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Annette J. Saddik2015
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publicationdata
Saddik, Annette J.
Tennessee Williams and the theatre of excess : the strange, the
crazed, the queer / Annette J. Saddik.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-07668-6 (hardback)
1. Williams, Tennessee, 19111983Criticism and interpretation.I. Title.
PS3545.I5365Z8335 2015
812.54dc23
2014043068
ISBN 978-1-107-07668-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracyof
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
I think the strange, the crazed, thequeer
will have their holiday thisyear,
I think for just a littlewhile
there will be pity for the wild
1 Tennessee Williams, The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Rossel and Nicholas
Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2005),150.
The biologist will tell you that progress is the result of mutations.
Mutations are another word for freaks. For Gods sake lets have
a little more freakish behavior not less.
2 Tennessee Williams, Something Wild, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak (New
York: New Directions, 2009), 47. As Bak notes, this essay first appeared in the New York Star on
November 7, 1948, under the title On the Art of Being a True Non-conformist and later as the
introduction to Williams 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1953 (274). In Tennessee Williams, Where I
Live: Selected Essays by Tennessee Williams, edited by Christine Day and Bob Woods (New York:
New Directions, 1978), there is apparently an error in the dating: the editors state that the essay first
appeared in the New York Star in 1945 and served as the introduction for the second edition of 27
Wagons Full of Cotton, in 1949 (7).
3 Tennessee Williams, The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York:
New Directions, 2008),290.
Contents
vii
Figures
viii
Acknowledgments
As some things are too sad and too deep for tears, so some things are
too grotesque and too funny for laughter.
George du Maurier, Trilby,18941
It is not, on the whole, the terror of the grotesque that poses critical
problems, it is the laughter.
Ralf Remshardt, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in
Performance,20042
Lately no one seems to laugh at my jokes on paper, perhaps theyre
too black, I dont know.
Tennessee Williams, Memoirs,19753
later that year, in August 1982; the script, however, was still a work in progress and several drafts
exist from 1978 to 1982, with a draft recorded by Linda Dorff as early as 1970 (in the New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts). Several versions of this play, titled Tent Worms, In Masks
Outrageous and Austere, Gideons Point, and Masks Outrageous and Austere, which differ in tone and
style, exist in various drafts in the archives at Columbia University and Harvard, and in the New
York Public Library. The evolution of the play is controversial, as Williams entrusted the script to
Gavin Lambert, who edited and perhaps revised the script, and several others worked on the play as
1
2 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
considered to cover the period from 1961 until his death in 1983), was a
stylistic departure from his most popular earlier work of the 1940s and
1950s. These plays continued to exhibit the kinds of risks that had always
made Williams exciting and inspirational, yet by the 1960s he was starting
to more blatantly ignore the boundaries of social and dramatic conven-
tion, as he boldly embraced excess as a vehicle for artistic expression.
Considering that the celebration of Williams centennial in 2011 was
marked around the world by festivals, publications, conferences, and produc-
tions of his plays, a new exploration of his critical position is timely and sali-
ent. The serious reevaluation of Williams reputation during the past twenty
years or so beginning with David Savrans Communists, Cowboys, and
Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee
Williams, in 1992, and my study, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical
Reception of Tennessee Williams Later Plays, in 1999, as well as excellent work
on the late plays by scholars such as Linda Dorff, Allean Hale, and Philip
C. Kolin has created a new respect for his later works, particularly in the
past five to ten years.5 The relatively recent publication of Williams formerly
unknown plays (both early and late) and world premieres or exciting new
productions of his plays from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in places such as
London, Cape Town, New York, New Orleans, Boston, and Provincetown,
Massachusetts along with the publication of his Notebooks and letters; new
biographies from John S. Bak and John Lahr;6 and new editions of his early
plays, his essays, and his Memoirs indicate that interest in Williams has
been peaking, and there is much left to be said about hiswork.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both Williams published and unpub-
lished post-1961 work was receiving some critical attention from academic
circles. The scholarship on the late plays at that time was often insightful
but scant. Collections and overviews by scholars such as Stephen Stanton,
Felicia Hardison Londr, Jac Tharpe, and C. W. E. Bigsby began to cover
well Williams literary assistant John Uecker, the director Peter Bogdanovich, and Gore Vidal. In
April 2012, a version of the play titled In Masks Outrageous and Austere was produced off-Broadway
at the Culture Project in New York City, opening on April 16 (previews began April 6)and clos-
ing on May 13, 2012. This draft was assembled by dramaturg Joe E. Jeffreys and the plays director,
David Schweizer. Because of the controversial evolution of this play and questions of authorship, it
is A House Not Meant to Stand that is generally considered by scholars to be Williams last complete
full-lengthplay.
5 William Prosser, who directed the premiere of Williams Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
in 1980, was working on a manuscript about Williams late plays before he died of complications
from AIDS in 1991, but his work remained unknown until 2009, when his partner, Eric Stenshoel,
had it published posthumously: William Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
John S. Bak, Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and John Lahr,
6
TennesseeWilliams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014).
Introduction: sicker than necessary 3
the later plays at some level, and were opening the doors to perceiving
them as serious offerings. In 1979, Stanton founded the Tennessee Williams
Newsletter (fall 1979spring 1981), which then became The Tennessee
Williams Review (spring 1981spring 1983). While these ventures were
short lived, they were indicative of the growing interest in Williams stud-
ies during the 1980s and led to a series of festivals, conferences, and jour-
nals dedicated to his work. In 1986, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans
Literary Festival was launched, and in 1989 Kenneth Holditch founded
The Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, which remained active until 2008.
In 1986, Albert J. Devlin edited a collection of interviews, Conversations
with Tennessee Williams, that included much information on the late
material. For the most part, however, scholars and critics did not know
how to relate to the later plays, and the conventional wisdom echoed the
narrative that these were odd and incomprehensible offerings by a once
great but ultimately failed playwright whose talent had tragically declined
by the 1960s, largely due to alcohol and drug abuse.
By the 1990s, the unpublished or unproduced later plays were begin-
ning to receive more serious attention. In 1991, Allean Hale introduced
scholars to a previously unpublished play, The Day on Which a Man Dies,
revealing The Secret Script of Tennessee Williams in Southern Review. In
1993, Philip C. Kolin published The Existential Nightmare in Tennessee
Williamss The Chalky White Substance in Notes on Contemporary
Literature, and in 1998 his essay on Something Cloudy, Something Clear:
Tennessee Williamss Postmodern Memory Play appeared in the Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. It was also during the 1990s that schol-
ars, including myself, were increasingly reassessing the Williams canon
through a variety of new theoretical lenses, and David Savran, John Clum,
Nicholas de Jongh, Robert Vorlicky, and Steven Bruhm were all taking a
new look at the politics of sexuality in Williams oeuvre. In 1995, Linda
Dorff organized a panel on the late plays at the San Francisco confer-
ence of the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), which
included David Savran, Robert Vorlicky, Steven Bruhm, Allean Hale,
and Lyle Leverich, who had just completed volume one of Williams offi-
cial biography, Tom. By the mid-to-late 1990s, George Crandell, Robert
Martin, and Matthew C. Roudan were producing collections that illumi-
nated Williams entire oeuvre in complex ways,7 and Ruby Cohns essays,
George W. Crandell, ed. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (Westport, CT: Greenwood
7
Press, 1996); Robert A. Martin, ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (New York: Twayne, 1997);
and Matthew C. Roudan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Late Tennessee Williams in Martins volume and Tennessee Williams:
the last two decades in Roudans, were making important contributions
to the scholarship of the late plays.
In 1998, the Tennessee Williams Annual Review was founded by Robert
Bray, and it quickly became an invaluable resource for criticism of Williams
work, both early and late. Dorffs essays in the Review, Theatricalist
Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous Plays (1999) and
All Very [Not!] Pirandello! Radical Theatrics in the Evolution of Vieux
Carr (2000), as well as Allean Hales essays Confronting the Late Plays
of Tennessee Williams (2003) and Tennessee Williamss Three Plays for
the Lyric Theatre (2005), were important in expanding the scholarship on
his late plays, as were Kolins Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin in The
Explicator (2000), The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde:
Tennessee Williamss Little Shop of Comic Horrors in the Tennessee
Williams Annual Review (2001), and A Play about Terrible Birds: Tennessee
Williamss The Gndiges Fraulein [sic] and Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds in
South Atlantic Review (2001). By the early 2000s, interest in Williams late
plays was well established, and a 2002 panel of the Scholars Conference
at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, moderated by
Robert Bray and featuring Allean Hale, Thomas Keith, Ruby Cohn, Philip
C. Kolin, Brenda Murphy, and myself, was dedicated to Looking at the
Late Plays of Tennessee Williams. Three seminal volumes of essays that
addressed the later work, Robert Gross Tennessee Williams: A Casebook,
Philip C. Kolins The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee
Williams, and Ralph Voss Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee
Williams, also appeared in2002.
In The Politics of Reputation, I explored Williams canon in terms of its
relationship to dramatic realism, arguing that his late plays, which had
been characterized as critical and artistic failures, were in fact conscious
departures from the more realistic forms that had established Williams
early reputation, as he increasingly experimented with anti-realistic styles
that had always been part of his artistic philosophy. I compared the recep-
tion of his late plays to that of playwrights who were similarly experi-
menting with the limits of language and the possibilities of anti-realistic
presentation Beckett, Pinter, and Albee, specifically and demonstrated
how critics were still judging Williams late plays according to standards of
realism, unable or unwilling to accept his development as a playwright as
they were limited by their own expectations and assumptions.
Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the
Queer continues my work on Williams later plays and explores in detail
Introduction: sicker than necessary 5
sixteen of these plays between 1961 and 1982 from The Night of the Iguana
(1961), which marks the end of his early period, to A House Not Meant to
Stand (1982)8 in the context of what I call a theatre of excess, which
seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. I
also discuss several other plays throughout his career in order to highlight
the continuum in Williams thinking about style, and I augment my dis-
cussion of the texts with analyses of several productions that successfully
captured the elements that are central to Williams late aesthetic the
delicate balance of laughter and horror, as well as a self-conscious, almost
ironic manner of acting. Williams often saw himself as the patron saint
of freaks, and I took the subtitle of this book from one of his poems
that he used in slightly altered versions in two plays: The Mutilated (first
performed in 1966) and a play that was written between 1957 and 1962
called And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, which premiered in
Washington, DC, at the Kennedy Center in 2004 and was first published
in 2005.9 This book looks at Williams late plays through the theoretical
lenses of Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonin Artaud, and Julia Kristeva as well as
through the sensibilities of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, German
Expressionism, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, in order
to contextualize these plays in terms of a subversive politics of excess and
laughter that celebrates the irrational. Williams later plays often employ
highly theatrical or stylized forms, and use exaggeration and distortion of
reality, humor, and satire as social commentary, going even beyond theat-
rical absurdism. Even though Williams said in 1965 that he could never
make a joke out of human existence,10 many of these late plays do face
lifes tragic elements and laugh at them, a liberating laughter that desta-
bilizes boundaries and breaks through imposed limitations. These highly
irreverent plays employ humor for the purpose of social critique and
resistance, highlighting the tragicomic elements and absurdities of lifes
struggles. In a 1978 letter to Truman Capote, housed in the archives of the
New Orleans Historic Collection, Williams identified with what he called
Capotes period of disequilibrium during a very difficult personal and
professional time, and ended his letter with the advice not to despair, and
to never, never stop laughing.
8 Both A House Not Meant to Stand and The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, which includes
several of the one-act plays I discuss in this book, were only published relatively recently, by New
Directions in2008.
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens appears in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays,
9
ed. Nicholas Moschovakis and David Rossel (New York: New Directions, 2005).
10 Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson, MS:
University Press of Mississippi, 1986),118.
6 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
During his later period, Williams often presented an ironic worldview
that was simultaneously comic and bleak rejecting romanticism, blur-
ring high and low culture, and playing indulgently with exaggeration.
Several of the later plays explored in this book embrace a grotesque sens-
ibility, simultaneously repressing and exploding with dark, ambivalent
humor. In keeping with such humor, they can come across as, simply,
too much. The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde (1982),
for example, begins with the entrance of a lasciviously grinning young
man, known as the Boy,11 one of Mme. Le Mondes sons who is hung
like a dray horse and kept on the place for incestuous relations
with his mother.12 He opens the play by dragging Mint a delicate lit-
tle man with a childlike face whose legs are mysteriously paralyzed13
behind the curtain and raping him, a sexual assault14 that Mint seems
to both dread and enjoy. Mints paralysis forces him to swing from hooks
implanted on the ceiling of Mme. Le Mondes attic, the rectangle with
hooks15 where he lives as a tenant.16 When the Boy is finished with Mint,
he tells him that their visitor, Hall, is downstairs with Mme. Le Monde
and will hook him back up if he ever hauls himself out of that ole buf-
falo waterin hole of Moms, alerting him that it takes Mom a long
time to come.17 Throughout the play, Mints desperation is evident and
cruelty permeates the atmosphere, as a world of instability and meager
resources is marked by the ruthlessness of individuals in their fight for
self-preservation.
Upon reading the play several times to try and make sense of the bizarre
excesses, it started to become clear that its uncanny power emerges pre-
cisely from the fact that it is too much and therefore deliberately defies
strategies that seek to construct and control meaning, to make sense in
traditional terms. Williams excesses serve to highlight the ambiguities
and inconsistencies of living in and experiencing the world the excesses
that leak out of closed systems of meaning, that seep through the cracks
of the rational, the stable, the complete, and point toward the essence of
the real. Williams had always been aware that language, images, all forms
of representation are inevitably inadequate and cannot contain emotion,
impulse, desire. As early as 1945, he sought what he called the language
11 Tennessee Williams, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, in The Traveling Companion
and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),91.
12 Ibid.,94. 13 Ibid.,91. 14 Ibid.,94. 15 Ibid.,91.
16 We also see this reference to a room that is described as a rectangle with hooks in Williams novel
Moise and the World of Reason (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975),11.
17 Williams, Rooming-House,91.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 7
of vision,18 which he famously described as a plastic theatre in the pro-
duction notes to The Glass Menagerie.19 In order to illustrate a truth about
reality and release the essential spirit of something, he needed to distort
and exaggerate our experiences of that reality.20 His plays honor the gro-
tesque power of chaos, of the irrational and inexpressible, and the truth
that it reveals. While this is what his work had been doing since his earli-
est plays and short stories,21 in his late plays Williams was taking us to
the brink of unbearable pain and horror, where the only place to go, the
only way of dealing with such intense experience, was laughter. As Ralf
Remshardt writes in Staging the SavageGod:
There are probably two distinct ways in which laughter can work in the
grotesque, and they are dependent on the distribution of the latent and
the manifest element. Simply put, if the horrible aspect is dominant or
manifest, laughter will almost always be a mechanism for counteracting the
horror. When the comical element is dominant, horror becomes a response
to the callousness of ones own laughter. Either way, the grotesque structure
must assure that the distribution of the elements is adequate to guarantee
that neither impulse takes over too quickly and that there is a responsive
interdependence of laughter and horror.22
This interdependence of laughter and horror what Frances K. Barasch
has called ludicrous-horror23 is key to understanding much of
Williams late work. Somehow, in all its perverse ugliness, The Remarkable
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde is a very funny play. It was written
by the man, rumor has it, who would sit in the back of the theatre dur-
ing performances of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and laugh hysteric-
ally at the final scene, when Blanche is taken away to an insane asylum.
Laughter is often unsettling when we dont know why someone is laugh-
ing, especially when it appears to be inappropriate, contradictory to the
situation that inspired it.24 In his Memoirs, Williams explained this sort of
18 Tennessee Williams, The Purification, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VI (New York: New
Directions, 1981),44.
19 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I (New York:
New Directions, 1971),131.
20 Williams, New Selected Essays,24.
21 In Williams first published short story, The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928), for example, the
Egyptian Queen Nitocris takes revenge on her enemies by inviting them to a banquet and, in the
midst of the excesses of celebration, opening a secret wall that allowed the waters of the Nile to rush
in and drown them a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and
horror (The Vengeance of Nitocris, in Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985),8).
Remshardt, Staging the Savage God,85.
22
23 Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque as a Comic Genre, Modern Language Studies 15:1 (1985),5.
24 See, for example, the scene in the 1959 film of Suddenly Last Summer, where Catherine (played
by Elizabeth Taylor) accidentally wanders into the drum of the asylum the recreation area for
8 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
excessive, inappropriate laughter as his inevitable substitute for weep-
ing: Laughter has always been my substitute for lamentation and I laugh
as loudly as I would lament if I hadnt discovered a useful substitute for
weeping. Usually I laugh longer than I should, as well as more loudly than
I should.25 For Williams, the comic and the tragic were inseparable.
No doubt due, in part, to both its obscurity and the extreme con-
tent that made it a risk to stage, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme.
Le Monde was not performed until September 2009, by Bostons Beau
Jest Moving Theatre, directed by Davis Robinson for its premiere at the
Charlestown Working Theater in Massachusetts and moving later that
month to the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. When I went
to see this production, I was prepared for the worst. This was not an
easy play. Even if the director, the cast, and the staging did manage to
translate Williams vision truthfully, there was always a risk in terms of
how audiences would react to that vision. Black humor, which requires
a precarious balance between the extremes of the comic and the cruel, is
often difficult to pull off, and I had no idea how audiences, or I, would
react. In order for the play to work on the stage, its ambivalent, grotesque
humor a sort of gallows humor that laughs in the face of horror must
come through. Otherwise, the play is too painful, too ugly, to tolerate.
Yet, as soon as I heard the audience laughing at the plays opening out-
rage, I knew it was going to work. It was not exactly an uncomfortable
laughter, but a strange laughter of both disbelief and relief. Remshardt
points outthat
The key is perhaps that grotesque laughter is not the laughter of humor; it
is always inappropriate laughter, and therefore it both does and does not
belong to the grotesque. One is, in other words, simultaneously in sym-
pathy and out of sympathy with the grotesque; this is an essential part of its
aesthetic definition. The grotesque is literally sick humor, humor too
diseased to allow for easy reconciliation.26
The productions atmosphere of exaggeration and comic-book caricature
was able to get across a sense of heightened, absurd cruelty that filled the
space until it had no place to go and had no choice but to burst into
laughter, a laughter of absurdity and exaggeration that my students, who
generally respond very well to this play, have simply called too crazy.
female patients and the women begin to laugh manically. The close-up of their distorted expres-
sions in contrast to her fear is a perfect example of a menacing, grotesque sort of laughter.
25 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Bantam Books, 1975),ix.
26 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God, 8182.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 9
Williams work had never been tame rife with forbidden desire, mad-
ness, castration, rape, cannibalism, all forms of emotional and physical
violence yet the relative innocence and outright censorship of the 1940s
and 1950s was able to keep these themes just barely under control. The
playfully dark humor of Williams late plays was therefore a logical and
mature continuation of his earlier work, employing what he called freer
forms that engaged the madness of political and social chaos during the
late twentieth century.27 Yet with plays such as The Remarkable Rooming-
House of Mme. Le Monde, A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976), and Kirche,
Kche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) (1979), for example, Williams
succeeded in pushing the boundaries of good taste to the extreme, chal-
lenging conventional notions of what can be shown onstage and thereby
revealing a more primitive, primary side of human nature. Making the
rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, the homosexual subtext in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955), and even the cannibalism in Suddenly Last Summer (1958),
the dismemberment in Orpheus Descending (1957), and the castration in
27 Williams, Conversations,218.
10 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) appear subtle and almost quaint, The Remarkable
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde went still beyond what the public had
come to expect of Tennessee Williams in terms of shock value and violent
imagery.
Extreme, excessive, grotesque, carnivalesque, tragicomic, campy, car-
toonish, pop art, burlesque, slapstick, Grand Guignol these are just
some terms that begin to describe the sensibility of Williams late work.
His late plays reflect the freedom to finally be too much, to laugh at the
absurdity of life and its inevitable suffering with a laughter that surpasses
tears. In Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous
Plays, Linda Dorff discusses several of what she calls Williams out-
rageous plays in terms of a shift toward grotesque parody, and cites
his 1965 preface to Slapstick Tragedy (1966), where he describes the plays
as vaudeville, burlesque, and slapstick, with a dash of pop art thrown
in.28 In his 1996 essay The War against the Kitchen Sink, John Guare
mentions Williams double bill of The Gndiges Frulein (1966) and The
Mutilated that was performed under the title Slapstick Tragedy, pointing
out that Williams showed one way to that part of our brain or our souls.
The part of theater thats vaudeville.29
Indeed, Williams late plays often embrace the spirit of vaudeville, as
well as the liberating transgressions of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed the
carnivalesque the spirit of carnival as social resistance, which includes
comic violence, bawdy language, exaggeration, inversion, and an irrev-
erent mockery of what is held by society to be sacrosanct.30 Remshardt
argues that the true grotesque, that which creates and sustains horror and
ridicule in equal measure, must simultaneously bring into play higher and
lower orders until they become nearly indistinguishable.31 And Geoffrey
Harpham sees the grotesque as, similarly, generating a destruction
of order, provid[ing] an alternative center, which arises in the clash
between the virtuous limitations of form and a rebellious content that
refuses to be constrained, bulging and bursting through the seams of
the rational and the stable. It brings together the margin and the center,
embodying a confusion of type and breaking through the limitations
28 Linda Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous Plays, Tennessee
Williams Annual Review 2 (1999),14.
29 John Guare, The War against the Kitchen Sink, in John Guare: The War against the Kitchen Sink
(New York: Smith and Kraus, 1996),x.
30 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Bakhtin began his study of Rabelais in 1934 and submitted it as his thesis in 1940. It was not pub-
lished, however, until 1965 (in Russian) and 1968 (in English).
31 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God,121.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 11
of language, embodying a coexistence of contradictions, a simultaneous
lack and excess neither/nor and both/and at the same time. He
writes that if the grotesque can be compared to anything, it is to para-
dox. Paradox is a way of turning language against itself by asserting both
terms of a contradiction at once. Grotesque, Harpham concludes, is
a word for this paralysis of language, when stable boundaries and defini-
tions fail.32
Wolfgang Kayser, who is widely recognized as the foundational theorist
of the grotesque,33 explores the history of the term tragicomedy in terms
of its interpenetration with the grotesque, and charts the emergence of
the tragicomic as a consistent and independent form rather than a mix-
ture of genres:
Beginning with the dramaturgic practice of the Sturm und Drang and the
dramatic theory of Romanticism, tragicomedy and the grotesque are con-
ceptually related, and the history of the grotesque in the field of drama is
largely one with that of tragicomedy The various modes of interpene-
tration determine the forms and variations of the grotesque in modern
drama.
For Kayser, the apparent contradictions of the tragic and the comic are
fused and intertwined across boundaries in the grotesque, as the gro-
tesque opens the view into a chaos that is both horrible and ridiculous,34
along the lines of Baraschs interpenetrative moments of ludicrous-
horror. Throughout his career, Williams presented himself as a paragon
of contradictions, both a Puritan and a Cavalier,35 an artistic revolutionary
who insisted that his place was always on the margins of Bohemia, des-
pite his status as one of the most commercially and artistically successful
playwrights in the history of American theatre: My place in society
has been in Bohemia. I love to visit the other side now and then, but
on my social passport Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on
my part.36 And, in his late plays, he is rejecting the boundaries imposed
by the bourgeois and the conventional, indulging instead the taboo, the
32 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 6, 38, 7, 6, 1920,6.
33 See James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections
(Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 14 and Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,46.
34 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1963), 5354.
35 Williams writes that Roughly there was a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in my
blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write
about (Facts About Me in Williams, New Selected Essays,65).
36 Williams, Memoirs,127.
12 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
outrageous, and the unacceptable, challenging absolutes and embracing
ambiguity and inconsistency in order to write more honestly about life
through a newlens.
These plays that Williams was writing during the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s were his response to a critical establishment that swung from hail-
ing him as Americas Greatest Playwright during the 1940s and 1950s to
viciously dismissing both him and his work after The Night of the Iguana
as perverse, sick, and lacking control. While charges of perversity were
not new with respect to Williams plays, repeated descriptions of both
him and his work as out of control were new, as was the conflation of
the artist and his work, implying that he had finally transgressed his own
boundaries.37 During the 1960s, the critical reception of Williams work
was brutal and often took the form of personal attack, tangentially (and
sometimes directly) targeting both his sexual identity and his drug and
alcohol use. Williams was never exactly in the closet, and his homosexu-
ality was essentially an open secret. Yet his (reputed) homosexuality, as
well as that of other prominent dramatists, was increasingly becoming the
subject of conjecture and surreptitious attack in the press during this tran-
sitional decade. In 1961, Howard Taubman, writing in the New York Times
about the infiltration of homosexual attitudes in the theatre, had this
to say about what he saw as the unhealthy result of these playwrights
distort[ion] of human values:
The infiltration of homosexual attitudes occurs in the theatre at many lev-
els What demands frank analysis is the indirection that distorts human
values. Plays on adult themes are couched in terms and symbols that do
not truly reflect the authors mind. Characters represent something differ-
ent from what they purport to be. It is no wonder that they seem sicker
than necessary and that the plays are more subtly disturbing than the play-
wright perhaps intended The unpleasant female of the species is exagger-
ated into a fantastically consuming monster or an incredibly pathetic drab.
The male is turned into a ragingly lustful beast or into a limp, handsome
neutral creature of otherworldly purity.38
Taubmans description of characters who are sicker than necessary is
curious, as one wonders how much sickness dramatic characters require
and what form this malady must take. His focus on excess and transform-
ation the exaggeration of the female into a fantastically consuming
37 Williams In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) deals directly with this lack of separation between the
artist and hiswork.
38 Howard Taubman, Not What it Seems: Homosexual Motif Gets Homosexual Guise, New York
Times (November 5, 1961), sec. 2,p.1.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 13
monster and the male as a creature of otherworldly purity could be
describing a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and points to an obsession
with the unnatural a label, of course, associated with queer or ambigu-
ous sexualities, and, not coincidentally, a central aspect of the grotesque.
Taubmans readings of these plays seem to say more about his own fears
and projections than about the playwrights constructions. His desire for
the traditional representation of character rejects any ambivalence or flu-
idity, both in the drama and in the playwright(s) themselves.
In 1966, Stanley Kauffmanns now infamous article, Homosexual
Drama and Its Disguises, recounted the principal complaint against
homosexual dramatists that, he declared, was well known: Because
three of the most successful American playwrights of the last twenty years
are (reputed) homosexuals, and because their plays often treat women and
marriage, therefore, it is said, postwar American drama presents a badly
distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general.39
Without naming names, Kauffmann, readers would easily know, was refer-
ring to Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Williams Inge (lesbian
dramatists were not even a consideration). He concluded that self-hating
homosexual dramatists (and there could not be any other kind) had no
choice but to masquerade, resulting in a distortion of marriage and fem-
ininity, since the heterosexual pairs they portrayed were actually pairs of
homosexual men, with the female character essentially in drag, drawn
less in truth than in envy or fear. This vindictiveness, of course, resulted
in a dishonest work, according to Kauffmann, and he lamented its effect
on the basic concept of drama itself and of art in general. He went on to
discuss the connections between homosexual dramatists and camp style
the glorifi[cation] of homosexual exclusion that exalts style, manner,
surface and acts as an instrument of revenge on the main body of soci-
ety. Kauffmann saw a distinct danger, or, at the very least, a gross social
irresponsibility, in camp, and his defense of traditional dramatic form
essentially, dramatic realism is worth quoting, if only for its unmistakable
39 Stanley Kauffmann, Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises, New York Times (January 23, 1966),
sec. 2, p.1. While his article has been criticized as a prime example of the virtual witch hunt of gay
playwrights by New York drama critics during the 1960s, Kauffmann saw the matter differently,
and responded with a follow-up article that addressed his critics (On the Acceptability of the
Homosexual, New York Times (February 6, 1966), sec. 2, p. 1). Kauffmann insisted that he was
actually arguing for homosexuals to be given the same freedom as heterosexuals to write honestly
about their lives. And, in a letter to American Theatre magazine in 1992, he maintained that the
articles were attacks on a society that (at that time) forced a gay writer to masquerade and then
criticized him for doing so (Drop the Masquerade, American Theatre, June (1992), 2). Perhaps
this was in fact Kauffmanns intention, and passages in the article can be read that way; still, the
homophobic language is there.
14 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
warning of the homosexual threat. In Kauffmans mind, there is no separ-
ation between artist and art, and he argues that these dramatists transmit
their deviant sensibilities (desire) into their work, thereby destroying the
whole culture and, by extension, the society that producedit:
Theme and subject are important historical principles in our art. The argu-
ments to prove that they are of diminishing importance in fact, ought
never to have been important are cover for an attack on the idea of social
relevance. By adulation of sheer style [i.e., camp], this group [homosexuals]
tends to deride the whole culture and the society that produced it, tends to
reduce art to a clever game which even that society cannot keep them from
playing.
Once again, traditional dramatic form is metonymically tied to traditional
desire, as form and desire feed off, or, at worst, in the case of homosexual-
ity, infect, each other. While Kauffmanns paranoid fears and the distor-
tions that both he and Taubman were referencing are clearly constructions
of their own (distorted) biases, these very types of attitudes would result in
even bolder stylistic revolutions in the theatre during the 1960s and 1970s,
a celebration of that which cannot be defined or contained. For Williams,
rebellion often took the form of irreverent, directly ironic distortions that
became central to his late plays, as he deliberately embraced the camp and
the grotesque, the fantastic and the uncanny, appropriating these sens-
ibilities and giving critics the excesses and ambiguities they most feared.
Excess became his strategy for resistance to convention, both social and
artistic, and a way of reimagining possibilities for relating to the world.
