"The Pieces Don’t Fit!"

Sitting in the Rectory living room, ostensibly working on a picture puzzle, Mrs. Winemiller, wife of the Episcopal minister of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, and mother of Alma, suddenly throws a piece on the floor and shouts in frustration, “The pieces don’t fit!”  That’s a moment from scene two of part one of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, but I’ve always felt that it’s a kind of clue to Williams’s dramaturgy—the answer, if you will, to why some readers and viewers of his plays have trouble with the dramatist’s writing. 

There are still people, both theatergoers and theater pros like directors and reviewers, who view Williams as a Realist.  Sometimes they modify that characterization by calling him a romantic Realist or a lyric Realist, but he’s usually categorized, however informally, with Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and his own contemporary Arthur Miller.  But the label doesn’t actually correspond to the dramaturgy so there’s a lot of equivocating, explaining, noting exceptions—and complaining.  There are too many symbols, some object.  The dialogue is too flowery and ornate.  The action is extreme, the characters are overdrawn, the situations are contrived.  Like Mrs. Winemiller’s picture puzzle, in other words, the pieces don’t fit. 

The problem with this common view of Williams’s playwriting is that it’s off-base.  He isn’t a Realist—and he never was.  As City University of New York English professor Roger Boxill bluntly stated: “[T]he fact is that Williams is never a realist in the photographic or journalistic sense.”  When someone sees his plays, from Glass Menagerie in 1944, his first major success, to A House Not Meant to Stand and In Masks Outrageous and Austere, his last plays in the 1980s, through the lens of Realism, it’s exactly like trying to force square pegs into round holes.  Some shapes tessellate, other’s don’t; the tiles of Williams’s creations aren’t designed to.  Even a cursory examination of certain Williams plays like the 1953 Camino Real, Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? of 1969, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow from 1970, or 1984’s The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. LeMonde, will make that very clear.  (The playwright’s one-acts are nearly all strikingly non-realistic, ranging from Expressionistic to Surrealistic to Brechtian to Absurdist.  Many of his short stories, too, contain salient non-realistic elements.)  The pieces just won’t fit, no matter how much you try to jigger and force them.  They weren’t meant to.

First let’s remind ourselves that Williams was, first (and always), a poet.  Before he adopted the identity of Tennessee Williams, playwright from New Orleans, he was Thomas Lanier Williams III, poet from St. Louis.  Poetry was his first love, and he published volumes of poems throughout his career, even when he was a famous and successful playwright.  When Williams turned his hand to writing plays, he didn’t leave his poetry behind or set it aside.  Williams biographer Lyle Leverich, who called his subject “a unique American phenomenon: the poet-playwright,” insisted that the dramatist “was never able to reconcile the diametric pull in being both a poet and a playwright” so that “it was the fusion of poet with playwright that gave him his uniqueness in the American theatre.”   In his 1987 criticism of the dramatist’s work, Boxill asserted that Williams “is not a poet in the theatre but a theatre poet.”  In his discussion of the plays, Boxill invoked the writer’s “poetic detail,” “the natural poetry of Southern American speech” in which Williams composed, and “his poetic temperament.”  Poetry, in other words, infuses the very essence of Williams’s dramaturgy.  Indeed, Williams’s friend from St. Louis, college schoolmate, and fellow poet Clark Mills McBurney, affirmed, “I think he has more poetry in his plays than in his poetry.” 

If poetry depicts emotionally and sensuously charged human experience, usually in heightened language, then what Williams wrote is surely distinct from Realism—which by definition portrays the world on stage, including the speech, as a refection of actual life.  (In another argument I would submit that the most renowned realistic playwrights, such as Ibsen—who introduced the form to theater—Strindberg, Chekhov—an inspiration for Williams—and Shaw, are not entirely Realists either.  But that’s a discussion for another time.)  Known as Clark Mills, Williams’s hometown friend went on to expand his sense of the dramatist’s writing:

I would say there is a quality that I think is unique to him.  It has to do with the flow of his language and dialogue: It has some kind of a poetic quality to it.  I don’t know of any other American playwright, living or dead, who has it. . . .  [I]t wasn’t the language or the words or the sentences or the way they were put together; it was the “sound” of the voice that came through somehow.  He seemed to “hear” the voice as much as he heard the words.  And I think when you hear the voice like that, you’re in the realm of poetry.

