Still smoldering

When Tennessee Williams died in 1983 at 71, alcohol and drug addiction had dissipated his once-formidable powers as the creator of such great ‘40s stage classics as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

In typical Williams fashion, “Streetcar” (and its film adaptation) roiled audiences with its mix of raw sexuality and brutal frankness. For nearly two decades extending into the early ‘60s, the Mississippi-born Williams, who endured an impoverished youth that informed many of his desperate characters, enjoyed wealth, critical acclaim and commercial success with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “The Night of the Iguana,” “Summer and Smoke” and “Suddenly Last Summer.”

These also challenged the social orthodoxy of the day with their themes of homosexuality, sexual violence and betrayal, incest and cannibalism. But when the playwright suffered a nervous breakdown after the early death of his lover, Frank Merlo, from cancer, he began a precipitous decline through drug and alcohol abuse.

Critics derided his later efforts like “Out Cry” (1973), “The Red Devil Battery Sign” (1975), “Vieux Carre” (1977), “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur” (1979) and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel” (1980), all of which were humiliating flops.

In 1977, the playwright told the New York Times, “I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible, excessively solid of flesh and perhaps too ambulatory, but a writer remembered mostly for works which were staged between 1944 and 1961.”

Even his seminal and successful dramas began to be dismissed by some critics and academics as excessively melodramatic and florid, perhaps even dated. Those are still among the criticisms one hears in a contemporary dramatic climate more likely to celebrate the dramatic works of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill.

That hasn’t stopped his more familiar plays from being revived. A production of “Cat,” starring Ned Beatty and Ashley Judd, ran on Broadway this season to mixed reviews. The same play will be mounted as part of Kennedy Center’s current “Tennessee Williams Explored” festival, which will also include revivals of “Menagerie,” with Sally Field as Amanda; “Streetcar,” with Patricia Clarkson as Blanche; and “Cat,” starring Mary Stuart Masterson.

Still, the festival is likely to reignite debate over Williams: Is he relevant in “a world lit by lightning,” as he put it in a different context in “Menagerie”? Has his poetic fire lost its brilliance over the intervening decades?

Conversations with eight contemporary playwrights reveal Williams is anything but passe. They revere him as, alternately, a sexual outlaw, unapologetic poet and courageous explorer of the frontiers of human experience.

*

Tony Kushner

“Caroline, or Change”

After reading the entire series of Williams plays, I thought there is nothing in American drama as beautiful as this, nothing as sexually transgressive, as radical. Eugene O’Neill is still our best playwright, Arthur Miller is a great one, but neither, line by line, delivers the lyricism and sophistication Williams did. Blanche’s scene about the suicide of the young man at the Moonlight Casino is the most beautiful passage in American drama.

He dared to take on this roiling sexuality and in the most disturbing and difficult way: the connection between desire and violence, desire and death, desire and danger. He suffered terribly as a gay man and, while that bred compassion within him, he paid a terrible price for it -- especially for a writer who was a big bag of nerves. That is what he thought writers had to be: the nervous system of society. He did that fearlessly and expressed it voluptuously. He gave me permission to be unapologetic about the expressiveness of my language and not worry because it wasn’t butch, it wasn’t boiled down to the essentials.

I admire Pinter, Mamet and Beckett, but I don’t want to write like that. There’s a tendency in playwriting to not wear everything so close to the sleeve, to be laconic and therefore give less of yourself away. In Williams, there is a willingness to let it all hang out.

Through drugs and alcohol, the gift for playwriting abandoned him. What never abandoned him was the poetry. To this day, he is the only significant poet to have written plays. That points to something that had the biggest impact on me: As a writer, there are things that you can’t quite grasp yourself, but you believe in the ability of language to strive after that, to say the un-sayable, to move an audience through complicated effects and linguistic strategies that are more like music than reactional speech. He says through them, “We’re going after something serious here, and we will pursue it until we find it.”

*

Christopher Durang

“Betty’s Summer Vacation”

When I wrote “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls” [a parody of “Glass Menagerie”], I felt more impatient with Laura and identified with the mother, Amanda. I mean, how hard can it be to go to typing school? So I turned Laura into Lawrence and made him into a hypochondriac who collected glass swizzle sticks, not glass unicorns.

