennessee Williams melodrama: amid the palms of the swarthy Florida Keys, a famous artist past the prime of his powers lives with a much younger companion while his former partner lives upstairs, dying of inoperable lung cancer.

For most of 1964, Tennessee Williams was a recluse. His partner since 1948, Frank Merlo, had died in a New York City hospital the previous September. After Merlo died there were no more Tony Awards, no more Pulitzers, no more NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Williams and Frank had been together for 15 years, shepherding 8 plays and countless films while creating a pseudo-domestic, settled homelife between Key West, New York, New Orleans and Rome. By 1964, the milk train didn't stop there anymore.

Occurring at the same time as his personal tragedy, there was another memorial service to attend: the end of Williams as master playwright and American theatre superstar. 1961's The Night of the Iguana squeaks by in anthologies as his last masterwork, according to critics of the day. By 1964, a rewritten version of his next play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with Tallulah Bankhead, bombed, closing after 4 performances. (TW's next venture - 2 shorter plays under the title Slapstick Tragedy - would also close after 4 performances in 1966.) When Milk Train was rewritten, it became a more naked treatise about death and life's ultimate futility. The main character rails: "What the hell are we doing? Just going from one goddamn frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddamn distractions lead to disaster and blackout?"

Milk Train covers a lot of same ground sowed a few years earlier with Sweet Bird of Youth: an aging, rich woman lamenting her loss of youth, a younger man who is both artist and paid sexual companion. He actually may be the angel of death, so the subtle metaphors are becoming less subtle...but, he's also referred to as a beatnik, so at least the play's trendy. Flora Goforth, however, is much more crude and grotesque than TW's previous heroines, and the conversation, set on a terrace on the Italian coast, ambles around a missing "sense of reality" as well as Flora's always imminent death. It is well known that after writing a play, Williams was convinced it would be his last and he was not to survive long enough to write another. Eventually, he would be correct, but not in 1964. Was Milk Train derailed by too much talk of death? (The San Francisco production had actual plaster skeletons scattered throughout the audience) Can't be - much of modern American theatre has focused on death, from 'Night Mother to Angels in America.

It was more than just the nagging spectre of being washed up that many successful artists experience. Those artists who dare to deviate from the hitmaking machine they have invented are condemned to the inevitable vegetable medley audiences and critics like to throw. TW had been writing about washed up characters from the get go. Blanche Dubois in 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire refers to herself as "played out"; Rev. Shannon in Night of the Iguana is defrocked and disassembled. Actresses Karen Stone and Alexandra del Lago are at the end of their careers as women of a certain age denied the roles of younger actresses and they acted out accordingly (although Alexandria, like TW himself, with a whole lot more pills and liquor). By 1964 Williams was beyond complaining about age, vitality and being relevant.

The state of theatre in the early 1960s showed experimentation becoming mainstream. Except when Williams attempted it. TW was a fan of Beckett's minimalism, Albee's rapid-fire dialogue (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf) and Orton's sex farce (Entertaining Mr. Sloane). TW enjoyed employing more humor in his plays, although the humor was far more grotesque than the sophisticated breezes of Neil Simon's 1963 night on Broadway, Barefoot in the Park.

In addition, unknown to most people was Williams' discovery of the Japanese theatre of Noh. He had visited Japan in 1959 and was affected by Kabuki theatre enough to write a play subtitled An Occidental Noh Play. Noh plays are, by their definition, full of minimalist dialogue, archetype characters (often without identities beyond their description), and pointed silences. Milk Train begins with stage assistants hoisting a flag, identified only as "One and Two" and actually refer to themselves as "theatrical devices...with occidental variations." Many of the plays TW wrote in the last 20 years of his life follow these attributes and were roundly panned by audiences and critics alike.

NY Times theatre critic Richard Gilman wrote: "It was clear to us that Williams was in flight from his own powers, that he was in fact beginning to parody them." Critics began attacking his plays for being too personal - but TW always claimed "all true work of an artist must be personal". This is the old argument about art vs. commercial art, or in this case, art vs. commercially-funded business of theatre. By contrast, in 1964, Arthur Miller had no qualms about presenting the fragmented memory play After the Fall - ostensibly about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Intensely personal, sure, because writers write from their experience.

The vicious circle of bad reviews = more drinking = worse writing = more bad reviews. Williams would spend the remainder of mid-60s whacked out on a combo of speed injections and handfuls of downers until he ended up in rehab by decade's end.

Recent reassessments say critics are often wrong to expect an artist to keep producing the same art as they did at the height of their powers - that TW turned abstract as his world closed in on him. Perhaps these plays were not good commercial theater - or even good theater - but as art, they definitely have merit.

































Works Cited

Gilman, Richard. "The Drama is Coming Now". The Second Coming of Tennessee Williams. Yale University Press.
Hale, Allean. "Tennessee's Long Trip," Gale Research volume 45 of Contemporary Criticism. 1984. http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2003/5hale.htm
Rader, Dotson. Cry of the Heart. Doubleday and Company, 1985.
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday and Company, 1975.
Williams, Tennessee. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. 1964.
Williams, Tennessee. Notebooks. Margaret Bradham Thornton, ed. Yale University Press, 2006.

No comments:

Post a Comment