In his biography of the writer, Leverich quoted the playwright from his journal: “The tragedy of a poet writing drama is that when he writes well—from the dramaturgic, technical pt. [sic] of view he is often writing badly.  One must learn—(that is the craft, I suppose)—to fuse lyricism and realism into a congruous unit.”  In other words, if you insist on judging by the prescribed criteria of dramaturgy (or, conversely, poetry), well . . . the pieces won’t fit.  Because, as Leverich saw, the “antithetical pull of the poet, his truer self, against that of the dramatist,” can’t be reconciled.  And I’ll argue that they aren’t meant to be.

In her analysis of Williams’s playwriting, Alice Griffin noted that playwright David Mamet described the esteemed artist’s plays as “the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language.”  Griffin, a prolific theater scholar and noted educator, posited that Williams didn’t compose “poetic plays” in the vein of Maxwell Anderson (Elizabeth the Queen, Mary of Scotland, Winterset), but rather “dramatic poetry.”  But though Griffin relied on Williams’s heightened speech to distinguish his writing, there was far more to the distinction than poetic language.

We should remember that, among his other important interests and preoccupations, Williams was also a painter and student of visual art.  (He invoked many famous artists in his plays and in his commentary, from El Greco, an intuitive and subjective painter, to Giorgio de Chirico, a metaphysical artist and proto-Surrealist, to Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist.  In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel features an artist who resembles Williams’s friend Jackson Pollock, another Abstract Expressionist.)  Boxill noted that the playwright “plans his sets, costumes, and lighting with a painter’s eye,” for instance, and English and theater professor Signi Falk wrote that “Williams makes full use of light and color as if he himself were a painter.” 

The playwright “employs a highly articulate visual language through which he gives concrete shape to his poetic perception,” asserted Esther Merle Jackson, “transposing the interpretive forms of the painting arts into the theatre.”  In addition to the writer’s painterly style, she remarked that Williams “gives to the composition of scenes a more sculptural quality as he manipulates form, volume, texture, line, color, light, shade, and space.”  The writer’s plays, longtime University of Wisconsin-Madison drama professor Jackson  explained, are “conceived . . . as a visual composition.” 

There was yet another visual medium that was influential on Williams’s dramaturgy.  As a boy, the incipient poet was enamored of movies, the escape he needed from his often burdensome childhood and the strictures of growing up in a small-town church rectory.  (The young writer had also done a stint as screenwriter at MGM where his first stage success, The Glass Menagerie, was conceived as a screenplay.)  “Throughout the canon, film techniques undermine the conventions of stage realism,” wrote Boxill.  In his essay “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams,” George Brandt, a British professor of theater and film, pointed out the movie techniques Williams adapted for his stage writing.  Brandt asserted that Williams, “of all American playwrights has most effectively learnt the lessons in freedom that the cinema has to teach.”  The plays reveal “strong cinematic features” which add “a degree of stylization imposed on more or less naturalistic material.”

Williams’s “attempt to turn the playhouse into a picture theatre,” Brandt added, is an aspect of the playwright’s “frequent experiment aimed at overcoming the leaden immobility of the naturalistic set.”  But Williams use of cinematic techniques isn’t just relegated to the visual effects it generates.  As Brandt also observed, “Williams’s careful orchestration of sound—music as well as effects—is almost as deeply indebted to the cinema,” which took the theater’s consciousness of sound effects much further, and the playwright employed “sound as he does light, i.e. atmospherically.” 

Williams’s use of lyrical language is embedded in his scripts, of course, and you can hear it whether you simply read the plays from the page or see them on the screen or stage.  It’s unmistakable, especially among the many characters whom the playwright endowed with artistic or poetic temperaments.  As for the other aspects of his dramatic structure, reading the notes he almost always appended to the beginning of his published texts will reveal his focus on non-realistic elements of the production he envisions.  Take, for example, this excerpt from his instructions concerning the setting of Summer and Smoke (noting the painterly allusions):

There must be a great expanse of sky so that the entire action of the play takes place against it.  This is true of interior as well as exterior scenes.  In fact, there are no really interior scenes, for the walls are omitted or just barely suggested by certain necessary fragments, such as might be needed to hang a picture or to contain a door-frame.