There’s just something about over-saturation that makes you want to write parody, but it was meant to be affectionate because I’m an enormous fan, even of the plays that got mixed responses like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Night of the Iguana.” I admire the tortured but ultimately triumphant sexuality of those plays.

As a Catholic, I particularly appreciate Williams’ bravery, because the church was forever condemning his work and preaching sermons against it -- this notion that anything outside of a monogamous relationship had to be repressed. I remember standing up to pledge that I would not see “morally objectionable” films, but my parents took me anyway.

My plays aren’t like Williams’ at all, but he influenced me strongly, especially in one respect: Even his larger-than-life characters make psychological sense. This is something that I struggle with all the time with the exaggerated characters in my surreal comedies; he showed the way in that regard.

*

Lynn Nottage

“Intimate Apparel”

I have always harbored a secret, guilty crush on the plays of Tennessee Williams because when I was a graduate student at Yale, the aesthetic there was the sparse language of the British playwrights like Harold Pinter or the staccato rhythms of David Mamet.

He was so unafraid of language and that made him so not in fashion that I suppressed aspects of my writing to conform to a style that was in vogue at the time. But I was much more drawn to the slow, poetic language of Williams, and I eventually learned, “You know what? I can write plays that have this sort of bold, poetic and expressive language.”

I was also drawn to his complicated, conflicted and hopeful women. I grew up in New York City in a family of incredibly dramatic, sometimes tragic, women, so he spoke to me in a way that a lot of other playwrights simply did not. His language was so sensual and romantic, he was such a mixture of human versus the mythic, that you were forced to enter his world. He didn’t pander.

But I found the most attractive thing about him was that he expressed sorrow and desire with such tremendous eloquence.

When I read “Glass Menagerie,” I was haunted by its characters, for better or worse. This poor girl, Laura, her brother feeling trapped by their overbearing mother, and his abandonment of them both. These were feelings that I tried to capture in my play “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” -- that the person you become is largely shaped by the family you leave behind and that you must move on even if it does have awful, heartbreaking consequences.

Though his world is so different from my own, I feel instantly drawn into his. But if you take this journey, you have to be prepared to be emotional, and I think audiences today are a little embarrassed by their emotions.

*

Douglas Wright

“I Am My Own Wife”

I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and my parents had tickets to an art series at a local college. One night when I was 9, my father took me to see “Streetcar Named Desire” because my mother was sick. As I watched Blanche DuBois’ veneer slipping over three harrowing hours, my eyes became very wide.

By age 10 or 11, I had read everything I could get my hands on by a writer who educated me on the dark, tortured history of the American South, an entire range of compelling perversity, and on my own emerging homosexuality. I have to say that I’m an enormous fan of those works, like “Suddenly Last Summer,” which are criticized for being overwrought and dramatically clumsy.

Williams has this baroque outrageousness, but at the same time he is humane. He never laughs at his characters, he has tremendous compassion for them, for their self-deceit, wounded pride, their poignant attempts to reclaim God’s favor.

Though some people have minimized him as a self-loathing gay man, because he grew up in an era that taught him his sexuality was pathological, Williams was the first man to create within the notion of a “gay aesthetic.” As gay men and women, we’re taught to inhibit our emotions in life but in art we can give them full flower in the most aggressive and original ways. And Williams, in a very heroic way, gave us permission to do that.

*

Terrence McNally

“The Stendahl Syndrome”

I think Beckett and Pinter are much more influential playwrights. Williams is sui generis, a unique poetic voice in American literature, important but not influential. I think it’s unfortunate that some of his latter works are obscured by the “great” Tennessee Williams plays.

I hope that someone will someday rediscover “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” or “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” “Gnadiges Fraulein,” “Slapstick Tragedy” and “Something Cloudy, Something Clear.” I just think there’s a wonderful poetry, mystery and electric tension in the air of some of these latter plays and one-acts that are the opposite of “Streetcar” and “Cat.” They were very experimental and daring and not well received; people just wanted him to continue writing Blanche and Alma and these flamboyant Southern heroines.