Williams increased use of prescription drugs and alcohol to cope with
depression and anxiety during the 1960s, particularly after the untimely
death of his partner, Frank Merlo, from lung cancer in 1963, led to a
three-month confinement in the psychiatric ward at Barnes Hospital in
St. Louis in 1969. His drug and alcohol use (exacerbated by the vicious
reviews of his new work), along with his coming out on the David Frost
show in 1970 and the publication of his sexually frank Memoirs in 1975,
were prominent in the minds of critics and audiences during the 1960s
and 1970s. When reviewing his plays, it seemed that critics had already
made up their minds that Williams degeneracy had taken its toll on his
talent and that his plays were not even worth reviewing. Richard Gilman
titled his 1963 review of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in The
Commonweal: Mistuh Williams, He Dead40 a playful, yet mean-spir-
ited, paraphrasing of Joseph Conrads Mistah Kurtz he dead in Heart
41 Robert Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965),126.
42 T.E. Kalem, Torpid Tennessee, Time (May 23, 1969).
43 Martin Gottfried, Womens Wear Daily (February 23,1966).
44 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, Village Voice (May 3, 1966).
45 Henry Hewes, Tennessees Quest, Saturday Review of Literature (May 31, 1969).
46 Life magazine advertisement, New York Times (June 10,1969).
47 See David Kaplan, ed., Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams (East Brunswick,
NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2011); Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams; and Annette J.
Saddik, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams Later Plays (London:
Associated University Presses, 1999) for discussions of Williams late reputation.
16 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
lack of comprehension and simply lamented Williams abandonment of
the Aristotelian formula on which dramatic realism is based, harping on a
nostalgia for The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. Reviewing
Slapstick Tragedy on February 23, 1966, John McClain acknowledged in
New York Journal-American that, although it was extremely funny much
of the time, he hasnt the foggiest idea of what Mr. Williams has to tell
us, and so he wished that he would give us something old and square
like Streetcar Named Desire.48 Others, such as Norman Nadel in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun, simply called the plays bizarre and
embarrassing, even though he admitted there were times when this out-
landish play is uproarious. His final impression of The Gndiges Frulein
focused on the plays excesses, describing it as, tellingly, something too
pitiful for humor, and too strange for pity.49 Some reviewers of Williams
late plays, however, did acknowledge begrudgingly that Williams work
was headed in a new, relevant direction. Even though Clive Barnes wrote
in the New York Times in 1969 that In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel repelled
[him] with its self-pity, he did believe that the play was avant garde and
would be appreciated and applauded in the theatre of the future.50
In 1996, two plays that Williams completed around 1980, The Traveling
Companion and The Chalky White Substance, premiered in New York City
with the Running Sun Theatre Company on a double bill titled Tennessee
Williams Guignol. It was directed by John Uecker, who was Williams last
assistant and was sharing his two-room suite at the Hotel Elyse in New
York City the day Williams died. Grand Guignol, of course, is a type of
drama that emphasizes the horrifying or macabre the gruesome, the sin-
ister, the dark side of human nature. This genre of short plays depicting
violence, horror, and sadism was popular in twentieth-century French
cabarets and took its name from Le Thtre du Grand-Guignol, which
flourished in the Pigalle section of Paris from 1897 to 1962. The genre was
introduced in England in 1908 but remained essentially a French form.
Guignol was a traditional Lyonnaise puppet character similar to Punch
of the English Punch and Judy puppet shows, and became the arche-
type for puppet theatre in France. Graphic murders, rape, mutilation,
insanity, and the baser human instincts were frequent subjects of Grand
Guignol, and many of Williams later plays embrace this dark sensibility.
In fact, a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the
48 John McClain, The Out and the Abstract, New York Journal-American (February 23, 1966).
49 Norman Nadel, Bizarre, Grim Slapstick Tragedy, New York World-Telegram and Sun (February
23, 1966).
50 Clive Barnes, Williams Play Explores Decay of an Artist, New York Times (May 12, 1969).
Introduction: sicker than necessary 17
archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, announces his plan for what
he calls Williams Guignol. He suggests three evenings in repertoire: I.
Sun Burst and Chalky White Substance; II. Night Waking: Strange Room and
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde; and III. A Monument
for Ercole.51 In a note at the top of the page, Williams writes that: While
these works have been written with as much attention to style as I always
use, I must admit their intention is to shock and so I have called them
my Guignol, and more recent productions of his late work have often
acknowledged and emphasized this sensibility.
Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines, for example, followed their highly suc-
cessful production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which ran at the Comdie-
Franaise in Paris in 2011, with Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister
Play. This piece deconstructs Williams late work in the context of Grand
Guignol, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque styles central to the aes-
thetic of many of the late plays I will be discussing in this book. Directed
by Breuer and co-conceived/adapted by Breuer and Maude Mitchell, Glass
Guignol captures the elements of excess and horror in Williams late plays
that come across as subversion and ironic commentary. The framework
for Glass Guignol is Williams The Two-Character Play (also known as Out
Cry), which is a play-within-a-play that Williams presented in several ver-
sions between 1967 and 1976.52 For their adaptation, Breuer and Mitchell
51 Of the plays proposed, Sun Burst, The Chalky White Substance, and The Remarkable Rooming-House
of Mme. Le Monde have all been published and are included in The Traveling Companion and Other
Plays. Night Waking: Strange Room and A Monument for Ercole exist either in fragments or in mul-
tiple, unfinished drafts.
Williams play was first produced in London in 1967 under the title The Two-Character Play,
52
directed by James Roose-Evans and starring Peter Wyngarde and Mary Ure. After several rewrites,
the play premiered in Chicago in 1971 under the title Out Cry, starring Donald Madden and Eileen
Herlie. Williams revised the script extensively yet again for the 1973 Broadway production (also
called Out Cry), directed by Peter Glenville and starring Michael York and Clara Duff-McCormick.
The Broadway production closed after twelve performances, and Williams maintained that he
always preferred the Chicago script. The Two-Character Play was recently revived in London (in
2010) and New York City (in 2013), directed by Gene David Kirk. In London the production
starred Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan, and received very positive reviews. Kirk brought the
production to the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2011, and it was later staged off-
Broadway at New World Stages, with Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif replacing Cusack and
McEwan. This production opened on June 19, 2013, and closed on September 29, 2013. It had some
success but did not quite communicate Williams vision effectively and was plagued by backstage
turmoil, often canceling performances (see, for example, Michael Riedel, Diva Amanda Plummer
a Nightmare Backstage, New York Post (September 5, 2013)). In the spring of 2014, The Two-
Character Play was presented once again at a small off-Broadway theatre in New York, 292 Theatre,
directed by Romy Ashby and starring Regina Bartkoff and Charlie Schick. This excellent produc-
tion, done on the ground floor of a small East Village tenement with only twenty seats, captured
the intense claustrophobia central to the play and managed to simultaneously bring out both its
humor and its Gothic/Guignol elements.
18 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
replaced the central narrative with excerpts from other Williams plays,
focusing on moments in the early work that echo The Two-Character Play,
particularly the brothersister relationship. In the first act, Glass Guignol
uses The Glass Menagerie as its play-within-a-play, and brings in the screen
titles that were omitted from the original production, which emphasized
the irony that is present across Williams oeuvre. The carnival and calliope
music in the piece was particularly effective in getting across the tone, and
the acting done in an exaggerated, self-conscious style highlighted a
particular interpretation that the late work invites, an almost Hammer
Horror excess. The stage hands characters that appear in many of
Williams late plays of the 1960s, such as The Day on Which a Man Dies
(1960) and The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore (1963) added a
sinister element that helped to move the play along with the appropriate
tone. An already deconstructed piece, The Two-Character Play is further
deconstructed by this production, bringing out the many layers of both
Williams early and late work, particularly The Glass Menagerie, which was
much more ironic in Williams original script, before it was edited for its
first production, in order to articulate a connection between the early and
the late plays and to demonstrate that Williams was always striving toward
an anti-realistic style to express his vision of reality.53 Clearly, Williams was
keenly aware of what he was doing when he offered the world these plays.
Rather than the uncontrolled ramblings of a drunk and disordered mind,
many of his late plays are conscious and deliberate constructions, part of
an artistic tradition rooted in controlled excess.
In Chapter 1, Drowned in Rabelaisian Laughter: Germans as gro-
tesque comic figures in Williams plays of the 1960s and 1970s, I cover
what is considered the last of Williams successes, The Night of the Iguana,
along with The Gndiges Frulein, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979),
and Kirche, Kche, Kinder in relation to his representation of Germans
as sinister and grotesque comic figures perverse, excessive, bawdy, and
often menacing. Using Bakhtins notion of the carnivalesque and his
discussion of the new grotesque of German Romanticism in conjunc-
tion with Julia Kristevas theories of the abject, I explore Williams use
53 To date, Glass Guignol has only been presented in workshops and staged readings at Towson
University, Duke University, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2011, and at
the Sundance Theatre Lab at Mass MoCA in 2012, but it has not yet received a full production.
Other recent productions of Williams late work that acknowledge his Guignol aesthetic, such as
Abrahamse and Meyers production of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore from Cape Town,
South Africa (2013) and Beau Jest Moving Theatres production of The Remarkable Rooming-House
of Mme. Le Monde out of Boston (2009), are discussed in detail later in thisbook.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 19
of exaggeration, chaos, and laughter in terms of its relationship to the
grotesque. Chapter2, Benevolent anarchy: Williams late plays and the
theatre of cruelty, continues to analyze The Gndiges Frulein, as well as
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (1981) and This is the Peaceable Kingdom,
or Good Luck God (1981), through the lens of Artauds theater of cruelty
and the liberation from rational constructs that he sought in the chaotic
spectacle of a primal theatre, as I examine the divisions between nature
and culture in relation to specific kinds of theatrical excess.
In Chapter3, Writing calls for discipline!: chaos, creativity, and mad-
ness in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, I explore the power of chaos and excess
in relation to representations of the feminine in Williams last Broadway
play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). In this ghost play about Zelda
and Scott Fitzgerald that focuses on the influence Zeldas madness had
on her husbands work, the excess and instability of madness are linked to
fears of the feminine, manifesting in what Freud characterized as a dread
of being infected by femininity. Chapter4, Act naturally: embracing
the monstrous woman in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The
Mutilated, and The Pronoun I, addresses Williams celebration of the
monster in the context of grotesque female identity and the performance
of natural femininity. This chapter covers recent productions of each of
these plays that employed acting styles that self-consciously avoided any
naturalistic or realistic creation of character and instead developed appro-
priately exaggerated and ironic performances that emerged from the plays
language and rhythms.
Chapter5, Theres something not natural here: grotesque ambiguities
in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady and A House Not Meant to
Stand, continues to unravel the notion of excess in the context of mad-
ness, desire, racial binaries, and the unnatural overlaps between life and
death that play with ambivalence and ambiguity. Finally, Chapter6, All
drama is about being extreme: in-yer-face sex, war, and violence, links
Williams darker vision in late plays such as Green Eyes, or No Sight Would
Be Worth Seeing (1970),54 The Chalky White Substance, and The Remarkable
54 The published text of Green Eyes, which I edited for inclusion in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, is based on the manuscript sent to New Directions by Audrey Wood, Williams agent
at International Creative Management, along with two other plays, The Demolition Downtown and
The Reading, on September 17, 1971, and incorporates revisions that Williams made to a copy of
the manuscript that exists in the archives of UCLA. One of the changes that Williams made on
the UCLA copy was to cross out the title Green Eyes and replace it with No Sight Would Be Worth
Seeing. In order to honor both titles in the final version of the published text, I titled it Green
Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing.Williams apparently made his last set of revisions in 1970
on the copy he gave to UCLA. He signed a letter to UCLA on September 9, 1970, when he sold
20 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde with the young British playwrights
who were part of what Aleks Sierz has defined as the in-yer-face thea-
tre sensibility of the 1990s, which thrives on exaggeration, shock value,
physical and emotional violence, and the transgression of social taboos in
order to elicit a visceral reaction and jar audiences out of their compla-
cency. Williams has been cited as an influence by in-yer-face playwrights
Simon Block and Philip Ridley in particular, who admired him for not
being afraid to go to extremes in order to access a truth that provided an
honest glimpse of human relations as we live in and with the world. Just
as several of the in-yer-face playwrights were reacting to reports of relent-
less international violence that absorbed their generation, particularly
the brutality of the war in Bosnia, Williams plays responded to cultural
moments entrenched, first, in the horrors of the Vietnam War, and, later,
the constant nuclear threat of the 1980s. In this chapter, I also discuss
the relationship of both in-yer-face theatre and Williams late plays to the
tradition of Grand Guignol, which relied on shock and graphic violence
to elicit both emotional and physical reactions from its audiences.
In her 1963 book written with Lucy Freeman, Williams mother Edwina
writes that during the early 1940s her son had been convinced that after
World War II was over the world would be ready for new plays, since
the future accepts more readily what the present rejects.55 By the time
Edwinas book was published, Williams prediction could be applied once
again, anticipating, or at least hoping, that the vision of his post-1961 plays
would be understood and appreciated one day. In a 1977 interview with
Barbaralee Diamonstein on About the Arts, John Guare discussed how
American playwrights were being destroyed by the commercial interests of
theatre producers and were not being given the chance to experiment and
grow. When asked for an example, he cited Tennessee Williams:
In our own lifetime, Tennessee Williams, who is our greatest playwright,
after he stopped turning out what they thought were commercially feas-
ible plays, was just dismissed. And his later plays one day will be discov-
ered and appreciated and used and theyll learn how [these plays should] be
performed. Theyre extraordinary pieces of work. But producers stopped
a suitcase of manuscripts to the university (including Green Eyes/No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing)
before traveling to Asia with Oliver Evans, attesting that the writing was all his own. Therefore, the
most accurate date of completion for Green Eyes would be 1970 (since the manuscript that New
Directions received in 1971 was actually the unrevised version). I am indebted, as usual, to Thomas
Keith for clarifying the circumstances surrounding the dating of the manuscript.
55 Edwina Dakin Williams and Lucy Freeman, Remember Me to Tom (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons,
1963),128.
Introduction: sicker than necessary 21
being interested in his work after it stopped being Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Streetcar Named Desire. It was him moving into new fields.56
Guare was ahead of his time in recognizing the value of Williams late
work and in acknowledging that the new fields Williams was moving
into were exciting and worthy of attention. The resurrection of Williams
reputation during the past ten years, with the publication and production
of several of his previously unsuccessful or unstaged plays, has apparently
proved him right. Williams was just as prolific in the last twenty-four years
of his life as he had been in the previous twenty-four; in the forty-eight
years from 1935 to 1983 he completed at least thirty-three full-length plays
and at least seventy one-acts.57 Ultimately, he was not backing down and
he was not going away. He was still here, he was most definitely queer, and
he wanted to make sure that everyone knew it. In his later years, Williams
went beyond the struggle, hope, and tragedy of his early plays, engaging a
kind of laughter that bursts forth through pain to the freedom of exagger-
ation and excess the grotesque, the camp, the irreverent always mov-
ing forward in his celebration of what he called the strange, the crazed,
the queer.58
22
Germans as grotesque comic figures 23
with the fantastic could be seen as early as 1941 in Stairs to the Roof, where
the plays solution to the automatism of the individual under industrial
capitalism is a rejection of social reality, as Ben and the Girl climb up to
the roof and escape to a new star known as World Number Two with
the help of the divine Mr.E.6
Williams interest in the fantastic would naturally lead him to experi-
ment with anti-realistic styles throughout his career. He was particularly
drawn to German Expressionism, believing that its dreamlike distortions
were an effective means of accessing the truths that exist behind the sur-
faces of constructed social realities. He would directly embrace an expres-
sionistic style in several of his later plays, such as A House Not Meant to
Stand his Spook Sonata in the tradition of Strindberg that he subtitles
A Gothic Comedy7 as well as in his other Ghost Plays, most not-
ably Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? (written in 1969 and first
performed in 1980), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and Steps Must Be
Gentle (1980).
Walter Sokel, in his introduction to the Anthology of German
Expressionist Drama (1963), writes that the extremism and distortion of
Expressionist drama derive from its closeness to the dream. In its crude
aspects, Expressionism is dramatized daydream and fantasy. In its sub-
tler and more interesting examples, Expressionism parallels the conceal-
ing symbolism and subliminal suggestiveness of night dreams. He argues
that distortion served the Expressionists as an X-ray eye for detecting the
dynamic essence of their time, the direction in which history was moving.
In caricature and nightmare they approached the truth.8 While The Night
of the Iguana is not itself a play in the German Expressionist tradition,
Williams interest in the fantastic modes of representation characteristic
of German Expressionism, along with his exaggerated, grotesque, and
dreamlike portrayal of Germans in the play, illustrates that he was begin-
ning to more fully engage a German sensibility that he would continue to
develop in his later plays throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
The realm of the fantastic itself operates on several levels in The Night
of the Iguana. As fantasy, it refers to a distortion of the laws of superfi-
cial reality in order to access a truth that can only be grasped through
6 Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof (New York: New Directions, 2000), 9495. For a discussion of
Stairs to the Roof, see my essay Blueprints for the Reconstruction: Postmodern Possibility in Stairs
to the Roof, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 9 (2007).
Tennessee Williams, A House Not Meant to Stand, ed. Thomas Keith (New York: New Directions,
7
2008),xiii.
8 Walter H. Sokel, Introduction, in Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, ed. Walter H. Sokel
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), xiv,xxiv.
24 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
metaphor and symbol. At the same time, however, fantasy can indicate
a delusion that denies truth. Yet the fantastic also refers to a sense of the
wonderful or amazing (filling us with wonder, amazement, mystery; as in
Thats fantastic!). Therefore, the fantastic can serve as a description of
the unbelievable in both a positive and a negative sense. In terms of artistic
form, the rejection of mimesis (verisimilitude, the believable) in favor
of the transformation of truth, life, or reality into other forms than
those which were merely present in appearance9 can reveal deeper truths
beyond the surface. On the other hand, indulging fantasy can also be seen
as turning away from an engagement with reality, unable or unwilling to
believe what seems to be the truth of ones circumstances (often depicted
in Williams plays as madness, illusion, delusion). And yet, the seductive-
ness of the fantastic/fantasy as simultaneously something marvelous, a
doorway into the unknown and the awesome, and an escape from what
only appears to be truth is equally present in Williamswork.
In keeping with the fantastic or anti-realistic elements that Williams
more regularly introduced into his later plays, a group of German tourists,
often considered to be minor characters, appears throughout The Night
of the Iguana as symbol, dream, grotesque image. While they are realistic
characters in the most basic sense, their function is more symbolic; they
are larger than life, excessive, operating more on the level of the extra-
realistic in the sense of being beyond realism than on the level of the
anti-realistic. These characters have very few lines in the play, but they do
not rely on language for their effect. Instead, their physical presence and
the great detail of the stage directions devoted to their actions make them
important dramatic figures.
The play takes place at a Mexican resort, the Costa Verde Hotel, during
the summer of 1940, when World War II was well under way but before
US involvement made it a national focal point, and the German tourists
are identified as Nazis, trooping up the beach singing a Nazi marching
song.10 They appear on the scene suddenly, making a startling, dream-
like entrance, walking astride a big inflated rubber horse which has an
ecstatic smile and great winking eyes,11 as Shannon arrives at the hotel. The
Germans are both excessively present and unreal, with smiles of euphoria
on their faces as they move like a dream-image, starting to sing a march-
ing song as they go.12 Maxine Falk, the proprietor and an old friend of
Shannons, explains to him that there are many Nazi tourists vacationing
27 Ibid.,101. 28 Ibid.,110.
29 For instance, the widespread publicity surrounding Hitlers relationship with his dog, Blondi,
which portrayed him as a kind, gentle man who was a lover of animals, is often cited as an import-
ant example of Nazi propaganda in terms of creating contradictory images of the Nazis.
30 Williams, Iguana,82. 31 Ibid.,112.
28 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
inversions of the carnival and the excesses of the grotesque body, is cen-
tral to the symbolic function of the German characters in Williams plays.
Bakhtin articulates that carnival is to a certain extent a parody of the
extracarnival life, a world inside out. It constructs a world of continual
shifting from top to bottom, front to rear, of numerous parodies and trav-
esties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.32
Through humor, chaos, violations of social decorum, and the celebration
of bodily excess, the medieval carnival serves to turn values upside down,
mingling high and low culture in order to devalue the privileged discourse
of the hegemony and mock authority. In this way, carnival laughter func-
tions as a form of social resistance. Bakhtins carnivalesque subverts the
dominant culture or style through humor, chaos, excess, and play, thus
offering an alternative to rigid forms of hierarchy that destabilizes the
official worldview.
Bakhtins concept of the grotesque body figures strongly in his charac-
terization of carnivalesque subversion. The grotesque body is indulgent
and excessive in its physicality; it revels in bodily fluids and scatalogical
functions, and celebrates the physical pleasures of eating, drinking, and
sexuality. Bakhtin writes that it is usually pointed out that in Rabelais
work the material body principle, that is, images of the human body
with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life, plays a predominant role.
Images of the body are offered, moreover, in an extremely exaggerated
form. Rabelais was proclaimed by Victor Hugo the greatest poet of the
flesh and belly.33 Bakhtin mentions Bosch in his historical account of
the representation of the grotesque body, arguing that it has been most
fully and masterfully expressed in Rabelais novel, whereas in other
works of Renaissance literature it was watered down. It is represented in
painting by Hieronymous Bosch and the elder Breughel; some of its elem-
ents can be found in the frescoes and bas-reliefs which adorned the cathe-
drals and even village churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.34
According to Bakhtin, Boschs watered down vision of the grotesque was
one that would become fully realized in Rabelaiswork.
In The Female Grotesque (1994), Mary Russo characterizes the grotesque
body as abject, open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and chan-
ging; it is identified with non-official low culture or the carnivalesque,
and with social transformation.35 Julia Kristeva describes the abject as
death infecting life It is something rejected from which one does not
32 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,11.
33 Ibid.,18. 34 Ibid.,27.
35 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994),8.
Germans as grotesque comic figures 29
part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary
uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.36
She emphasizes that it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes
abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
For Kristeva, abjection is above all ambiguity.37 Dissolving the bound-
aries between self and world, human and animal, the grotesque is an
ambivalent body that stands on the threshold between, on the one hand,
birth and renewal, and, on the other, death and decay. The grotesque,
argues Bakhtin, discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world,
of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of
the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable.38 In this sense,
the grotesque body has the potential power to renew and regenerate, but
it also destabilizes and disrupts.
In The Night of the Iguana, Hannahs grandfather Nonno who is
ninety-seven almost a century young! is described as a grotesque fig-
ure when he expresses delight in all his own little jokes. Williams states
that, while this quality may once have been charming, now it has become
somewhat grotesque in a touching way, this desire to please, this playful man-
ner, these venerable jokes.39 This juxtaposition of Nonnos cheerfulness
with his advanced age and fallen circumstances makes him seem pathet-
ically touching at these moments, evoking both empathy and disgust,
and thus focusing attention on grotesque contradiction. Even Shannons
image of God touches upon the grotesque, when he describes him as a
senile delinquent.40
Several of Williams late plays, such as Lifeboat Drill (1981) and This Is
the Peaceable Kingdom, or Good Luck God, also recall the grotesque in deal-
ing with the subject of aging and decay.41 In Lifeboat Drill, the decrepit
old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Taske, are described as swaying forward and
backward in grotesque profile.42 And in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, the
octogenarian residents of a nursing home have decayed to the point where
36 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982),4.
37 Ibid.,4,9. 38 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,48.
39 Williams, Iguana,71. 40 Ibid.,58.
41 Aged characters are often seen as grotesque in Williams plays. In addition to Nonno and the octo-
and nonagenarians in Lifeboat Drill and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, the ninety-nine-year-old
Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger in Kirche, Kche, Kinder is particularly grotesque in her decaying
sexuality. I address this character later in this chapter during my discussion of theplay.
42 Tennessee Williams, Lifeboat Drill, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New Directions:
New York, 1981),295.
30 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
there is nothing left but an open mouth at the end.43 For Bakhtin, the
open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the
nose are all points where the body transgresses its own limits, dissolving
boundaries between self and world.44 The repeated references in This Is the
Peaceable Kingdom to voracious open mouths mak[ing] greedy sounds,
to bodily functions, and to a loss of control (even language is oozing, and
the characters must be careful of what [they] say) creates precisely the
grotesque picture that Bakhtin describes.45
The grotesque body is therefore one of contradictions signifying both
life and death and Rabelaisian laughter is ambivalent. The grotesque
Germans in The Night of the Iguana serve as ambiguous figures signifying
the coexistence of contradictions, simultaneously human and monster,
familiar yet unfamiliar, celebratory yet menacing. They are emissaries of
a world inside out, shaking the foundations of stability both in terms of
their historical reference to World War II and the more personal upheaval
of Shannons spiritual world. While Shannon struggles with his blue
devils and an image of God as a senile delinquent, the Germans are
laughing both at and with him. Their laughter can be read as carnival-
esque subversion, a mockery of dogmatic religious doctrine and a resist-
ance to hegemony that signifies liberation from social restraints, much like
Shannons blasphemous tirade at the pulpit that led to his removal. They
represent freedom in their abandon and excess, and yet they are repul-
sive (in contrast to Hannah, with her gentleness and purity), constantly
interrupting the action (and Shannons search for spiritual redemption)
with their loud, invasive physicality. Like Chance Wayne at the end of
Sweet Bird of Youth they demand your recognition of me in you,46 yet
they are also decidedly alien. The Germans remain celebratory throughout
Iguana laughing at chaos, indulging in their splendid physicality and
in the pleasures of the flesh.47 At the same time, however, their laughter
haunts the play as a reminder of a world where fire bombs and sadistic
cruelty can drown out spiritual longings for tenderness and beauty.
The relationship between Rabelaisian laughter and Germans in
particular is one that Bakhtin addresses in his discussion of the new
43 Tennessee Williams, This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII
(New York: New Directions, 1981),350.
44 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,26.
45 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom, 349, 347. See Chapter2 for further discussion of This Is the Peaceable
Kingdom.
46 Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. IV (New York:
New Directions, 1972),124.
47 Williams, Iguana,11.
Germans as grotesque comic figures 31
grotesque of German Romanticism, the gothic or black novel. He
claims that in Germany this subjective form had perhaps the most
powerful and original development, citing the Sturm und Drang dra-
matics and early Romanticism (Lenz, Klinger, the young Tieck), the
novels of Hippel and Jean Paul, and finally the works of Hoffmann, who
strongly influenced the development of the new grotesque in the next
period of world literature.48 E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic
author of macabre tales that embraced the supernatural, horror, and the
grotesque, is particularly known for his blending of realism and fantasy.
He is probably most famous for his short story The Sandman(1816) and
his novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (also 1816), on which the
ballet The Nutcracker is based both tales where inanimate objects come
to life, blurring the boundaries between human and object.49 Bakhtin
explains how the Gothic, or Romantic grotesque, was a reaction against
the elements of classicism which characterized the self-importance of the
Enlightenment. It was a reaction against the cold rationalism, against offi-
cial, formalistic, and logical authoritarianism; it was a rejection of that
which is finished and completed, of the didactic and utilitarian spirit of
the Enlighteners with their narrow and artificial optimism. For Bakhtin,
the most important transformation of Romantic grotesque was that of
the principle of laughter, which was cut down to cold humor, irony, sar-
casm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regener-
ating power was reduced to a minimum.50
This essential difference that Bakhtin posits between the Romantic
grotesque he associates with German literature and the medieval and
Renaissance grotesque the transformation of the principle of laugh-
ter51 is relevant to reading the Germans in The Night of the Iguana.
Ultimately, their laughter is not regenerative but is ironic, sinister, and
mocking. In this play, Williams depiction of Germans is filtered through
a sensibility borrowed from particular German literary traditions pri-
marily Expressionism and the Romantic grotesque that rely on distor-
tion, exaggeration, and, particularly, contradiction, dissolving the binaries
we rely on for certainty and safety and allowing access to a deeper truth
through the fantastic.
48 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 27,37.
49 Ernst Jentschs essay The Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and Sigmund Freuds The Uncanny
(1919) both cite Hoffmans story The Sandman as an exemplary tale of the uncanny, something
both familiar and strange at the same time that leads to cognitive dissonance. This sense of ambi-
guity and a blurring of boundaries that threatens stability can of course be seen in relation to the
abject and the grotesque.
50 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 37, 3738. 51 Ibid.,38.
32 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
In several plays that would follow The Night of the Iguana The
Gndiges Frulein, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, and Kirche, Kche,
Kinder, for example Germans continue to function as grotesque comic
figures: perverse, darkly humorous, excessive, and bawdy. The Gndiges
Frulein, as I mentioned in the Introduction, was presented on a double
bill titled Slapstick Tragedy along with another one-act, The Mutilated, a
play that takes place in New Orleans and contains a Bird-Girl remin-
iscent of Boschs bird-headed monster in the Hell panel of Garden of
Earthly Delights.52 While The Mutilated does not deal with a representation
of Germans, it relates to The Gndiges Frulein through the grotesque,
which is realized in a description of Trinket as a mutilated monster ! and
a freak, something peculiar, not natural, morbid.53 Trinket struggles
with the secret of her mastectomy, writh[ing] grotesquely in the grasp of
rough sailors who seek to humiliate her.54 The play centers on her betrayal
by a former friend, Celeste, who blurts out Trinkets secret one night
over a disagreement about whether to have dinner in the Garden District
or the French Quarter. In contrast to the elysian beauty of the Garden
District, the French Quarter recalls the Hell panel of Boschs painting,
as the Bird-Girl, a freak-show attraction who is actually Rampart Street
Rose with chicken feathers glued to her,55 is paraded through the streets
screeching AWK AWK AWK!56 The conflation of girls and birds is a
common one in Williams plays, particularly in those that deal with gro-
tesque imagery. In The Night of the Iguana, Shannon refers to the teenage
girl with whom he had an affair a musical prodigy who declares her
love for him in song as Miss Bird-Girl.57
In The Gndiges Frulein, a sort of giant pelican called a cocaloony
bird appears as a menacing figure that dominates the action and links the
two one-acts. Williams indicates that there is a Bird-Girl in The Mutilated
who could also appear as the cocaloony in this one.58 Linda Dorff has
called The Gndiges Frulein a grotesquely animated cartoon of a play59
and cites Harold Clurmans description of the Frulein as an odd but
52 The Gndiges Frulein starred Zoe Caldwell as Polly and Kate Reid as Molly in its world premiere.
Even though the play ran on Broadway for only sixteen previews and seven performances, Caldwell
won a TONY for Best Featured Actress as well as a Theatre World Award.
