"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. 

Dispatches from Spain 7

by Rich Gilbert

[The continuing adventure of Rich and Sallie in Madrid, Spain, proceeds below.  Check back for Dispatches 1-6 (30 November 2014, 10 December 2014, 20 December 2014, and 14 January 2015) to catch up with the story.  As Rich mentions below, he was in the Washington, D.C., area for a few weeks in January and I got to see him briefly while we were both in the area.  We caught up a little, but most of my news from him and Sallie comes from his e-mails and the blog Sallie maintains on her own, Rambling Solo, at http://ramblingsolo.blogspot.com.es.]

Madrid at 4 months - mas o menos‏

Madrid – February 27, 2015

Dear Friends and Family,

It has been over four months since we left Washington, D.C.  Of course, I spent nearly three weeks back for work in January, so four months more or less in Spain (over four for Sallie, a bit less for me). I thought I would catch you up.

Weather

I know the northeast of the United States is getting hammered this winter.  My friend Ron L*** had record high temperatures in Salt Lake City, but 11 inches of snow at his cabin in Nevada. Spain is a little like that.  Madrid is not Malaga on the Costa del Sol (southern coast) or Ibiza (the resort island in the Mediterranean), so it has been cold (sometimes below freezing at night, but usually not during the day). Still, we have had very little precipitation of any kind, and have at least some sun most days.  So it has been much easier than it has been back for you on the East Coast.  In northern Spain however, there are heavy snowfalls, sometimes isolating small villages, and in lower elevations very heavy rains with serious flooding.  We even had an earthquake in south central Spain this week.  (We did not feel it, but I was taking a siesta, so I might have missed it.)

Daily Life

We had a visit from Sallie’s younger son last week.  With four kids ranging from 9 to 17, it was hectic.  We made it down to Toledo for the day, but otherwise stayed in Madrid.  Sallie took that week off from her Spanish class, but has been back in class this week.  She goes to class for four hours each weekday, and usually has several hours of homework each night.  She is working very hard and is making progress, but we both still need practice speaking and listening.  With her in class, I do the laundry (no dryer, have to hang on lines on the roof) and the shopping and much of the cooking.  I also have time to go to the gym and stop by a local place for coffee every day. The proprietor there always takes her time to talk to me.  So do the guys at our favorite place, where I go to watch futbol three or four nights a week while Sallie does her homework.

Spanish Politics

This is an election year in Spain, so things are starting to heat up, much the way things are gathering steam in the United States about the 2016 election.  There are major elections in Andalucia and several other important provinces this Spring.  In September, the Catalans are holding an election.  The plan of the “independistas” who want to secede from Spain is to run a single slate in which all the parties favoring independence will be represented.  That way if they gain an absolute majority, they will view that as, in effect, a referendum.  The leader of Cataluna, Arturo Mas, would then set a date of 18 months in which to negotiate a peaceful exit from Spain.  Other parties wanted to push things more aggressively.  It is not a foregone conclusion that the separatists will win; perhaps the most popular option is to have Cataluna be a fairly autonomous state within a decentralized federal Spain, but there is no guarantee that the government would offer that.

National elections are likely to be held in October.  Right now the Popular Party, which is conservative and which heads the government now, is in deep trouble.  The corruption scandals have taken a serious toll.  The President, Mariano Rajoy, and the head of the Socialist party, which holds the second largest group of seats, exchanged very harsh words in the House of Deputies this week.  There seems little chance of a coalition government between the two parties, although they did agree on a joint antiterrorism bill recently.  The Popular Party is going to run on the improving economy in Spain, which is finally showing some sustained growth, while the Socialists are going to run on the continuing high unemployment and, more pointedly, the corruption angle despite having several members here in Madrid recently charged for corruption as well.

Of course, the wild cards here are Podemos [“We can”], the populist left wing party, and, to a lesser degree Ciudadanos [“Citizens”], a populist center party.  Both are new, and thus currently have no deputies in the legislature, but that will certainly change.  In fact, Podemos, polls well ahead of the other parties, and Pablo Iglesias, its leader could well form the next government.  Podemos has been hurt a little by the revelation that one of its co-founders, not Iglesias, took a lot of money from the Venezuelan government for some as yet unspecified work.  Ciudadanos has in the space of little more than year climbed to the fourth place in the polls.  If I were to bet, and there are betting parlors everywhere for sports, I would predict a coalition government with Podemos and the Socialists, with the leader of the party with the most votes given the chance to form the government.  But egos involved are big, and that could fall apart.  Moreover, if Ciudadanos makes a lot of progress, they could join with Podemos instead.

The corruption stories just keep on coming.  Part of this is that the investigations take a long time, so the stories linger, but there are new ones all the time.  Interestingly , the latest controversy has been that a private company with a contract from the Madrid government to update the information system for the courts has been paying judges and prosecutors for work on the project in addition to their regular salaries.  The money involved is small potatoes compared to the normal corruption case here, and no one seems to be alleging they did not do any work, but one would have expected them to work on a project to improve the courts as part of their duties, which would be the case here in the United States.  I do not think that anyone is going to jail, but it is embarrassing for the judicial branch and prosecutor, many of whom investigate corruption cases.

European Politics

As Spain is part of the European Union and the Eurozone, one cannot completely divorce the politics in Spain from what is going on in Europe.  The three major crises are, in no particular order, the Greek debt, Ukraine, and terrorism in Europe.

As you may know, a populist left-wing party, Syriza, won the national election in Greece earlier this year.  It ran on a promise to end the austerity policies imposed on Greece as part of the “rescue” from a debt crisis that exploded about the time of the worldwide recession, five years ago.  After winning the election, the new Greek government sought to renegotiate the terms of the bailout.  It was pretty flatly rejected, although the Europeans agreed to give it a six-month extension in return for more concessions.  The Germans, who have the greatest economic clout in Europe, were the force behind rejecting the Greeks, but the other European countries, including Spain, joined forces with Germany.  Part of this was Spain’s view that having worked their way out of an economic crisis, they thought Greece should have to earn its way out also.

But, here’s my take on the backstory.  Podemos is very similar to Syriza, they are both populist left wing parties, and Pablo Iglesias travelled to Greece to lend support both before and after the elections.  I am willing to bet that [President] Rajoy, who is definitely looking over his shoulder at Podemos, wanted to create a narrative that populist parties really cannot significantly change circumstances within the pervasive influence of the European economic system, and thus it would be better to trust to parties, like the Popular Party, with experience in governing and working with other European countries and institutions.  We will see how this plays out as many other European countries have rising populist parties on both the right and left, many of whom reject the assumptions which have bound the European Union to date.

El Pais, the paper I read each day, gives a fair amount of coverage to Ukraine, especially the battles and casualties, even a shocking (to me anyway) front page picture with the corpse of a Ukrainian soldier.  I sense that it is skeptical of economic sanctions stopping Russian aggression.  So far, the Europeans have been unwilling to provide arms to Ukraine government, and have persuaded the United States to hold off.  This issue is not being discussed by Spanish politicians very much, maybe because the European efforts at negotiation are being spearheaded by Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande.

