Williams, Tennessee (1911-1983)

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Williams, Tennessee (1911-1983)

An American playwright and screenwriter, Tennessee Williams was regarded in his literary prime with an equal measure of esteem and notoriety. After Eugene O'Neill, Williams was the first playwright to gain international respect for the emerging American dramatic genre. Williams excelled at creating richly realized characters peppered with humor and poignancy. The ever-shifting autobiography of Williams is equally renowned—always casual with fact, the playwright shone in an era that adored celebrity and encouraged excess.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a rough man with a fine Southern pedigree. Absent for long periods of time, Cornelius moved his family from town to town throughout Williams' childhood. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, imagined herself to be a Southern belle in her youth; born in Ohio, Edwina insisted that her sickly young son focus on Shakespeare over sports, and a writer was born.

The plays of Tennessee Williams deeply resonated with the performing arts community of the 1940s. The complex characterization and difficult subject matter of young Williams' plays appealed to a new generation of actors. The 1949 Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire featured then-unknown actors Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, and Karl Malden, trained in "Method Acting," a new model of acting experientially to project character psychology. Actors trained in the Method technique quickly discovered Williams was writing plays that stripped bare an American culture of repression and denial. A close-knit circle of performers, directors, and writers immediately surrounded the temperamental Southern playwright. Williams preferred certain personalities to be involved with his projects, including actors Montgomery Clift and Maureen Stapleton, directors Elia Kazan and Stella Adler, and a cheerfully competitive group of writers including Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and William Inge.

The 1950 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire brought Williams and the actors instant fame. Lines from the film have entered into the popular lexicon, from Blanche's pitiful ironies ("I have always depended on the kindness of strangers") to Stanley's scream in the New Orleans night ("Stella!"). More than any other of Williams' screenplays, A Streetcar Named Desire's lines resurface today in the most unlikely places, from advertisements to television sitcoms; the public often recognizes these phrases without having seen the production at all.

Pairing misfortune and loneliness with gracefully lyrical speech, Williams wrestles in his works with a repressed culture emerging from Victorian mores. Social commentary is present in most works, but the focus for Williams is the poetry of human interaction, with its composite failings, hopes, and eccentricities. Early works were bluntly political in nature, as in Me, Vashya!, whose villain is a tyrannical munitions maker. After The Glass Menagerie, however, Williams found he had a talent for creating real, vivid characters. Often, figures in his plays struggle for identity and an awakened sense of sensuality with little to show for the effort. Roles of victim and victimizer are exchanged between intertwined couples, as with Alexandra and Chance in Sweet Bird of Youth. The paralyzing fear of mortality, so often an issue for his characters, plagues Mrs. Goforth of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop here Anymore. Most significantly, perhaps, characters like Shannon of The Night of the Iguana, one of Williams' late plays, sometimes find peace of spirit after they can lose little else. Arthur Miller once declared Williams' most enduring theme to be "the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits, who exist in order to remind us of our trampled instincts, our forsaken tenderness, the holiness of the spirit of man."

The relationship between Williams' work and popular culture is long and varied. Many of his plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night of the Iguana —became major films of the 1950s and 1960s. Williams' films were immediately popular with mainstream audiences despite their focus on the darker elements of American society, including pedophilia, venereal disease, domestic violence, and rape. Williams was one of the first American dramatists to introduce problematic and challenging content on a broad level. Some of the playwright's subplots border on sensationalism, with scenes of implied cannibalism and castration. Consequently, Tennessee Williams had the curious distinction of being one of the most-censored writers of the 1960s; Baby Doll, Suddenly Last Summer, and other films were thoroughly revised by producers before general release. The modern paradigm of film studios, celebrating fame while editing content, can be seen in the choices made with Williams' work, as Metro Goldwyn Mayer produced his films and at the same time feared his subject matter to be too provocative for audiences.

Tennessee Williams nurtured a public persona that gradually shifted from shy to flamboyantly homosexual in an era reluctant to accept gay men. Williams' fears of audience backlash against his personal life gradually proved groundless. Even late in life, however, Williams was reluctant to assume the political agenda of others. Gay Sunshine magazine declared in 1976 that the playwright had never dealt openly with the politics of gay liberation, and Williams—always adept with the press—immediately responded: "People so wish to latch onto something didactic; I do not deal with the didactic, ever … I wish to have a broad audience because the major thrust of my work is not sexual orientation, it's social. I'm not about to limit myself to writing about gay people." As is so often the case with Williams, the statement is both true and untrue—his great, mid-career plays focus upon relationships rather than politics, but the figure of the gay male appears in characters explicit (Charlus in Camino Real) and implicit (Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) throughout his works.

As is noted in American Writers, Williams took a casual approach toward the hard facts of his life. In the early period of his fame, Williams intrigued audiences by implying that characters like Tom (read Thomas Lanier) in The Glass Menagerie represented his own experiences. Elia Kazan, a director whose success was often linked to Williams, promoted the Williams myth once by declaring that "everything in [Williams'] life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." Tennessee Williams' connection with the outside world was often one of gentrified deceit, beginning early as the Williams family sought to hide his sister's schizophrenia and eventual lobotomy. In the closest blend of reality and art, the playwright's attachment to his sister, Rose Williams, has been well documented by Lyle Leverich and others. The connection between Rose and Tennessee Williams was profound, and images of her mental illness and sexual abuse often surface in Williams' most poignant characters. The rose rises as a complex symbol in his plays, a flower indicative alternately of strength, passion, and fragility.

The 1970s saw a gradual decline in Tennessee Williams' artistic skill, but he continued to tinker with the older plays and write new works until his death. Williams was highly prolific, crafting over 40 plays, 30 screenplay adaptations of his work, eight collections of fiction, and various books of poetry and essays. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and again in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His work continues to command considerable social relevance—in 1998, a play on prison abuses, Not About Nightingales, was staged in London for the first time.

—Ryan R. Sloan