Tennessee Williams, The Mutilated, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII. (New Directions:
53
61 Williams, The Gndiges Frulein, 217, 238. The setting of The Gndiges Frulein is clearly Key West,
Florida, where Williams stayed in boarding houses since he began visiting in 1941, and bought a
house in 1950, which he owned until his death in 1983. Southernmost a term associated with
Key West as the southernmost point in the United States is used as a comic descriptor throughout
the play, and, in his Memoirs, Williams refers to Key West as the Cocaloony Key (Memoirs,312).
62 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,218.
63 Ibid.,230. 64 Williams, Iguana,128.
65 The figure of the Frulein, particularly her habit of competing for fish on the docks, seems to be
based on the German performer Valeska Gert (18921978), whom Williams knew in New York
and Provincetown, and Madame Pumpernickel, the seventy-year-old dwarf who worked briefly
at Gerts Provincetown establishment. Gert was Jewish and fled Berlin in 1933, arriving in New
York in 1938. In 1941 she opened the Beggars Bar in Greenwich Village, where Williams worked
for her as a waiter. He was fired after he refused to share tips but reunited with Gert in 1944
in Provincetown, where she opened Valeskas and hired Madame Pumpernickel to play the piano
and sing. David Kaplan reports on a conversation with Donald Windham in May 2006 in which
Windham recalls how Williams would see Madame Pumpernickel walking the beach picking up
floaters fish that had died on their own and snacking on them raw. Williams would imitate
Madame Pumpernickel biting into a floater and throwing it away saying: diz vun iz bad (David
Kaplan, Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2007),
64). The story varies to sometimes identify Gert as the one who would scavenge for fish; whether
there is any strict truth to either version is difficult to determine, but it is highly likely that these
eccentric German performers did inspire Williams portrait of the Frulein.
In his Memoirs, Williams recalls that during 1941 he was very briefly employed at a bistro called
the Beggars Bar, owned by a fantastic refugee from Nazi Germany named Valesca [sic] Gert, whom
34 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
The owner of the rooming house, Molly, and the visiting Society Editor
of the local paper, Polly, provide the comic relief in this tragicomic play.
They function as clowns, dressing in pelican colors that mirror the coca-
loonies66 and smoking marijuana onstage. In production they often appear
in exaggerated makeup, with painted white faces and bright-red lips. The
Frulein, on the other hand, is more of a dark, contradictory figure, simul-
taneously tragic and comic, both pathetic and poised. The first time we see
her, she has just returned from the docks after being attacked by the coca-
loonies, who do not appreciate the competition and have gouged out one
of her eyes and ripped out her hair. She emerges wearing a curious costume
which would not be out of place at the Moulin Rouge in the time of Toulouse-
Lautrec. One eye is covered by a large blood-stained bandage. Her hair is an
aureole of bright orange curls, very fuzzy. She sits in a pool of her own blood
and opens a big scrapbook, a remnant of her former glory,67 creating an
image that is an ultimately grotesque juxtaposition of glamour and hor-
ror. The plays characters and its situations are decidedly excessive too
much which is central to the grotesque and carnivalesquetone.
The Frulein is not only a grotesque figure in terms of her abject body,
oozing with blood and transgressing its own boundaries, but also in terms
of her role as a transitional figure, sitting on the precipice between life and
death. Asked to describe the Fruleins condition after her last encounter
with the cocaloonies, Polly responds, Shes alive, still in the land of the
living, but this is barely the case. She is now completely blind, since her
other eye has been gouged out (her vision is now zero-zero) and Molly
doesnt even want to give her time to come out of shock and stop bleed-
ing before demanding that she repair the fence she crashed into while
being violently pursued by the cocaloonies.68 The description of her situ-
ation is reminiscent of the exchange in Samuel Becketts Endgame (1958)
where Hamm asks Clov to check on his father, Nagg, who is both figura-
tively and literally discarded in an ashbin. Hamm asks Clov to go check
and see whether Nagg is dead, and Clov announces that Hes crying.
Hamms response is simply, Then hes living.69 Suffering signifies life.
Blurring the boundaries between life and death, the Fruleins ambivalent
body becomes a grotesque site of contradiction.
he refers to as a dance-mime, and gives his account of the night he lost his job after refusing to
share tips (Memoirs, 8990). See also Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New
York: Crown Publishers, 1995) for Williams association withGert.
66 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,217.
67 Ibid.,230. 68 Ibid.,244.
69 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958),62.
Germans as grotesque comic figures 35
In A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Germans essentially serve as dark
comic foils. Their lives are presented as unappealing options, and their
tragedy is primarily found in the dreary, practical, and pedestrian exist-
ence they embrace. The play is set in the West End of St. Louis, and the
protagonist is a romantic and attractive schoolteacher, Dorothea Gallaway,
who is encouraged by her roommate Bodey a frumpy, middle-aged
woman of German descent who is hard of hearing to marry Bodeys
awkward, unromantic, but sincere and practical twin brother Buddy after
Dorotheas dream of marrying the man she loves is shattered. Dorotheas
neighbor, Sophie Gluck, another woman of German descent, lives a life of
loneliness on the brink of madness, and represents an equally unappeal-
ing option for Dorothea. Left alone after the recent death of her mother,
Sophie is afraid to go back into her own apartment, believing it to be
spooked.70 She therefore intrudes constantly on Bodey and Dorothea,
sobbing and rolling her eyes like a religieuse in a state of sorrowful vision71
and babbling alternately in English and German.
Tragicomic figures such as Sophie are balanced by more blatantly child-
ish humor, which abounds in adolescent sexual puns and scatological ref-
erences in relation to Germans in this play. For example, Bodeys account
of shopping for chickens at the butchers Mr. Butts speaks for itself:
Mr. Butts always lets me feel his meat. The feel of a piece of meat is the best
way to test it, but theres very few modern butchers will allow you to feel it.
Its the German in me. I got to feel the meat to know its good. A piece of
meat can look good over the counter but to know for sure I always want to
feel it. Mr. Butts, being German, he understands that, always says to me,
Feel it, go on, feel it.72
Later, Sophies attack of diarrhea, which Williams insists must be handled
carefully to avoid excessive scatology but keep the humor, is both comic and
sad. While Dorotheas colleague Helena, a stylishly dressed woman with
the eyes of a predatory bird has no sympathy for Sophie and simply wants
to avoid such scenes in the future, Bodey is more nurturing and appeals
to Dorothea for support, claiming that Dottys a girl that understands
human afflictions,73 a diluted version of Hannahs acceptance of all things
human in The Night of the Iguana.
Yet Dorothea is not as down to earth as Bodey imagines, and is clearly
not interested in a life of drab domesticity with Bodeys brother Buddy:
70 Tennessee Williams, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VIII
(New Directions: New York, 1992),162.
71 Ibid.,154. 72 Ibid.,122. 73 Ibid., 163, 136, 164,165.
36 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Youve been deliberately planning and plotting to marry me off to your twin
brother so that my life would be just one long Creve Coeur picnic, inter-
spersed with knockwurst, sauerkraut hot potato salad dinners. Would
I be asked to prepare these dinners? Even in summer? I know what you
Germans regard as the limits, the boundaries of a womans life Kirche,
Kuche, und Kinder while being asphyxiated gradually by cheap cigars.74
By the end of the play, however, Dorothea is desperate to find a life part-
ner or her life will have no meaning,75 and so she goes off to meet Bodey
and Buddy for a picnic at Creve Coeur (heartbreak) Park in order to
consider a union with the twin brother.
In Kirche, Kche, Kinder, Williams takes this German ideal of church,
kitchen, children and stands it on its head in one of his most outrageous,
irreverent plays. The history of the plays title is worth mentioning in rela-
tion to its depiction of a world turned inside out.76 The title of an earlier
version of the play is Kitche, Kutchen, und Kinder, which Williams later
revised to Kitche, Kutche, Kinder. He finally settled on Kirche, Kutchen,
und Kinder for the plays only production at the Jean Cocteau Repertory
Theatre during its 19791980 season, directed by Eve Adamson. Kitche,
presumably an invented word that refers to kitchen, was eventually
replaced with Kirche, the German word for church, and Kutchen, the
German word for cook, was restored in lieu of the earlier Kutche, a mis-
spelling of Kche, the German word for kitchen. Williams is consistent
with Kinder, the German word for children. Of the three variations on
the title, this last one, Kirche, Kutchen, und Kinder, is closest to the old
German expression that designates the proper role of women: Kinder,
Kche, Kirche children, kitchen, church functionally equivalent
to barefoot and pregnant. Not fluent in German, Williams probably
confused kitchen (Kche) with cook (Kutchen) in wanting to refer-
ence the original expression but initially wasnt sure whether an and was
included. In the definitive version I edited for the volume of late Williams
plays published by New Directions, The Traveling Companion (2008), I
corrected his German spelling, adding the umlaut mark, and removed the
und to conform more closely to the German saying. Williams rework-
ing of the title and the reversal of the word order (from Kinder, Kche,
Kirche to Kirche, Kche, Kinder) corresponds to the plays scenes: we
are first introduced to the action in the Kirche, then the play moves to
the Kche, and finally the Kinder appear. Symbolically, the reversal of the
74 Ibid.,133. 75 Ibid.
76 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,11.
Germans as grotesque comic figures 37
expression reading it backward is highly relevant for this particular
play, as Kirche, Kche, Kinder is a comic reversal, turning everything upside
down. Like Camino Real (1953) which the Gypsy in the play insists is
a funny paper read backward!77 Kirche, Kche, Kinder is, in Dorffs
estimation, a theatricalist cartoon78 complete with invisible canaries that
sing as the Wife turns slowly and dizzily about after getting hit over the
head with the Ministers umbrella.79
The plays title is also significant in terms of what can be seen as its
camp reversal. Charles Ludlam, who founded the Ridiculous Theatrical
Company in 1967, describes camp as a sensibility a way of looking at
77 Tennessee Williams, Camino Real (New York: New Directions, 1953), 114. Camino Real, another
Williams play with a carnivalesque sensibility, contains several references to the grotesque. For
example, when Marguerite is trying to escape from the Camino Real, she is persecuted by grotesque
mummers who act as demon custom inspectors and immigration authorities (85). Later on, Williams
describes the Carnival, or Fiesta, as as sort of serio-comic, grotesque-lyric Rites of Fertility with roots in
various pagan cultures, and has Kilroy emerge in grotesque disguise (103).
The Rose Tattoo (1950) obviously embraces the carnivalesque as well, complete with an inter-
ior that is as colorful as a booth in a carnival (in Tennessee Williams: Three by Tennessee (New York:
Signet Classics, 1976), 139), a grotesque little procession featuring a goat and the cackling old
Strega (152) with a mop of wild grey hair (151), a clownish salesman (201), and two female
clowns of middle years and juvenile temperament (167). The plays central reference to clowns comes
in the contradictory figure of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (eat-a-horse), who has the beautiful body of
Serafinas dead husband and the head of a clown (205).
In a 1953 letter to Brooks Atkinson, Williams wrote that In writing fantasy it is terribly hard
to know when you have violated the boundaries of audience acceptance A lot of the grotesque
comedy in the work, and I think that is a dominant element, even though all of it had a serious
import back of it, is traceable to the spirit of the American comic-strip and the animated cartoons,
where the most outrageous absurdities give the greatest delight (To Justin Brooks Atkinson, 3
April 1953, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. II: 19451957, ed. Albert J. Devlin and
Nancy M. Tischler (New York: New Directions, 2004), 469).
In 2012, Davis Robinsons Beau Jest Moving Theatre produced an earlier one-act version of Camino
Real, titled Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, which Williams wrote in the 1940s; it was first staged by
Elia Kazan in a workshop in 1949 at the Actors Studio, and wasnt seen again until it was produced
as a black-and-white film for television in 1966, starring Martin Sheen as Kilroy and Lotte Lenya
as the Gypsy. Robinsons production premiered at the Charlestown Working Theatre (Charlestown,
Massachusetts) in May 2012 and was presented at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in
September 2012. Like his production of The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, Robinsons
Ten Blocks was successful in carefully staging the grotesque qualities of the play and was able to cap-
ture Williams concept of a plastic theatre (Production notes in Williams, Menagerie, 131).
For a discussion of Camino Real in relation to American postmodern plastic theatre, see Annette J.
Saddik, Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), where I explore
the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its social, political, and theoretical
dimensions, focusing on the postmodern performance of American identity on the stage since World
War II. The original working title of this book was Performing Postmodernism: The Struggle for Cultural
Identity on the American Stage, but in keeping with the publishers guidelines for its Critical Guides to
Literature series the title had to be altered to fit the model for the other guides in the series.
78 Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,13.
79 Tennessee Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed.
Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),114.
38 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
things, never whats looked at.80 He sees in camp a kind of excess, or
overdoing, in order to make a point, and also recalls Prousts discussion
of camp as an outsiders view of things other people take for granted, a
reverse image incorporating a sly sense of humor because of its inversions
that speak to a particular, usually marginalized, social group.81 Ludlams
Theatre of the Ridiculous resists conventional, formalized notions of art,
preferring instead to allude to icons of popular culture and current events
alongside classical literary texts. These plays combine serious social cri-
tique with a highly self-conscious and playful style.
Susan Sontag, in her 1964Notes on Camp, writes that the essence of
Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration and that
it is a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the
frivolous. Camp, Sontag claims, is art that proposes itself seriously, but
cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.82 Since The
hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance, reactions such as Its too
much, Its too fantastic, Its not to be believed, are standard phrases of
Camp enthusiasm.83 Like the carnivalesque, camp turns the world inside
out, turns values upside down84 and revels in this reversal, erasing the
distinction between high and low art and indulging in an ironic sens-
ibility typical of postmodern aesthetics that is, making a statement and
simultaneously mocking and denying it as the performer/author winks
at the audience members as coconspirators in some kind of culturaljoke.
Kirche, Kche, Kinder epitomizes a subversion of authority and the dis-
missal of good taste, as its pseudo-Germanic characters mock the institu-
tions society tends to hold in high regard: religion, family, education, and
marriage. Even the handicapped are not exempt, as the Man appears in a
wheelchair, which turns out to be a sham since he is able to spring up
and perform cartwheels to demonstrate an excellent state of health, then
[jump] back into the wheelchair.85 Sokel describes the content of German
Expressionist drama as frequently the opposite of Christian: glorification
of murder, blasphemy, pederasty, and the vigorous anti-theism (a term
more fitting than atheism in the context of expressionism).86 Like Bakhtins
80 Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles
Ludlam, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 227. Everett
Quinton a member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Ludlams romantic partner
recalls that Williams was often at Ridiculous Theatre performances. In his novel Moise and the
World of Reason (1975), Williams mentions the Theatre of the Ridiculous aswell.
Ibid.,225.
81
82 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 275, 276,284.
83 Ibid.,283. 84 Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre,226.
85 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,117. 86 Sokel, Introduction,11.
Germans as grotesque comic figures 39
notion of carnivalesque resistance, German Expressionism as a dramatic
form was known for its rebell[ion] against propriety and common sense,
against authority and convention in art and life.87 And, while Williams is
still not writing in the German Expressionist style in this particular play,
his use of a German artistic sensibility is once again evident. He also con-
tinues to embrace a sense of the fantastic in Kirche, Kche, Kinder, not only
through the outrageous and unbelievable comic situations but also in the
fluid presentation of dramatic space signified by the dissolution of bound-
aries between the rooms, which are walls only suggested by huge Venetian
blinds in primary colors yellow, red, and blue.88
The first character to appear, the Man, is a retired hustler who is asso-
ciated with the space of the Kirche and presents his opening remarks
as the organist, Miss Rose, plays an arpeggio.89 We then move into the
Kche, a space of exaggeratedly comic and cartoonish slapstick. The Kche
is presided over by the Wife, a woman inclined to slatternly ways of dress
and behavior, who lets in her father, the Lutheran Minister of the island
known as Staten, a tall and very dour-looking man all in black, bearing
a Bible and an umbrella.90 Since throwing his wife off the Staten Island
Ferry, the Minister has taken up with Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger
(also known as Hotsy), a decrepit ninety-nine-year-old woman dressed
like a groupie chick short-cut Levis and a kind of sweat shirt decorated
with cartoon characters and captions,91 who was played by a man in drag,
Harris Berlinksy, in the 1979 production at the Jean Cocteau Repertory
Theatre. The Frulein sexually services the Lutheran Minister behind the
organ, and she is presented throughout as hyper-sexed and also pregnant.
Blasphemy is probably at its height in this play during the scene where the
Minister throws a paper bag over Hotsys head, plops his huge Bible under
[her] derriere and mounts her [as] members of the press burst in.92 Nor is
the family sacrosanct in this topsy-turvy world. When die Kinder finally
appear, the Man inspects his childrens genitalia before sending them off
to prostitute themselves so that he can avoid going back to work.93 The
children have been expelled from school after fifteen years in kindygar-
ten,94 which is conflated with Yale in a mockery of education,95 and the
only hope for them now is to make use of the instinct and intuition that
more than compensate for deficiencies in the department of intellect.96
Williams, Memoirs,x.
101
Benevolent anarchy
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty
In The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud proposes a theatre of cru-
elty that does not involve
the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each others bod-
ies, carving up our personal anatomies but the much more terrible and
necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And
the sky can fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us
that first ofall.4
Like the grotesque world that Kayser discusses, the unstable Artaudian
universe is and is not our own world. The ambiguous way in which
we are affected by it results from our awareness that the familiar and
apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal
42
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 43
forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence.5 While Artuads cryp-
tic description of his theatre of cruelty has been applied to authors such
as Jean Genet and August Strindberg (his later experimental plays, in
particular), Williams plays, most commonly associated with long, poetic
speeches, do not immediately seem to correspond with Artauds vision of
changing the primary role of speech, of reducing its position, of consid-
ering it as something else than a means of conducting human characters
to their external ends.6 Yet, from his earliest beginnings, Williams vision
of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted
theatre of realistic conventions that he describes in his production notes
to The Glass Menagerie echoed Artuads insistence on a theatre that is not
psychological but plastic and physical,7 highlighting the inadequacy
of language to represent the ambiguities and inconsistencies of human
experience.8
It was with his later plays, however, that Williams finally began to
achieve his vision of this Artaudian plastic theatre that expresses a meta-
physical fear beyond language,9 one that exists to explore what cannot be
expressed in words. The eruption of violence in Williams work is often
a manifestation of the fear and frustration of being trapped in language,
and so the physicality of the theatre creates a space for emancipation, one
where we can begin to explore the chaos signified by that violence. It is
precisely this chaos beyond rational constructs the excess of the primal
scream with which Artauds theatre of cruelty concerns itself. Artaud is
not directly interested in violence per se but rather in the impulse behind
the violent act, the primitive instincts and desires in their purest states
before they become repressed by culture and emerge in what he sees as
distorted, sublimated forms. Honoring, capturing, and presenting these
impulses in ritualistic spectacle are key to the theatre of cruelty, and there
are clearly elements of this philosophy in several of Williams later one-
acts, such as The Mutilated, The Frosted Glass Coffin, and Lifeboat Drill, for
example. While it would be difficult to say that any one play corresponds
exactly to Artauds vision of a theatre of cruelty, The Gndiges Frulein,
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom
Ibid.,71.
7
8 While Williams is not usually associated with Artaud, C. W. E. Bigsby points out in Modern
American Drama: 19451990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) that Mary Caroline
Richards translation of Artaud uses the same term a plastic theatre that Williams used for the
new theatre he desired to create.
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,44.
9
44 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
succeed in liberating the spectator from a reliance on plot and its linguis-
tic constructs, creating through sound, gesture, and spectacle the cruelty
of the real that remains linguistically untranslatable.10 One key element
that links Artauds work with Williams later anti-realistic plays is precisely
a revelation of the metaphysical cruelty that lies beyond logical represen-
tation, marginalizing language and instead taking advantage of the phys-
icality of the theatre.
In The Gndiges Frulein, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This
Is the Peaceable Kingdom, Williams moved beyond psychological charac-
terization and conventional moral ideology, beyond theatre as mimetic
representation, often emphasizing the physical presence of the sexualized
body and the illusive energies of the spirit. All these plays share an element
of the grotesque, a sensibility that is consistent with Artauds technique
of exaggeration. Representation in these plays, therefore, becomes sym-
bolic and ritualistic representation without a mimetic referent outside
immediate repetition. The Gndiges Frulein, for example, relies heavily
on the aural, the visual, and the physical, articulating the world of the
outcast through ritualistic spectacle. While the familiar Williams theme of
survival of going forward in the midst of personal and social adversity,
echoed by the famous En Avant! with which he signed his letters is
certainly present in this play, the mode of representation is very different
from that of his earlier works. The characters are presented as two-dimen-
sional rather than as human beings with complex psychological histor-
ies, and the form Gndiges takes is certainly more physical and much less
reverent than the moments of psychological realism we see in plays such
as A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie, functioning more as
metalinguistic expression that laughs sadly at the inevitability of cruelty,
rife with irony and using parody as its backdrop.11 In this sense, Gndiges
comes across more like Williams stylistic departure of the 1950s Camino
Real than any of his earlier, successful work. The 1960s gave Williams
a freedom and a style to explore what had been taboo and unaccepted
10 Ibid.,71.
11 Since the screen devices and other anti-realistic elements were omitted from the original produc-
tion (and most subsequent productions) of The Glass Menagerie, the plays sense of irony has often
failed to come through, and it has therefore typically been been read as psychological, sentimen-
tal realism. In his article The Two Glass Menageries: Reading Edition and Acting Edition (in
Modern Critical Interpretations: Tennessee Williamss The Glass Menagerie, ed. Harold Bloom (New
York: Chelsea House, 1988)), Geoffry Borny reads the play as highly ironic, citing the playful dis-
tance that the titles and images (inspired by Piscator, Brecht, and film) create. See Saddik, Politics
of Reputation for a discussion of how The Glass Menagerie deals simultaneously with realistic and
anti-realistic conventions.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 45
in America during the 1940s and 1950s, and he was able to finally realize
his opinion of art as a kind of anarchy that he had discussed in 1945. In
Chapter1 I discussed grotesque ambiguities in Gndiges, as well as in The
Night of the Iguana, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, and Kirche, Kche,
Kinder, primarily in terms of German Romanticism, the comic grotesque
or grotesque body, and Bakhtins theories of the carnivalesque. In contrast,
here I shall focus more on these ambiguities as they relate to the culture
nature binary associated with Artauds primal spectacle and the complex-
ities of signification through gesture versus language.12
This excess of benevolent anarchy that Williams claimed as the role
of theatre was very much in line with Artauds sense of a virtual revolt
that lay at the core of dramatic representation. For both, artistic rebellion
was effective precisely because it was not reality but a true image laden with
symbolic status that begged to be read as spectacle, not a mere random
event. Representation and, therefore, mimetic repetition have no place in
the theatre of cruelty, as the theatre exists to create something new and
explore a terror beyond rational expression. As Kayser points out, Over
and above the ridiculousness suggested by absurdity and distortion, the
grotesque inspires a fear which grows out of the sudden recognition that
mans position is precarious.13 Jacques Derrida usefully untangles Artauds
explanation of the primitive and prelogical nature of the theatre of cru-
elty as not representation but life itself, in the extent to which life is
unrepresentable. Life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation.14
For Artaud, cruelty is manifested in the theatres disruption of all the
audiences prior conceptions, and it is that disruption that leads to social
awakening, forcing us to experience in the theatre what civilization does
not allow. Theatre then becomes the transformative and the real. Like
Artaud, Williams was never primarily interested in the exploration of psy-
chological problems of individuals, commonly associated with realism,15
nor was he particularly committed to the politically charged emphasis
12 See Chapter1 for a detailed discussion of the comic grotesque in this play. For more on The Gndiges
Frulein, see Una Chaudhuri, Awk!: Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkwardness in
Tennessee Williamss The Gndiges Frulein, and Allean Hale, The Gndiges Frulein: Tennessee
Williamss Clown Show, in The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, ed.
Philip C. Kolin (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
13 Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature,154.
14 Jacques Derrida, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, in Mimesis,
Masochism, and Mime, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997),
42. For a more complex discussion of the theatre of cruelty as nonrepresentative, see this essay.
15 Even in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, probably Williams most realistic play, he clearly states that the
bird [he] hope[s] to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one mans psychological problem.
46 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
on social transformation through the motivations of intellect that other
critics of realism, such as Bertolt Brecht, emphasized. Instead, Williams
Artaudian plays are concerned with aspects of theatre connected to the
unconscious mind, favoring intuition, feeling, and experience over reason
and the cataclysmic celebration of these sensory functions through ritual-
istic presentation.
Artauds theories can probably best be seen in practice in the plays of
Genet, who, although he had read little of Artuads work, shared his goals
for a primarily ritualistic theatre that focused on accessing prelogical con-
sciousness and primitive existence through the symbolic, where action is
separated from function. Both writers sought to invert the conventional
moral code of good and evil, and, therefore, what was deemed good in
traditional society (culture, repression, self-control, obedience to the law)
became universally evil and what was considered evil (nature, sexuality,
violence, power) was encouraged as good. While I have found no evidence
that Williams was directly familiar with Artauds work, he was well read
in theatre history and theory, and it is likely that he encountered Artauds
theories during his studies at the New School in New York City during the
1940s. He was certainly familiar with Genets work. In fact, in an essay that
appeared in New York Magazine in 1960, Williams cited Camus, Genet,
Brecht, Anouilh, Ionesco, Durrenmatt, and Albee as his fellow defend-
ants in writing honestly about life.16 His late plays Kirche, Kche, Kinder,
The Pronoun I (c. 1975), and THIS IS (An Entertainment) (unpublished,
1976)contain moments of remarkable similarity to Artauds and Genets
work. The scene in Kirche, Kche, Kinder that I described in Chapter1,
for example, where the Minister throws a paper bag over Hotsys head,
plops his huge Bible under [her] derriere and mounts her [as] members of the
press burst in17 is reminiscent of the same dismissal of good taste in Count
Cencis violent pursuit of his daughter as he seeks to rape her in Artauds
The Cenci (1935), an adaptation of the texts by Shelley and Stendhal. In
THIS IS, the role-playing of the Count and Countess that opens the play
is strikingly similar to that in Genets The Maids (1947), and the invasion
of the hotel by the revolution outside, with the Countess lover, General
Eros, leading the way echoes the ending of Genets The Balcony (1956). A
similar siege of the Queens palace by revolutionaries ends The Pronoun
I, and Queen Mays multiple masked personas (she is a young queen
Rather, he seeks to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering,
evanescent fiercely charged! interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis
(1971:114).
16 Williams, New Selected Essays, 109110. 17 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,136.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 47
masquerading as an old, mad queen, moving from Fair Queen May to
Good Queen May to, finally, Mad Queen May) also recalls the costumed
role-playing of The Balcony.18
Like Nietzsche, both Artaud and Genet want characters to be judged
outside good and evil, and Artauds theatre of cruelty forces the spectator
to confront the harsh facts of a cruel world and his or her own isolation.19
These writers explore the contradictions and hypocrisies of bourgeois
society and often champion the primitive impulses of the socially mar-
ginalized. Williams well-known focus on the world of outcasts or social
outlaws, beginning as early as his 1937 play titled Fugitive Kind (not to be
confused with the film version of Orpheus Descending, titled The Fugitive
Kind), was typically expressed in a much more romanticized manner in
the pre-1961 work than one would normally associate with Artaud or
Genet. While he often valorized the overtly sexual outcast as charismatic
and spiritually alive, there is clearly a split in his sympathies, stemming
from what he has often claimed to be the combination of Puritan and
Cavalier strains in [his] blood.20 The paragons of an animalistic desire in
his earlier plays Val Xavier, Stanley Kowalski, Chance Wayne, Sebastian
Venable, for example are morally problematized and are often pun-
ished for their transgressions. In the later plays I mention above, however,
this moral split virtually disappeared as Williams committed to a more
starkly anti-realistic, physical, and morally inverted theatre characteristic
of Artaud and Genet.
The Gndiges Frulein overtly resists realistic coherency from the begin-
ning, yet, although the title of the double bill that included both Gndiges
and The Mutilated (Slapstick Tragedy) indicates a strong reliance on the
physical, slapstick is hardly a sufficient description of the action. This is
a play that is meant to be seen. It opens with Polly, the Society Editor of
the Cocaloony Gazette, introducing the scene to the audience among the
swooshing of the cocaloony birds above. We then encounter Molly, the
caretaker of a boarding-house for drifters, mopping up blood. Hungry
18 Moreover, Michael Paller points out in his book Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams,
Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 211,that
THIS IS seems to have been inspired by Genets Splendids. Splendids was one of Genets earliest
plays, apparently written while he was in prison. The manuscript was rediscovered only in 1993 and
produced in London in 1995, so it is unclear whether Williams would have known it, but the simi-
larities are there. John Bak also sees similarities between the work of Jean Cocteau and The Pronoun
I, which I discuss in my exploration of the play in Chapter4.
19 The relationship of Artaud and Genet to the Nietzschean reversal of cultural values is articulated in
more detail in Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre 18921992 (London: Routledge, 1993).