Some of his plays are too “girly” for me, but I’m very high on “Night of the Iguana.” I recently saw a production of “Iguana” in Key West done by a local theater group and was struck by how bleak it is. I really think that sometimes his plays are overshadowed by the glamour of his casts. I didn’t enjoy the original cast of “Iguana,” with Bette Davis and Margaret Leighton, half as much as this one with semiprofessional actors when you really hear the play. His vision by then had become very tragic and not very entertaining.

“Iguana” really is a play that makes you want to go out and kill yourself, but it’s bleakness is very well-earned. The poetry does cut through the bleakness, but you just feel that these characters, so spiritually and materially exhausted, are going to die. The world has shut down all possibilities.

*

A.R. Gurney

“Mrs. Farnsworth”

When I was between high school and college in the early ‘50s, I drove down to see “A Streetcar Named Desire” with Anthony Quinn playing Stanley and Uta Hagen as Blanche.

The sexual juice of the play had you on the edge of your seat -- Blanche as the seductress and not pretending she wasn’t. On the one hand, there was the muscularity of the poker game, and on the other the women spraying themselves with perfume and running around in slips. To do that on stage and say those things was new and very impressive to me. And when I saw “Glass Menagerie” -- twice, once with Helen Hayes and once with Maureen Stapleton -- just the way he told the story, the compression of the play, had an enormous influence on me. You didn’t have to have great crowds running around on stage, really just four characters.

He reached me on so many levels: the poetry in the dramatic form, the strong motors of his plays and the frankness. He had guts. At a time when any portrayal of children on the stage was usually very sentimental, there he was with his no-necked monsters in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I think what I’d emphasize is his emphasis on the precariousness of our culture, this notion that the sensitive are victimized and destroyed by the cruel and the mendacious, the artistic destroyed by the materialistic, which, of course, is still very true today.

*

Donald Margulies

“Sight Unseen”

I teach at Yale, and there is this sneering among many undergrads that some of the plays of Williams seem too dated and soap opera-ish. The emotions are too large, the desires too great, so over the top. I think film has a lot to do with that. It’s a medium that is so naturalistic that there’s little tolerance for the kind of pumped-up stakes and language inherent in Williams. My students find that embarrassing.

But it is just this pure theatricality and musicality that is so stunning to me. In a play like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which I teach, each act is a distinct movement of music. Maggie has an aria in the first act, and the scenes between Big Daddy and Brick are virtually duets. This is true not just of one or two great plays but quite a significant number of stage-worthy plays. He is really the most prolific in the score of American playwrights.

I think for playwrights of my generation, encountering the “Glass Menagerie” is a seminal experience. It continues to be one of the most influential pieces in the modern American canon, the quintessential memory play using a narrator and these experimental ideas of time and space. In the later half of the 20th century, Sam Shepard may have shaped the milieu of dramatic writing and Mamet the jazz of the language, but Williams shaped the stylistic narrative.

Some of my students still think he’s corny. In this post-Pinter age, so much is left unsaid, so much is context. In Williams, everything is raw and bleeding and eviscerated before your eyes. But what really endures is not so much Williams as a philosopher but Williams as a storyteller. And that’s what people will always respond to. The characters are a mode of entry, but he really delivers in the storytelling. Things happen, people change. That’s eternal.

*

Neil LaBute

“The Distance From Here”

Growing up in Utah, I didn’t have access to theater, so I discovered Williams in film and later in reading his plays. Though his experience bore little resemblance to mine, I found him incredibly accessible, yet incredibly adventurous -- this marriage of drama and poetry that is unique, at the time and still today.

He wasn’t influential in the way that I write, but he taught me that strange dynamic of theatrical writing: that words can sound incredibly like the way people talk -- and yet nothing like the way people talk. He instructed me on how to take an almost impressionistic mode of language and to marry that to human behavior.

Like all good work, his plays make you yearn for what is just beyond the page. It’s hard to believe he was writing these plays that pushed the limits of sexual relationships 50 or 60 years ago. More than being on the vanguard of playwriting, he was at the vanguard of the psychology of drama.

A sensualist, he was driven by demons and desires to go further and further, his writing became more and more naked, his subject matter more and more adventurous. He was one person who made me run constantly to the dictionary, to the encyclopedia, who forced me to go beyond the text to explore the world beyond the play.