Again, this is my personal take on how it may affect internal politics in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.  The annexation of the Crimea by Russia and the de facto autonomy of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine have been accomplished by Russian military force, but, as always, by competing legal claims.  For many European countries, the legal principle that internal regions cannot simply declare their independence unilaterally, with or without a referendum not sanctioned by the national government is a very real issue, with the Catalan situation in Spain likely to come to a head in the next year or two.  There have been competing economic studies, but I think it is fair to say that the economic viability of an independent Cataluna will be very affected by whether it is permitted to join the European Union and continue to use the Euro.  (I think it is precisely this set of difficulties which have dissuaded, at least for now, the new Greek government from simply defaulting on its debts and leaving the Eurozone.)  So, it is very possible that, to avoid providing Russia with a legal example of a unilateral secession with which to justify its influence in functionally separate regions in Ukraine, but also Moldova and Georgia, other European governments may decline to support an independent Cataluna, to include recognizing it and offering it membership in the European Union.  Indeed, Spain might encourage them to make their feelings known in advance of the Catalan election.  I want to be clear; I am no expert on European politics and none of these things may come about in the way I speculate, but I am learning how interrelated things are in Europe.

Terrorism, the “homegrown” variety, is an important concern throughout Europe, especially after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the subsequent shootings in Copenhagen.  The Popular Party and Socialist party are in basic agreement, having just passed a new bipartisan anti-terrorism bill, which includes some new terrorism crimes and the possibility of life with the possibility of parole. (Spain still has no life without parole, and no country in Europe has a death penalty.)  However, the Popular Party initially tried to move its own version of the legislation without Socialist support.  After much criticism, especially about various expansions of surveillance capabilities, some without judicial authorization, the law was scaled back somewhat.  Privacy remains an important tissue in Spain and in Europe.  Just the other day, a Spanish court threw out the results of a listening device placed in the car of a major drug dealer because the police did not get prior judicial approval.  I expect these issues to continue to be matters about which the Spanish parties disagree, much as we have these debates in the United States concerning security and the right to privacy.  

Spanish Futbol

Real Madrid continues to have a comfortable, but not insurmountable, lead in the Spanish league, with main rivals, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, having lost league matches to lower-ranked clubs in the past few weeks.  Both Barcelona and Atletico will need help to overtake Real Madrid.

All three clubs are still in the hunt for the European Champions League title.  Unlike American football, once you reach the head-to-head stage, the matches are all in a home-and-away format, with total goals the deciding factor.  The exception is the final match which is a single game played on a neutral, predetermined site.  (In the United States, Major League Soccer uses the same format.)  There are four German clubs left in the tournament, out of sixteen, 3 English clubs, and 2 French clubs, but only 1 from Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Ukraine.  (Ironically, the Ukraine club is from the Donetsk region, but because of the war there, has to play its home games elsewhere in Ukraine.)  Real Madrid and Barcelona both won their initial matches, but Atletico lost.  Each team has another match against the same clubs.

Spain also has the King’s Cup tournament open to all clubs in Spain.  Barcelona is in the semi-finals and won its first match.  (For reasons I do not understand Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico were all placed in the same quadrant of the brackets, guaranteeing only one would make it to the semi-finals.)

Of course, soccer being soccer, what would news be like without problems off the field?  One second division club is accused of bribing rival players to win against a third club. It does not really make sense unless there were going to be further bribes to take a loss, but who knows.  More disturbingly, fans in Betis, which is in Andalucia, started an offensive chant against the former domestic partner of one of its star players accused of abusing her; they were calling her a whore and saying she deserved it.  The leagues is contemplating some punishment such as closing part of the stadium for subsequent games, but it just shows how ugly things can get.  Not just in Spain, of course, as Chelsea fans demonstrated by taunting black Metro riders in Paris and claiming they were racists and proud of it.  In Greece they have simply suspended the top two leagues altogether for fan violence.  I really love the sport, but you can see why I have avoided going to the live matches.  (We may go to see a Real Madrid match against one of the lower ranked teams from a distant location, figuring there will be few problems in a match of presumed little importance, but we will see.)

Future Plans

Our lease runs out here in Madrid in May.  We will certainly miss our neighborhood, which we have grown to love.  We will probably spend a lot of June traveling in Italy with Sallie’s oldest son, David, his wife, Heidi, who lived in Italy for many years and speaks Italian, their daughter Emily, and Heidi’s mother and her husband.  Right now, our plans are to rent a place in northern Spain for the month of July.  We are not sure where.  San Sebastien would make it easy to go to Pamplona and to visit France.  Galicia or Asturias have more striking scenery and it would be easier to visit Portugal [from Galicia or Asturias than from San Sebastien].  We are currently thinking of going north to Germany, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Brussels after that.  Greece would be later in the trip, perhaps even at the end.

It was good to see so many of you while I was in Washington, but I am trying to arrange not to have to come back for work or medical appointments until October.  I hope some of you can still arrange to visit us.  Do not forget to check out Sallie’s blog, Rambling Solo, http://ramblingsolo.blogspot.com.es, for a different take on our adventures, plus pictures!

Rich

Memoirs of a Desperate Actor

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend Kirk Woodward has come through with another terrific contribution to ROT.  This time, he’s dug into his own archives and brought out a series of entries from a journal from the early 1970s when Kirk was an amateur actor (and, coincidentally, an active-duty army officer).  Here Kirk’s recounting his “memoir of one of my most awful experiences in theater” while working on a performance on an army post, contending with rehearsals at a time before he gained any training or practical experience in acting technique.  Let’s look back along with Kirk.  ~Rick]

*  *  *  *

(I discussed on this blog on 27 October 2010 the process by which a wonderful acting teacher named Elizabeth Dillon helped me become at least an adequate actor [“Making A Movie”]. The following memoir, written day by day at the time the events occurred, shows me in an earlier state – with no acting technique at all and enough bad theatrical habits to fill a Betty Ford Center of the Arts. Fortunately, as Monty Python would say, “I got better.”  What happens in this memoir, though, can give an actor nightmares. You’ve been warned. Children: don’t try this at home! Or not this way. Time: the early 1970’s. Place: a US Army post.)

TUESDAY, 17 AUGUST

A week ago I tried out for a scene (a cutting, not the whole play) from Black Comedy [by Peter Shaffer, 1965, about a disastrous meet-the-parents evening when the power and the lights go out], to be done in September. The director, a soldier here, is young, serious, and nervous. I suspect he’s more serious than he is confident. He heard me and a girl read – off just one script – alone, in an office. I read badly – nervous, no sign of physical control. Voice dropping at ends of sentences, swallowing words. The girl who read with me gave a poised, “theatrical” reading. The director wrote some notes; mine said only “Physical,” I noticed. A shortage of actors; I was cast. Now, apprehension; what about my lack of vocal technique? What about my lack of physical technique? What else is there?

WEDNESDAY, 18 AUGUST

Rehearsal in the living room of Katina, a woman with some theatrical experience. I’m Brimsley; a nice-looking girl named Sue is Carol. The other two haven’t shown up yet. The director has a long thin face and blue eyes. When making a point he leans forward, staring earnestly.

He explains the set – standard living room – sketchily. He says, “The first time we’ll just read through. Next time I’ll start commenting on characterization. We’ll read through it about four times.” Then we begin to discuss rehearsal times; they’re necessarily a little vague, but we arrange some times and places, cordially.

We begin to read. On the second page he stops us and does something which turns out to be a pattern for the evening. He makes a comment on the scene, on how it should be characterized and paced. Then he reads the lines in question himself, asking, “Do you see? Understand?” looking earnestly. This is directed at Sue twice in the evening and at me many times. Sometimes he asks character questions. “How do you feel about Carol? Do you really love her?” “I don’t know,” I say, and we all laugh at the confusion between my “I” and the character’s. But I’m slightly pissed at being asked questions about a person that, so to speak, I just met. This time Katina (referred to sometimes as the assistant director by the director) asks the director if we’d read the whole play, and he sees that we haven’t. He arranges for us to read the whole play. But we keep doing detail work, trying to get the right line readings on the first night while sitting on the sofa, for scenes demanding interplay while moving about on a stage.