20 Williams, New Selected Essays,65.
48 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
for publicity, she offers Polly material for an intense story of human inter-
est and proceeds to tell the tale of her most tragic boarder, the Gndiges
Frulein. We find out that the Frulein once performed before European
royalty as part of a famous artistic trio, the other two being a trained seal
and the trained seals trainer, a beautiful Viennese Dandy who was the
object of the Fruleins unrequited affections. One day, in order to gain
his attention, the Frulein suddenly leaped into the air and intercepted
the fish that was thrown to the seal by catching it in her own jaws. This
absurd novelty was popular for some time, until one day the seal rebelled
and attacked her in defense of its territory. Molly tells us that, after this
failed career in show business, the Gndiges Frulein just drifted, until
she finally wound up lodging in Mollys big dormitory.21 As I recounted
in Chapter1, when it became clear that the Frulein was not earning her
keep, the business-minded Molly, aware of the Fruleins acrobatic past,
sent her off to the fish-docks to compete with the cocaloony birds for
fish, just as she had competed with the seal for attention. The cocaloo-
nies, however, like the seal, did not appreciate the competition and would
increasingly terrorize the Frulein, chasing her from the docks. By the end
of the play, the cocaloonies have gauged out both her eyes and ripped
out most of her hair, and her skirt and legs are streaked with blood, but
still she takes her fish bucket and runs to the docks to compete for fish as
the scene closes. This is the degraded condition to which the once great
Frulein has been reduced, but her survival in the face of lifes cruelties
makes her an honorable woman for Williams. After all, high station in
life, Williams tells us, is earned by the gallantry with which appalling
experiences are survived with grace.22
Language as a means of direct expression is not at all primary in
Gndiges, and even the long speeches are impressionistic rather than nar-
ratively coherent, interrupted by lapses of lost concentration with Molly
and Polly star[ing] blankly for a couple of moments.23 Words are not
important in terms of rational signification, so it becomes easy, even inev-
itable, for Molly and Polly to forget what they were saying in the mid-
dle of a sentence. Narrative is also frequently interrupted by gesture, as
Pollys long opening speech is punctuated with loud swooshes of the
cocaloony birds, countered by her cries of OOPS! amid bits of gos-
sip. Throughout the speech, the term southernmost is used more as a
Williams Theater Festival in 2007. Both shows, done in very different theatrical spaces, did an
excellent job of honoring the grotesque in their ownways.
29 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 7,10.
30 Ibid., 88,70. 31 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,246.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 51
Molly and Polly must use a megaphone to address her, and her vocabu-
lary is essentially limited to reciting from memory on command.32 The
Fruleins use of language reading it, hearing it, speaking it has broken
down and is replaced primarily by gesture and onomatopoeia. She can
still sing, but even her singing is interrupted by those moments of lost
concentration.33
In The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance,
Elin Diamond writes that Artaud sought an immediate and physical lan-
guage (Artauds words)that
would penetrate its spectators, act upon [them] like a spiritual therapeu-
tics. Artaudian cruelty is a theater of total spectacle intended to destroy
barriers between analytic theater and plastic world, mind and body a
theater composed of and addressed to the entire organism For Artaud,
the bubonic plagues of Europe provided the best metaphors for physical,
psychical and cultural transgressions.34
Artaud felt that the theater is a formidable call to the forces that impel
the mind by example to the source of its conflicts andthat
if the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious,
but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exte-
riorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse
possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are local-
ized We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly identi-
fied with sexual freedom, which is also dark, although we do not know
precisely why.35
Sexuality is represented in The Gndiges Frulein primarily through the
erotic fantasy of Indian Joe, who is emblematic of the culture of mimetic
representation described as blond and dressed like a Hollywood
Indian,36 yet with a dancers sense of presence and motion onstage.37
The cruel competition over access to Indian Joes sexuality is one example
of the struggle for domination in the natural world in this play. Not only
is there competition between Polly and the Gndiges Frulein (who con-
fuses Indian Joe with the memory of her love, Toivo, the Viennese Dandy,
who, similarly, did not pay her any attention) for the attentions of Indian
Joe but also his sexuality is linked to a macho sense of domination and
38 Ibid.,240.
39 Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997), 143144.
40 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,250.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 53
scene articulate through action the cruelty of a world in which language
cannot begin to address the natural forces that drive us. The Gndiges
Frulein presents a dialogue that is constantly interrupted by gesture and
sound and, therefore, does not (re)present any logically coherent referent,
thereby resisting repetition. Artaud puts forth the notion that the stage
is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its
own concrete language to speak and this concrete physical language
to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it
expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language.41 He calls for an
aspect of pure theatrical language which does without words, a language
of signs, gestures and attitudes having an ideographic value as they exist in
certain unperverted pantomimes, which he describesas
direct Pantomime where gestures instead of representing words or sen-
tences represent ideas, attitudes of mind, aspects of nature, all in an effec-
tive, concrete manner, i.e., by constantly evoking objects or natural details,
like that Oriental language which represents night by a tree on which a bird
that has already closed one eye is beginning to close the other.42
Artauds unperverted pantomime is clearly manifested in Williams
Giant Cocaloony bird, which terrorizes the Frulein along with Molly
and Polly. Similarly, the Fruleins penetrating scream, which Molly
describes as the inexpressible regret of all her regrets43 and Polly calls
the saddest soliloquy on the stage since Hamlets, is expressed regret-
fully through three instances of AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! and is
one of the most powerful and poignant moments I have ever seen on the
stage. Surely this moment articulates Artauds emphasis on the difficulty
of communicating in mere words the feeling of a particular sound or the
degree and quality of a physical pain and a movement toward a more
organic and hieroglyphic language in space, language of sounds, cries,
lights, onomatopoeia.44 Diamond discusses a similar moment in Helene
Weigels performance in the well-known scene in Bertolt Brechts Mother
Courage in which Mother Courage is forced to identify the corpse of her
son. Diamond writes that In Brechts text, Mother Courage refuses,
twice, to identify the corpse. In performance, when the questioners left,
Helene Weigel completed the moment by turning her head with mouth
extended fully and mimed, silently, the cathartic scream her character
York: New Directions, 1981), 214. For more on The Frosted Glass Coffin, see Philip C. Kolin,
Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin, The Explicator 59:1 (2000), one of the fullest commentaries I
have found on this much-neglectedplay.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 55
Molly replies, Either a goldfish in a goldfish bowl or a society reporter
in a soundproof telephone booth50 representations of both animal and
human trapped by cultural artificiality. This scene strongly echoes modern
and postmodern ideas of alienation, and, among other things, represents
on a physical level Val Xaviers sad realization in Orpheus Descending that
Nobody ever gets to know no body! Were all of us sentenced to solitary
confinement inside our own skins, for life!51 This ability to express alien-
ation in rational language breaks down in The Gndiges Frulein, as the
Frulein is reduced to an absurd gesture of signification that is beyond
rationality and signifies nothing that can be absolutely located or deter-
mined. Similarly, the pantomime scene between Harry and Tom in Susan
Glaspells The Verge (1921), where Harry attempts to communicate to Tom
through the glass door of the greenhouse that he wants him to go fetch
salt for the breakfast eggs, prompts Claire to comment that It was all
so queer. He locked out of his side of the door. You locked in on yours.
Looking right at each other and52 Claires interpretation of the moment
recalls the incommunicability of the human condition, where we are all
trapped, be it inside our own skins, goldfish bowls, telephone booths, or
greenhouses, trying desperately to connect through word or gesture, but
the signifying universe failsus.
Artauds emphasis on gesture over language in the theatre, like Williams
similar emphasis in Gndiges Frulein, does not offer us an escape from
the futility of trying to make connections, but it does powerfully highlight
the illusion of rational language that this connection (communication,
expression) can occur unproblematically. Artaud sees a rupture between
things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their
representations53 at the root of social and metaphysical confusion, and,
like Williams, who aimed to present the cruelties of the human condi-
tion through his slapstick tragedy, seeks a theatre that will address that
rupture orgap.
Although I focus here on the Artaudian aspect of cruelty in this play,
Dorff reads Gndiges, along with Williams later plays THIS IS (An
Entertainment), Kirche, Kche, Kinder, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,
and an unpublished fragment titled The Everlasting Ticket (1981), as
56 Tennessee Williams, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII
(New York: New Directions, 1981),299.
57 Ibid. 58 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,24.
59 Williams, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws,305.
58 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
table, Dionysian and vulgar, which he interprets linguistically to mean
that the porno show is directly across the street.60 Madge suggests that
a massacre could occur as a result of the different preferences in televi-
sion channels at the hotel, and the panic to buy, which has been stimu-
lated by recession, has caused the streets to be stampeded with panic
purchasers.61 Perverse sexuality is introduced with the entrances of the
First Young Man and Second Young Man, amid their discussions of love,
death, and sexual/social degeneration, as the First Young Man exclaims:
Did I ever tell you that Im a social alien? Anarchist?62
In this play, as well as (less blatantly) in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom,
Williams combines Brechtian and Artaudian anti-realistic/alienating elem-
ents, as different as the two are ideologically, in an effort to marginalize lan-
guage on several levels. Brechtian placards are used to identify key points
in the performance, first with the title Trivialities63 followed shortly by
Bea and Madges dance, to which the Manager sings64 another Brechtian
trademark to break up realistic illusion, found, of course, in plays such
as The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Good Woman [Person] of Setzuan
(19381943). This particular song emphasizes a chaotic excess of sensual
frenzy, and the banalities65 of life are discussed shortly afterward. Once
again, in true Brechtian fashion, lines suddenly are sung a cappella, break-
ing up any rational coherency of plot, in a discussion of sexual kink and
hustling.66 The next placard is worn by a hunched man labeled Mr.
Black, an obvious symbol of death, whom several characters deny they
see. More interpretive dance and singing duets carry us into the second
scene, which begins with dialogue sung in the style of Gregorian chant
that changes after a shattering crash is heard out on the street. After the
violence of the car accident and the removal of the body, the chaotic end-
ing is performed, like Artauds plague scene, outside language:
Outside the great window they form a tight circle, milling about in confusion,
shoving each other with their huge purchases their hats are knocked awry and
they begin to exchange kicks and punches. Then there is a sound like the roar
of an ogre in the sky. They disperse, screaming, running. The street is dark and
silent.67
The Waitress then proclaims that she will not be back at work ever again,
since she was attacked on the subway (a likely scenario in New York City
in 1981)and theres no other way for her to get to work, as the taxi fare
Ibid.,312.
60 61
Ibid.,314. 62 Ibid.,317.
63 Ibid.,306. 64
Ibid.,308. 65 Ibid.,309.
66 Ibid.,320. 67
Ibid., 328329.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 59
is too high. The Manager leads a lyric on the subject of spectacle and its
audience (the cats with jewelled claws) full of ineffectual disdain:
And now the cats with jewelledclaws
glide down the wall ofnight
softly to crouch with bated breath
and glare at all below,
their malice on each upturnedface
descending cool as snow.68
There is a social message in this play concerning the civilized city in a
state of anarchy, violence, and chaos and the muted spectatorship of the
privileged who sit and watch the pain of the dispossessed without action
or comment beyond malice.
Ultimately, this play could be seen as containing both Artaudian and
Brechtian elements in terms of its form and content. The refusal to priv-
ilege rational linguistic constructs and the interruption of mimetic illu-
sionism with song, dance, and slogans are devices common to both
theorists, and the emphasis on the chaos of our unleashed nature, typified
by Artauds plague scene, is paired with an (albeit vague) social commen-
tary on violence, fear, and the inaction of those in power. Spectacle inter-
rupts any attempt at rational coherency, and, once again, it is the basest
forms of our natures that are revealed and presented as inevitable in true
Artaudian fashion. What makes this play different from The Gndiges
Frulein, however, is the refusal to celebrate this chaotic nature fully in
an embrace of moral reversal and a dismissal of culture, instead curbing
the chaos with a Brechtian message of social contempt. It could be argued
that the Brechtian moment occurs most strongly in the ambiguity of the
ending, as the Manager leads the Young Man out toward the revolving
door, offering to introduce him to his future, which, although presum-
ably dark and already determined, still remains unknown, undisclosed,
and possibly malleable, the state of his world sliding into the fate of the
world not final, but left for the audience to determine.
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws finally premiered in 2003 at Hartford
Stage in Connecticut, but a more recent 2011 production at La MaMa
E. T. C. in New York (which originated at the Provincetown Tennessee
Williams Festival that same year) highlighted the camp and carnivalesque
tone of the play, bringing out its grotesque humor. Directed by Jonathan
Warman and starring Everett Quinton (a core member of the Ridiculous
68 Ibid.,329.
60 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Figure2 Erin Markey, Regina Bartkoff, Mink Stole, and Everett Quinton in Now the Cats
with Jewelled Claws, directed by Jonathan Warman. La MaMa E. T. C., New York City
(2011). Photo by Jonathan Collins.
Theatrical Company), John Waters film actress Mink Stole (also known
as Nancy Paine Stole; she is considered one of the Dreamlanders, a dis-
tinction given to the cast and crew of regulars that Waters has used in his
films),69 and downtown actress Regina Bartkoff, the production brought
out the psychedelic aspects of late 1970s and early 1980s glam culture.
Warmans choice of actors was in keeping with his playful yet dark vision
for the play, and, while the apocalyptic and Brechtian elements are muted,
the frivolous excess, tinged with an underlying element of sinister greed
and frenzy that Williams was presenting in this black comedy, came across
well in this imaginative production. In a review of the play for Stage and
Cinema, Gary Larcan writes that As the manager of the seedy caf, Everett
Quinton channels his Ridiculous Theatrical Company style (with a bit of
the Emcee from Cabaret). He twists and turns to elicit humor and horror
by squeezing out every bit of grotesqueness he can muster.70
Written the same year as Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, the one-act
This Is the Peaceable Kingdom continued Williams plea for social action
69 Mink Stole also starred in a production of The Mutilated that was presented at the 2013 Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Theater Festival and went on to a successful run in New York City later that
year. I discuss this production in Chapter4.
Gary Larcan, Tennessees Lesser Known Cats, Stage and Cinema (November 1, 2011). www.
70
stageandcinema.com/2011/11/01/jewelled-claws-lamama.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 61
in the midst of chaos, as Man becomes God cultures only hope by
the end of the play. Yet this play is much more pessimistic in its vision of
the role of culture and, while nature is not entirely celebrated over cul-
ture here, it is certainly exhibited as the ugly, primary force that drives
us and reveals itself more fully the closer we get to death. Williams picks
a very specific and realistic location for his setting a nursing home in
one of the drearier sections of Queens during the nursing home strike in
New York City in the spring of 1978 marking its social context from
the beginning. The residents are starting grimly out at us as the curtain
rises, and for the first half-minute no word is spoken during a panto-
mimic performance that should provoke the two tragic elements of pity and
terror.71 While the element of tragedy here is strong, as in The Gndiges
Frulein, there are moments of bizarre humor, which Williams describes
as gallows humor. This is a place where decent existence is ended and
indecent existence begins,72 with the natural impulses drowning out
cultural restraints. In this play, the living conditions of the aged and the
infirm are presented as so tragic that they cross a line into perverse com-
edy; rather than face the uncomfortable degeneration and helplessness
to which we are all potentially susceptible, we laugh at their excesses and
outbursts.
As in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, Hysteria is the condition of
this place, the city, the world!73 and the action of the play is marked by
riots and the explosion of grotesque gestures that point to desire outside
linguistic expression. The residents are starving, and cultural niceties are
mocked in a scene where a gloved matron offers charitable food contribu-
tions. A lengthy history of the Colonial Dames of America is presented,
however, before any food is given out, and the cultural cachet becomes
meaningless in a world where basic needs are not met. The residents riot
wildly, taking food by force. One woman, Lucretia, ends scene i by bang-
ing her head against the wall [with] despairing outcries,74 the frustrated
expression of human pain beyond language presented in this spectacle
of human suffering. Moreover, the self-consciousness of the spectacle
throughout the play is made evident by the journalists and photographers
who chronicle and display all the events on television, the ultimate cul-
tural manipulator of the real. The violence of human nature is repackaged
and re-presented to society in a more palatable, distancedform.
73 Ibid.,353. 74 Ibid.,358.
62 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Of all Williams plays discussed here, the physical degeneration, tragi-
comic elements, and loneliness, along with a Strange Voice that period-
ically announces that This is the Peaceable Kingdom and sets the mood,
make this play the most Beckettian in content and form, and certainly
bring it in line with Artauds theories. In the play, Sauls observation that
humans are ultimately defined by desire and lack Nothing but an open
mouth left at the end75 can easily be associated with both Becketts Not I
(1972) and Sebastians ultimate fate in Suddenly Last Summer, recalled here
in the greedy sounds, mouth open made by Bernice. Mrs. Shapiro simi-
larly smacks her mouth repeatedly open and shut for more food, with the
grotesque gesture of her head lolling this way and that.76 As I discussed
in Chapter1, the protruding, open mouth is one of the central elements
in Bakhtins description of the grotesque body, one that blurs boundaries,
denying the classical body and dissolving the controlled divisions between
self and outside world. This intense reliance on the body and on gesture
signifies one of the most notable elements of this play, the undisguised fear
and suspicion of language on several levels. Not only is language unreli-
able and inadequate, often giving way to pantomime, but also a constant
awareness of the danger of language in warnings to be careful what you
say,77 with a rather realistic social context of the fear of antisemitic lan-
guage, runs throughout. Like Suddenly Last Summer, this play deals with
the threat of babbling78 of language gone out of control. Ultimately,
however, the linguistic, social, and religious struggles created by culture
become irrelevant we are all equal in the end, as we fall to the chaotic
powers of nature. The character Ralston, another resident in the nursing
home, names himself God at the end, a declaration that is eventually con-
firmed by Lucretia. Unlike in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, however,
hope seems extinguished, as God the savior becomes just an old man in a
nursin home in a wheelchair.79
What distinguishes Williams later work discussed above from his earl-
ier forms is primarily the anti-realistic marginalization of language and an
emphasis on the physicality of the theatre, while the more specific ideo-
logical elements of the presentation of ritualistic spectacle, a reversal in the
primacy of nature over culture, and a revelation of inevitable metaphysical
cruelty that occur throughout these plays mark them as much more specif-
ically Artaudian in their goals. Therefore, while I would hesitate to argue
that these plays fulfill Artauds philosophical vision the total spectacle
75
Ibid.,350. 76 Ibid., 350,351. 77 Ibid.,342.
78 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, 367. 79 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom,361.
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 63
that he articulated (one that would liberate the spectator from mimetic
representation) I would argue that a movement toward this vision is
most effectively present in Williams plays that rely strongly on gesture,
dance, song, color, and lighting. In that sense, informed productions of
The Gndiges Frulein, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This Is the
Peaceable Kingdom are able to powerfully achieve a chaotic liberation from
the rational that Artaud sought, a return to the popular, primal theatre
sensed and experienced directly by the mind, without languages distor-
tions and pitfalls in speech and words.80
1 Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),271.
2 Tennessee Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play (New York: New Directions,
1983),13.
3 Williams, Conversations, 155156.
64
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 65
the Lyric Theatre, which Williams was working on in the mid-1970s).4 In
Steps Must Be Gentle, the ghosts of Hart Crane and his possessive mother
rehash the conflicts they experienced in life. Williams also returned to the
ghosts of his past in plays such as Vieux Carr (1977), Something Cloudy,
Something Clear (1981),5 and A House Not Meant to Stand, where spectral
children haunt the stage.6
In Williams last Broadway play, the ghost play Clothes for a Summer
Hotel, he brings back the ghosts of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who meet
once again at Highland Hospital, the facility in Asheville, North Carolina,
where Zelda died in a fire just after midnight on March 10, 1948. She was
locked in a room on the top floor when flames consumed her, along with
eight other women. Zelda had been at several sanitariums and hospitals
since her first mental breakdown in 1930 and was in and out of Highland
from 1936 until her death, often voluntarily electing to go, an issue that
Williams brings up in the play. Clothes for a Summer Hotel opens with
4 Williams submitted Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre to his publisher, New Directions, in 1980. Will
Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? and A Cavalier for Milady were published in 2008 in The
Traveling Companion and Other Plays.
5 In Something Cloudy, Something Clear, the writer August observes that Life is all its just one time.
It finally seems to all occur at one time (Tennessee Williams, Something Cloudy, Something Clear
(New York: New Directions, 1995), 59). Even more so than The Glass Menagerie, Something Cloudy,
Something Clear (which was finally published by New Directions in 1995)and a related play, The
Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer (1962), which Williams began in 1940 and completed
(aside from a few possible minor revisions) in 1962 see my note in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, where a definitive version of the play was finally published (Williams, The Traveling
Companion and Other Plays, 308) are his most directly autobiographical plays.
The world premiere of The Parade was presented by Shakespeare on the Cape at the First Annual
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival on October 1, 2006, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin
and Eric Powell Holm. Something Cloudy, Something Clear, which premiered in 1981 at the Bouwerie
Lane Theatre by the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York City, directed by Eve Adamson, seam-
lessly shifts between past and present, weaving in autobiographical details that also form the plot
of The Parade, a play about Williams experience of his first great (and tragic) love affair, with a
young Canadian dancer named Kip Kiernan in the summer of 1940. At the Provincetown Tennessee
Williams Theater Festival in September 2011, The Parade, directed by Grant Kretchik, and Something
Cloudy, Something Clear, directed by Cosmin Chivu, were presented together on the beach in
Provincetown, the actual setting of both plays, using some of the same actors in overlapping roles.
This brilliant paring highlighted the autobiographical elements and revealed these pieces, particu-
larly Something Cloudy, Something Clear, as among Williams most beautiful plays; this was one par-
ticular instance where seeing an insightful production was crucial to doing justice to the latework.
For the epigraph to his introduction to the 2008 New Directions edition of A House Not Meant
6
to Stand, Thomas Keith quotes Williams from his draft notes for the play: I am offering you my
Spook Sonata, and probably it would astonish Strindberg as much as it does you and me (Williams,
A House Not Meant to Stand, viii), and in the plays opening stage directions Williams describes the
genre of the play as his kind of Southern Gothic Spook Sonata (3). For further discussion of
ghosts in Williams late plays, see Jessica Knight, When Reality Becomes Too Difficult to Bear:
Tennessee Williamss Artist Ghosts, Valley Voices 10:1 (2010).
66 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Scott, who looks just as he did before he died of a heart attack in 1940,
visiting the asylum and waiting for Zelda to appear. As Ive argued was
common to Williams representational style from his earliest beginnings
to, increasingly, his later plays, in Clothes for a Summer Hotel he eschews
realistic representation and takes extraordinary license with time and
place in order to allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is
truth of character.7
Clothes for a Summer Hotel shifts back and forth in time from Sarah
and Gerald Murphys 1926 party at their villa in the south of France to
Zeldas years in Highland Hospital. The French aviator Edouard Jozan,
with whom Zelda had an affair in 1924, also appears as a character in the
play, as does Ernest Hemingway, whose relationship with Scott and Zelda
is presented in Williams play as an important factor in Fitzgeralds emo-
tional struggles. Fitzgerald had seen some of Hemingways work in 1924,
and Hemingways name begins to appear with greater frequency in 1925
in letters to Fitzgeralds friends at home.8 Hemingway and Fitzgerald first
met in Paris in 1925, and Fitzgerald had recommended Hemingway to
his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Hemingway strongly disapproved of Scotts
marriage to Zelda and held her responsible for Scotts professional and
personal decline. The last time Hemingway and Fitzgerald saw each other
was in 1937, when Fitzgerald was working in Hollywood.
Williams had met Hemingway, but in 1970 he told Don Lee Keith that
Hemingway and I never established a rapport Hemingway seemed shy
to me; we didnt have much to talk about. In a way, it was embarrassing.9
However, asked in 1973 about what writers exerted a special influence on
Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Authors Note. This edition incorporates Williams last
7
changes to the play. For criticism on the play, see Thomas P. Alder, When Ghosts Supplement
Memories: Tennessee Williams Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Southern Literary Journal 19:2
(Spring 1987); Jackson Bryer, Entitled to Write About Her Life: Tennessee Williams and F.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, in Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, ed. Ralph
F. Voss (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); George W. Crandell, I Cant Imagine
Tomorrow: Tennessee Williams and the Representation of Time in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, in
Kolin, The Undiscovered Country; Linda Dorff, Collapsing Resurrection Mythologies: Theatricalist
Discourses of Fire and Ash in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, in Tennessee Williams: A Casebook,
ed. Robert F. Gross (New York: Routledge, 2002); Norma Jenckes, Lets Face the Music and
Dance: Resurgent Romanticism in Tennessee Williamss Camino Real and Clothes for a Summer
Hotel, in Kolin, The Undiscovered Country; and John S. Baks excellent study, Homo americanus:
Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2010).
William Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries (New York: World Publishing
8
14 In Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1985), 384. While Martin is echoing familiar narratives regarding Williams paranoia,
Williams later critical reception demonstrates that blaming the critics for his failures was not
entirely paranoid.
Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 389,384. 16 Williams in ibid.,384.
15
Here I am arguing that what androgyny and homosexuality have in common for Fitzgerald and
Hemingway is a misogynistic fear of feminine influence as undermining the perceived need for
control and stability in order to produce creative work. Williams is, of course, not saying that all
good writers must be homosexuals; his point is more subtle in his estimation that androgynous
sensibilities in a writer assist, rather than hinder, creative work. Moreover, I am not claiming that
Fitzgerald and/or Hemingway were necessarily misogynists or homosexuals these debates will
continue but that the deeply embedded cultural fears of the feminine emerged in their writing,
even as they (Hemingway in particular) freely explored issues of androgyny and polysexuality.
26 In Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries,221.
27 Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel,77.
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 71
in poetry or psychosis that disrupts the linear and the rational. Judith
Butler reads the semiotic as expressing that original libidinal multipli-
city within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic lan-
guage in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In
effect, poetic language has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and dis-
place the paternal law that structures the Symbolic, which is the domain
of rational discourse. She argues that the semiotic is a dimension of lan-
guage occasioned by [the] primary maternal body, which serves as a
perpetual source of subversion within the Symbolic.28
As a woman out of control who, by all accounts, did not observe
boundaries very well and who represented chaos and irrationality in light
of her documented schizophrenia,29 Zelda embodied the personal and
professional fears of failure that haunted Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Hemingway famously disliked Zelda mainly for what he saw as her
disruptive influence on Scott, as well as because of her own ambition,
which Hemingway decided was the jealousy of a woman who wanted
to compete with Scott and ruin him. Hemingway strongly disap-
proved of Scotts marriage to Zelda and believed that she was responsible
for his professional and personal decline. In 1934, Hemingway wrote to
Fitzgerald:
Of all people on earth, you need discipline in your work and instead you
marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you
and ruins you. Its not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the
first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with
her and, of course youre a rummy.30
Even though Hemingway acknowledges that the reasons for Fitzgeralds
ruin were not simple, he still largely blames Zelda and suggests that
Fitzgeralds downfall was accelerated by her captivating influence over
him his being in love withher.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel opened in January 1980 at the Eisenhower
Theater in Washington, DC, to decidedly negative reviews that led Williams
28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),
101102.
29 Nancy Milford notes that the doctor who first diagnosed Zelda had later put aside that original
diagnosis, stating that certain symptoms or behaviors are called schizoid and this does not mean
that the person is schizophrenic (Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 399).
Elaine Showalter has also pointed out that, while Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she
did not meet most of the criteria for the illness (Unwell, This Side of Paradise, The Guardian
(October 5, 2002), www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/05/biography.fscottfitzgerald).
30 In Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries, 166167, emphasis added.
72 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
to make cuts and rewrite the play. It moved to Chicago in February and
received somewhat better reviews. Claudia Cassidy, who had helped launch
Williams career with her review of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago in 1944,
was positive about the play. It then moved to Broadway, where it opened at
New Yorks Cort Theatre on March 26, 1980 (Williams sixty-ninth birth-
day), and starred Geraldine Page and Kenneth Haigh. Audiences liked it
but, as was typical for Williams from the 1960s onward, the critics did not,
and the show closed three weeks later. Working on cuts and rewrites of
the play was a very intense emotional experience for Williams, and he was
depressed and irritable and had to be coaxed out of his hotel room for
rehearsals and press engagements. Once rehearsals began in New York, the
press was forced to go to his Manhattan Plaza apartment to locate him.31
In 1981 Williams said that Clothes for a Summer Hotel was, of all his plays,
the most difficult play to write because of the documentation that
he had to do. Williams research for the play was intensive, and he spent
several months reading about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.32 Like most of
Williams plays, Clothes went through several significant rewrites, and his
choice to highlight the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway
was one he felt strongly about. He claimedthat
the scene the critics objected to most violently was that between Hemingway
and Fitzgerald. But thats an integral part of the play because each was a
central figure in the life of the other. I thought the confrontation between
them indispensable. Now Ive rewritten the play again [in 1981], and Ive
built up that scene, not so much in length of playing time, but in content,
making it more pointed.33
40 Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Childrens Literature (New York:
Routledge, 1997),188.
41 Freud, The Taboo of Virginity,271.
42 In Christine L. Williams, Gender Differences at Work: Women and Men in Nontraditional Occupations
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991),14.
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 75
the conduct of the New Woman. In Hemingways novel, Bretts mannish
clothes and bobbed hair provide an additional clue to her unnatural sexual-
ity and her loss of true femininity.43
According to Goldhurst, the New Woman, or modern woman of the
1920s and early 1930s represented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other
writers of the period, is aggressive, domineering, sexually indulgent
(either promiscuous, adulterous, or in some way aberrant), idle, and ego-
centric44 in other words, both male and female, an androgynous figure.
Hemingways oeuvre is replete with homoerotic suggestion and gender
exploration in stories such as A Simple Enquiry (1927) and The Sea
Change (1933), narratives that Williams references in Clothes for a Summer
Hotel. But the two most significant works where he famously introduced
homosexual themes, blurring gender roles and exploring androgyny in
particular, are his memoir of expatriate life in Paris, A Moveable Feast
(published posthumously in 1964), and his unfinished novel, The Garden
of Eden, edited by Tom Jenks and published in 1986. In A Moveable Feast,
Hemingway writes about himself as sexually stable and is disturbed by
what he sees as Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Steins unstable sexuality. In
The Garden of Eden, on the other hand, Hemingway questions the very
notion of sexual stability and depicts a more androgynous and fluid type
of sexuality. Hemingways mockery of Fitzgeralds feminine allure is noto-
rious, as is his own ambiguity surrounding homosexual themes. His (in)
famous depiction of Fitzgerald in the chapter on Scott Fitzgerald in A
Moveable Feast is usually read as mean-spirited and marks Fitzgerald as
androgynous:
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome
and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly
eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been
the mouth of a beauty The mouth worried you until you knew him and
then it worried you more.45
Williams recalled this description in a 1981 interview: Hemingway said
that Fitzgerald was pretty. He had a mouth that troubled you when you
first met him, and troubled you more later.46 Hemingways homosexual
themes and his accounts of Fitzgeralds androgynous appeal, along with
Zeldas taunting and Fitzgeralds own treatment of gender and sexuality
47 In Tennessee Williams Outs Scott and Ernest, Peter L. Hays claims that Williams imposes on
Fitzgerald and Hemingway his own homosexual identity and concerns with androgyny, outing
them as homosexuals despite not one shred of real evidence to suggest that Hemingway, for one,
had ever had any covert homosexual desires or overt homosexual relations (Jeffrey Meyers in
Hays, Tennessee Williams Outs Scott and Ernest, 259). He concludes that Williams creates
a bond between himself, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and claims that all three are homosexual,
but that only he, Tennessee Williams, is sufficiently self-confident to admit that truth, citing as
evidence Williams comment that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald had elements of homosexual-
ity in them (261). While Hays argument that in Clothes for a Summer Hotel Williams was paying
a compliment to himself, insisting that it was his homosexuality, his ability to respond to the
feelings of both men and women that made him the artist that he was, and conversely, denying
artistry to writers who lacked such androgyny (256) is understandable in light of Williams sup-
port in both the play and interviews for the androgynous impulse in writers, I see Hays reading
as extreme. To say that Hemingway and Fitzgerald had elements of homosexuality in them is not
the same as saying they had acted out any homosexual behaviors or even had any overt homo-
sexual desires. Williams certainly does not imply in Clothes that they had a physical homosexual
relationship, nor that only writers with androgynous or homosexual sensibilities are worthwhile. It
is true that the Fitzgerald and Hemingway of Clothes are not always biographically accurate, and
their concerns with androgyny are somewhat exaggerated for the purposes of hypothetical explor-
ation, but Williams was writing fiction a fantastic ghost play, in fact and not autobiography.