During the day scenes the sky should be a pure and intense blue (like the sky of Italy as it is so faithfully represented in the religious paintings of the Renaissance) and costumes should be selected to form a dramatic color contrast to this intense blue which the figures stand against.  (Color harmonics and other visual effects are tremendously important.)

In the night scenes, the more familiar constellations, such as Orion and the Great Bear and the Pleiades, are clearly projected on the night sky, and above them, splashed across the top of the cyclorama, is the nebulous radiance of the Milky Way.  Fleecy cloud forms may also be projected on this cyclorama and made to drift across it.

A few paragraphs further on, Williams makes direct reference to a specific artist and one of his canvasses: “[Giorgio de] Chirico has used fragmentary walls and interiors in a very evocative way in his painting called ‘Conversation among the Ruins’ [1927].”  In an addendum to Williams’s production notes, the text’s publisher remarks:  “The play as originally produced had a good deal of incidental music, especially composed [by Williams’s friend Paul Bowles], and more selected from the popular music of the period.  Because it has been practically impossible to secure the texts and necessary legal clearances of such music, the author urges that such music as may be used by nonprofessionals be chosen from music already available—which should be compositions originally published at least 56 years ago [i.e., 1890s]—or that music should be especially composed or arranged.”  Both statements demonstrate how integral to his plays Williams considered the so-called production aspects of the performance, and how delicate and careful his considerations were.  Note, of course, that these are not realistic elements of a production—fragmentary scenery inspired by a nearly surrealistic painting and music effects more akin to a film soundtrack than a live stage presentation.

Now, many writers include production notes in their scripts, some more detailed and specific than others, especially in the theater of post-World War II.  But I don’t think any author has focused his attention on the production elements of the script as closely as Tennessee Williams—and that wasn’t just an accident of his temperament.  It was purposeful and deliberate, and Williams intended to compose his plays as composites of all the arts and technologies available in the contemporary theater.  Williams, in a way, was just harking back to the etymology of the word ‘playwright,’ which means more than a mere writer of plays.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘wright’ as “a constructive workman”; the obsolete verb ‘wright’ means “to build” or “to construct.”  In other words, Williams envisioned dramatists who, rather than just writing scripts, wrought them from all available materials—not to be limited to the realistic and naturalistic realm.  As he advised fellow dramatists, the so-called production elements of a performance should be the métier of the playwright, not left to the directors and designers, who may not share the same vision as the writer, to apply after the script has been written.  (As we’ll see, many of Williams’s interpreters haven’t complied with the author’s overall conception.) 

This idea was something the writer had begun to conceptualize even before his first successful Broadway production, The Glass Menagerie in 1944.  Longtime followers of this blog may know already that I’m referring to Williams notion of “plastic theater,” which he publicly discussed first in his “Production Notes” to every published version of Glass Menagerie from the 1945 first edition on.  (In a journal entry composed between January and April 1942, three years before the publication of Menagerie, the playwright discussed what he then called “sculptural drama” in terms that are very similar to his concept of plastic theater.  I wrote an article on this subject entitled “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” for the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and republished it on ROT on 9 May 2012.)  It is in this technique that Williams explained his rationale for paying such close attention to the non-literary parts of a play, the ones usually left to the director and the designers, and directly expressed his deviation from stage Realism. 

It’s significant to note here that not all stagings of Williams plays hewed to his production wishes.  Eddie Dowling, who co-produced and co-directed the Broadway première of Menagerie, ignored all the distinctly Brechtian production elements Williams included in that play’s stage directions—including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and lighting dissolves and fades—presenting an essentially realistic stage picture of the Wingfield home.  So seeing the plays may not always reveal Williams’s non-, even anti-realistic bent.  Reading the texts (particularly the front matter) can, and Williams’s notes to Menagerie are a dead giveaway:

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth.  When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.  The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness.  Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Just to be certain there was no misunderstanding that this concept was a consistent part of Williams’s dramaturgy, he continued:

These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play.  They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