He says: “Remember this is a conversation. You’re talking to each other.” “The most important thing is to be convincing to the audience about your relation to each other. It’s just like being in this room, only it’s up there, on stage, in another world.” “This whole play depends on the pacing. Without pacing there wouldn’t be any comedy at all.” (To Sue: ) “Have fun with this scene. You’ve got to enjoy it.” He gives specific line readings – “put a pause there and then an ‘uh’ before you say the line.” I find myself doing the line the way he says to.

His interpretations of portions of the play are sound: ”He’s the richest man in the world! Think how you feel about that!” “You’re lying in your teeth. You’ve got to be more nervous.” My objection to that is that it comes too early – I don’t even know what I’m reading. On the other hand, I could be using my incipient-director point of view to cover my fear of what I’ll be able to do (or not do) when I do know the lines. Actors are such sensitive people. Katina says at one point, after both the director and I had read a speech: “The difference between your reading and Kirk’s is that you stress the verbs, he stresses the pronouns.” God’s truth. I often sound to myself like an imitator of Noel Coward.

At the end: “You’ll both be good. You’ve both got what it takes. You’ll both be very good. I may be pushing you hard right now, but it’s because we’ve got so little time [a dozen rehearsals]. I may do things in a way that’s a little unorthodox.”

Later: I read the whole play. (We’re doing a cutting.) I’d like our scene better if I hadn’t. Shaffer despises people. The ends of his plays find his characters on stage, broken and humiliated. Our scene must be light and fast and not dwell too much on any one thing.

THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST

Rehearsal in Sue’s living room. The director worked with her for an hour before I arrived. I didn’t notice any difference (except for the first speech she read, which was more punched and suburban-bitchy than the rest). He told her, “I see we’ll have some problems with your projection.” We read straight through the first section. He went back to a particular bit, trying to get me to project, and I hope I did justice to his criticism of my overall readings of passages. Basically, I was trying to give the humor and sense of nervousness by reading all the lines fast and tensely, as though about to become hysterical. Part of the reason for this, I think, is a need I feel to loosen up on stage in every way. This feeling comes out by my being louder.

The director had us stand up and read “as an exercise.” He gave us starting positions and then let us move. We made tiny, nervous steps – mostly facing each other, rustling our scripts and looking vaguely around. He stopped us and pointed out some ways characters would move – away on lines of confidence, sitting during emotional scenes, etc. So we started to read again and I moved on her line. He stopped me and said you never move on someone else’s line, and I said never? And he said never, and I got pissed and snapped at him about the difficulty of making up our own blocking as we went along. Then he had to say conciliatory things to calm me down.

The next time we read he gave us some simple blocking which worked all right and shaped the scene, in a primitive way. A better rehearsal than the first; he seemed fairly certain it’ll end up all right. We’re becoming more familiar with the text. . . . Perhaps it’s best to have a definite idea about how long rehearsals will last each night?

FRIDAY, 20 AUGUST

Rehearsal at Sue’s again. Everyone slightly tired. The director begins by urging us to “be very funny.” We read; I start slowly, with pauses between sentences of my speeches; Sue picks up that tempo, and we do a painful, mechanical reading of the first section. The director doesn’t stop us. Afterward I say how dull I thought it was. The director says not to worry, that it was an improvement over last night, that he knows we’re tired of sitting and reading. He’s learning about actors’ temperaments.

We do blindfold work. First we try to do a scene blindfolded, but we don’t know enough lines and it’s just stumbling around anyway. So we take turns watching each other work in the dark – crossing the room, becoming disoriented, trying to identify objects, opening doors, dialing phones, climbing steps. We do some practice walking as though in the dark, without blindfolds, and learn that without constant concentration we’re not convincing.

A fun evening. The director is exuberant, confident about prospects for the show. “I thought it would be much harder.” I think he may not have confronted yet how different a living room is from a stage; but that may hit him over the weekend. The director tells us we’ll be all right because we both care about the show. He tells me: “You know what you want, but you haven’t broken through. You haven’t broken the ice.”

MONDAY, 23 AUGUST

Rehearsal at Katina’s house. One other character, the Colonel, is due tonight for the first time. We chat a long time, led by Katina, on non-theatrical subjects. The director looks over the rehearsal schedule; he has a self-conscious nervous habit of raising topics disconnectedly. “Thursday? I don’t know” in the middle of a discussion of life in the Philippines. He sounds slightly world-weary.

Memorized lines are due tonight. Sue and I begin without scripts, improvising some fumbling blocking. Line memorizations not too bad, contact between characters nil. Halfway along we stop because the Colonel comes in. We never try that scene again, so we don’t know if we know our lines or not.

Reading begins again – the last part of the show, with the Colonel. He’s a large man with a marvelous big slightly-Southern voice.  He’ll be very funny without too much effort. He’s done a lot of acting and approaches this scene relaxed.

The director works on my readings in several passages. “I want you to be more nervous on the phone.” “We need a lot of giggling in this scene. You’re humoring him along, trying to smooth things over. You’re badly embarrassed.” Once he tells me to do a speech a way I’d done it last week and gotten criticized for it (I think). He does some line readings again as examples, but not too many. When making corrections, he doesn’t ask the actor what’s happening here, how his character feels; he tells. When he does ask, it’s so he can answer himself.

He tells me – several times – “You’re still too self-conscious… You need to break out”

Now more blindfold work, one blindfolded or two, the others watching; then without, being watched and critiqued. Once again I get mad; the first time I act as though I couldn’t see, it’s not good, so next time he says, solemnly, “Do you think you can do it this time? Remember what it was like to be in the dark. Remember,” etc. “I’ll try,” I mutter. I’m not concentrating.

“The most important thing about this show is its believability. You’ve got to convince the audience.”

“Be as creative as you can. The more creative you are, the funnier you’ll be, in this case.”

During the blindfold work he refers to us as “the Artists” – “let the Artist have room.”

The Colonel picks up the blindfold work quickly. Sue’s good, too. An issue which surfaces briefly tonight: if we do realistic mimes of people who can’t see, will we correspond to what the audience imagines people who can’t see are like?

“I feel better about the show than I did when we started tonight. It’ll be good.”

Some discussion of costumes. The director isn’t prepared, but his ideas sound good.

The rehearsal was called for 8:00; it’s over at 11:30. Needless.

TUESDAY, 24 AUGUST

Rehearsals in a mess-hall-sized room. Furniture arranged for the set, but compressed somewhat. We begin the scene – jerkily – grind to a quick halt. (The first section of the play is done in darkness in the play, so the audience couldn’t see much of it.) “I see I’ll have to give you blocking,” the director says. “I made a few notes on my script here.”

Well, about time! He improvises the blocking through the scene, and it’s good – instinctively, I think. Places I like: where the direction that a person is moving, or the fact that he’s sitting, gives the line a meaning, a feeling of appropriateness. That’s how it should be – as though the line had sprung from thee action rather than the other way around. He sketches the blocking for long stretches and then we do it immediately. For me it’s not easy to remember. “It’s mostly common sense.”