And he was certainly not alone in his conjectures regarding Fitzgeralds and Hemingways sexu-
ality, which, by now, have become commonplace. Williams was much more subtle than Truman
Capote, for example, who called Hemingway the greatest old closet queen to ever come down
the pike (in Thomas M. Inge, ed. Truman Capote: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi, 1987),166).
48 J. Gerald Kennedy, Hemingways Gender Trouble, American Literature 63:2 (1991),200.
49 Ibid.,191. 50 Ibid.
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 77
tensions between the activity of writing and the distractions of the writ-
ers personal life and see the life of writing as hard work demanding
enforced loneliness.51
In his carefully argued essay, Kennedy goes on to analyze an unpub-
lished and unfinished fragment from the Hemingway Collection, clearly
drafted for the memoir, to which he assigns a composition date of 1957 or
1958.52 Kennedy argues that the fact that Hemingway discarded this frag-
ment is significant for both A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden in
terms of a focus on androgyny. The married couple in the sketch Hem
and Hadley decide to get identical haircuts and blur the boundaries
of their identities, acknowledging that this would make them bohe-
mian, damned, and savages,53 living outside the boundaries of social
law. At the same time, however, they will become free from social and
sexual constraints, approaching the Edenic happiness suggested by the
title.54 According to Kennedy, Had the sketch been incorporated into A
Moveable Feast, it would have subverted the masculine, heterosexual image
of the young Hemingway, who would have been in no position to mock
the uncertainty of Fitzgerald or the lesbianism of Stein and Toklas.55
Kennedy concludes:
The potentially scandalous manuscript thus betrays both the wish to reg-
ister the allure of androgyny to display that radical fascination with sexual
difference and gendered otherness which infused some of [Hemingways]
best writing and the need to deny that compulsion as an emasculating
perversion. By suppressing the story of Hem and Hadleys androgynous
experiment, Hemingway sought to reinforce the distinction between
A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden, which is to say the difference
between a seemingly controlled, heterosexual sphere of being and an appar-
ently unbounded playground of androgynous desire.56
This unbounded playground of androgynous desire is akin to the
sense of moral and sexual chaos or moral irresponsibility that Collins
attributes to Fitzgeralds depictions of the transgression of gendered and
sexual boundaries, albeit with a somewhat more positive connotation.
While this chaos or excess this playground proves seductive in its
promise of freedom and release, it is this very freedom that is feared as
potentially destructive. Therefore, despite this ambivalence surrounding
instability, for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway androgyny, polysexuality,
51 Ibid., 188189.
52 Ibid., 195. Item 256 in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library.
53 Ibid., 195196. 54 Ibid.,197.
55 Ibid.,199. 56 Ibid.,202.
78 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
and a lack of gender or sexual boundaries are ultimately related not only
to a lapse in morality but also to a sense of waywardness and a lack of
discipline or productivity in their writing. Once again, gender or sexual
instability is linked to the emotional, intellectual, and moral instability
that destroys creative work. Androgyny signifies play while masculinity is
the domain of serious work.57
Williams noted the androgynous overtones in the work of Fitzgerald
and Hemingway, and in Clothes for a Summer Hotel he tries to rescue the
androgynous and the playful, offering his own voice as a champion of
androgyny in a writer. He often stated that an androgynous sensibility was
necessary to the writer and that it enriched rather than thwarted creative
gifts. Referring to his own characters in 1973, he told C. Robert Jennings
I can identify completely with Blanche we are both hysterics with
Alma and even with Stanley, though I did have trouble with some of the
butch characters I can understand the tenderness of women and the
lust and libido of the male Thats why I seek out the androgynous, so
I can get both.58 In 1981 Williams told Dotson Rader: I dont think the
sexuality of writers is all that interesting. It has no effect. I can tell you
that. In very few instances does it have any effect on their ability to por-
tray either sex. I am able to write of men as well as women, and I always
project myself through whichever sex Im writing about.59 Williams him-
self, despite periodic problems with alcohol and drug dependency, depres-
sion, and anxiety throughout his life, never had an issue with productivity
or discipline when it came to writing. He reportedly wrote every day of
his life, and he was highly prolific until his death.
Unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Williams was free from the hetero-
sexual male writers anxieties surrounding masculinity, even as, accord-
ing to Tom Buckley, he was boastful of his masculinity.60 Although
Williams work often does portray the potentially destructive effects of
unbounded sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, in his own life he
was quite happy with his sexual orientation and didnt see his sexuality as
57 For a discussion of hetero-masculine identity politics in the work of Hemingway and Williams, see
Bak, Homo americanus.
58 Williams, Conversations, 228229. While Williams gender stereotyping is somewhat problematic,
his particular views of gender identity are not the core issuehere.
59 Ibid., 348. This statement could be seen as Williams response to critics such as Stanley Kauffmann,
who accused Williams and other homosexual dramatists of not being able to write accurately and
honestly about women and heterosexual relationships (see Introduction).
Ibid.,170.
60
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 79
a destructive distraction from work.61 Yet Williams did not entirely escape
the influence of conventional Christian attitudes regarding sexuality and
often remarked that he was born in [an] Episcopal rectory and grew up
in the shadow of the Church.62 His maternal grandfather, an Episcopal
clergyman, was actually quite supportive of Williams relationships and
sexual orientation, but Williams did recognize his own ambivalence
regarding prescribed codes of sexuality, morality, and behavior. In contrast
to his mothers side of the family, his paternal ancestry boasted pioneers
of the state of Tennessee (one theory as to how he chose his name), and
his father, by Williams account, was an often violent drinker and a gam-
bler who, unfortunately for his puritanical wife, openly enjoyed sex and
carousing. Williams believed that this was the source of that combination
of Puritan and Cavalier strains in [his] blood which may be accountable
for the conflicting impulses he represented in his characters.63
Ultimately, however, Williams said that he was never particularly
embarrassed by public reports of his homosexuality, adding in a 1979
interviewthat
Ive never been a promiscuous person or a person who has used his sex-
ual tastes in a way that I thought was wanton or an exploitation of other
people. I never felt much conscious guilt about it. I think that society has
imposed upon homosexuals a feeling of guilt that makes them somewhat
neurotic, that makes all of us somewhat neurotic. Right now, I dont think
about it too much because, at 68, it is not longer a paramount issue in ones
daily or nightly life.64
While sources such as Williams own sexually frank Memoirs indicate
that he was engaging in revisionist autobiography when he claimed he
was never a promiscuous person, this contradiction is not necessar-
ily problematic. It is important to keep in mind that Williams recollec-
tions were not only unreliable when he said he wasnt promiscuous but
also unreliable when he said he was. He wrote the Memoirs in part for
money and to spark publicity, and so his sexual pursuits are often exag-
gerated. Moreover, the definition of promiscuity is a fluid one that
depends on historical period, religious influences, and prevailing moral
61 For discussions of sexuality and disruption in Williams work, see, for example, Annette J. Saddik,
The (Un)represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williamss Desire and the Black
Masseur and Suddenly Last Summer, Modern Drama 41:3 (1998) and David Savran, Communists,
Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
Williams, Conversations,55. 63 Williams, New Selected Essays,65.
62
64 Williams, Conversations,322.
80 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
standards. From the point of view of the 1970s, a time of sexual freedom
in the United States, it was easy for Williams to deny that he was promis-
cuous. In fact, by Williams account, his sexual awakening came late (he
was a virgin until he was twenty-eight years old), and often the impression
we have of ourselves is formed early and from our purest intentions. And
so, just as Blanche DuBois insisted that she didnt lie in [her] heart,65
Williams ultimately felt he was sexually conservative, despite some of his
actions that may indicate otherwise. In any case, in 1981 he described his
first experience in the gay world as a happy and playful one, an adven-
ture: I didnt think of it as coming out. I thought of it as a new world, a
world in which I seemed to fit for the first time, and where life was full of
adventure that satisfied the libido. I felt comfortable at last. And that was
a happy time.66
Unlike Williams, the character Scott Fitzgerald sets up a clear distinc-
tion between work and play in Clothes for a Summer Hotel. In Act I, Scott
is struggling to work, exclaiming to Zelda that Writing calls for discip-
line! Continual!67 as she keeps interrupting him, trying to discuss her
art, but the wind blows [her] voice away.68 Desperate to control and
contain her, Scott demands that she stop play acting [and] come here!
According to Scott, he is working, she is playing. The first time we hear
Zeldas voice she is engaging in her own creative work, counting off ballet
steps: Un, deux, pliez, un, deux, pliez. Referring to her dance number,
she asks an intern, How shall I play it?69 Zeldas playing is related to
the practice of ballet her most cherished form of creative expression
after she saw herself being denied a literary career, despite the publica-
tion of Save Me the Waltz in 1932. In Clothes, Gerald Murphy reminds
Scott that he made her promise not to publish Save Me the Waltz till
[Scotts] Tender Is the Night had come out, and Scott is unapologetic.70
Later, Scott scolds Zelda once again, and speaks to her as if she were a
child: Zelda, you are interrupting my work! Mustnt do that, thought it
was agreed you wouldnt! Her response What about my work? is
met with a lack of comprehension: Your ?71 Scott is relentless: I do
have to get on with my work. Did you hear me? I must GET ON WITH
MY WORK!72 This construction of Zeldas artistic activities as play in
65 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I (New
York: New Directions, 1971),147.
66 Williams, Conversations,322.
67 Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel,13.
68 Ibid.,12. 69 Ibid., 13,5,7.
70 Ibid.,5. 71 Ibid.,33. 72 Ibid.,34.
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 81
contrast to Scotts insistence on disciplined work dismisses Zeldas cre-
ativity as childish and unimportant, as opposed to Scotts more serious
professional efforts. She is finally reduced to a voyeur rather than a par-
ticipant in creative work, creep[ing] into his room against orders to
admire [Scott] at work.73
Clothes implies that it was not only Zeldas jealousy of Scott, as he and
Hemingway have claimed historically, but also Scotts jealousy of Zeldas
possibly superior talent that tormented him. In the play, Scott tells Sara
Murphy that Zelda is jealous of his work,74 but Dr.Zeller later tells Scott:
Your wifes novel, Save Me the Waltz Im sure you wont mind my say-
ing that there are passages in it that have a lyrical imagery that moves me,
sometimes, more than your own Mr. Fitzgerald, I think you suspect as
well as I know that Zelda has sometimes struck a fire in her work that Im
sorry to say this to you, but I never quite found anything in yours, even
yours, that was equal toit.75
It was actually Williams who felt this way, stating in a 1979 interview that
Zelda has as much talent as her husband did. Its true she was schizo-
phrenic, but, very often schizophrenic people can write beautifully. And
she did write a beautiful book called Save Me the Waltz There are pas-
sages in it that have a brilliancy that Fitzgerald was unequal to.76 While
it is not my intent here to debate the relative merits of Scotts and Zeldas
writing, Williams portrayal of Scott as defensive and threatened by Zeldas
art lays doubt upon Scotts faith in his own work in the play. He is angry
with Zelda, calling her a pathetic creature and blatantly blaming her
for his decline.77 He tells Dr. Zeller that it was he, along with his pub-
lishers, who edited Zeldas book and tried to make it coherent. Their
next exchange is telling with respect to the value Williams places on the
instability that Zelda symbolized:
DR. ZELLER: Im not depreciating your work; I wouldnt think of depreciating
your work, but I stand by my belief that
SCOTT: That none of my desperately well-ordered understood writing is
equal tothe
DR. ZELLER: More desperately somehow controlled in spite ofthe
SCOTT: Madness.
Scott breaks down when he realizes that the disciplined order he felt
was necessary for great writing is surpassed by the prose of his mad,
85 Ibid.,30. Ibid.,31.
86
Ibid.,57.
87
88 Ibid.,64. Ibid.,65.
89 90
Ibid.,66.
84 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
kinds of human relations that Hemingway claimed he must observe as a
serious writer91 contains some inaccuracies, as Williams misremem-
bered Hemingways titles and plots. In the play, Scott tries to recall a
Hemingway short story where An Italian officer [asks] a young orderly
waiting on him, a boy with the sort of androgynous appeal that you said I
had, a provocative question. According to Scott, the officer asks the boy
whether he is engaged, and the boy says he is married.92 The story that
Scott refers to is titled A Simple Enquiry and Williams did not quite
recall the plot accurately. The officer in the story asks the orderly whether
he has ever been in love with a woman, not whether he is engaged. The
boy replies that he is in love with a girl, not that he is married. Hemingway
does not correct Scott in the story, but he then mentions another story that
he says is called Sea Change, which concerns a couple, young man and
older young man, on a ship sailing to Europe and at first the younger
man is shocked, or pretends to be shocked, by the older ones attentions
at night. However the sea change occurs and by the end of the voyage, the
protesting one is more than reconciled to his patrons attentions.93 This
story that the character Hemingway says is called Sea Change is actu-
ally an untitled short story from the author Hemingways Death in the
Afternoon (1932) and it takes place in a Paris hotel, not on a ship. The Sea
Change is a different Hemingway story about a woman who leaves a man
for another woman.94 After the discussion of sexual play in Hemingways
stories, the scene ends with Hemingway exclaiming that he has to stop
this game because its gone soft, cant play it any longer! He tells Scott
that he finally had to blast [his] brains out because his strong, hard
work was finished.95
The material surrounding the relationship between Hemingway and
the Fitzgeralds illustrates that both men saw Zelda as an interference, a
destabilizing force inspiring moral and sexual chaos in contrast to the
masculinized discipline strong, hard work necessary to the life of a
professional writer. As they struggled with their own doubts surrounding
creative talent, the question of masculinity, and the limits of control, they
often blamed Zelda for Scotts professional and personal failures, even as
she was discouraged from pursuing an independent creativity. While the
Act naturally
Embracing the monstrous woman in The Milk
Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated,
and The PronounI
86
Embracing the monstrouswoman 87
plays beginning in the 1960s, women who embrace and use their excesses
to fight for survival, and win, emphatic that When monster meets mon-
ster, one monster must give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BEME.7
In the program for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams eighth annual
Theater Festival, whose theme was 50% Illusion: Tennessee Williams and
Women, David Kaplan writesthat
The assignment of strength to women, not to mention sexual desire or the
pleasure of the chase, in any of his plays, early or late, brought on the accus-
ation that Williams had created unreal monsters: male desires with female
appendages. If a woman strong in desire or strong in any way is mon-
strous, some strong women in Williams [sic] plays are unashamed to pro-
claim themselves monsters, as do the Princess in Sweet Bird of Youth and Flora
Goforth in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore with her griffin flags.8
In plays such as The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated,
and The Pronoun I, the deconstruction of grotesque or mutilated
female identity in terms of the role of the monster is taken even fur-
ther with regard to gender stereotypes. Not only do these plays blur the
distinctions between natural and culturally constructed conceptions of
woman but they also perform female identity, desire, and desir(ability)
as an ongoing negotiation between lack and excess, swinging between
the two poles, embracing the ambiguous, monstrous woman who often
embodies these poles simultaneously. These women are unstable in the
most celebratory sense, and they maintain their power through leading an
unapologetic life that allows room for the complex coexistence of contra-
dictions, defeating those who seek to exploit their instability in order to
take advantage of them and living passionately in the face of death. After
all, Blanche reminds us, the opposite of death is desire.9
7 Ibid., 43. Similarly, Miss Sylvia Sails in Sunburst (c. 1980), a lady of somewhat advanced years who
is in retirement from a long career as an actress (Tennessee Williams, Sunburst, in The Traveling
Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008), 211), foils the
plot of two scheming young men who try to steal her priceless sunburst diamond. She humorously
resists her captors, who try to manipulate and subdue her, by stalling them and reciting excerpts
from Shakespeares plays. We see this sort of triumph of the aging artist throughout the late work,
and with Williams gay male characters as well. Vieux in The Traveling Companion, for example,
stands up to his handsome young companion, demanding (and achieving) dignity and respect. And,
in Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, the aging Southern belle, Louise, waits on the front
portch for her lover, Mr. Merriwether, who has promised to return for her, and he does return.
8 David Kaplan, 50% Illusion: Tennessee Williams and Women, program for the Provincetown
eighth annual Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (2013), 12. See my Introduction for a discussion
of these sorts of accusations by critics that Williams created female characters who were fantastic-
ally consuming monsters.
Williams, Streetcar,120.
9
88 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
In his Authors Notes, Williams describes The Milk Train Doesnt Stop
Here Anymore as an allegory and a sophisticated fairy tale.10 He specifies
that the cast includes a pair of stage assistants that function in a way thats
between the Kabuki Theatre of Japan and the chorus of a Greek Theatre.11
These stage assistants, who explain themselves as a theatrical device of
ancient and oriental origin, begin the play by self-consciously announ-
cing the event that is about to take place, informing the audience that
they will be assisting in the presentation, play, masque, or pageant
of the two final days of Mrs. Goforths existence and raising Flora Sissy
Goforths flag, a golden griffin A mythological monster, half lion, and
half eagle, yet wholly and completely human.12 The play is rife with such
monstrous constructions: wolf-like watchdogs lupos13 that guard Mrs.
Goforths mountain fortress; a sea full of Medusas that sting;14 a Witch
whom Williams describes as a creature out of a sophisticated fairy tale
living on blood transfusions;15 and a cold snapper dish (dentice freddo)
for supper that the Witch refers to as a monster of the deep with a hor-
rid expression on its face.16 Even the sun is an angry old lion.17 While
Mrs. Goforth is described by her secretary, Blackie, as a dying monster
who eats nothing but pills: around the clock,18 her appetites are still very
much alive. Having survived four husbands,19 she remains ravenous in her
desires, declaring that more than all the shots and pills in the pharma-
ceutical kingdom what she needs most is a lover, since the dead are
dead and the living are living!20 Her excess is clear not only in her erotic
desire and life of mad parties that set the record for madness21 but also
in her proclivity for marriage; it seems unclear, however, how many times
she has been married, since she claims that her fourth husband was the
last one22 and that all four husbands are memory now, but a moment
later announces that she has had six.23 Blackie, on the other hand, is in a
liminal state of mourning over her only lover, the husband she lost last
spring, and sees herself as not dead and not living.24 In several respects,
the world of this play, which is set on Mrs. Goforths mountain in Italys
63 Ibid.,88. 64 Ibid.,110.
65 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer,396.
66 Ibid., 414,415. 67 Williams, Milk Train, 72. 68 Ibid.,83.
69 Williams, Streetcar, 279,281. 70 Ibid.,279.
71 Williams, Milk Train,81. 72 Ibid.,91. 73 Ibid.,14.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 93
did. No storm couldve driven you back or changed your course but
sees her vulnerability and lack as well, telling her that shes still a fool if
she doesnt realize that sooner or later she will need someone or some-
thing to mean God to [her].74
Mrs. Goforths cruelty, however, is her protection, rooted in the war-
ring poles of pride and insecurity, as she cannot bear the possibility of
being seen as a desperate old woman taken advantage of by a beatnik
trespasser, a professional house guest with charm75 out to scam a
meal and a place to stay from an easy target. She has had experience with
charming free-loaders, having been besieged by writers that dont write,
painters that dont paint,76 and does not see any romantic liaison with
Chris emerging out of honest, mutual desire or affection but rather from
a more mercenary mentality, even advising him later to not work on the
young ones or anybody attractive. Theyre not ripe to be taken. And not
the old ones either, theyve been taken too often. Work on the middle-
aged drunks, thats who to work on, Chris.77 She therefore wants to make
sure that Chris knows she is aware of his trick[s] if she does in fact yield
out of loneliness or desire, never giving more than she thinks she canget.
The fear of being tricked also emerges in this play as an anxiety sur-
rounding the stability or authenticity of identity. Chris reveals that he has
lost his sense of reality and proposes that one persons reality can seem
like madness or chaos to another when they are too disturbingly dif-
ferent, causing some to hang labels, tags of false identification on people
that disturb their own sense of reality, like the bells that used to hang
on the necks of lepers!78 This notion of false identification is ech-
oed in Mrs. Goforths complaint that she has been plagued by imposters
lately imposters of celebrities, writers, actors, and so forth the false
Truman Capote, the false Mary McCarthy. Their convincing appearances
caused her to be taken in by them, before learning the truth and cast-
ing them into her Oubliette, which she refers to as a medieval institu-
tion that, in her personal opinion, was discarded too soon a dungeon,
where people were put for keeps to be forgotten. The punishment for
collapsing the line between seeming and being is banishment to Mrs.
Goforths little grass shack on the beach, where she puts these imposters
to forget them and thereby forget her vulnerability. Yet, while authenti-
city and the location of a stable self may be impossible to determine with
any certainty, it is not until she is indeed convinced that Chris is not the
79 Ibid.,8182. 80 Ibid.,7. 81
Ibid.,117.
82 Ibid.,101. 83 Ibid.,102. 84
Ibid.,101.
85 Ibid.,105. 86 Ibid.,106. 87
Ibid.,109.
88 Ibid.,110. 89 Ibid.,105.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 95
rings so they wont be stolen, since shes more afraid of being robbed
of her jewelry than her life.90 As a last comforting gesture, Chris helps
her take off the rings, which cut her circulation, and describes her bed as
the catafalque of an Empress.91 He leaves her rings under a pillow like
a Pharaohs breakfast waiting for the Pharaoh to wake up hungry.92 Like
a pharaoh or a vampire in her coffin, Mrs. Goforths hunger lives on after
death, and nothing can kill all that fierce life in her.93
The world premiere of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore was
presented at the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in
Spoleto, Italy, in 1962, directed by Herbert Machiz and with Hermione
Baddeley as Mrs. Goforth, Paul Roebling as Chris, and Mildred Dunnock
as the Witch of Capri. In 1963, the play moved to Broadway with Baddeley,
Roebling, and Dunnock reprising their roles, but it lasted for only ten
previews and sixty-nine performances. A revised version then opened in
Abingdon, Virginia, later in 1963 and received some promising reviews.
They were encouraging enough for Williams to present the play once
again on Broadway in 1964, this time starring Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs.
Goforth, Tab Hunter as Chris, and Ruth Ford as the Witch; this produc-
tion ran for only two previews and five performances.
When I first wrote about Milk Train in The Politics of Reputation,94 I
was not convinced that its allegorical elements worked within the con-
text of the semi-realistic story line and agreed with Williams that, while
he wanted to make [the character of Chris] deliberately ambiguous,
he had made him too ambiguous.95 At the time, I didnt fully appre-
ciate the play, and it was not until years later, when I reconsidered it
in the context of ambiguity and grotesque excess, that I understood its
potential for production, a potential finally realized in the Abrahamse
Meyer production of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore from
Cape Town, South Africa. Their show premiered at the Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in September 2013 and went on to an
award-winning production in South Africa, presented at Artscape (Cape
Towns premiere theatre venue) in October of that year (in English), and
in an Afrikaans translation by Saartjie Botha at the US Woordfees and
Vryfees, also in 2013. This production, directed by Fred Abrahamse with
costumes by Marcel Meyer and starring Meyer as Chris, Jennifer Steyn
as Mrs. Goforth, Nicholas Dallas as Stage Assistant One/the Witch
of Capri, and Roelof Storm as Stage Assistant Two/Blackie, effectively
96 Program of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, Artscape, Cape Town, South Africa
(2013), 6.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 97
yetalways authentic, and the interpenetration of laughter and horror97
came across effectively, a very difficult balance to realize. She was able to
maintain the requisite distance for an allegorical presentation yet sim-
ultaneously inspired sympathy and, at some key points, identification.
Comic lines, such as the assertion that she doesnt trust humans, just
dogs. All except poodles, I never trusted a poodle,98 which could easily
have been overlooked, stood out without seeming forced. Her dazzling
yet bizarrely comic appearance in the kimono scene with the Witch99
and her outrageous costume in the sunbathing scene,100 for example,
were juxtaposed with her more dignified costumes, and this vacillation
between the two poles must somehow be integrated and realized in the
acting in order for the production to evoke the ludicrous-horror101 cen-
tral to the emotional effect of the play, which it did.102 Steyn was able to
describe her process articulately, explaining that the style of acting is in
the music of the text, but working from the real and not being afraid to
shift without explanation.103 The performance, however, went beyond
any linguistic descriptions, transgressing the boundaries of any one par-
ticular style, weaving itself through various approaches to find Williams
voice, and Steyns own, in the music of the text.
David Kaplan has written that Staging Williams The Milk Train Doesnt
Stop Here Anymore has AbrahamseMeyer pursuing Williams vision of
theater past kitchen-sink realism to poetry onstage: a South African fulfill-
ment of an American authors lifework.104 Indeed, Abrahamse and Meyers
interpretation of Williams text effectively supported the goal of access-
ing the poetry onstage. Williams instructs that the two stage assistants
will be sometimes appearing in costume for small parts,105 but the parts of
Blackie, the Witch of Capri, Rudy (a watchman), Giulio, and Simonetta
are apparently separate roles. He writes that the Japanese Kabuki assistants
serve as a theatrical expedient and therefore
Figure3 Roelof Storm, Jennifer Steyn, and Nicholas Dallas in The Milk Train Doesnt
Stop Here Anymore, directed by Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer. Cape
Town, South Africa (2013). Photo by Pat Bromilow-Downing.
102 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
After Mrs. Goforths death, both stage assistants come out of charac-
ter and move to the forestage, along with Chris, who removes his wig
and kimono, sheds his American accent, and becomes a stage assistant
himself. This is not specified in the script, yet it completely supported
the essence of the play, and, in fact, enriched it. In that moment, we see
that Chris too was simply a device in this allegory to help Mrs. Goforth
along her journey, and his moniker as the Angel of Death is even more
apt at that point. Moreover, the revelation of Chris as a stage assistant lent
even more complexity to Meyers gentle and layered interpretation of the
character, which could have been reduced to the con-man Mrs. Goforth
fears he is, but Meyer refused to go there. These choices resulted in a
believable and moving performance, which can be very difficult for this
character to accomplish, particularly in terms of the nonrealistic frame-
work. Abrahamse recalled discussions in rehearsal where the cast consid-
ered the possibility that the two stage assistants were in fact lesser angels
who came to make preparations for the more senior angel, Chris. This
interpretation helped them to make sense of the roles of the stage assist-
ants, particularly in terms of Blackies subservience to Chris, and establish
a hierarchy among the three male players. As far as I know, Abrahamse
is correct in stating that this particular explanation of the role of the
assistants has never been alluded to in the scholarship on the play, and I
found that it did illuminate the roles symbolic construction. The produc-
tion makes this concept apparent at the end, when Chris too removes his
wig and garments and the three men/angels stand stripped of all artifice
before us, the audience, having successfully completed the mission.123
The play therefore ends ritualistically, with the (now three) stage assistants
on the forestage, as the assistant who played Chris drinks from a gob-
let that the assistant who played Blackie passes to him (a gesture speci-
fied in the script). Finally, they refer to the sound of the sea, which is the
name of Chris next mobile Boom! Asked for an explanation, Chris,
like the play, resists any stable definitions, as he recites the final lines: It
says Boom and thats what it means. No translation, no explanation, just
Boom. [He drinks from the goblet and passes it back to her].124
While Milk Train ends with the death of a powerful monster-woman
who simultaneously embodied excess and lack, The Mutilated fragments
the mutilated woman into two characters, who triumph over death
(Jack in Black) through their Christmas reunion at the end of the play.
Celeste and Trinket are a symbiotic pair of friends who have had a falling
123 Discussion with Fred Abrahamse in emails to the author, April 21,2014.
124 Williams, Milk Train,120.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 103
out and must therefore spend the holidays alone. They complement each
other in terms of the negotiation between excess and lack, represented
primarily by their bodies through a classic marker of feminine identity:
breasts. Celeste is a short, plump little woman of fifty with an uncon-
querable spirit and a large bosom of which she is excessively proud, wearing
low-cut dresses by night and day.125 She is embodied excess, both in her
physical appearance and in her hyper-sexual behavior that, however, is no
longer able to attract the attention she craves, no matter how enthusias-
tically she displays her bosom to passersby. Despite her height, everything
about her is big: the pearls around her neck, her giant purse, her person-
ality, even her loud, drunken voice.126 By contrast, Trinket has undergone
a mastectomy, the source of her secret shame, and experiences a pain in
[her] breast127 as a constant reminder of her lack. Trinket appears more
refined and subtle in her sexuality, yet she too craves passion, love, and
companionship; the insecurities she experiences over her mutilation,
however, have led her to go without love for three years.128 When she
does find the possibility of relieving her loneliness for one night with a
drunk sailor, the encounter is, not surprisingly, fraught with violence and
anxiety, and fails to satisfy. While Trinkets mutilation is primarily phys-
ical, Celestes is emotional, but Celeste knows that we all have our mutila-
tions, some from birth, some from long before birth, and some from later
in life, and some stay with us forever;129 none of us are complete. Both
women openly perform their lack, their desires, in a search for some illu-
sion of completion or wholeness, someone or something to mean God
to them.130 And, while they are ultimately unable to fulfill these desires
with any sort of stable or ideal union, they are, however, not afraid to
acknowledge them, and in the end are able to defeat the loneliness of a
solitary Christmas, finding solace in their friendship, however chaotic and
fraught with conflict. Another source (or result) of the womens mutila-
tion is that they are both social outcasts what Williams called his fugi-
tive kind and need each other in order to belong, seeking a public
place where their names are not unknown.131 Even though their reunion
may not provide the necessary completion that would make them whole,
it does serve to temporarily heal their physical and emotional mutilations,
bringing on a Christmas miracle and allowing them to forget death for
a little while.132 For Williams, temporary solace and reprieve is all we can
ever ask for. Death may have been postponed, but it will be back one day;
133 One Arm, in Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 198. This
short story, written in 1945 and published in 1948, about a former boxer who winds up as a street
hustler after the loss of one arm in a car accident, deals with a much more obvious physical mutila-
tion and the psychic fragmentation that results from it. Another story that deals with an attack on
the wholeness of the body (but in a very different manner) is Desire and the Black Masseur, writ-
ten in 1946 and published in 1948. This story is linked to Suddenly Last Summer in terms of cannibal-
ism and a punishment for transgressive sexuality (see Saddik, (Un)Represented Fragmentation).