To be sure, a plastic production could probably end up being essentially realistic if the creator selects elements to collate that are in themselves predominantly realistic and naturalistic.  Where Williams included carefully chosen music used atmospherically, other playwrights could incorporate only real-world sounds and even music heard over radios and phonographs.  But that’s clearly not what Williams conceived for his plastic theater.  This is once again why many critics and analysts complain that the pieces of some Tennessee Williams plays don’t fit.  But I think this is a misreading of Williams’s concept of dramatic structure.  Let’s go back to the term “plastic theater” (and the argument I made for its derivation in my TWAR and ROT article, which I won’t recap here).  In the novella Moise and the World of Reason, Williams specifically credited artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, whom the writer knew, with an idea Williams called “plastic space.”  I posited that the playwright coined his term “plastic theater” based on his understanding of plasticity as expressed by Hofmann.

Hofmann defined plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting.  He contended that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he called “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting.  (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space in a painting, sculpture, or installation of objects, for instance, creates this kind of tension.)  The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move.  Hofmann also believed that an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork.  We may posit, then, that the tension among the disparate arts and techniques employed by Williams—the “push-pull” of the parts that don’t seem to fit—would create the plasticity of the theatrical experience.  Just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theater work has a theatrical experience beyond the mere image of actual life.  All because the pieces aren’t quite meant to fit. 

“The Sculptural Drama”: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater

In his production notes to The Glass Menagerie, which appears in every published edition of the play, including the first in 1945, Tennessee Williams introduces a concept that describes the theater for which he was writing:

Being a “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention. Because of its considerable delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his ideal theater make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience greater than mere Realism. Though Williams only publicly discussed plastic theater once again (he essentially quotes himself in “Williams: People-to-People” in the New York Times on 20 March 1955), from Glass Menagerie on, his plays are very theatrical: his language is lyrical and poetic; his settings, “painterly” and “sculptural”; and his dramaturgy, cinematic. His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the world of art and painting and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just Realistic effects. In Camino Real and many later plays, for example, Williams consciously exploits non-Realistic styles like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Absurdism, which he explicitly calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth. Indeed, Williams’s stage directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements, including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and lighting dissolves and fades (none of which made it to the stage under Eddie Dowling’s direction).

The scholarship which has focused on Williams’s plastic theater principally examines its practical implications. Roger Boxill simply states, for instance, “The ‘new plastic theatre’ must make full use of all the resources of the contemporary stage—language, action, scenery, music, costume, sound, lighting—and bind them into an artistic unity conceived by the playwright” and describes the cinematic aspects of Williams scripts (with reference to George Brandt’s “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams”). Esther Merle Jackson is even less detailed: “[T]he plastic theatre of Williams is not confined to visual structures. Its sensuous symbol also embraces sound patterns: words, music, and aural effects.” A more extensive discussion of plastic theater in the critical literature is from Alice Griffin, but even she doesn’t go beyond explaining,

To express his universal truths Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive new style of drama. He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects—all the elements of staging—must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language.

Others who mention plastic theater in a similar vein, giving the concept import as the key to the poetic nature of Williams’s drama, are Matthew C. Roudané and Allean Hale, both of whom include it in more general discussions.

The only critical work which specifically uses plastic theater as an analytical tool, Claus-Peter Neumann’s “Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre: Camino Real,” ultimately says no more about the concept than, “The purpose of this ‘plastic theatre,’ of which lighting, music, set, and props are essential elements, is to provide ‘a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are’ than mere realism can accomplish”—little more than a restatement of Williams’s own declaration in the Glass Menagerie note. In fact, the most extensive discussion of the concept appears in Robert Bray’s “Introduction” to the 1999 edition of Glass Menagerie which he edited. Bray cites Williams’s own journal, in which the writer had described minimalist balletic movement for the actors. In its simplest terms, then, a plastic theater is a theatrical theater as opposed to a literary (or literal) one.

(In the interest of full disclosure, there is one other study I discovered that employs plastic theater as an analytic device. It’s a 1999 English-language master’s thesis for a German university, Michael Grawe’s “Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire: Contrasting the Play with the 1951 Movie Production.” Grawe devotes chapter two to “Williams’ ‘Plastic Theater’” but he doesn’t add anything to the scholarship concerning the concept or the term itself.)