While we’re learning these movements, the director starts to get after me for the way I stand. “Don’t just cross over there and stand. It’s not as though your shoes are nailed to the floor.” This said, not sarcastically, but solemnly and a shade patronizing. “Turn on that line. … You’re too stiff. I want you to relax. Come over here on your line and stand like this” (does a pose, hands in front of his pants). Now I’m angry. All right, so I look stiff; and I really don’t know how my character moves or looks; in fact, I know embarrassingly little about what he thinks. What good is it to copy somebody else’s pose? What if my Brindsley doesn’t stand like that? How should the director get me to see what I should do? Not by saying, “Relax more,” which he repeats several times. So I’m pissed.

We go on with readings. In the romance scenes, he gets after both Sue and me about our obvious embarrassment and coldness, focused in two lines I just can’t say well: (after an embrace) “I like you in yellow. It brings out your hair” and (after a kiss) “Nobody in the world kisses like you.” Sue and I begin to break character to giggle or make remarks – she doesn’t do it much, just breaking up occasionally, and she wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t. The director is amazingly patient: “You’re breaking character a lot, too. If you don’t stop that, pretty soon I’m going to start being very upset about it.” Back to work. I get stuck on one speech and feel so obviously nasty about it that, after comments (“All I hear is commas. It’s doing da-da-da-da-DA-da, da-da-da-da–DA-da, da-da-da-da-DA-da”), he lets me alone on it, telling me to take it home and work on it. By now my readings are all impersonal and flat. I feel ghastly. Four or five people – experienced theater people – are standing around, too, watching.

A break, because of something. Sue and I do our lines to each other, trying to see if we really know them. The third actor, the Colonel, comes in. We resume, starting now where the lights go out for the characters and on for the audience. The director talks about pacing – the nerve! Our blind bits are bad. When I have my speeches with the Colonel, I at least feel as though it’s fun, although I’m no more with the character than ever. The truth is, I don’t give Sue much to play against and she doesn’t give me much. Although the director corrects me five times to each time he corrects her, I really believe we are in about the same shape, only I’m loud and she’s soft. (He keeps talking about her projection.) The theater people have left. We do the last part twice and go home.

Oh – earlier, he told me, “Try different line readings.” I’d thought about some before rehearsal tonight anyway, so I try. When he doesn’t like one, though, he corrects it – it’s wrong – and I stop that pretty soon.

Well, awful. How do I get out of this? Who is my character? I can’t have another night like this; but rehearsals are over so late, there’s no time to work by myself; and I suspect I’ll have to pull myself out. Besides, getting up at 6:00 each day, I’m perpetually tired. No point in this.

WEDNESDAY, 25 AUGUST

Rehearsal in the same room as last night. The before-rehearsal atmosphere is, thank heaven, nonrecriminative. The director makes another glancing remark about breaking character (but I do it again several times anyway. Those errors stand for something!) Before rehearsal I’d read to myself trying out different line readings and characterizations; there’s still no Brindsley there, but I liked some of my ideas. Didn’t do five speeches before he stopped me, said it sounded lifeless, wanted the pace picked up. I objected – not now! – but Sue backed him up and I went along. Turned out he was probably right. He’s trying to get me to be fuller; trying to get a more confident character; trying to break several vocal habits of mine – rising and falling words within a sentence; breaks in a sentence or speech, stopping the flow; a tendency to start too low and stay there. How to be big and not just be loud? …

Went through the rest of that scene. Physically both of us – Sue and I – are dreadfully restrained. We did the scene again, blindfolded now, and the combination of having to listen to the other person’s speech, and not being conscious of how one is standing, helped enormously. I began to be able – just faintly - to hear how I sound. The director made me do several of my speeches much faster, in one breath, and bigger and more climactic.

Break. The Colonel was here. We did the scene with him blindfolded. Again, the director kept building me up, and did the same with Sue. Pretty good for an early rehearsal.

A visitor was there. “It got much better the twenty minutes I watched,” he said. “When do you do the show?” “The seventh,” the director said. “Of November?” “No, of September.” “Really?” said the guest.

I drove the director home. “You’ve got to be able to relax,” he said. “How do you get an actor to relax – as a director?” I asked him. “Oh, you do exercises, if you’ve got enough time. Touching and looking – there’s a whole course on that at some drama schools . . . .”

FRIDAY, 27 AUGUST

After one night off, rehearsal at the Colonel’s house. We did the whole thing through once (except for one whole section involving Sue and the fourth person, who’s recovering from a wisdom tooth operation and won’t be back until Monday). The director only stopped us at patently inadequate line readings. We did the thing with the lights roughly as they will be for the show – out and then on. Not too bad. Sue was up some, and I had more strength, although there were huge dead patches in my dialogue. We took a break and then did the play again. Between halves this time the director gave us a talk. It was down this time, he said, because we weren’t concentrating. Correct. We finished up – slightly ho-hum – and went home. The best atmosphere our rehearsals have had so far. After this weekend, rehearsal on the stage!

MONDAY, 30 AUGUST

On the stage indeed. First run-through slow, but Sue and I look at each other more. A lot of embarrassment in the affectionate scenes, as the director is quick to point out. He gets after Sue for her projection three or four times. Our Miss Furnival is here for the first time – a jolly gal who’s uninhibited and funny. We block the scenes with Miss F. for the first time. The director tells us every little movement, although he keeps urging us to create more as we see how. My walking-in-the-dark is bad. I watched the part I’m not in, sitting in the auditorium. It’s terribly unshaped. The actors move fairly well. We run through again completely, trying to keep the pace up. A shade better, but formless. Afterwards, the director says, “I have some exercises, but you’re too tired for them now. We’ll start with them tomorrow night.” So there!

One thing he does which upsets me is to give us notes which are actually a complete description of what acting is at its best. “I want you to listen to each other, and make your lines come off the preceding lines. Don’t stop acting while the other character is speaking. Don’t be tense on stage, but move just like your character . . . .”  “I know what’s wrong,” he said, “it’s Monday.”

TUESDAY, 31 AUGUST

Rehearsal cancelled.

WEDNESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER

Rehearsal on stage. The technical things are starting. The director’s blocking, which he had to change a lot last night (“It’s like a first rehearsal,” the Colonel complained), got changed a lot more tonight. Move the bar upstage, put the piece of sculpture on the other side, move the coffee table out…  Sue and I did our first scene twice. It went all right; surprisingly, she seemed rattled about something and bobbled many of her lines. The director said we did all right at first and then dropped off. “Concentration!”  That definitely is the key. Then the scene with Miss F., who didn’t entirely know her lines yet (only her second night) and the Colonel. Many missed lines, and raggedy movement. Timing ’way off. We did the whole scene again with blindfolds on; partly all right; I nearly walked off the stage, and Miss  F. and Sue broke up a lot.

An exercise with just Sue and me: standing with eyes closed, facing each other, imagine the end of the world has come, you’ve been living for months thinking you were the only person in the world and now you find this other person. Embrace. We did – very cold. Now, with just hands touching, eyes closed – show sorrow. Fear. Anger. Loneliness. Happiness. Now embrace again. Better, but still cold. I was astonished at how inexpressive our hands were. Then we did the sitting-on-the-couch scene again. We seemed friendlier, this time, but the line readings weren’t much better.

TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER

First a run-through of the scene in the dark with Sue. Good pacing until halfway through, where it starts breathing hard. The director gives different readings on speeches – a longer pause to indicate the kiss, for example. Another run-through. To myself I sound somewhat impersonal, and my words sound unnatural – exaggerated consonants, etc. Now a practice of the scenes in the light. It starts slowly, as the director has us make sure we know our lines. A new piece of business is invented at Miss F.’s entrance. It’s funny but could be funnier. Why isn’t it funnier? I think because the director is embarrassed at doing exploratory work at this late stage of rehearsals . . . . I have no idea what’s funny to see. I have a spectacular fall over a phone wire; it knocks me out – really – but is it funny? Does it look staged?

The scene in the light is muddy. Miss F.’s tempo is good; Sue’s is erratic – the Colonel’s – surprisingly – very slow.

Then we do something I’ve always wanted to do – a speed rehearsal, where all lines and business are done at three times the normal speed. It’s not always appropriate, but when it is, it builds confidence and it relaxes. It also breaks everybody up. The director has to keep shouting, “Don’t break character!” We did anyway. Miss F.’s not secure in her lines yet.

Then a complete run-through. Pace better; still massive dull or amateurish spots. Dunno about the comic business.

In the earlier run-through, I watched while the director gave Sue instructions on her readings for specific lines, acting out whole pieces of script. She looked on passively.

WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER

Last rehearsal before dress rehearsal. A relaxed mood, though Sue seems somber. The director urges us to be “as funny as you can, relax, have a lot of fun with the show.” We run it through with lights on the whole time. Same situation with pace as before. The director gets after us for looking at objects while we’re in the “dark.” I feel more relaxed not wearing my glasses.

Another speed rehearsal. Atmosphere among the group generally jolly now. Another complete run-through, this time better. I bobble some lines, though. The show has “jelled” as much as it’s going to. Later the director tells me I did well the second time through. I felt more aware at odd moments on the stage.

MONDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER

Dress rehearsal. The acts preceding us are: three song-and-dance numbers from Cabaret and George M; and a mime, wonderful, done by somebody who studied under somebody who studied under Marceau. We have makeup and costumes for the first time and lights for the second time. In the dressing room beforehand, a run rough of lines; the director doesn’t listen to it, and it’s not concentrated on as much as it should be. On stage, we take our places and go into the play without preamble. I sound choppy to myself. Sue misses a line and isn’t as energetic as she was last time – I think she’s nervous. I feel as though I could break through something somehow, but I can’t. A laugh from the audience (of two) somewhere – encouraging. The pacing of the part after I leave the stage is good, but the spirit isn’t. Last section seems very slow.

Notes from the director: “Sue, we need more whininess. All I saw was Sue Bailey up there. Brindsley: more exasperation in your phone conversation with the power company. Miss Furnival: all your movements need to be more exaggerated. . . . As a whole it was really down tonight, I won’t try to disguise that.” He repeats that idea several times – he’s depressed. Finally Miss F. exclaims, “It’ll be better with an audience!” and that shuts down the notes-session.

Later, the director tells me my putting down the phone in the dark needs to be more exaggerated – “the way you’re doing it, it could be in the light.” Also, he wants to work with me and the Colonel tomorrow night on the last section – “It may feel a lot better for you if it goes real fast.” (As it turned out, we didn’t do that work.)

He’s glum, walking slowly from person to person, listening moodily and not saying anything. This show means a lot to him – he told me the other day, “It’s the first time the staff will be seeing what I can do.”

TUESDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER

Performance night. The director has us arrive at 6:30; Miss F. and I are early. After makeup, Sue and I are instructed to wait in the office (the occasion for the show is an open house where people are shown through the theater from 7:30 through 8:30). I’m not nervous, just curious. Sue is nervous. We go to the stage at 8:25. Bad backstage manners on my part: I make noise walking around. Others do, too; one flushes a toilet. In front of the curtain, three welcoming speeches. The two acts preceding us seem to go well; a warm audience (about 75?). Our set is to be set up with the curtain open. We cast members had been told other people would do the job, but we look around and there are no other people. (The group’s President: “Now you can see, the actors are setting their own set . . . . You don’t often see that . . . .”)

I had tried concentrating and loosening up my face in the dark backstage. Now in performance, the first scene, in the dark, goes well. With the lights on, we go all right until a late cue for the telephone to ring – always an embarrassing kind of pause. Then Sue forgets, “Perhaps we can call Mr. Bamburger” or whatever the line is. Laughs from the audience at the two women groping for each other in the dark, and for my fall. The scene between the two women starts well, then falls apart, the catalyst for the collapse being a couple of slow cues. The Colonel doesn’t strike the audience as hilarious – are they beginning to become caught up in the plot? I don’t know. Cues very slow. The Colonel bobbles a line (about the Buddha) he’d always gotten right before. I didn’t realize before tonight that he’s never felt as though he were really into the show. The last part of the show, which I’m in, seems to me to go all right, but gets small laughs. (Recently I’d wondered whether the way I did it was funny.) Curtain call – one – never rehearsed before; clumsy, of course. Applause.

Offstage, some praise. Miss F. is satisfied. Sue – finished with it. The colonel uncomfortable over some standard of his own. I try to discuss the performance with one of the staff members but sound so silly, even to myself, that I give it up as a bad job. Later I ask the director, “What did you think of the job you did?” “I was satisfied, that’s all I want to say.” “What did you think you did well?” “I couldn’t say.” “– bad?” “I couldn’t say that either.” He continues briefly: “I learned to know some people. When I came here I hardly knew anybody. I didn’t know what kind of actors to expect on an Army post. I’ve learned some things . . . .”

[When I read Kirk’s journal entries, I remarked to him that this “really is an ‘Actor's Nightmare #2’—#1 always being appearing on stage in the play you don't know, of course.”  Anyone who’s ever done any acting—school plays, amateur performances, professional productions—has experiences like this in one way or another!  My own version of this kind of experience goes all the way back to second grade—and I won’t tell that story now: it’s still too embarrassing to share!  (I did recount some experiences—both horrific and amusing—in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010.)]

Getting from 'Summer and Smoke' to 'Eccentricities'

I suppose most people, especially anyone reading an ostensibly theater blog, knows that Tennessee Williams’s mid-century plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are related texts.  If you read my blog post “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale” (20 March 2010), you certainly know this.  That article recounts some of the process by which Williams developed Summer and Smoke and then transformed it into Eccentricities.  There’s a good deal more to that progression, however, and it’s much more complex and intricate than a superficial account suggests.  From my research on the two plays, which resulted in the chapter on them in Phillip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood Press, 1998) and “The Lost Première” (Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Spring 1999), I’ve pieced together the story of that nearly unique circumstance.

Tennessee Williams was a habitual rewriter and recycler.  Many of his plays were developed through several versions and forms.  Quite a number started out as short stories (the 1961 play Night of the Iguana was adapted from a 1948 story of the same title), others as one-acts (1952’s The Enemy: Time became Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959, and the 1953 full-length Camino Real started as the one-act Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in 1949), and one famously began life as a screenplay (The Gentleman Caller for MGM in 1943 was the basis for The Glass Menagerie in 1944).  Almost all of Williams’s plays exist in two or more variations, usually considered an "acting" version for production and a literary version for reading (Summer and Smoke is one of these; the Broadway première in 1948 generated the shorter text, but José Quintero’s long-running Off-Broadway revival in 1952 was produced from the longer, “reading” edition); however, a few even rendered two separate scripts with different titles after the playwright revised and rewrote them, often after initial productions.  Seventeen years after Battle of Angles, Williams’s first professionally produced play, closed on opening night in Boston in 1940, his revised “new play based on an old one,” Orpheus Descending, opened on Broadway.  (I’m not even counting here the plays Williams used as the bases for films such as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, 1946, which the dramatist redeveloped for the movie Baby Doll in 1956, or The Fugitive Kind, Williams’s 1959 film adaptation of Orpheus Descending—using a title he borrowed from a 1937 play of his with a completely different plot.) 