134 David Savran, Tennessee Williams Institute lecture/discussion, Provincetown Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival (Provincetown, Massachusetts), September 28,2014.
135 See Williams, Collected Poems, 150 for the version of this poem that I quoted at the beginning of
this book, which differs significantly from the version in The Mutilated, quoted below.
136 Williams, The Mutilated, 8182.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 105
The focus here on the temporary, as well as on approximate substitutes for
what is truly needed or desired (particularly in the repetition of nearly
and for a while), sets the tone of this play, another allegorical presen-
tation, play, masque, or pageant137 that deals with the inevitability
of death and the loneliness of the human condition. Williams vision for
the set was that it would appear as delicate as Japanese line drawings so
abstract, so spidery that the audience will accept the nonrealistic style of
the play,138 echoing, albeit on a much smaller scale, the Japanese aesthetic
of Milk Train.
Like Mrs. Goforth, Celeste and Trinket mirror social codes by locating
identity and self-worth in their bodies, in representations of traditional
feminine beauty. Large breasts are a source of pride, while their lack is a
source of shame,139 perhaps even a loss of identity. Trinkets mutilation is
the mastectomy that has destroyed her status as a natural, socially accept-
able woman a trinket or pretty object, albeit one of little value. Yet she
experiences this loss not only via her operation but also through the proc-
esses of time and aging. She even goes so far as to undergo her mastectomy
under an assumed identity, Agnes Jones.140 Knowing this, Celeste gives
the police that same pseudonym when she is arrested for shoplifting141 and
later uses it as her alternate identity for the potential employment that her
brother has set up for her, since hes got kids growing up in the same
city and doesnt want her using his name anymore.142 The name originat-
ing in Trinkets mastectomy therefore becomes a shameful and clandestine
identity attached to social exclusion and shame, and the ugly, cowardly
bitter-old, winter-cold voice of Agnes Jones becomes a demon that
possesses Trinket. She concludes that it is the lack of what [she] need[s]
most, love, that allows that voice to dictate her identity, and yet it is that
very voice that she must exorcize in order to find the miracle of love and
become Trinket Dugan once again. Trying to regain her confidence and
sense of self-worth, Trinket dissociates herself from the name associated
with her mutilation, asserting that she is not Agnes Jones and perform-
ing a ritual of walking around a bench, repeating her name three times in
order to drive her out143 in her quest to become whole.
As in Milk Train, this plays philosophy on the satisfaction of desire is
rooted in an overt system of exchange: love and friendship are for sale,
just more cravings to satisfy in return for something else in this mercenary
Figure4 Mink Stole and Penny Arcade in The Mutilated, directed by Cosmin Chivu.
New York City (2013). Photo by ScottWynn.
Like Milk Train, The Mutilated is a late play that reveals itself most
effectively in production. Theatremanias review of the 2013 New York pro-
duction commented that this lost gem of a play excels in placing those
sublime feelings of loneliness and regret in a musical and vibrant under-
world inhabited by vagrants, whores, and pious queens Director Cosmin
Chivu leads an 18-person cast in fully realizing Williams vision.184 Arcade
and Stole were appropriately excessive and unnatural in their perform-
ances, remaining true to the tragicomic tone of the play by eschewing real-
istic acting styles and maintaining the balance of humor and heartache,
hope and despair, necessary for its ambivalence to come across. Similar
to Lauras recurring tune in The Glass Menagerie the unsettling circus
music that is the lightest, most delicate music in the world and perhaps
the saddest, which still manages to simultaneously express the surface
vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible
sorrow185 this production captured the simultaneous beauty and sadness
of being alive. Even though the specter of death was rightly emphasized
184 Zachary Stewart, The Mutilated: Penny Arcade and Mink Stole Star in This Haunting Revival of
a Lost Tennessee Williams Gem, Theatremania (November 10, 2013).
185 Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,132.
112 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
(the plays reference to the death of a bar patron who died here tonight.
Screamed and fell off that barstool an hour ago186 makes it clear that
death is omnipresent), the tone was still highly humorous and celebratory,
laughter in the face of fear and sorrow. This production opened with the
presence of New Orleans street life onstage with an energy that spilled out
into the theatre. A live band led by the actor/musician who would later
emerge as Jack in Black (Jesse Selengut) played while actors danced and
playfully interacted with each other as the audience waited for the per-
formance to begin. The choice to make the celebratory band leader also
play the emissary of death highlighted the plays binary collapses: in the
Provincetown production Selengut turned around to reveal a large white
skull on the back of his long black coat in a moment that was brilliantly
chilling; the skull was not used in the New York production, yet Jacks
menacing identity was still clear, and the triumph over death just as satis-
fying as he joined the revelry. We were able to laugh at death, and death,
for just this moment, laughed withus.
The heroine who cheats death in The Pronoun I, Mad Queen May a
deceitful reproduction of Queen May of England, Williams fictional
monarch formerly known as Fair Queen May and, later, Good Queen
May is probably the most obviously and aggressively fragmented char-
acter in his oeuvre, as her unstable and ambiguous identity is overtly pro-
nounced through an overlapping of labels and masks.187 This play about
the slipperiness of identity and the overcoming of egoism opens with the
queen on her throne, as her young lover, an indolent and petulantly pretty
youth named Dominique, who is also an enormously vain poet who can-
not begin a poem without the pronoun I,188 sprawls upon cushions at her
feet, with only his genitalia clothed. While Dominique (a unisex French
name suggesting androgyny or sexual ambiguity) is the obvious egotist, he
194 Ibid., 83. The exchange that follows between Dominique and the queen can be seen as Williams
commentary on the narcissism that he himself was accused of by critics who repeatedly declared
his work too personal (see, for example, his 1972 essay Too Personal? in Williams, New Selected
Essays, 165167, where he answers this charge). In the play, the queen refers to critics who find
[Dominique] unduly infatuated with the enormity of personal concern, disregard of all others
on earth. Dominique insists, however, that his narcissism is true, since life commences with
the pronoun I and probably ends with it, too (Williams, The Pronoun I, 84). Later, when the
queen is besieged by the revolutionaries who seek to destroy her, she decides to try and flee, since
our defenders do nothing(85).
195 Ibid.,85. 196 Ibid.,83. 197 Ibid.,85.
198 Ibid.,86. 199 Ibid.,86. 200 Ibid., 8687.
201 Ibid.,86. 202 Ibid.,87.
Embracing the monstrouswoman 115
As a rebellious woman who refused to play by the rules she denied mar-
riages and declined to play the game demanded of her, choosing instead
lovely and gifted young courtiers203 she was no longer considered fair
but rather mad or despised, and had to be hidden away, suffocated by
the multiple labels imposed upon her that created her instability. She was
then required on all public occasions and even most private ones to play
this role. Dominique points out that, as queen, she call[s] herself we
but she insists this is only on public occasions; privately she is I,204 her
fragmented identity only a performance. Despite being a victim of her
own desires hereditary inclinations or defects fueled by arrogance,
pride, and the eroticism that runs riot in [her] veins she insists that
her clever[ness] is entirely [her] own205 and has accepted her desires,
remaining true to them and refusing to pretend.206 Although this choice
has resulted in social rejection and prompted the performance of instabil-
ity that had permitted her to survive only in the shadows, it is finally
the very slipperiness of her public identity that helps her to escape the
mob, allowing her to reveal her most authentic self. It is her fidelity to her
monstrous qualities that saves her, as her true self is fair and grotesque-
ness is discarded as the social role she was forced toplay.
The Pronoun I had its world premiere at the 2007 Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Festival, staring New York-based burlesque per-
formers Julie Atlas Muz as Queen May and James (Tigger!) Ferguson as
Dominique, her young lover and a poet. It was also directed by Muz, with
Jerry Stacy and Jon Pacheco designing the set and costumes and Megan
Tracey designing the lighting. Casting burlesque performers in these roles
highlighted this short pieces playful camp tone, which needs to come
across in order to understand its excess and irony. Muz and Fergusons
awareness of the requisite tone came across well in their acting styles, lead-
ing to a successful realization of Williams sketch of desire and rebellion,
the triumph of the old queen.
The monstrous, unnatural women in these plays challenge the
very notion of what it means to be natural or real in the truest sense,
in much the same way unconventional or anti-realistic dramatic forms
challenge realistic representations of reality. Just as naturalism or realism
as dramatic styles are highly artificial forms that depend on illusion and
appearance for their effect, offering us hegemonic representations of what
117
118 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
The central characters Myrtle, Chicken, and Lot all serve as symbolic
figures rather than representations of complex human beings, and, while
there is a basic plot in the traditional sense, it is not where the strength
of this play lies. Myrtle and Lot, now married, return to Lots childhood
home, where his half-brother Chicken lives and of which Chicken hopes
to take possession, if he can withstand the flood that threatens to destroy
the house along with those who occupy it. As Lot brings Myrtle to his
home for the first time, he insists that she become accustomed to her social
position as the lady of the house. As much as she wants to embrace her
new role, however, Myrtle is not quite comfortable with it, responding that
It dont seem natural to me.6 We eventually learn that Myrtle a loud-
voiced and rather fleshy7 young woman used to be a professional per-
former, the last surviving member of The Four Hot Shots from Mobile,
the other women all having come to rather cruel, violent, and even gro-
tesque ends one womans mutilated corpse was found under a trestle.8
Myrtle has retired from show business but continues to perform parodies
of herself in gaudy outfits that emphasize her sexuality and vitality. Lot,
by contrast, is a frail young man who is obsessed with the memory of his
dead mother, Miss Lottie, as Myrtle tries to affectionately, yet subtlely,
dominate him. Her domination of Lot, however, is not the driving force of
the play, and multiple power struggles operate simultaneously. The overtly
sexual Chicken, who is described as being like a crouched animal, seems a
suitable antagonist to a flooding river9 and, apparently, to Myrtle aswell.
The central struggle for dominance in this play is grounded in the rela-
tionship between Lot and Chicken; yet this struggle is not so much rep-
resented by the simple battle between the two brothers as by the battle
between what they symbolize as emissaries of culture and nature, death
and life, respectively with Myrtle as the virgin/whore who shifts back and
forth between them, caught in the struggle between the cultural and the
natural. Myrtle initially comes on the scene as a maternal figure, protecting
Lot as her husband/child and insisting that she finds his inability to perform
sexually and his refined appearance attractive, superior to a man. She
claims that his impotence touches the deepest chord in [her] nature, which
is the maternal chord and informs him that she is not just [his] wife but
also [his] mother.10 Chicken, the perfect contrast to his invalid brother,11
12 Ibid.,147. 13
Ibid.,155. 14
Ibid.,161.
15 Ibid.,131. Ibid.,175.
16 17
Ibid.,138.
18 Ibid.,129. 19
Ibid.,130. 20
Ibid., 129,184.
120 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Myrtle, at first, denies being disgusted by Chicken, claiming to be
pleased an relieved that he wanted to kiss her.21 Michael R. Schiavi
points out that, in the 1968 version of the script, Myrtle reveals that she
has borne five children whom she, in her destitution, had to sacrifice to
adoptive parents. Five such accidents would suggest further evidence that
she can control neither her bodys receptivity nor its productivity.22 Her
sexuality, like her uncontrollable voice, which Lot attempts to curtail at
various points,23 is characterized as chaotic and beyond repression. Her
appearance is over-the-top, and she presents herself in a sort of grotesque
drag, explaining to Lot that all [her] dresses are made over from cos-
tumes.24 Myrtle tells the brothers that one of her jobs in show business
involved a performance as the headless woman in a carnival: I been the
headless woman in a carnival show. All a fake, done with mirrors! Sat
in a chair and pretended to have no haid, it was done with mirrors!25
In The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, the 1970 film of Kingdom of Earth,
Lynn Redgrave portrays Myrtle as a particularly grotesque carnival figure,
appearing in the bright yellow Mardi Gras gown of Lots mother with a
whitened face and shocking red curls, like a living doll in a sideshow, blur-
ring the boundaries of the artificial and the real. By virtue of her sexuality,
her speech, her outrageous costumes, and her Rubenesque body,26 Myrtle
is simply too much and cannot be contained. She describes herself as a
warm-natured woman whose doctor prescribed her some pills to keep
down the heat of [her] nature, but alas, they had no effect.27 The terrific
attraction between the hysterical Myrtle and the constantly masturbating
Chicken culminates in the fellatio scene suggested between scenes ii and
iii of Act II, with Myrtle crying as Chicken, like Lot before him, calls her
a whore.
After their crude union, however, Myrtle is indeed disgusted by her
relations with Chicken, as she moves her chair back from the table like a
monster was on it.28 Williams stage notes explain that she has the typical
Southern lower-class dread and awe of negroes,29 and so she is apparently
not sure how to process the unnatural (both in terms of the sexual act
21 Ibid.,201.
22 Michael R. Schiavi, Effeminacy in the Kingdom: Tennessee Williams and Stunted Spectatorship,
Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2 (1999), 111112. For more recent criticism of the play, see
Alexander Pettit, The Queer Mockery of High Expectations: Comic Closure and the Texts of
Kingdom of Earth, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 14 (2013).
Williams, Kingdom of Earth,137.
23
24 Ibid.,156. 25 Ibid.,143.
26 Ibid., 127. This is indicated in the plays stage directions, but Redgrave is hardly plump in thefilm.
27 Ibid.,201. 28 Ibid.,205. 29 Ibid.,204.
Grotesque ambiguities 121
and its object) expression of natural desire. She returns to virgin mode
as she asks Chicken not to talk crudely to her. But her cultured (i.e.,
learned) revulsion of Chickens race, which signifies his bestial, natural
sexuality, is discarded as she opts for a life of physical indulgence, priding
herself on noticin an appreciatin a mans appearance. Physical, seeking
salvation in Chickens sexuality and brutal strength as he look[s] like a
man who could hold back the flood of a river!30 Together, they will meet
the forces of nature head on, celebrate the cataclysm, and survive, drink-
ing warm chicken blood to keep them alive. Chicken even asks her to
produce a son for him, a child from an all-white woman, who would
presumably dilute his own ambiguity.31
Lot, however, is the picture of sterile civilization, taking pains to trans-
form himself into the perfect mimetic representation. He carefully bleaches
his hair so that it appears natural, and is very proud of his artistic ability,
learned, of course, from his mother. He spends the play dressing up, first
in his mothers white silk wrapper, posing with her ivory cigarette holder,
then progressing to full drag in a gauzy, white dress, blond wig, and wide
picture hat trimmed with faded flowers in an attempt to recapture his
mothers image.32 Yet, like Chicken, there is something menacing in his
performance, as by Act II his Mona Lisa smile is more sardonic and the
violet shadows about his eyes are deeper.33 This entire play, in fact, is laden
with a menacing tone. At the end, Lots cross-dressing transforms him
into both a mimetic image and a sinister parody of his dead mother, Miss
Lottie. Lots drag incorporation of his mother, a performance that not
only blurs boundaries of gender but also those of life and death, highlights
the excess and ambiguity that is central to the grotesque. Obsessed with
the past and refusing to move forward, Lot, like his Biblical namesakes
wife, looks back and becomes frozen in representation, an object of art
transformed in his own death by the sexless passion of the transvestite.34
Chicken, by contrast, embraces survival in the present and aligns him-
self with the earth, the land, waiting with his home to take on the chaos
of the flood, a natural act of God.35 Here, God is not the spirit cultivated
by organized religion and glorified in the church songs Myrtle can no
longer remember but a force of nature and chaos, more like Sebastians
conception of God in Suddenly Last Summer another play about desire
that cannot be contained and the, perhaps, unnaturally close bond
between a mother and son as he watches the sea turtles being devoured
30 Ibid.,208. Ibid.,214.
31 32
Ibid.,211.
33 Ibid.,177. Ibid.,212.
34 35
Ibid.,200.
122 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
by giant black birds in the Encantadas.36 Chicken chooses reality over
representation, life over art, nature over culture, and a life with Myrtle,
who, although no match for the centerfold on the wall,37 is real, not a
two-dimensional image frozen in time once again, recalling Sebastian,
whose mother Violet insists looks the same in two photographs taken
twenty years apart.38 The struggle between the spiritual gates and the
lustful body39 is resolved, and the body dominates and incorporates the
spirit as the forces of nature become the way to salvation. The mind (the
rational, the logical) is pushed aside, and the spiritbody split, which must
be destroyed in order to celebrate natural life, collapses. Kingdom of Earth
echoes the familiar Lawrencian tension that often appears in Williams
work sexuality is equated with nature and the life force, in a struggle
against the cultured repression that seeks to destroy it. In a note to his
one-act play about D. H. Lawrence, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
(1951), Williams wrotethat
Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex, as the primal life urge, and
was the life-long adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked
away in the cellars of prudery. Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by
tangent obsessions... but all in all his work is probably the greatest modern
monument to the dark roots of creation.40
The celebration and presentation of the dark roots of creation are what
lie at the core of Kingdom of Earth. The last words of the play Up!
Quick! carry a sexual connotation of triumph that serves to completely
drown out the civilized impotence symbolized byLot.
A recent production of Kingdom of Earth, presented by Abrahamse
Meyer Productions from Cape Town, South Africa (the same company
that produced The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in 2013), pre-
miered at the September 2012 Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, and went on to open at Artscape in Cape Town later that
year. This production powerfully captured the spirit of lifes primal urges
and the irrepressible forces of nature and desire that mark this play. While
this Williams play, which takes place in the very particular setting of the
American South, may seem an unlikely choice for South Africans, its prob-
lematic racial stereotypes and the symbolic cultural assumptions associated
Figure5 Nicholas Dallas, Marcel Meyer, and Anthea Thompson in Kingdom of Earth,
directed by Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer. Cape Town, South Africa
(2012). Photo by Pat Bromilow-Downing.
124 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
with them make it an understandable choice for a nation that has strug-
gled with such widely publicized racial issues. As Marcel Meyer, found-
ing producer of AbrahamseMeyer Productions and the actor who played
Chicken, stated for Provincetown Magazine: I think there are so many rea-
sons that this work resonates in South Africa in regards to issues of land
ownership and race It felt like a South African play, but then at times it
felt like an American play. Our countries have a lot in common. We know
the people in this play. We know the issues. We know the pain.41
Directed by Fred Abrahamse, the plays three central characters were
able to work together to achieve the balance that the play needs in order
to succeed. As Myrtle, Anthea Thompson played her role with perfect
comic restraint, bringing out the humor in her character yet never allow-
ing parody to overwhelm the performance. Chicken (Marcel Meyer) and
Lot (Nicholas Dallas) were formidable adversaries struggling for domin-
ation, and, when Myrtles sensual instinct overwhelms her more civi-
lized inclinations, the choice is clear. Both Meyer and Dallas were able
to fully realize their characters while allowing Myrtle to take center stage,
as she moved between them in the battle between nature and culture,
descending further into Chickens world. Meyers portrayal of the socially
marginalized Chicken was performed with pure animal sex appeal; he was
always menacing, yet he was clearly wounded and, at times, even tender,
making him and the life force he represents appear seductive rather than
simply crude or violent. As Lot, Dallas delicate refinement was balanced
by the masculine competitiveness and sinister frustration that informed
his performance at the most desperate moments, a performance that
seemed inspired by Williams short story The Kingdom of Earth (1954),
on which the play is based.
Williams short story differs somewhat from the play in tone and plot
yet still maintains the requisite ambiguity and excess that inform the play.
The story is narrated from the point of view of Chicken, and, while Lot
is still a lustful creature determined on satisfaction,42 he is more aggres-
sively masculine as well. He does not have any problems with his sexual
performance with Myrtle, and in fact spends the story having animalistic
41 In Steve Desroches, From Cape to Cape: South African Theater Company Returns to
Provincetown, Provincetown Magazine 36:24 (2013), 32. Meyer also played Chris in The Milk Train
Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Cape Town, South Africa, in 2013,
a production that I discuss in Chapter4. Additionally, he designed the costumes for both Kingdom
of Earth and Milk Train.
42 Tennessee Williams, The Kingdom of Earth, in Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books,
1985),399.
Grotesque ambiguities 125
sex with her, described by Chicken as panting like two hound-dogs
and grunting together like a pair of pigs in a sty.43 The story also ends
with Chicken and Myrtle getting together; however, Chicken goes on to
explain how they got hitched up that December and are expecting a
baby, which they will name Lot if it turns out to be a boy, in memory of
[his] brother,44 and Lottie if its a girl. Unlike their renegade and rebel-
lious union in the play, Chicken and Myrtles relationship in the story is
socially sanctioned, and they aspire to honor the more civilized side of the
family lineage.
Yet another lustful creature determined on satisfaction can be seen
in the character Nance in A Cavalier for Milady. Like Chickens aggres-
sive lust, Nances desire is characterized as grotesque, but for very different
reasons.45 Played by an actress between twenty-five and thirty,46 Nance is
described as a young woman dressed as a child going to a party in Victorian
costume, and she is treated as if she were a child.47 While she isnt retarded
in the clinical sense, she is obscene,48 and her mother supposes that she
has a morbid derangement that defies diagnosis. She reads adult fiction
and she expresses herself in the language of a refined, grown-up young
lady, except its twisted, depraved, so shocking that Ive stopped taking her
out.49 Yet her mother explains that Nance is simultaneously pure, as she
ignores all language beneath the purity of the dream world she lives in.50
Kept in the house in her nursery51 and locked in the image of a doll-
child, Nances desire oozes outside natural boundaries as she sits with
her eyes bugging out, clinging onto a picture book of Vaslav Nijinsky
and staring at a nude male statue in the hallway while she masturbates
and his sister Rose, who was chastised by her mother for inappropriate expressions of sexual
desire.
50 Ibid.,67. 51 Ibid.,50.
126 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
discretely, her hand in her lap with the fingers movin.52 Her tenuous
grasp on reality is confirmed as the statue transforms for (only) her into
the apparition of Vaslav, who appears for an intimate conversation53 but
rejects her ravenous lips and hungry flesh54 throughout the play, insist-
ing that IT WILL NEVER BE REAL! You can only dream!55
The mother and her friend, Mrs. Aid, both in their sixties, regularly leave
Nance with a sitter while they go on nightly excursions with young male
escorts. Although they are clearly women, they are strange women
shameless.56 Their desire is depicted in terms of a specific stereotype of
gay male desire; they are predatory and pay young men to satisfy them
sexually, even going so far as to have their rendezvous in the Ramble, a
section in Central Park where gay men infamously go cruising, which
adds another layer to their ambiguous drag. Like Nance, their actions
and their desire are portrayed as excessive, inappropriate, and grotesque,
as are their self-images and obsession with youth.57 Mrs. Aid, admiring
herself before going off to meet the gentlemen, pirouettes flirtatiously
before herself in the pier-glass at the opening of the play, prompting the
newly arrived sitter, Miss Josie, to remark that theres something not nat-
ural here.58
Josie sees Nance as a disgusting idiot a creature and insists
that she wont sit with nothing morbid, nothing unnatural.59 Nances
mother finds this attitude limiting,60 canceling out any room for human
ambiguity or expression. Yet Josie is herself grotesque, a stocky, fiftyish-
looking woman who enters glumly61 and is called an old creature62
by Mrs. Aid. Nances hallucinatory indulgences make Josie sick, and
she flatly announces that she is going to the bathroom,63 presumably to
engage in more natural human functions. Disgust for what the charac-
ters consider inhuman or unnatural comes up repeatedly, and the contrast
between that attitude and what Nance sees as natural human desire64
figures strongly throughout the play.65 The conflict between sick desire
and pure spirit66 is central to the grotesque contradiction in Cavalier.
78 Ibid.,75. Ibid.,76.
79
Ibid.,75.
80
81 Ibid.,69. Ibid.,64.
82
Ibid.,72.
83
Grotesque ambiguities 129
pretensions of elegance and decency come across as absurd and contra-
dictory. She repeatedly remarks Shit84 in the presence of Nance and the
women, announces her bathroom visits, and tries too hard to come across
as refined and respectable. And Vaslav, in spite of the closed, classical body
that the statue in the hall implies (the mother informs Josie that the statue
is a classic statue and that classic statues are called nude, not naked85),
sees his body as disproportionate, grotesque. He confesses to Nance that
his beauty was just an illusion:
Actually, I was short. Slant-eyed, my hair receded early. My legs were so
muscular that my upper torso, while hairless and well-formed, seemed
inadequate to them. However, costumes and light and the creations of
Bakst and my passion for my art, and, I must admit it, the possessive care
that Diaghelev gave me till I defected to matrimony and madness, made
me appear to have beauty.86
Vaslavs madness, like Nances, is another aspect of grotesque contradic-
tion, on the boundaries between sane and insane. He is perfectly coherent
but claims that his talk is madness and that the licenses of mad-
ness are almost unlimited87 excessive, incoherent, unbounded. Even
Vaslavs memory of Diaghelev is grotesque: he is disgusted by the sight
of Diaghelevs black hair dye staining the pillowcases, not only a symbol
of impurity the black dye infecting the clean, white sheets but also a
blurring of the real and the artificial, compounded by the instability of the
oozing body transgressing its own boundaries.88
A House Not Meant to Stand, another play haunted by apparitions, is
subtitled A Gothic Comedy, already setting up the coexistence of (possibly)
opposing forces. Williams referred to House as his Spook Sonata in the
tradition of Strindberg89 and calls it my kind of Southern Gothic spook
sonata in the opening stage directions.90 Not only are there actual ghosts
in this play, but even the living are characterized as existing in a twilight
state nothing but the disposition of the living remains.91 Williams
1969 play Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? is similarly engaged
with apparitions and begins with a Voice belonging to a tiresome
old man, apparently the ghost of the playwright, who debates the mer-
its of the play with the characters in the prologue. Throughout the play,
the apparitions of Vincent Van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, and Cornelius
92 Both ghost plays House and Merriwether include a character (or apparition of a character)
named Cornelius, which was the name of Williams father, who died in1957.
93 Tennessee Williams, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),285.
94 In Knight, Too Difficult to Bear,83.
95 Ibid. 96 Ibid.,80.
97 Ibid., 8081.
Grotesque ambiguities 131
human condition inside [The play] is indeed mysterious, grotesque and
desolate but whoever said that theater is none of those things? There is here
the acute compassion Tennessee Williams has always had for the victims of
the world we livein.98
Similarly, Gregory Mosher, who was artistic director of the Goodman
Theatre in Chicago when the finalized script of the play was produced in
1982, describes what he calls its gothic savagery in the foreword to the
published version: Replacing a tone of haunting grace with one of gothic
savagery, [Williams] summoned echoes of The Glass Menagerie, bringing
the absent Mr. Wingfield down from his photo as grinning, tempestuous
monster, and transmogrifying a mothers dreams of gentlemen callers into
hallucinations of missing children. Best of all, he gave this nightmare a
distinctive comic force.99 The comic and the tragic continually shift and
merge in House as the audience negotiates its monstrous conflations.
Keith describes a soliloquy, for example, where Jessie Sykes, senior citizen
and recent plastic-surgery patient, speaks in her frilly pastel negligee to
the audience, rambl[ing] from flirtation to death to agony:
It is a forgivable, understandable sort of deception in a woman with my
sometimes I think almost unnatural attraction to desire for sex with
young men. Spud at the Dock House, he understands the looks I give him
and the large tips, he knows what for expectation! [She lowers her voice
confidingly as she continues speaking to the audience.] He knows my name,
address, and phone number! and so does Mr. Black thats what I call
death Oh, I didnt give it to him, but of course he knows it. Everyones
address is jotted down in his black book, but some for earlier reference
than others. Still, I refuse to take cortisone till the pains past bearing, since
it swells up the face which would undo the pain and expense of all those
lifts at Ochsners.100
The connection between desire and death is a familiar paradigm through-
out Williams work, but what makes Jessies speech interesting is both her
directness and the coexistence of these opposites in the same space, a style
much more characteristic of Williams late work. The object of her desire
Spud at the Dock House is conflated with Mr. Death, and both have
her number. Moreover, Jessies speech is lent a grotesque tone by the per-
sonification of death as Mr. Black (we also see this moniker in Now the
Cats with Jewelled Claws, and with Jack in Black in The Mutilated), the
98 In Keith, Introduction,xvi.
99 Gregory Mosher, Foreword, in Tennessee Williams, A House Not Meant to Stand, ed. Thomas
Keith (New York: New Directions, 2008),xi.
100 In Keith, Introduction, xxvii.
132 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
overt anxiety surrounding her desire as excessive and unnatural, and a
simultaneous and unapologetic disregard for these concerns. While there
may have been a subtle grotesque quality to Blanche DuBois and her
outcry that the opposite [of death] is desire101 or even to Amandas
spectacular appearance as she emerged with her hair in ringlets in her
girlish frock, which she wore several years before when she led the cotil-
lion102 in her youth Jessie is not subtle about her demands, nor is she
girlishly flirtatious or hiding in shadows and avoiding a bare lightbulb to
preserve her illusions. She is quite open about the fifty percent illusion
that makes up her charm103 and has no problem discussing her rejuvina-
tion104 and enhancements such as her new contact lenses, insisting that
she has a right to lie about her age.105 Her entitled embrace of excess and
her acknowledgment of the mask she constructs to defy death (in a speech
delivered in a negligee, no less) are part of what makes her situation so
bizarrely grotesque.