There’s nothing amiss with any of these descriptions of what Williams meant by plastic theater as he laid it out in his Menagerie note. Boxill, Jackson, Griffin, Roudané, Hale, Neumann, and Bray are all precisely correct—and in absolute agreement, as we can plainly see—in all their interpretations and the illustrations they invoke to show Williams’s application of his own notion. Though the writer never again discussed plastic theater in a public forum, he did reinforce his ideas, and essentially reify the analysts’ understanding, in private communications. In a letter to Eric Bentley, for instance, Williams chastises the critic for

a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre, the various plastic elements, the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design, which play, for example, such a tremendously important part in theatre . . . and which are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas are.
He further admonishes,

I have read criticism in which the use of transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects, which are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue, were dismissed as “cheap tricks and devices.” Actually all of these plastic things are as valid instruments of expression in the theatre as words . . . .

Earlier, as Robert Bray noted, Williams expounds at some length on what he calls the “sculptural drama” in an entry in his journal. Though he never uses the word “plastic” in the entry, he spells out quite explicitly the same basic notion that he expresses in the Glass Menagerie note. (Yale University Press, which later published Notebooks: Tennessee Williams in 2006, wouldn’t grant permission to quote from the journals, even the passages already published by Lyle Leverich, author of Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, and Bray. Ironically, the entry in reference here wasn’t included in the published edition.) The Bentley letter was written in 1948, three years after the publication of Menagerie, and thus can be seen as a kind of restatement of an idea about which Williams has already written. The journal entry, however, dates from between January and April 1942 (which we shall see is just after he was a student in Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop and while he was assisting Piscator on a production), so we may regard it as a step in Williams’s development of the idea—presumably before he conceived the term “plastic theater.” Even without the name, itself, however, it’s clear that “sculptural drama” invokes the same theatricality that “plastic theater” does in the Menagerie note. Williams speaks in the journal entry of the lack of realism in the innovative form and asserts that it wouldn’t serve the traditional Broadway play. He describes stylized, dance-like movement and stresses simplicity and restraint in acting and design and all the elements of the staging. In fact, though he doesn’t use the word, he describes a theater that is, by definition, Expressionistic—where the emotions of the play are rendered visually or aurally on the stage—an artistic style he specifically names in the Glass Menagerie note.

In all the analyses, however, there’s been little speculation about where Williams got the ideas which coalesced into the concept or how he came to coin the term, itself. There seems, however, to be a connection between the dramatist’s plastic theater and the notion of “plasticity” as defined by painter Hans Hofmann. Williams had a pervasive interest in painting, even turning his hand to it himself, and he knew Hofmann from Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early 1940s when Hofmann ran a summer art school there and Williams vacationed there with his circle of friends and lovers; they had many acquaintances in common—including artist Fritz Bultman, who helped bring Hofmann to the United States and who may have introduced the writer and the painter; Jackson Pollock, whom Williams met on Cape Cod and who’d attended some of Hofmann’s early lectures at the Art Students’ League in New York; Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife and a painter herself who was a student at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown; and Williams’s dancer friends Kip Kiernan and Joe Hazan who both worked as models at Hofmann’s Provincetown school—and later Williams even wrote an appreciation of the artist. Hofmann wrote extensively about plasticity, already publishing in English as early as 1930, and defined space in terms identical to what Williams calls “plastic space” in Act 2, scene 2 of Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?:

LOUISE: Did you set something on the table?
NORA: I just set down the upside-down cake on a vacant spot on the table.
LOUISE: There is no such thing as a vacant spot on the table.
NORA: – Ow, but there was a space with nothing on it, I didn’t move anything, not a thing, not an inch!
LOUISE: The spaces on the table are just as important as the articles on the table. Is that over your head?
NORA: I’ve seen your pitcher of ice tea on the table and glasses for it.
LOUISE: The pitcher of ice tea and the glasses for it are part of the composition.
NORA: – The what of the what did you say?
LOUISE: In painting there’s such a things as plastic space.
. . . .
LOUISE: If you’ve ever looked at a painting in your life you must have observed some spaces in the painting that seem to be vacant.
NORA: I’ve looked at paintings in the museum, dear, and I’ve seen vacant spaces between the objects painted.
LOUISE: The vacant spaces are called plastic space.
NORA: Ow.
LOUISE: The spaces between the objects, as you call them, are important parts of the total composition.
NORA: – OW ?
LOUISE: What would a painting be without spaces between the objects being painted?
. . . . Nothing. And so the spaces are what a painter calls plastic.
NORA: Plastic, y’mean, like a plastic bottle or –
LOUISE: No. Plastic like the spaces between the objects in a painting. They give to the painting its composition like the vacant spaces on my table give to the articles on the table its arrangement. . . . .
. . . .
LOUISE: The articles on the table, including the spaces between them, make up a composition . . . .