Williams authority Nancy Tischler wrote that the playwright “does not abandon an unsuccessful or incomplete work”: “I revise continually, because I’m never quite satisfied,” the dramatist himself attested.  “Finishing a play, you know, is like completing a marriage or a love affair,” he once said.  “You feel very forsaken by that, that’s why I love revising and revising, because it delays the moment when there is this separation between you and the work.”  In his introduction to Williams’s Collected Stories (1985), many of whose pieces had been reworked a dozen times or more over many years, Gore Vidal asserted: “I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published.  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘rewrite what’s already in print?’  He looked at me, vaguely, then said, ‘Well, obviously it’s not finished.’”  He was such an inveterate reworker that one of his friends dubbed him “Tenacity” Williams. 

But no other of Williams’s plays resulted in two independent scripts that generated such impassioned comparisons and which are still today seen as competing texts for the attention and admiration of theater professionals and audiences than Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  In fact, the one-act predecessors of the full-length plays we know are almost never staged (Ten Blocks is performed in schools as if it were a cut-down version of Camino Real) and Battle of Angels, the early version of the better-known Orpheus Descending, is not in many theaters’ repertoires since it failed the first time around.  Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities, however, are both fairly frequently produced and there’s a rigorous debate every time one is staged about which play is better and which one people like more.  (In Williams’s estimation, Eccentricities “is less conventional and melodramatic,” but which is “better” is pretty much a toss-up, depending entirely on taste and personal interest.  Even Williams vacillated.)  Among Tennessee Williams’s works, that only occurs with regard to these two plays, and the wonderful things is—both scripts are readily available for production or reading.  (When I did a production of The Wood Demon, Anton Chekhov’s early version of Uncle Vanya, in 1976, we had to use a photocopy of the translation prepared for the Actors’ Company’s U.K. revival because the published text was long out of print.  Even the Russian-language version, which I consulted, was hard to locate.)  A few other playwrights have multiple versions of related plays in print, such as William Inge, who rewrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1957) into the more obscure Summer Brave (1962; produced 1975), which was actually an early version of the better-known script that Inge resuscitated (if you can follow that), but even here the second in the pair is seldom done and little known. 

All this makes the pairing of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale all the more fascinating to examine.  Not just why did Williams go from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities—a simple (and incomplete) answer to that would be that Summer failed in its first Broadway outing—but how did he get from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities?  The explanation, in my analysis, has as much, if not more, to do with the great writer’s personality as it does with circumstances and professional considerations.

In order to lay out the transformation as I perceive it, I have to recover some of the ground I reported superficially in “The Lost Première.”  Bear with me if you’ve already read this; it all links up in the end.

Williams developed Summer and Smoke from a short story, “The Yellow Bird,” published in 1947, which introduces Alma Tutwiler (the name Winemiller first appears in the short story “One Arm,” published in 1948) as an incipient spinster and daughter of a small-town Southern minister.  Aside from literary recycling, most of Williams’s writing also contains elements of his life and the lives of his family and neighbors, but next to the specifically autobiographical Glass Menagerie, none of the dramatist’s major plays are as tied to his private history as are the two Alma Winemiller plays.  The character of Alma, for instance, contains elements of both Williams’s mother, Edwina, who in her youth had been called a nightingale, and his cherished sister, Rose; the egocentric hedonist of Summer and Smoke, John, is a portrait of Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, the traveling salesman who preferred carousing to domesticity, and at the same time, the elder Dr. Buchanan, a remote and cold father, depicts another aspect of C. C. Williams.  The Reverend Winemiller is inspired by (but not a portrait of) Williams’s beloved grandfather, Rev. Walter Dakin.  (Port Gibson, Mississippi, where Reverend Dakin served as Episcopal minister from 1902-05, had a famous landmark: the steeple of the Presbyterian church was topped by “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven,” as Alma describes her father’s Glorious Hill Episcopal church in Eccentricities.)  The foundation of Summer and Smoke, in fact, are the tales of Edwina Williams about her youth in Port Gibson and Natchez, Mississippi.

In 1916, the year in which the play is set, the Williamses were living with Edwina’s parents, Walter and Rose Otte Dakin, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the town which became Glorious Hill.  Like Reverend Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, Reverend Dakin was the Episcopal minister of the town and like “The Nightingale of the Delta,” Williams grew up at the rectory.  Reverend Dakin’s father had been a small-town doctor like the Drs. Buchanan and Rose Dakin had taught piano and voice like Alma.  There were Tutwilers in Clarksdale, and other names from Williams’s life appear in the play: Williams’s own first love was Hazel Kramer and the salesman in Summer and Smoke is Archie Kramer (who, like the playwright’s father, is a commercial drummer for a shoe company); Rosa Gonzales shares her first name with Williams’s sister and grandmother; and Williams, himself, had a hot-tempered lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez (the inspiration for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire), in the 1940’s. 

Williams began composing Summer and Smoke, originally entitled A Chart of Anatomy, in St. Louis as early as February or March 1944.  As was his habit, he continued to work on the script—in 1945 in Mexico, where he went to recuperate from a cataract operation, and in Texas, where he met with Margo Jones in Dallas; in New Orleans; in Taos, New Mexico; on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in 1946, where he shared a cottage with Carson McCullers while she dramatized her novel The Member of the Wedding; and on until well after its successful Dallas première in 1947.  (A typescript of Summer and Smoke in the theater archive of New York Public Library is labeled “Rome Version (March 1948)” and hand-annotated “Produced by Margo Jones at the Music Box Theatre, 6 October, 1948.”)

Summer and Smoke’s world première was presented by Jones and her Theatre ’47 at the Gulf Oil Theatre in Dallas on 8 July 1947. The original cast included Katherine Balfour as Alma and Tod Andrews as John, with the appearance of Jack Warden as the waiter at the Moon Lake Casino.  It was a significant success, garnering even a laudatory review in the New York Times and extending its scheduled run, but because Streetcar had already opened on Broadway that December, the transfer of Summer and Smoke to New York’s Music Box Theatre was delayed until 6 October 1948, when nearly every critic unfavorably compared it not only to Streetcar but also to The Glass Menagerie.  Though they praised Jo Mielziner’s set and the performance of Margaret Phillips, who replaced Balfour as Alma, the production closed on 1 January 1949 after 100 performances.  (The production marked an early appearance of Anne Jackson, who played Nellie Ewell.)

Most critics condemned Williams for re-covering in Summer and Smoke the ground he previously covered more movingly and magically in Menagerie and more dynamically and powerfully in Streetcar.  Alma was seen as a wan successor to Laura and a pale precursor to Blanche, and some reviews felt that Williams had overlooked the characters in favor of a theme which becomes unclear because the characters don’t actually represent the ideas Williams intended to place in opposition.  The overall point was often deemed too obvious, with schematic characters representing superficial traits making a simplistic statement.  Several critics remarked that Summer and Smoke’s short scenes don’t cohere into a whole drama.  The play’s too symmetrical and too pat, they said, and the reversals too neat; Williams, some charged, had composed an elementary psychology lecture, not a play, because the text is larded with such obvious symbols. 