Death, decay, and degeneration are central themes of A House Not Meant
to Stand, set in a crumbling house that also reflects a society in decline, as
the dilapidation of this house is a metaphor for the state of society.106 It opens
with Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, a couple in their late-sixties or early-
seventies,107 returning home from the funeral of their gay son, Chips. Their
daughter, Joanie, has recently been admitted to an insane asylum for a
little nervous break down after a tragically disappointing love affair,108 and
their younger son, Charlie unemployed and broke, once again has,
without their knowledge, come back home and is upstairs having sex with
his pregnant, born-again fiance, Stacey. Confusion sets the overall tone
of the play, and, while Bella is in shock and mourning, drifting between
past and present and merging the identities of her dead and living sons,109
her husband refuses to mourn for a son who indulged in sex confusion110
and disgusting practices, designing womens clothes and playfully dress-
ing in drag.111 Even on the day of his funeral, Cornelius mocks the apparent
mix-up in the class annual that led to Chips being voted the prettiest girl
at Pascagoula High.112 He is primarily concerned with getting his hands on
a large amount of family money Bella has inherited and that is supposed
to be hidden somewhere inside their home. Bella, who seems lost in a fog
of her own, has forgotten the location of the cash and, at times, denies
Williams, House,35.
153
Ibid.,86.
154
Ch apter 6
138
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 139
While the plays that Williams was writing during the 1970s and 1980s
retained many of his earlier concerns with physical and emotional vio-
lence, the predatory nature of human beings, the ravages of time, and
the inevitable struggle to survive and endure, these late works, as I have
discussed, were often much more direct than the early ones, both in con-
tent and in form. He continued to write about the cruelty of the world as
he did in the earlier plays, but he depicted this cruelty more graphically
and literally. Several factors, including a new social permissiveness, made
it possible for Williams to dismiss the subtlety of symbolism and meta-
phor that marked the early plays and instead turn to the outrageous and
the extreme in dealing with intersections of the personal and the political,
to present what he saw as the chaos of a society on the verge of a nervous
breakdown. The shocking excesses and perverse comic elements we see
in Kirche, Kche, Kinder and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le
Monde, for example, as well as the emotional, sexual, and physical vio-
lence in plays such as Green Eyes and The Chalky White Substance, express
the brutality of human nature stripped of cultural artifice. In essence, the
approach of much of Williams late work, particularly during the 1970s
and 1980s, is therefore more directly in-yer-face, anticipating the social
frustrations and stylistic rebellions that would emerge from young British
playwrights during the 1990s.
According to Sierz, in-yer-face theatre thrives on shock value in order
to elicit a visceral reaction and jar audiences out of their complacency,
defamiliarizing the cruelties that we live with everyday. He argues that the
best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under
our skin. In other words, it is experimental, not speculative, in contrast
to the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we
see in detachment.6 Characteristics of the in-yer-face sensibility include
filthy language, nudity and sex onstage, physical and emotional vio-
lence, humiliation and abuse, and the transgression of social taboos. In
terms of content and form, the subject matter is often beyond the scope
of what is considered acceptable material for the theatre (or for public dis-
course). The style is typically anti-realistic and seeks to subvert traditional
dramatic forms. Politically, these young playwrights focus more on the
personal politics born out of their own observations than on more formal
or organized political ideologies. Dominated by British playwrights Sarah
Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Anthony Neilson, it is a theatre that reflects
6
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4.
140 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
the chaos of working-class, post-Thatcher Britain and the young people
who grew up in its wake.7
Influenced, like Williams, by writers such as Artaud and Genet, as well
as by Jacobean theatre, Greek tragedy, and the avant-garde theatre of the
1960s, in-yer-face theatre questions moral norms and affronts the rul-
ing ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more
primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating
discomfort8 and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in order
to question current ideas of what is normal, what it means to be human,
what is natural, or what is real.9 These Generation X playwrights, there-
fore, blatantly eschew in both form and content the conventions of domes-
tic realism what Williams dismissed as superficial, the photographic in
art, favoring instead a closer approach to truth a more penetrating
and vivid expression of things as they are.10 Both Williams late plays and
in-yer-face theatre owe a debt to the work of Artaud, in particular, who
pushed for a theatre of honesty and visceral involvement.11
While it is doubtful that the playwrights involved with in-yer-face
theatre would have known the very late Williams plays that had received
limited productions (or were not produced at all),12 they were certainly
familiar with his classics of the 1940s and 1950s such as A Streetcar Named
Desire, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of
7 Sierz also includes Patrick Marber, Simon Block, Philip Ridley, Jez Butterworth, David Eldridge,
Nick Grosso, Tracy Letts, Martin McDonagh, Phyllis Nagy, Joe Penall, Rebecca Pritchard, Judy
Upton, Naomi Wallace, and Richard Zajdlic among the practitioners of in-yer-face theatre.
8 Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4. 9 Ibid.,5.
Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.
10
11 See Chapter2 for a discussion of Artauds theatre of cruelty in the context of Williams late plays.
12 Kirche, Kche, Kinder was first presented at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York City in
September 1979, where it ran in repertory until January 1980. It was first published in 2008 in the
collection The Traveling Companion and Other Plays. The Chalky White Substance was originally
published in issue 66 of Antaeus in 1991 and received its first production in 1996 by the Running
Sun Theatre Company at Center Stage in New York City, directed by John Uecker (a definitive
version of the play is published in The Traveling Companion). The Remarkable Rooming-House of
Mme. Le Monde was originally published in a limited edition in 1984 by the Albondocani Press
in New York (and in The Traveling Companion in 2008). The probable composition of the play
is 1982. According to George Bixby, publisher of Albondocani Press, in 1982 he requested per-
mission of Williams agent, Luis Sanjuro, to publish a limited edition of the play The Travelling
[sic] Companion, which was written in 1980 and published in Christopher Street magazine in 1981.
Sanjuro conveyed to him Williams feeling that, if Bixby wanted to publish something in a lim-
ited edition, it might as well be something new and previously unpublished. Williams instructed
Sanjuro to send Bixby The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde. It was only first produced
in 2009, at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival (see the Introduction to this book for a
discussion of the premiere). Green Eyes was also published in 2008 (in The Traveling Companion)
and received its first production at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2008, directed
by Jef Hall-Flavin.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 141
Youth, which shocked audiences both at the time they were presented and,
to a lesser extent, for generations to come. In-yer-face playwright Simon
Block cites Williams as an influence for his 1995 play Not a Game for Boys,13
and Philip Ridley, also influenced by Williams, claims a curious connec-
tion with Williams Southern sensibility in spite of the apparent differ-
ences in their cultural backgrounds: Something about the Deep South
of America and Londons East End produce dynamic, strong women and
sexually confused males.14
Williams plays of the 1970s and early 1980s take the exploration of
shocking truths that marked his earlier plays to its logical extreme, embra-
cing the possibilities that came with this eras new freedoms in the thea-
tre.15 Although I am not suggesting that Williams late work in the United
States had a direct or immediate effect on the young British playwrights
who emerged to create the controversial in-yer-face plays, I am arguing
that these late plays were often similar in sensibility to this working-class,
youth-inspired style of theatre that would soon erupt, illustrating that
Williams was still culturally relevant and in touch with the social frustra-
tion and anger that would carry into the next decade and inspire casualties
of the Reagan/Thatcher era to virtual revolt16 in the theatre. Like these
playwrights, Williams saw himself as a social and artistic revolutionary,
one whose politics was born more out of his own observations of human
suffering than on more formal or organized political ideologies, and his
late plays share the spirit and tone of the courageous, rebellious drama on
the fringes that would soon be presented by young British artists. Both
tend to expose the violence and cruelty that are masked by polite, civilized
discourse and organized codes of social behavior in order to challenge
hypocrisy and resensitize us to the daily onslaught of emotional and phys-
ical violence we live with in our personal and social relationships.
Sierz discusses the history of provocation in the theatre that he locates
as beginning with Greek tragedy, with its extreme states of mind: brutal
deaths and terrible suicides, agonizing pain and dreadful suffering, human
sacrifice and cannibalism, rape and incest, mutilations and humiliations,
moving through Jacobean drama and, later, gothic fantasy, melodrama,
Grand Guignol (great punch), and the horror story.17 He sees in-yer-
face theatre as part of this tradition of provocative drama, and, indeed,
18 Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997),18.
19 Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2002),39.
20 Rivire and Wittkop in ibid.,22. 21 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol,38.
22 This quotation is from Gordon, Grand Guignol. Gordon offers this quotation as an epigraph to his
volume.
23 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol,2.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 143
to the Guignol sensibility: The psychological motivation of the Grand
Guignol protagonist/antagonist in the comedies as much as the hor-
ror plays is dictated by the primal instincts, or unpredictable mania,
the plots obsessed with death, sex and insanity and exacerbated or com-
pounded by grotesque coincidence or haunting irony.24 Fear in the Grand
Guignol tradition, therefore, is generated primarily by acknowledging and
embracing an abject world of irrationality and chaos that we must deny
in order to maintain our illusions of security and order. Along these lines,
Williams darkest late plays can be seen as similarly exposing the failure of
rationality he witnessed in the chaos of late twentieth-century culture a
period characterized by war, drastic social upheavals, and political betray-
als marked by a destruction of the very institutions that were supposed
to make us secure.
Viewed within this larger tradition of the history of extreme violence
in the theatre, even Williams most shocking plays seem restrained, drawn
more from the puritanical side of his nature than the aggressive and rebel-
lious cavalier sprit that he often claimed influenced the other side of his
split sensibility. In this respect, while his The Remarkable Rooming-House of
Mme. Le Monde and The Chalky White Substance, for example, do exhibit
elements of the Grand Guignol or in-yer-face plays, they do not come
close to the psychological terror, horror, and direct violence that charac-
terized these popular forms, and hardly deserve to be condemned as too
sick or violent in the context of late twentieth-century theatre.
By 1972 Williams had insisted that he was finished with the long play
form for Broadway and was growing into a more direct form, one that
fits people and societies going a bit mad, going so far as to say that he
wouldnt even mind having a young collaborator now on a thing or two.25
He admitted in 1975 that his work had become darker and that people
find it painful.26 Politically and socially, American society was changing,
and Williams late plays respond to and address these issues. During the
1970s, the Vietnam War had absorbed the United States, which was also
struggling with difficult economic times and tumultuous social revolu-
tions: gay rights, the Womens Liberation Movement, the Black Power and
civil rights movements, as well as race riots throughout major US cities.
While Williams had always resisted positioning himself as an overtly pol-
itical writer, his plays throughout his career do engage the political sphere
in terms of how it can affect the social and personal relations between
human beings, and they demonstrate his awareness of political issues from
Ibid.,x.
24
Williams, Conversations,218.
25 26
Ibid.,287.
144 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
his earliest beginnings. In what have become known as two of his appren-
tice plays, Candles to the Sun (1937) and Not About Nightingales (1938),27
he addressed themes such as the plight of Alabama coal miners and the
inhumane treatment of prisoners in a large American prison during the
summer of 1938.28 In the foreword to the published edition of Candles,
William Jay Smith, who knew Williams at Washington University (they
met in 1935)and attended the play, points out that Reed Hynds, review-
ing Candles to the Sun for the St. Louis Star-Times, contended that it was
certainly not a propaganda play, as some lobby critics had thought, but
rather an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set
out in human and dramatic terms.29 In an interview for the same paper,
Williams explained that the play ends as a tragedy for individuals, for in
the end they realize they cannot achieve success and happiness apart from
the group but must sacrifice for the common good,30 and Smith contends
that the play must be read as a closely unified and carefully developed
metaphor.31 In the opening stage directions to Nightingales, which Hale
calls a very American play in its reflection of the Great Depression of the
thirties, its references to President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal, its
apprehension about Hitler and Mussolini and the approaching threat of
war,32 Williams focuses on the widespread human costs of institutional-
ized inhumanity, remarking that the conditions which the play presents are
those of no particular prison but a composite picture of many.33 Even The
Glass Menagerie begins with Toms monologue on the social background
of the play, commenting on the Revolution in Spain and the political
situation in the United States: In Spain there was Guernica. Here there
were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peace-
ful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis.34
Williams outrage at systematic human injustice seemed to reach its
height later in his career, during the years of the Vietnam War. Once
27 For more commentary on the grotesque elements of Not About Nightingales, see Allean Hales
Editors Note to the published version of the play, where she describes its nightmarish, grotesque
quality, pointing out that its climactic scene was performed center stage, with the circle of prison-
ers writhing on the steel grating of trapdoors, as bursts of hot steam assaulted them, suggesting
the Hell Williams intended, a vision by way of Hieronymus Bosch (in Tennessee Williams, Not
About Nightingales (New York: New Directions, 1998), xxv). See also Chapter1 for a discussion of
Bosch and the grotesque in Williams plays.
28 Williams, Nightingales,1.
29 William Jay Smith, Foreword, in Candles to the Sun, by Tennessee Williams (New York: New
Directions, 2004),xv.
30 In Ibid., xvxvi. 31 Ibid.,xvi.
32 Allean Hale, Introduction: A Call for Justice, in Not About Nightingales, by Tennessee Williams
(New York: New Directions, 1998),xiii.
33 Williams, Nightingales,1. 34 Williams, Menagerie,145.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 145
again, it seemed to be the specific human costs, rather than the larger
political policies, that hit home with him and inspired him to speak out.
In Warring Desires: Sex, Marriage, and the Returning Soldier, Michael
Hooper points outthat
If it is possible to make a distinction between them, Williams was always
more troubled by military aggression than by the political decisions that led
to war and ensured its continuance. In a 1966 interview with Walter Wager,
he observed that the military cruelty burnings and napalm spraying
constituted something incomprehensibly evil and confidently foresaw
that there would be no gains worth the life of a single man.35
In December 1971, Williams spoke against the Vietnam War at the
Remember the War Benefit, held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
in New York City. According to Dotson Rader, Williams was inspired
to speak after being briefed on the statistics of the war, the dead and
wounded, the bomb tonnage, troop numbers, the count of the antiwar
Americans still in jail.36 Accounts of the dead and the wounded on both
sides were too much for Williams to bear, and he wondered by whose
secret schedule this mass slaughter [will] end, this shamefully criminal
war stop?37 In his speech, he called Vietnam an evil, immoral war and
declared that, although he was too old to march anymore, he would
march on paper.38 Similarly, in 1975 he maintained that, while his thing
is revolution, personal and artistic, it is not militant and not under-
ground, since [his] violence is all verbal.39
In Green Eyes, Williams addressed the intimate and ambivalent rela-
tionship between aggression and desire, particularly wars effect on sexu-
ality and human relationships during the Vietnam era. Hooper sees both
Williams 1960 play Period of Adjustment and Green Eyes as addressing the
issue of the returning soldiers rehabilitation during the Korean War and
the Vietnam War, respectively, partly with a sense of moral outrage but
mainly with a view to charting the breakdown of marital relations and
the impact of war on sexual desire.40 In the original manuscript of Green
Eyes, Williams had consistently crossed out the word Vietnam in the
35 Michael S. D. Hooper, Warring Desires: Sex, Marriage, and the Returning Soldier, Tennessee
Williams Annual Review 10 (2009),33.
36 In Dotson Rader, Cry of the Heart: An Intimate Memoir of Tennessee Williams (New York: New
American Library, 1985),107.
37 Ibid.,108. 38 Ibid., 113114. 39 Williams, Memoirs,301.
Hooper, Warring Desires, 31. For a discussion of the interplay between desire and politics in
40
Williams work, see Michael S.D. Hooper, Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire
Over Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which resists recent arguments that
Williams was a fundamentally political writer, pointing out that his disaffected characters tend to
146 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
dialogue, replacing it with the curious term Waakow, which, as I pointed
out in an editors note to the text, seemed to be the characters slang for
Vietnam, probably derived from whacked out or whacko.41 The point
here is that, even though Williams clearly had Vietnam in mind, in choos-
ing to instead locate the war in a mythical place, he seemed to want to
move from the particular to the general, to make a comment about all
wars and their effects rather than on the specific politics of any particular
war just as Not About Nightingales takes place in no particular prison but
a composite picture of many.
In Green Eyes, what begins as rape ends in sexual satiety.42 The play
opens in New Orleans with a young honeymooning couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Claude Dunphy (or Boy and Girl), waking up and arguing over who
will order breakfast. Claude, a soldier on leave,43 demands to know where
his wife got the tooth an claw marks on her body, like shes been t bed
with a wildcat. She claims that it was he who squeezed an bit [her] las
night in [his] sleep and that it was his sex starvation44 that was respon-
sible for her bruises. She had left her husband drinking on Bourbon Street
the night before to go back to the hotel, and when he tells her that he
found a condom in the toilet of their room, she claims it must be his and
that she suspects he forgot to take it off after having sex with a Bourbon
Street stripper. Their conversation shifts seamlessly between his aggressive,
tormented insistence on an explanation for his wifes bruised body and
his aggressive, tormented experiences in Waakow, where he complied
with orders to shoot down screamin wimmen an children;45 domestic
intimacy and war are fused. The Girl, who sees his duty as doing whatever
he was ordered to, a soldier got to do what hes ordered particularly
since those jungle people are animals Lessn human46 dismisses
the anguish he expresses over his actions and calls his patriotism and
revert to glamorized marginalization rather than fight for social change. Hoopers book explores
the interface between desire and the broader politics it often succeeds in stifling and argues that
while the pursuit of desire creates its own power structures, it also diverts, even dismantles, larger
political frameworks, so that Williamss social conscience is lost in stories and plays that probe the
personal rather than the ideological, that reference contemporaneous events but are not fundamen-
tally political(9).
41 Tennessee Williams, Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing, in The Traveling Companion
and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),152.
42 John S. Bak, A Streetcar Named Dies Irae: Tennessee Williams and the Semiotics of Rape,
Tennessee Williams Annual Review 10 (2009),59.
43 The soldier who is about to get sent to Vietnam in Gerome Ragni and James Rados hit play Hair,
which ran on Broadway from April 1968 to July 1972, is also named Claude. It is unlikely that this
was a coincidence, given the timeline of Green Eyes, which was sent to Williams publisher, New
Directions, by Audrey Wood at International Creative Management on September 17,1971.
44 Williams, Green Eyes, 151,152. 45 Ibid.,155. 46 Ibid.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 147
masculinity into question, warning him not to lose her respeck.47 Their
argument over whether she could have carried out such orders herself slides
into the present argument over ordering breakfast, as the word ordered
becomes layered with double meaning, sliding from his past traumatic
experiences to their present mundane argument:
BOY: Could you have doneit?
GI RL: If ordered.
BOY: Then you go back to Waakow in five days, you take my place there!
SayI
GI RL: I would if ordered.
BOY: You know you wont be ordered. Git back inbed.
GI RL: Not with breakfas ordered, waitll tnight.
BOY: Come away from that window with your back to me like you hated t
seeme.48
Not only are war orders and breakfast orders conflated but Claude now
gives his wife orders to get back into bed with him. Even as he sus-
pects her of infidelity the night before and demands an explanation, he
tries to make love to [her] advances she rejects as rough and awk-
ward: Feelin me like a melon t see if Im ripe is not makin love tme,
Claude.49
After he informs her, however, that he will be sending his army paycheck
to his mother, not to her, she offers to tell him the truth about las night,
claiming that she done it five times with a man who caught hold of [her]
wrist, drug [her] between two buildings, and befo [she] could holler put
his hands on her, which she enjoyed it was too late to holler after that
and they had sex in the alley.50 They both wanted more, and she goes on to
describe a night of passionate, animalistic sex in her honeymoon bed with
this sailor who had enawmus green eyes,51 an obvious reference to his sex-
ual potency. Claudes reaction is that people with green eyes have nigguh
blood in em and are therefore racially ambiguous, as he dismisses this
man as a nigguh riddled with disease, but the Girl calls him clean as
the sea.52 Language is blatantly overdetermined, as blackness becomes a
signifier of both burning desire and racial otherness, and Claude marks his
wife as infected with blackness. Her claim that her lover had burned the
room runnin in like it caught fire. I tell you its a wonder Im not burned
black! is followed by Claudes attack that a whore fucked by a nigger is
Williams, House,48.
60
61 Philip C. Kolin, The Existential Nightmare in Tennessee Williamss The Chalky White Substance,
Notes on Contemporary Literature 23 (January 1993),9.
150 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
shrinking population a man will use a woman a while and then, when
shes no longer desirable to him, not as she was before, hes likely to des-
troy her.62 The play ends with Mark finally dragging Luke, futilely strug-
gling, across the stage to turn him in to be locked up confined til long
out-used, to the end of [his] time. Even Lukes pleas to have mercy and
just kill [him] are rejected, since Mark will not sacrifice the reward.63
It is with The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, however
the play Williams called his Guignol that Williams succeeded in
affront[ing] the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage,64
thereby revealing a more primitive, bestial side of human nature. It is rele-
vant that this is Williams only published play to be set in England,65 as
Rooming-Houses mock-Englishness takes advantage of a culture that (at
least through American eyes) values socially proper, civilized behavior
that is often expressed in a careful, self-diminishing manner. The play
smashes this polite faade and uncovers an extreme self-regard marked
by the human quest for power, embracing a sense of cruelty, manipula-
tion, control, and the fight for sexual domination beneath social repres-
sion. The power games in Rooming-House play with the notion of what it
means to be human when all taboos and boundaries have been removed.
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, like in-yer-face thea-
tre, draws on Artauds philosophical concept of a theatre free from social
taboo to access the truth of what lies beyond the civilized surface of human
interaction.
As I discussed in Chapter 2, Artaud likens the theatre to an urban
plague, an extreme situation that breaks through civilized repression to
reveal a more honest and primal human reaction. Once the plague is
established in a city, Artaud writes, the regular forms collapse66 and the
dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed,
62 Tennessee Williams, The Chalky White Substance, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed.
Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008).
63 Ibid., 1112. The Chalky White Substance was revived in 2007, directed by David Kaplan at the
New Orleans/Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. It starred Ben Greissmeyer (now known as Ben
Berry) and Jeremy Lawrence, and was presented with another Williams two-hander, The Traveling
Companion, using the same actors, a pairing that highlighted the familiar Williams theme of
opportunism and greed revealing themselves as part of the power dynamics of intimate relation-
ships. This production was also presented later that year at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival, with Zachary Clause replacing Ben Greissmeyer.
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4.
64
65 The Pronoun I focuses on Mad Queen May and also apparently takes place in England, but the
play is so absurdist, and Queen May so obviously a fiction, that the setting is inconsequential.
66 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,23.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 151
enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no pur-
pose or profit.67 For Artaud, this irrational explosion of human will is
emblematic of the theatre, in the sense that theatre is an immediate gra-
tuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.68 Yet, rather than attack-
ing bodies, the theatre attacks social customs. Excess and exaggeration are
needed in order to free us from the old forms, as there must be absolute
freedom in revolt: In the true theater a play disturbs the senses repose,
frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which
moreover can have its full effect only if it remains virtual) and imposes on
the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic.69
Like the human spectacle that occurs in reaction to the plague, the theatre
releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these
possibilities are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but
of life. Rather than seeing this darkness as negative, Artaud insists that
it is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes
the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, the baseness, and hypoc-
risy of our world.70 For Artaud, incest, rape, physical violence, emotional
cruelty, and the quest for power are all part of the primal reality that is
revealed when the mask fallsaway.
Along these lines, Rooming-House exhibits a desperate self-concern and
a cruelty, evident in physical and emotional violence as well as in the with-
holding of comfort and sustenance. The deliberate cruelty that Blanche
DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire insisted was unforgivable71 is taken
to an extreme in Rooming-House. The rooming houses landlady, Mme.
Le Monde who is described as a large and rather globular woman with
a fiery red mop of hair that suggests a nuclear explosion, as does her voice72
distributes meager rations for Mints consumption, and eventually these
too disappear as their visitor, Hall, greedily devours the tea and biscuits
without regard for Mints suffering, even as Mint begs him to have pity
on a broken and desperate soul, subsisting on diminishing bits of char-
ities.73 Mint is used for violent sexual gratification throughout the play:
raped, neglected, mocked, and starved. Denying Mints request for the
lubricant that would make an assault endurable, even pleasurable, his
assailant Mme. Le Mondes son instead announces that he will be
using astringent, causing Mint to cr[y] out in terror.74 Yet, as in Green
75 Philip C. Kolin, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde: Tennessee Williamss Little
Shop of Comic Horrors, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 4 (2001),41.
76 Williams, Rooming-House,95. 77 Ibid.,96. 78 Ibid.,97.
79 Ibid., 99,95. 80 Ibid.,93. 81 Ibid.,101. 82 Ibid.,99.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 153
and dishonesty of politeness and propriety in general. Moreover, this
juxtaposition of cruel violence and polite expression engages the sick
humor, humor too diseased to allow for easy reconciliation that marks
the grotesque.83 Halls shift from offensive, cruel remarks presented
in a matter-of-fact manner to casual observations about the weather
made through broken spectacles to requests to borrow money from
the present object of his cruelty is performed without transition or
differentiation:
[He munches a biscuit.] At Scrotum-on-Swansea you were a notorious fag
and bed-wetter but reasonably mobile. Now you can get about only by
swinging from hook to hook, like that historical ape-man swinging from
branch to branch in the jungle. [He puts on broken spectacles to look about.]
Twilight descending with intemperate weather. [He picks a crumb or two
off the floor and pops them into his mouth.] Havent had time to stop by my
bank today. Can you spare me a couple of quid?84
His shocking lack of awareness is both disturbing and funny in a sick
sort of way, creating a dizzying disorientation, a response that leaves spec-
tators in an ambivalent emotional space.
The theme of fundamental human selfishness and the predatory aspect
of human nature that appeared in Williams plays such as Suddenly Last
Summer, The Gndiges Frulein, and Kingdom of Earth, for example, is
intrinsic to Rooming-House. Natural law dominates and the characters are
reduced to their bestial origins, as Mint can now get about only by swing-
ing from hook to hook, like that historical ape-man swinging from branch
to branch in the jungle. At one point, Hall insists that Mint had groped
his genitals without realizing it, perhaps by allowing his unconscious
impulse to over[come] propriety for a second.85 At the end of the play,
Mme. Le Monde murders Mint, Hall, and even her son, claiming that
he is expendable and replaceable: I am constantly reproducing drones
such as that one.86 Human life has no value, and individuality no longer
matters. The taboos of incest, homosexuality, rape, pedophilia, murder,
and the parentchild bond are all carelessly done away with in this play.
Halls story of a child murdering his parents with tools that ranged from
hacksaw to meat grinder is relayed with a matter-of-factness that assumes
cruelty and accepts the cycle of life: Well, what of it? Obviously suffered
child abuse in his youth: finally evened it out.87
88 Ibid.,105. 89 Ibid.,104.
90 I want to thank my doctoral students in our Spring 2013The Grotesque in Theatre course at the
CUNY Graduate Center Program in Theatre for these insights.
91 Williams, Rooming-House,103. 92 Ibid.,105.
93 Kolin, Little Shop of Comic Horrors,42.
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 155
as rooted in the theatrical tradition of grotesco criollo of the late 1920s
and early 1930s, and argues that this traditions tragicomic presentation
degraded the pretentiousness of the foundational myths of the social
system by depicting the degradation of the individual.94 Gambaro, she
writes, carries over techniques and patterns from this tradition into her
novels as well as into her plays. Some of them are the failure of the gro-
tesque protagonist, the inability to control ones own body, the breakdown
of language as communicative device, and the use of animal imagery to
describe human beings.95 Zandstra cites Francine Masiellos discussion
of Argentine narrative works that opposed the dictatorship during the
Military Process of National Reorganization of 19761983, pointing out
that, in these texts, the body takes center stage to speak the truth regard-
ing its own oppression.96 Similarly, the broken body of Mint that his-
torical ape-man and morphodite gimp97 who is dependent on Hall to
place him back on his hooks in order to have even the most rudimentary
mobility is starved, carried off repeatedly to be raped, and finally thrown
onto his cot which flattens to floor, where he evidences no sign of sur-
vival.98 While Mint must perversely depend on the kindness of stran-
gers who instead torture him, his body becomes a metaphorical site on
which the chaos of political, social, and interpersonal situations that are
outside our control operate. This lack of control over ones body culmi-
nates in the sexual incontinence that permeates the play incest abounds
in Mme. Le Mondes relations with her son; Mint was never blessed with
a particularly strong nature to resist the lustful advances;99 Hall refuses
control and ejaculates when and where he pleases; and Mme. Le Mondes
son the Boy is equated with an out-of-control phallus, at the mercy of
his own rapacious desires.
Even though the playwrights who launched what came to be called
in-yer-face theatre most likely had Williams classics of the 1940s and
1950s in mind as influences, plays such as Rooming-House and Green Eyes
as well as several of his other plays of the 1970s and 1980s went far beyond
what he was able to depict on the stage thirty years before. They there-
fore have the most in common with these British plays of the 1990s. Sierz
writes that the early sixties saw the first steps in the emergence of a truly
94 Dianne M. Zandstra, Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque (Cranbury, NJ:
Bucknell University Press, 2007), 1516.
95 Ibid.,16. 96 Ibid.,15.
Williams, Rooming-House, 95,103.
97
98 Ibid.,104. 99 Ibid.,101.
156 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
confrontational theatre in Britain,100 and in 1968 censorship laws were
repealed in both the United States and Britain, providing opportunities
for playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic to write, as Williams put
it, more honestly about life.101 One difference between Rooming-House
and in-yer-face theatre, however, is that the perverse sexual act[s] in
Williams play occur behind the semi-transparent curtains, provided as
a retreat for certain occasions that require privacy.102 In-yer-face theatre
rejects the very concept of privacy, exposing most of the graphic violence
and perverse sexual acts onstage in front of the audience, taking Artauds
notion of excess in the theatre that which is too much to a new level,
as the violence that was only referred to or partially hidden in Rooming-
House is, in most cases, actually depicted in front of us on the stage.