In the novella Moise and the World of Reason, Williams specifically credits Hofmann (though Williams misspells the art teacher’s name) with the idea of plastic space, though the painter never actually used the phrase. (The 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, about a painter much like Jackson Pollock, also makes direct reference to Hofmann’s color theory.) Hofmann wrote of plasticity in terms of many aspects of painting and art, however, and what both men said was that space isn’t inert but alive, and that unoccupied space isn’t just empty but as significant to the work as the occupied space: “Space must be vital and active . . . , with a life of its own.” Note how nearly identical their language is. In his early essay “Plastic Creation,” Hofmann writes:

[S]pace is not only a static, inert thing, space is alive; space is dynamic.

In Moise, Williams’s painter character explains:

Space is alive, not empty and dead, not at all just a background.

Hofmann defines plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting. His contention is that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he calls “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting. (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space, for instance, creates this kind of tension.) The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move. Hofmann also believed that an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork. I posit, then, that Williams married ideas he was already formulating with the language of Hofmann to create the term “plastic theater,” perhaps on the model of the term “plastic stage” of the 1920s.

This may be how Williams conceived the term “plastic theater,” but it’s not an assertion that the playwright took the idea of plastic theater from Hofmann—he surely put the concept together from several sources over his early years, including the University of Iowa, Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and other influences. At Iowa, where Williams studied in 1937-38, the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts required every student to gain practical experience in all aspects of production from acting to stagecraft. While the 26-year-old playwright was a poor scenic art student—he failed the stagecraft course, delaying his graduation until he made up the F—he dutifully fulfilled the requirements. Piscator had the same policy at the New School, where Williams took the Playwrights’ Seminar in the Spring 1940 term. The Seminar was chaired by Theresa Helburn, a producer at the Theatre Guild, and John Gassner, a teacher, critic, drama anthologist, and writer who was a playreader at the Guild. Gassner was a champion of disquieting, new theater writers and introduced innovative dramaturgical ideas in the Seminar. While Williams took only the Playwrights’ Seminar and therefore wasn’t obligated to take courses in the other stage arts, all students of the Dramatic Workshop, whether enrolled in one course or more, were required to attend the “informal talks” of Barrett H. Clark’s “The American Drama in Our Times,” which included presentations on “various aspects of [. . .] theatre as an art, a profession and a social phenomenon” by artists and professionals in fields as varied as playwriting (Maxwell Anderson, George S. Kaufman, Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman, Howard Lindsay), design (Robert Edmond Jones), directing (Harold Clurman, Eddie Dowling), music (Hanns Eisler, Erich Leinsdorf), producing (Lawrence Langner), dance (Maria Ley), acting (Monty Woolley), and theater education (E. C. Mabie). Another required course was “The March of the Drama,” a survey of world theater history taught by Gassner and Italian scholar Paolo Milano. In this course, the students read plays from not only the standard periods of Western theater, but from the classical Asian cannon, the Soviet drama, and the European avant-garde.

The German director also emphatically promulgated his own innovative theories and his “Epic Theater” philosophy, with which Williams got first-hand experience when he assisted Piscator in the production of War and Peace in 1942. This production contained several aspects which may have foreshadowed some of Williams’s later practices, but most provocatively, it used the character of Pierre Besuchov as a commentator, much the way Williams used Tom Wingfield in Glass Menagerie. Techniques Piscator used in War and Peace, whose script, as adapted by Piscator and Alfred Neumann, was kaleidoscopic and panoramic, included a set designed so that scene changes didn’t interrupt the action, providing the production a cinematic sweep as one scene flowed into the next—not unlike Williams’s triptych setting for Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Enhanced by Impressionistic lighting effects and the film and projections Piscator employed on stage, the performance unfolded on a two-level Constructivist set with screens and panels, and with action that took place in the wings as well as on the stage. Williams would surely have called this “plastic theater.”

