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.