Having sailed for Gibraltar in December 1948 with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo (the basis for Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo), and his friend, writer-composer Paul Bowles (who composed the music for Summer and Smoke), Williams was in Fez, Morocco, when he received the telegram announcing the closing.  He was depressed, according to his brother Dakin, but the character of Alma Winemiller was indelibly imprinted on his soul.  Indeed, Alma means ‘soul’ in Spanish, as Williams points out in the script, and the character was, indeed, the writer’s soulmate.  She “seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” he wrote, and later, during rehearsals for the Broadway premiere of Eccentricities, Williams candidly acknowledged, “Look, I’m Alma.”  As Williams explained, “You’re totally absorbed in the play or the novel or the piece of writing” so that it becomes “the center of your life.”  Williams confessed once that “I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”  That suggests that once having conceived of this desire, it was hard, even perhaps impossible to let it go.  I don’t know which character in Summer and Smoke would have attracted the playwright physically—perhaps John Buchanan, Jr.—but Williams frequently acknowledged that his emotional connection to this story was the Nightingale of the Delta, and that relationship was likely just as compelling for the writer as physical attraction.  Numerous critics have asserted that Alma was Williams’s favorite character of all those he created, including Blanche, Laura, and Maggie the Cat.  Even Williams himself admitted, “Alma is my favorite—because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle.”  He could not let her go.

Ronald Hastings, theatre correspondent of London’s Daily Telegraph in the 1960s and ’70s, reported that Williams “did not, eventually, like his play, but he liked the characters and decided to write another play for them.”  So, while on one of his frequent retreats to Rome in the summer of 1951, the dramatist continued to rework Summer and Smoke.  Correspondence from Williams to producer Cheryl Crawford and his agent Audrey Wood between January and September 1951 affirm that he’d completed a new version of the script. 

Around New Years 1951, Williams wrote Crawford, who was producing The Rose Tattoo on Broadway at the time, “I am still working on the new ‘Summer’.  It has turned into a totally new play, even the conception of the characters is different,” and in June, he wrote: “I am doing a completely new version, even changing the title as it now takes place in winter, and I think I have a straight, clean dramatic line for the first time, without the cloudy metaphysics and the melodrama that spoiled the original production.”  By August, Williams was writing to Wood that he’d completed a draft of the new script, which he was still calling Summer and Smoke, and by September, he must have finished the revision because he wrote Crawford that he didn’t know which version the London company would present, “the new or old one.” 

Producer H. M. Tennant’s London première of Summer on 22 November was already in preparation by this time, but Williams rushed off with his new version of the play.  His friend Maria Britneva, who was playing Rosemary at the Lyric Theatre, met the writer at the airport but he arrived too late to substitute the new script for the one Britneva explained was “already deep into rehearsals” under the direction of Peter Glenville (who, ten years later, would direct the film version).  “Crestfallen,” as Williams described himself at the bad timing, the playwright recounts that his friend told him, “Give me the new play and I’ll put it safely away . . . .”  That script, which Williams says he didn’t see again for “10 or 15 years,” the dramatist insists was The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  

I found no archival evidence that Williams focused on Eccentricities, under either its old or new title, between 1951 and 1961, so apparently Britneva, a model for Maggie the Cat of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, did keep the script hidden away during the intervening decade.  There doesn’t seem to be any existing typescript of the revised Summer and Smoke dated 1951 or 1952 in any archive I could search; the latest Summer and Smoke script of which I know is the 1948 “Rome Version” and the earliest Eccentricities edition is a 1961 text in the NYPL and New Directions archives.  So Williams appears to have returned to his new Alma play in about 1961.  A typescript of Eccentricities in the NYPL is dated 20 June 1961, and letters in 1963 and 1964 to Robert MacGregor and Jay Laughlin at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, state that he was working again on the play he now called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  Except for a subtitle—The Sun That Warms the Dark (A very odd little play)—the typescript is nearly identical to the published 1964 text.  A duplicate typescript is in the New Directions archive, but it was marked for typesetting.  One change from the NYPL copy is that the subtitle had been crossed out, indicating that it never again appeared on any version of the play—which, with one exception, it didn’t.

In any event, Williams reworked the new play between at least 1961 and its première in 1964.  (Even though by this time, the play was officially entitled Eccentricities of a Nightingale, many people still referred to it as Summer and Smoke.)  New Directions announced in June 1964 the publication of a single volume to comprise the texts of both Alma plays and the New York Times’ report of the forthcoming publication noted that the new play would receive its première later in the month.  The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premiered at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York, on 25 June 1964 under the direction of George Keathley.  Edie Adams, star of TV variety shows and Broadway musicals, was cast as Alma and Alan Mixon played John.  Because of an early-morning backstage fire at the theater, however, the play’s scheduled Broadway try-out of 10 days was truncated after the Friday night performance on 26 June.  Eccentricities of a Nightingale got a world première of two performances.

There wasn’t a lot of critical coverage for the début.  The only New York City paper which reviewed the Tappan Zee Playhouse opening of a new play by one of America’s most renowned and respected playwrights was the New York World-Telegram and Sun.  Review-writer Norman Nadel complained that “‘Summer and Smoke’ never looked better than it does in comparison with this revision” and that Williams “has made Alma and the play more, rather than less melodramatic.”  Nyack’s own Rockland County Journal-News touted the “excitement” of seeing “variations on a familiar theme” in Williams’s new version of Summer and Smoke with the “added fillip” of “a new play, still in try-out.”  Reviewer Mariruth Campbell, citing part of the subtitle in the production’s program, confirmed that Eccentricities was, indeed, “a very odd little play”—the Nyack production was, in fact, the only one that ever carried the subtitle as it appears on the title page of the NYPL collection’s typescript.  Campbell objected that the play was “over-long” and noted that the cast “[a]ll worked valiantly to breathe life” into the play. 

Nevertheless, the new Alma play was launched, and publication followed in February 1965.  Over the rest of the decade, there were revivals and regional premières of Williams’s new play, and the British début was staged on 10 October 1967 at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, Surrey, directed by Philip Wiseman with Sian Phillips as Alma and Kevin Colson as John.  Then on 16 June 1976, the play’s profile was considerably raised when it was aired on PBS for Great Performances’ Theatre in America, in collaboration with San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, starring Blythe Danner as Alma and Frank Langella as John, directed by Glenn Jordan.  Following that broadcast, which Williams himself pronounced his “most successful” television adaptation, a staging at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre starring Betsy Palmer as Alma and David Selby as John was transferred to Broadway’s Morosco Theatre for a long-awaited New York City première on 23 November 1976.  Directed by Edwin Sherin, who’d staged a Long Island revival eight years earlier, the play was not well received in New York despite a successful run in Buffalo, with evaluations ranging from “a pleasing, small play” to “a pale outline of a play” whose “production was in every way substandard.”  Clive Barnes, on the other hand, wrote in the New York Times that while he’d expected Eccentricities just to be “a rewrite of Summer and Smoke,” he was surprised to find “a different play with different characters and even a different theme.”  Williams “new work effectively knocks Summer and Smoke off the map,” Barnes declared, “except as a literary curiosity.”  The Times reviewer concluded, “This is a warm, rich play full of that compassion and understanding and that simple poetry of the heart that is Mr. Williams at his shining, gentle best.  It may be an eccentric nightingale but its tune is still sweet.”  Brother Dakin recalls that Williams felt good about Barnes’s response: “It was the best Broadway reaction he had received in a long time.”  Nevertheless, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale on Broadway closed on 12 December after eight previews and only 12 regular performances. 