Furthermore, following the 1941 commercial failure of Williams’s Battle of Angels, Piscator considered presenting it at the Dramatic Workshop’s Studio Theatre and in 1942 he had several meetings with Williams to discuss adapting the script for the director’s Epic Theater. The German director didn’t have much regard for playwrights, treating them as just one of the many theater artists who contributed their talents to a production, and Williams rejected Piscator’s way of working, but he admired the director’s staging techniques. Ultimately, Williams’s play didn’t meet Piscator’s requirements, but it’s certain that during the process, the young dramatist got a private course in Epic Theater techniques. There was further contact, too: though Williams had vainly approached Piscator for a job reading plays for the Studio Theatre, he did end up working in close proximity to the director when he took a job for the New School in 1942 doing publicity for the theater.

Piscator’s theatrical approach and Williams’s own experience working at the MGM film studio in 1943 certainly affected his own work, which has often been described as “cinematic” and shaped by film techniques. (Williams loved movies, one of the few pleasures of his childhood when he would lose himself in them. Even before his stint with MGM, one of the novice playwright’s bread-and-butter jobs was an usher in a New York movie theater.) Another source for Williams’s non-Realistic ideas, however, was Eugene O’Neill, with whose writing and techniques the younger playwright was very conversant, having immersed himself in the reading of, attendance at, and study of O’Neill’s plays from as early as 1928. In that year, a touring production of Strange Interlude came to St. Louis and the 16-year-old Williams wrote his grandfather, describing some of the unusual aspects of the play—which, ironically, he hadn’t seen. Later, at both the University of Missouri (1929-32) and Washington University (1936-37), Williams was surrounded by O’Neill. Course readings at Missouri included heavy doses of O’Neill’s one-acts and the student theater, the Missouri Workshop, presented O’Neill’s decidedly Expressionistic play The Hairy Ape in 1930. When Mourning Becomes Electra opened in New York in October 1931, the Columbia, Missouri, campus buzzed with discussion of the startling new work, spurred by unprecedented press attention, including a Time cover on 2 November. During Williams’s time at Washington University, he wrote a term paper, “Some Representative Plays of O’Neill and a Discussion of His Art,” which focused on some of the unconventional elements of the plays. It’s also certain that Williams was among the many in his class who were rapt when O’Neill’s Nobel Prize, the first for an American dramatist, was announced in 1936. Exposed as he was to O’Neill’s works and techniques at this early stage in his theatrical education, it’s unimaginable that Williams wouldn’t absorb many of the older writer’s ideas about non-Realistic theater.

These multifarious experiences, surely enhanced by Williams’s private contacts with artists, performers, and writers of many different disciplines and styles—among his friends in New York and Provincetown were painters, sculptors, composers, dancers, and actors, as well as writers in forms other than drama—impressed on him how integral to theater all the arts were and how effective the non-Realistic forms of theater and art could be. While painters like Hofmann, who was an Abstract Expressionist (as was his Williams’s and friend, Jackson Pollock), were restricted to space, color, form, line, and the other elements of two-dimensional art, dramatists and theater artists had, in addition to the painters’ techniques, a broader palette from which to draw: sound, light, language, movement, and so on. The New Stagecraft’s “plastic stage,” as described in Kenneth Macgowan’s The Theatre of Tomorrow and practiced by designers Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Lee Simonson, and Robert Edmond Jones, among others, focused on a self-consciously three-dimensional stage: constructed scenery instead of painted flats. This movement, of course, added the elements of sculpture and architecture to those of painting as techniques available to stage artists—and we’ve already noted that Williams had explored the notion of “sculptural drama” before, perhaps, he lighted on the term “plastic theater.” On this analogy, Williams, already working with a three-dimensional stage, wanted a truly multi-dimensional theater, integrating all the arts of the stage to create its effects. He didn’t want language to be the principal medium of his theater, merely supported by a picture-frame set and enhanced by music and lighting effects. While there seems to be a connection here with Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] concept, Wagner was talking about the director and production, but Williams pushes the idea back to the playwright and the creation of the text. Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and designers to be co-equal aspects of the play and part of the playwright’s creative process. Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his team of theater artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical experience, Williams envisioned a theater which begins with the playwrights who create the theatrical experience in the script because they aren’t just composing words, but theatrical images.