While this chapter would not accommodate an in-depth analysis of the
major works of in-yer-face theatre at this point, one illustrative play does
merit some consideration in relation to Williams late works. When the
enfant terrible of in-yer-face theatre, Sarah Kane, had her first play, Blasted,
produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995, she endured extra-
ordinary public controversy.103 The play was first performed in the United
States at Harvards Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in
April 2008, and the New York premiere opened in October of that year
at the Soho Rep Theatre, directed by Sarah Benson and staring Marin
Ireland, Reed Birney, and Louis Cancelmi. Masturbation, rape, defeca-
tion, fellatio, racism, sexism, homophobia, and foul language are only the
beginning of the list of what makes this play shocking and uncomfortable,
both on the page and, even more so, in performance. In the course of the
one hour and fifty minutes of action (no intermission), a baby is eaten,
eyes are gouged out, a woman is raped in a blackout scene, and a man is
sodomized onstage. Sex is a power game, one of violence and domination.
Written as a comment on the war in Bosnia, Kanes play draws parallels
between personal aggression and the more widespread aggressions ofwar.
The plot is absurd and extreme, in keeping with Kanes sense that the
form and content attempt to be one. The form is the meaning. She sees
the play as experiential rather than speculative,104 putting the audience
in the second half of the play through the experience it had previously
only witnessed in the first half. Blasted opens in a very expensive hotel
105 Sarah Kane, Blasted, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001),3.
106 Ibid.,3.
107 The violence of Cates rape is not depicted onstage. See Kim Solga, Blasteds Hysteria: Rape,
Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible, Modern Drama 50:3 (2007) for an insightful discus-
sion of Cates unstaged rape through a feministlens.
108 Kane, Blasted, 39,24. 109 Ibid.,39.
110 Ibid.,45. 111 Ibid.,25.
158 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
before she abandoned the idea of a trilogy.112 The symbolic function of
water in Blasted can be contrasted with its role in the devastated landscape
of The Chalky White Substance, where water is severely restricted by the
authorities and Luke bathes in an illegal, subterranean stream in order
to keep his skin clean and soft for Marks pleasure. It is this information
that Mark uses to betray Luke and turn him in to the authorities for a
reward, as water becomes the catalyst for punishment rather than redemp-
tion. Similarly, in Rooming-House the rumble of thunder and sounds of
gusty rain sweeping the attic roof at the beginning113 serve as a sinister,
almost Gothic, commentary. The rain bridges the two instances of Mints
suffering that open the play, as it comes right after the Boy rapes Mint and
is followed by the entrance of Hall, Mints new tormentor. And Kingdom
of Earth, of course, is driven by the destruction of the coming flood.
During scene iii of Blasted, the violence that had previously been sug-
gested on a smaller scale finally explodes onstage. The hotel has been blasted
by a mortar bomb and there is a large hole in one of the walls, and everything
is covered in dust which is still falling.114 As in The Chalky White Substance,
suffocating dust has replaced refreshing water. The violence escalates as the
soldier rapes Ian onstage, sucks out his eyes, eats them, and then shoots
himself dead, ending scene iii. In scene iv, Cate returns, carrying a baby and
announcing that Soldiers have taken over and Everyone in town is cry-
ing.115 By scene v, the baby has died, and Cate leaves to go trade sex with
the soldiers for food in her focus on survival. During this final episode, the
plays excesses are evident in both the language and the action. Ian mastur-
bates, defecates, and eats the dead baby, as he performs his climactic solio-
quy: cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.116
Like Mark and Luke in Chalky White, the characters in Blasted strug-
gle to survive amid the debris of a postapocalyptic landscape. Images of
apocalyptic explosion mark Rooming-House as well. Mme. Le Monde, as I
pointed out earlier, is described as a large and rather globular woman with
a fiery red mop of hair that suggests a nuclear explosion, as does her voice,117
and Kolin argues that she is the larger world, intimately betrothed to
the flesh and the devil in Williamss (sometimes comic) apocalyptic cos-
mography.118 While Blasted is a 1990s response to the war in Bosnia, the
sexual violence in Green Eyes is tied to the violence of the Vietnam War,
I made my agent laugh, a few weeks ago, when I told her that the
career of a writer was shorter and more hazardous than that of a trap-
eze performer who works without the net beneath him, and at the
top of the tent. I laughed, too. We both laughed. There are some very
serious matters at which the only thing to do is laugh.
Tennessee Williams, excerpt from the Columbia University
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, c.19601
Everyone expects me to write another Streetcar. I dont want to, even
if I could.
Tennessee Williams,19812
I need somebody to laugh with.
Tennessee Williams, Memoirs,19753
1 I am in debt to Jeremy Lawrence and John S. Bak for bringing this quotation to my attention and
locating its source at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Bak dates the
quotation circa 1960 (in an email to the author, May 3, 2014).
2 In Rader, Cry of the Heart,257. 3 Williams, Memoirs,304.
161
162 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
succeed when their subversive politics of excess, ambiguity, and laughter
is embraced and celebrated. Despite a continuity in his development as an
artist, the experience of Williams late plays is very different from that of
the early ones, not only in terms of their anti-realistic emphasis but also
in one other important respect: While Williams early plays come across
well when read, many of the late plays can only be fully appreciated when
given informed and imaginative productions that fully realize their the-
atrical potential and capture the subtleties that operate beyond language.
In Streetcar, for example, the power lies primarily in the language, charac-
ters, and plot. In the late works, as Ive argued, this is often not the case,
and the spectacle has to be managed carefully in order to negotiate the
plays excesses. The late plays therefore need to be approached differently
in order to reveal what can be determined only on the stage.4 Dotson
Rader recounted that, in Williams later years, he told Rader: I used to
write symphonies. Now I write chamber music, smaller plays. Everyone
expects me to write another Streetcar. I dont want to, even if I could.5
Williams was, however, trapped in his own ambivalence. On the one
hand, he was not afraid to confront life and go to extremes in his art,
experimenting with new forms and breaking socially constructed taboos
in favor of accessing a truth beyond convention that provided an hon-
est glimpse at what it really means to be human and to live in the world,
in all its ambiguity, uncertainty, horror, and joy. On the other hand, he
was deeply affected by how his work was received, and took to heart the
attacks on him and his work in the press, needing approval, or at least
understanding. We know that he wrote and rewrote his plays multiple
times, even after they had been performed and published, as he strove
for clarity and completion in what Jessica Knight sees as a madness for
control.6 And, thinking he could control his reputation and the recep-
tion of his work, he wrote letters responding to his critics throughout his
career, pointing out their lack of comprehension and even defending his
honor when accused of not being truthful in his art. As John Bak writes
in A Broken Romance: Tennessee Williams and Americas Mid-century
Theatre Culture: If you were looking to pick a fight with Williams, all
you had to do was call him a liar.7 Never one to back down from a fight,8
4 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,46. 5 In Rader, Cry of the Heart,257.
Knight, Too Difficult to Bear,81.
6
John S. Bak, A Broken Romance: Tennessee Williams and Americas Mid-century Theatre Culture,
7
in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (London: Methuen, 2014), 222. See this illuminating essay for
Williams responses to his critics.
See Rader, Cry of the Heart, where Rader recalls Williams standing up to assailants in Key West and
8
declaring, My name is Tennessee Williams! and I am not in the habit of retreat! (193194).
Conclusion: the only thing to do is laugh 163
Williams responses to his critics demonstrate how [he] was not going to
sit idly by and watch his reputation getting destroyed.9
But, whether or not he was always successful in communicating his
vision, there is no doubt that Williams was engaged with his work and
its relationship to the world around him. He was not the played out,
self-obsessed, Southern relic that the press tried to suggest he was from
the 1960s to the end of his life. Nor could he be dismissed as a drunk
and sick old queen, a sad victim of his own personal excesses, who was
employing gratuitous shock value and violence in his later plays because
his talent had failed him, as some of his most hostile reviewers claimed.
His work was rooted in a theoretical and theatrical tradition of excess,
and he remained in touch with current styles of theatre and the work
of young playwrights, taking risks to experiment with tone and style in
his work and paying the price for these risks when his vision was misun-
derstood, dismissed, and attacked. As Bak aptly points out, If Williams
made one great mistake late in his career, it was not in altering his theatres
direction; it was in assuming that American audiences and theatre critics
would grant him the right to evolve.10 Not content to rest on his laurels,
Williams fought for the right to change, to experiment, and to develop
as an artist. He was aware, he was current, he was brave. And, despite his
ambivalent views of humanity and growing anxieties about the state of
the world in which he lived, as well as his own personal struggles, he was
a survivor. Never abandoning his lifelong habit of waking up at five every
morning to write, he was in-yer-face and not going away. When he died
at the age of seventy-one, Tennessee Williams was young.
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New Directions,1972.
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New Directions,2008.
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Directions,1992.
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Other Plays. Ed. Annette J. Saddik. New York: New Directions,2008.
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Editions,2005.
Zandstra, Dianne M. Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque.
Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press,2007.
Index
173
174 Index
camp (cont.) Coward, Nol98
Kirche, Kche, Kinder3738 Crandell, George3
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws59 creativity and productivity 6869, 7071, 78,81
Pronoun I, The115 cruelty seeRemarkable Rooming-House of Mme.
Cancelmi, Louis156 Le Monde, The; theatre of cruelty
Candles to the Sun (Williams)144 culture vs. nature 45, 5051,6263
cannibalism 9, 104n.133 Kingdom of Earth118
Capote, Truman 76n.47 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws59
letter to56
carnivalesque 5, 10, 17, 18, 28,161 Dallas, Nicholas 95, 9899, 101111f.3, 124,
Rose Tattoo, The 37n.77 123f. 5
Cassidy, Claudia 72, 130131 Day After, The (TV movie) (Hume and
castration, Sweet Bird of Youth910 Meyer)149
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 4546n.15 Day on Which a Man Dies, The (play)
and homosexuality9 (Williams)3
Cavalier for Milady, A (Williams) 9, 64, 117, death
125129,137 and desire 100, 131132
Miss Josie 126127, 128129 seealsoMutilated, The, Jack inBlack
Mother 125128 decay 2930, 64, 100,132
Mrs. Aid 126128 House Not Meant to Stand,A132
Nance 125128,137 Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The 92,
premier 125n. 45 94, 96,100
Vaslav Nijinsky 117, 125126, 127128 social 40,149
Cenci, The (Artaud) 46,56 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom2930
censorship9 de Jongh, Nicholas3
Chalky White Substance, The (Williams) 1617, Derrida, Jacques45
149150,158 Desire and the Black Masseur (Williams)
and Grand Guignol143 104n. 133,152
and in-yer-face theatre 1920,139 Devlin, AlbertJ.3
Luke 149150,158 Diamond, Elin 51,54
Mark 149150,158 Dorff, Linda 1n. 4, 2, 3, 4, 10, 32, 37, 49,5556
redemption160 drug abuse seealcohol/drugabuse
Chamberlain, Travis 148149 Dukakis, Olympia98
chaos19 du Maurier, George1
Chivu, Cosmin 65n. 5, 110,111 Dunnock, Mildred 95,98
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (Williams) 19, 23,
64,6585 Endgame (Beckett)34
Cassidy review72 England150
Dr. Zeller8182 exaggeration 19,44
opening7172 excess 161163
Scott Fitzgerald 19, 64,8085 personal 12,40
Zelda Fitzgerald 19,8085 theatre of56
Clum, John3 seealsogrotesque
Clurman, Harold3233 Existential Nightmare in Tennessee Williamss
cocaloony birds 3234, 47, 4849, 52,53 The Chalky White Substance (Kolin)3
Coen, Larry9f.1 expressionism 22,23
Cohn, Ruby34 German 5, 22, 23, 3839,40
Collins, Angus P. 68,73
color schemes 34, 39, 100,133 fantasy
Communists, Cowboys, and Queers (Savran)2 and Night of the Iguana, The2232
Confronting the Late Plays of Tennessee Williams on 37n.77
Williams (Hale)4 Female Grotesque, The (Russo)28
Connor, Steven52 femininity
Conversations with Tennessee Williams3 Clothes for a Summer Hotel 19, 6869,7071
Couperthwaite, Adam148 and homosexuality7475
Index 175
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The19 and Germans as sinister 18,3234
Mutilated, The 19,110 Guareon10
Pronoun I, The19 Indian Joe5152
Tender Is the Night7374 Molly 34, 4749, 5051, 53,5455
Ferguson, James (Tigger!)115 Nadel review16
Fitzgerald, Scott 6585 Polly 34, 4749, 5053,54
seealsounder Clothes for a SummerHotel seealsoSlapstick Tragedy
Fitzgerald, Zelda 6585 Goldhurst, William7475
seealsounder Clothes for a SummerHotel Gordon, Mel142
Ford, Ruth95,98 Gothic, term 130131
Foucault, Michel69 Gottfried, Martin15
Freeman, Lucy20 Grand Guignol 1617, 142143
Freud, Sigmund 64, 6869, 74,128 Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing
friendship 105106 (Williams) 19, 139, 140n. 12, 145149
Frosted Glass Coffin, The (Williams)1,54 Girl and Boy/Claude Dunphy 146148
Mr. Kelsey54 premier 148149
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homosexuality and redemption160
the Genesis of Tender is the Night Gross, Robert4
(Collins)73 grotesco criollo155
Fugitive Kind (Williams)47 grotesque 5, 712, 17,161
fugitive women 103, 109110 and feminine identity19
and German Romanticism 18, 2832
Gambaro, Griselda 154155 seealsoCavalier for Milady, A; Germans;
Garden of Earthly Delights, The (painting) House Not Meant to Stand, A; Mutilated,
(Bosch)25 The; Remarkable Rooming-House of
Garden of Eden, The (Hemingway)7577 Mme. Le Monde, The; Suddenly Last
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais)27 Summer
Genet, Jean 43,4647 Grotesque as a Comic Genre, The
Germans41 (Barasch)136137
in Gndiges Frulein, The 18,3234 Guare, John 10,2021
in Kirche, Kche, Kinder 18,3640 Guernica (Picasso)54
in Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A 18,3536
in Night of the Iguana, The 18, 2428,30 Haigh, Kenneth72
Gert, Valeska 3334n.65 Hair (Ragni and Rado) 146n. 43
gesture Hale, Allean 2, 3, 4,144
and language 45, 5255, 61,62 Hall-Flavin, Jef148
ghost plays seeCavalier for Milady, A; Clothes Hand, Richard J. 142143
for a Summer Hotel; House Not Harpham, Geoffrey1011
Meant to Stand, A; Something Cloudy, Harrison, Jordan9f.1
Something Clear; Steps Must Be Gentle; Hays, Peter L. 76n.47
Vieux Carr; Will Mr. Merriwether Hemingway, Ernest 6667, 6871, 7273,
Return from Memphis?; Youthfully 7578,8385
Departed,The Hemingways Gender Trouble
Gibson, Walter25 (Kennedy)7677
Gideons Point (Williams) 12n.4 Hewes, Henry15
Gilman, Richard14 Hibbert, Edward98
Glaspell, Susan55 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 31,128
Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play Hollywoods Tennessee98n. 108
(Breuer and Mitchell)1718 Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises
Glass Menagerie, The (Williams) 7, 18, 22,144 (Kauffmann)13
Amanda 107,132 homosexuality
Gndiges Frulein, The (Williams) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof9
and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43, Cavalier for Milady,A126
4445,4756 Clothes for a Summer Hotel 6869, 73,8385
Frulein 3235, 4849, 5152, 53, 5455,152 and femininity7475
176 Index
homosexuality (cont.) Kauffmann, Stanley1314
House Not Meant to Stand,A132 Kayser, Wolfgang 11,45
Tender Is the Night7374 Kazan, Elia91
Williams 1215, 21, 64,7880 Keith, Don Lee66
Hooper, Michael 145,148 Keith, Thomas 4,1920n. 54, 65n. 6, 130, 131,
Hourihan, Margery74 134,135
House Not Meant to Stand, A (Williams) 12n. 4, Kennedy, J. Gerald7677
5, 23, 65, 129137,149 Kiernan, Kip 65n.5
Bella McCorkle 132134,135 Kindness of Strangers (Spoto)6768
Charlie McCorkle 132, 133,137 Kingdom of Earth, The (story) (Williams)
Chips McCorkle 132,133 124125
Emerson Sykes 133, 134135 Kingdom of Earth (Williams) 117125,137
Jessie Sykes 131132, 133, 135 AbrahmseMeyer production of 122124, 123f. 5
Joanie McCorkle 132, 133,134 Chicken 118122, 124125,137
Mr. Black131 Lot 118121, 124125,137
redemption160 Myrtle 118121, 124125,137
reviews 130131 short story 124125
Spud131 Kirche, Kche, Kinder (Williams) 9,139
Stacey McCorkle 132, 133, 135136,137 compared to Artaud46
Hugo, Victor28 Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger
Hume, Edward149 (Hotsy)3940
Hunter, Tab95 and the Germans 18,3640
Hynds, Reed144 Minister39
premiere 140n. 12
I Cant Imagine Tomorrow (Williams) 159n. 122 redemption160
identity Son40
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Man 3940,160
The9394 Wife39
Mutilated, The105 Knight, Jessica 130,162
Pronoun I, The 113,115 Knight, Richard73
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (Williams) Kolin, Philip C. 2, 3, 4, 149, 152, 154,158
Barnes review16 Kretchik, Grant, 65n. 5
Hewes review15 Kristeva, Julia 5, 1819, 2829, 7071,74
Kalem review15
language57 Lahr, John2
in-yer-face theatre 138142, 155160 Lambert, Gavin1n. 4
and Chalky White Substance, The1920 language 6, 4344,162
and Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth and gesture 45,5255
Seeing19 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom 61,62
and Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Gndiges Frulein, The 4849, 51,5255
Monde, The19 Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing
In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today 147148
(Sierz)138 In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel57
Ireland, Marin156 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws57
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (Williams)122 and paradox11
I Think the Strange, the Crazed, the Queer Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le
(poem) (Williams)21, 104105 Monde, The 152153
Larcan, Gary60
Jeffreys, Joe E.2n. 4 Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (film)120
Jennings, C. Robert78 Late Tennessee Williams (Cohn)4
Jentsch, Ernst128 laughter5,19
appropriate/inappropriate 710,136
Kalem, T.E.15 and Grand Guignol142
Kane, Sarah 139, 156160 Rabelaisian 25, 2728,3032
Kaplan, David 3334n. 65, 87,9798 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom61
Index 177
Lawrence, D. H. seeI Rise in Flame, Cried the stage assistants 18, 88, 9596, 98, 99,102
Phoenix Witch of Capri 90, 95,9899
Lehmann, Hans-Thies54 Mitchell, Maude1718
Leighton, Margaret110 Moise and the World of Reason (Williams)
Leverich, Lyle3 6n. 16, 152
Life (magazine)15 monsters 8688
Lifeboat Drill (Williams)2930 seealsoMilk Train Doesnt Stop Here
Losey, Joseph98 Anymore, The; Mutilated, The;
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A (Williams) Pronoun I,The
Bodey3536 Monteiro, George83
Dorothea Gallaway3536 Monument for Ercole, A (Williams)17
and Germans as sinister 18,3536 Mosher, Gregory131
Helena35 Mother Courage (Brecht)5354
Mr. Butts35 Mountford, Fiona 125n. 45
Sophie Gluck35 mouths, open 30, 5455,62
ludicrous-horror 7, 11,97 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway)7577
Ludlam, Charles 3738,110 Murphy, Brenda4
Mutilated, The (Williams) 5, 60n. 69,86
Mabou Mines17 Bernie106
Machiz, Herbert95 Celeste 86, 105110
madness19 and femininity19
Cavalier for Milady,A129 and grotesque figures3233
House Not Meant to Stand, A 133, 134135 Guareon10
Streetcar Named Desire,A100 Jack in Black 102, 104, 109,112
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Maxie107
Memphis?130 and the monstrous woman 102112
and Zelda Fitzgerald 19, 71, 8182,85 Our Lady109
Magical Muse (Voss)4 premier110
Maids, The (Genet)46 reviews111
Markey, Erin 60f. 2,148 Trinket 105110,152
Martin, Robert3 seealsoSlapstick Tragedy
masculinity 7071,74 Muz, Julie Atlas115
seealsofemininity
Masiello, Francine155 Nadel, Norman16
McClain, John16 nature seeculture vs. nature
Memoirs (Williams) 1, 2, 14, 42, 117,161 Nazis27
on laughter78 Neilson, Anthony138
on promiscuity79 New Woman7475
work at bistro bar 3334n.65 Night of the Iguana, The (Williams) 5, 12,
on his writing41 2223,32
Merlo, Frank14 and the fantastic2232
metadrama56 Frau Fahrenkopf2627
Meyer, Marcel 9598, 124, 123f. 5 and Germans as sinister 18,2428
Meyer, Nicholas149 Hannah Jelkes 22,2627
Milford, Nancy 71n. 29, 72n. 32,82 Maxine Falk 2425,2627
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Nonno29
(Williams) 86, 8795, 101111f.3 Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon 22, 2425, 2627,
AbrahamseMeyer production of 95102 30,32
Blackie 86, 8889, 91, 94,99 Night Waking: Strange Room (Williams)17
Chris Flanders 89, 9096, 98, 99102 Not About Nightingales (Williams) 144,146
and femininity19 Notebooks (Williams)2
film version98 Notes on Camp (Sontag)38
Gilman review14 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (Williams)64
Mrs. Goforth 86, 8897, 98,99 and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43,
premiere95 44,5660
178 Index
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws Rabelaisian laughter 25, 2728,3032
(Williams) (cont.) Rader, Dotson 73, 78, 145,162
Bea57 Rado, James 146n. 43
First/Second Young Man 58,59 Ragni, Gerome 146n. 43
Madge5758 rape151
The Manager 5758,59 seealsoBlasted; Green Eyes, or No Sight Would
Mr. Black131 Be Worth Seeing; Remarkable Rooming-
premier5960 House of Mme. Le Monde, The; Streetcar
The Waitress 57,5859 Named Desire,A
nuclear holocaust 149,159 realism 4, 13, 16, 44, 4546, 115116,137
Nutcracker and the Mouse King, The (Hoffmann) and Hoffmann31
31,128 hyper-135
Night of the Iguana, The24
One Arm (Williams) 104n.133 redemption160
Orpheus Descending (Williams) 55,160 Redgrave, Lynn120
dismemberment9 Reid, Kate110
Val Xavier 55,160 Rein, Matt148
Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,
Pacheco, Jon115 The (Williams) 910, 9f. 1, 17, 139, 140n.
Page, Geraldine72 12, 151154,158
Page, Jaimi148 Boy 6, 155,158
Page, Michael 49n. 28 and Grand Guignol143
Palmer, Barton98n. 108 and the grotesque6,7
Parade, The (Williams) 65n.5 Hall 151, 152154, 155,158
paradox11 and in-yer-face theatre19
Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, A (Williams)1 Mint 6, 151152, 153, 155,158
Period of Adjustment (Williams)145 Mme. Le Monde 6, 151, 153154, 155,158
Perkins, Maxwell66 production (2009)8
Pettie, Darren98 and redemption160
Pettit, Alexander120n. 22 Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,
Picasso, Pablo54 The: Tennessee Williamss Little Shop of
plastic theatre 7, 22,4344 Comic Horrors (Kolin)4
Play about Terrible Birds, A: Tennessee Williamss Remshardt, Ralf 1,7,8
The Gndiges Fraulein [sic] and Alfred Ridiculous Theatrical Company 3738,5960
Hitchcocks The Birds (Kolin)4 Ridley, Philip 20,141
Politics of Reputation, The (Saddik) 2,4,95 riots6162
polysexuality83 Robinson, Davis 8,9f.1
postdramatic theatre54 Roebling, Paul95
Postmodernist Culture (Connor)52 Romanticism11
Powell Holm, Eric65n. 5 German 18,40
Pronoun I, The (Williams)4647 Rose Tattoo, The (Williams) 37n. 77,152
Dominique 112113, 114115 Roudan, Matthew C.3,4
and femininity19 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul25
and the monstrous woman 112115 Russo, Mary28
premiere115
Queen May 112115 Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats)89
Young Revolutionary 113114 sailors108
Prosser, William 2n. 5,130 Sandman, The (Hoffmann) 31,128
psychoanalytic theory5 Save Me the Waltz (Fitzgerald)8082
Psychology of the Uncanny, The (Jentsch)128 Savran, David2,3
Pumpernickel, Madame 3334n.65 Schiavi, Michael R.120
Schick, Charlie17n. 52
Quinton, Everett 59, 60, 60f. 2 Schweizer, David2n. 4
Sea Change (Hemingway)84
Rabelais, Franois 25,2728 seal, trained 48,50
Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 22,2728 Secret Script of Tennessee Williams (Hale)3
Index 179
Selengut, Jesse112 Steine, Gertrude 75,83
Seven Descents of Myrtle, The seeKingdom Steiner, George54
ofEarth, The Steps Must Be Gentle (Williams) 23,65
sexuality 3, 1215,47 Steyn, Jennifer 9597, 101111f.3
in Blasted (Kane) 156159 Stole, Mink (Nancy Paine Stole) 60, 60f. 2, 110,
Cavalier for Milady, A 125128 111, 111f. 4
Clothes for a Summer Hotel8283 Stoller, Robert74
Gndiges Frulein, The5152 Storm, Roelof 95, 98, 99, 101111f.3
Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams) 7, 91,
145148 92,137
House Not Meant to Stand, A 133136 Blanche DuBois 7, 86, 8788, 100, 132,151
interview with Dotson Rader78 rape 9,100
and in-yer-face theatre156 Stanley 91,92
The Kingdom of Earth 120121 wedding night133
Kingdom of Earth (short story) 124125 Suddenly Last Summer (Williams) 89,92
Kirche, Kche, Kinder3940 birds in 49, 121122
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, cannibalism9
The9192 Catherine92
Mutilated, The 103104, 105106, 108109 film 78n.24
Night of the Iguana, The2627 Mrs. Venable89
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws5758 Sebastian Venable 62, 92, 121122,152
polysexuality83 Violet122
Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway)7475
Monde, The 151152 Sunburst (Williams) 17, 87n.7
seealsohomosexuality survival44
Shepard, Sam133 Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams) 30, 86,87
Showalter, Elaine82 Alexandra Del Lago (Princess
Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Kosmonopolis)8687
Performance, The (Diamond)51 castration910
Sierz, Aleks 20, 138140, 141142, 155156,159 Chance Wayne 30,86
Simple Enquiry, A (Hemingway)84
Slapstick Tragedy (Williams) 10,47 Taboo of Virginity (Freud) 64,74
Gottfried review15 Taubman, Howard 1213,14
McClain review16 Taylor, Elizabeth 7n. 24,98
Nadel review16 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald)7374
Smith review15 Tennessee Laughs1
Smith, Michael15 Tennessee Williams: A Casebook (Gross)4
Smith, William Jay144 Tennessee Williams Annual Review4
Sokel, Walter 23,3839 Tennessee Williams Guignol 16,142
Some Problems for the Moose Lodge Tennessee Williams Literary Journal,The3
(Williams)12 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary
Something Cloudy, Something Clear Festival3,4
(Williams)65 Tennessee Williams Newsletter3
Something Cloudy, Something Clear: Tennesse Tennessee Williams Review,The3
Williamss Postmodern Memory Play Tennessee Williamss Three Plays for the Lyric
(Kolin)3 Theatre (Hale)4
Something Wild (Williams)42 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Sontag, Susan38 (Saddik)46
Sorge, Reinhard22 Theater and Its Double, The (Artaud) 4243,138
speech seelanguage theatre of cruelty 4344,4547
Spendids (Genet) 47n.18 Gndiges Frulein, The 19,4756
Spoto, Donald6768 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws 19,5660
Stacy, Jerry115 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom 19,6063
Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss
Performance (Remshardt)1,7 Late, Outrageous Plays (Dorff)4,10
Stanton, Stephen23 THIS IS (Williams)46
180 Index
This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, or Good Luck God Williams, Edwina (mother) 20,79
(Williams)2930 Williams, Rose (sister) 6768, 69, 70,160
and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43, 44, Williams, Tennessee
57, 58,6063 alcohol/drug abuse 3, 12, 14, 70,78
Bernice62 ambiguity117
Lucretia62 androgyny78
Mrs. Shapiro62 The Bird64
Ralston62 Christian upbringing79
Saul62 on Clothes for a Summer Hotel73
Thompson, Anthea 123124, 123f. 5 death of 16,163
Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre6465 death of partner14
Tom (Leverich)3 on D. H. Lawrence122
Tracey, Megan115 German expressionism22
tragicomedy11 health70
transformation1213 on homosexuality 69,73
Traveling Companion, The (Williams) 16,36 homosexuality 1215, 21, 64,7880
Trilby (du Maurier)1 on House Not Meant to Stand,A129
Two-Character Play, The (Williams) interviews73
17n. 51,1718 laughter161
letters 37n. 77,91
Uecker, John2n. 4,16 and politics 143145
uncanny, the128 productivity/creativity 21,78
Uncanny, The (Freud)128 psychiatric confinement 14,41
Undiscovered Country (Kolin)4 his reputation 162163
sexuality78
vampire imagery 86, 89, 96,100 on shock138
Vengeance of Nitocris, The (Williams) 7n.21 on Streetcar Named Desire,A161
Verge, The (Glaspell)55 and the Vietnam War 144145
Vidal, Gore 2n. 4, 64 on Zelda Fitzgerald81
Vietnam War 144145 seealsoMemoirs
Vieux Carr (Williams)65 Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin (Kolin)4
Vorlicky, Robert3 Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
Voss, Ralph4 (Williams) 23, 64, 129130
Louise130
wabi-sabi96 Wilson, Michael (author) 142143
war20 Wilson, Michael (director) 98
War against the Kitchen Sink, The (Guare)10 Woolf, Virginia69
Warman, Jonathan5960
Warring Desires (Hooper)145 Yeats, William Butler89
Weigel, Helene5354 Youthfully Departed, The (Williams)64
Wilde, Oscar86
Williams, Cornelius (father) 130n. 92 Zandstra, Dianne M. 154155