(I did find an essay in Art and the Stage in the 20th Century called “Gilberto Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater” that speaks of plastic theater in the same sense that Williams uses the term. Clavel, a Swiss poet and art critic writing about a series of dances, Balli Plastici [plastic dances], designed in 1918 by Fortunato Depero, a Futurist painter, sculptor, and designer, states: “The Plastic Theater offers us the right to project onto one plane a multiplicity of means of artistic expression and to enclose them in a unity. It enlarges the visual horizon of the real world and leads things and objects of different species and origin towards a single center of irradiation.” The original essay, “Il ‘Teatro plastico’ di Depero,” however, was from Il Mondo, a Milan monthly, in April 1919 and wasn’t published in English until 1968. It’s unlikely, therefore, that Williams ever saw this parallel use of his term before he formulated his notion.)

In a sense, Williams was harking back to the original etymological meaning of playwright. The word, we note, isn’t playwrite—it’s more than a mere writer of plays. The Oxford English Dictionary provides one definition of wright as “a constructive workman” and we still have the obsolete noun in words like wheelwright, shipwright, millwright, and cartwright—craftsmen who construct wheels, ships, mills, or carts. The obsolete verb wright, in fact, means “to build” or “to construct” as we can deduce from the past participle, the only form of the verb that we still use. Wrought, according to the OED, means “that is made or constructed by means of labour or art; fashioned, formed”; before that, it meant simply “created; shaped, moulded.” (Interestingly, the word dramaturg—or dramaturge, if you’re a Francophile—which was another word for playwright before it designated a separate theatrical professional, has a similar etymology from a Greek, as opposed to Old English, origin.) In other words, Williams was envisioning dramatists who, rather than just writing scripts, wrought them from all the materials that were available in the theatrical lumberyard. Then the tension—the “push-pull”—among these disparate arts would create the plasticity of the theatrical experience and, just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theater work has a theatrical experience beyond the mere image of actual life.

Today, plastic theater isn’t a particularly rare application. It’s what Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Brecht were after, and directors like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Peter Brook, and Yuri Lyubimov, and groups such as Théâtre du Soleil, Théâtre de Complicité, Ex Machina, Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, and Théâtre de la Jeune Lune do it all the time. Now, these artists aren’t strictly playwrights, though they function as auteurs, and the companies work as collaborative ensembles in creating their works, but that may be closer to what Williams had in mind than a conventional dramatist-director symbiosis. Certainly the plastic playwright would have to have more control over the production than Williams managed to get in 1944 with Dowling. Even on the Broadway of recent decades, however, there couldn’t have been M Butterfly, say, or The Invention of Love, or The Grapes of Wrath, or Angels in America without plastic theater. What makes Williams’s 1945 expression remarkable is that, first, he’s not often regarded in such terms even though he wanted to be and, second, he was writing at a time when straightforward Realism was the dominant style on American stages, and the Actors Studio—the creation, in part, of Elia Kazan and the nurturer of Marlon Brando, both part of Williams’s early, defining success—was the paradigm for American acting and production. (Ironically, there have been some recent productions of Williams’s first plastic play, Glass Menagerie, with an eye to his original staging directions. Two such productions were in California: one at the Pasadena Playhouse, directed by Andrew J. Robinson in 2000, and the other in 2002 by the American Conservatory Theater at the Geary Theater in San Francisco, directed by Laird Williamson.)

[This article is based on research I conducted for the “Plastic Theater” entry in Philip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2004). A version of this piece was published in Issue 5 (2002) of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, on line at The Tennessee Williams Annual Review | 2002 Journal (tennesseewilliamsstudies.org). A bowdlerized version of the original essay was published, without my participation or acquiescence, as “Richard E. K***** on Sculptural Drama and Plastic Theatre” in Harold Bloom’s textbook Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (Bloom's Guides, 2007). (I wrote about this “theft” in “The Case of the Purloined Paper,” ROT, 5 February 2010.)]