Among the differences between Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, possibly the most discussed are the changes Alma and John undergo.  Alma, it has been observed, evolves from hyper-conventional and old-fashioned but essentially normal to truly eccentric.  John, on the other hand, mellows from a rebellious, hedonistic egocentric to a decent, if somewhat dull, young man.  The other significant alteration is the replacement of John’s father in Summer and Smoke with his mother in Eccentricities. 

We have seen that both John and his father are, in part, depictions of Williams’s own father, the man who called him “Miss Nancy” and lost part of an ear in a fight over a card game.  Shortly before C. C. Williams’s death in 1957, Williams acknowledged, he stopped hating him and began to understand, even love him.  This adjustment, Williams has confessed, resulted from treatment by Lawrence Kubie, a Freudian psychoanalyst he began seeing in 1957.  As a consequence of his treatment, Williams asserted, “I felt like a great load was lifted from my mind.”

Williams saw Kubie every weekday for nearly a year, and, according to Williams biographer Ronald Hayman, Kubie even telephoned his patient on Saturdays and Sundays to check on him.  During the time of this treatment, the writer also began to become estranged from his mother, whom he had adored as a child just as he had hated his father.  He described the shift in a 1961 radio interview with writer Studs Terkel: “My homelife was dominated by a very wonderful but rather puritanical mother, who was in conflict with a very wonderful but rather profligate father. . . .  First I sided with the mother’s side and then after my father’s death, for some strange reason, I began to see his point of view better.”  Under analysis, Williams came to see that his very survival had depended on his father’s fighting spirit, inherited, according to family lore, from 18th-century East Tennessee Indian fighters like John Sevier (Revolutionary War officer and first governor of the State of Tennessee), and the playwright himself later wrote of C. C. Williams: “I wonder if he knew, and I suspect that he did, that he left me something far more important [than inherited money], which was his blood in my veins?  And of course I wonder, too, of there wasn’t more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.”

As for Williams’s feelings toward his mother, he came to blame Edwina for allowing his beloved sister’s lobotomy, which left Rose a hopeless invalid, surviving in what Dakin Williams said his brother “considered . . . a kind of living death.”  Williams also felt that Edwina, whom the playwright called in his 1975 Memoirs “a little Prussian officer in drag,” had alienated him from his father and “that my mother had made me a sissy.”  Under analysis, his affections shifted as did the personas of the parental villains in the Alma plays, from the remote and absent father in Summer and Smoke to the imperious and controlling mother in Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  A similarly striking change for the worse takes place between the Mrs. Winemiller of Summer and Smoke, whom critic Felicia Londré characterizes as “a querulous and perverse child,” and the Mrs. Winemiller of Eccentricities, who’s become “a social liability.”   

As Williams biographer Lyle Leverich asserts:

Although Tom’s mother and grandmother were giving him the concrete support he needed, paradoxically it was not so much their inspiration as his rage against his father that inflamed his burning desire to write.  Tennessee Williams’s career could be called an act of revenge, until at length he entered analysis, understood his sublimated love for his deceased father, and turned his anger on his mother, thus changing the character of his plays.

It seems clear that Kubie’s influence on Williams’s feelings for his parents are reflected in the shifts in character manifested in the reworking of Summer and Smoke into Eccentricities.  I contend that though he may have begun the new play in 1951, he certainly continued to work on it during the years he underwent psychoanalysis or just afterwards when he was still under the psychoanalyst’s Freudian influence, and the completed script illustrates the new-found Freudian outlook.  Indeed, Williams acknowledged that his plays “reflect somehow the particular psychological turmoil I was going through when I wrote them.”  Without a copy of the earlier revision from 1951 or ’52, it’s impossible to know for sure if that’s so, but that’s my sense of Williams’s process. 

Rather than a cold and distant father, for instance, John now has a dominating, controlling mother, the “heavy” that theater historian W. David Sievers pointed to in his psychoanalysis of the American stage as a Freudian figure.  John’s relationship with Mrs. Buchanan in Eccentricities  is nearly classic Oedipalism, a distinctly Freudian concept.  (It is also significant that Mrs. Winemiller transforms from a childlike personality to a potentially destructive one.  Compare, also, the pre-analysis mother, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, 1944, with the post-analysis Eccentricities mothers.  The most salient manifestation of this attitude change is Violet Venable, Sebastian’s dragon-lady mother in Suddenly, Last Summer, 1958.)  Sievers also identifies as Freudian developments “the dethroning of motherhood and the liberation of children from possessive parents,” both of which appear in Eccentricities but not so much in Summer and Smoke.  John, himself, is no longer the undisciplined savage that was Williams’s other image of his father.  Together, Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are a study of a shifting parent-child relationship, a depiction of Williams’s own vacillating allegiance.

With the elimination of the fiery Gonzaleses, furthermore, the violence of Summer and Smoke is also eliminated in Eccentricities .  (The Daily Telegraph announcement of the British première of Eccentricities was even entitled “Unviolent Williams.”)  There’s no longer, for instance, a stabbing or shooting, and the Moon Lake Casino episode has been replaced with a visit to a cheap hotel.  The excision of the violence of Summer and Smoke, a hallmark of Williams writing since the beginning, from Eccentricities  was almost certainly also a direct response to Williams’s treatment under Kubie.  “If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people and violent material,” Williams acknowledged in a 1958 interview in the New York Herald Tribune.  (This outcome of the psychoanalysis didn’t last long, as Williams returned to writing about violence in later plays like Suddenly, Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth.  In 1959, after the playwright had stopped seeing Kubie, he wrote that in the previous 19 years, “I have only produced five plays that are not violent: The Glass Menagerie, You Touched Me, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo and, recently in Florida, a serious comedy called Period of Adjustment, which is still being worked on.”  Most critics would argue with his appraisal of Summer and Smoke—unless, of course, the playwright meant the “new” Summer and Smoke  which was actually Eccentricities of a Nightingale and which had been stashed away by this time for eight years.)

Another shift that takes place between Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities is the one from a summer setting to a winter one.  It’s less clear that Kubie’s therapy had an effect on this change, especially since Williams noted that it had already taken place in the 1951 script on which he was working in Rome that June.  Nevertheless, it reflects a change in the writer’s psychological adjustment—as well as the manifestation of his lifelong bugaboo, the destructiveness of “life’s destroyer, time.”  As Williams said to New York Post writer Robert Rice in 1958: “It haunts me, the passage of time. . . .  I think time is a merciless thing.  I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.”  (Remember that his one-act precursor to Sweet Bird was entitled The Enemy: Time.)  Summer and winter echo the two aspects of Alma: fire and ice, and the passage from one to the other accompanies Alma’s passing from “brief bloom to . . . decay.”

With the change from a summer setting to a winter one came also the title change.  With that was also the elimination of a focus, almost an obsession, in which Williams engaged in Summer and Smoke: the life, and particularly the death by suicide, of poet Hart Crane.  The title of Summer and Smoke is adapted from a line from Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” and Crane, a homosexual like Williams, drowned himself on 27 April 1932 in a moment of deep despair by throwing himself overboard while aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico.  (The line, “By that time summer and smoke were past,” is from a stanza that seems to predict the poet’s own death.)  Williams viewed Crane’s struggle to confront a hostile and indifferent world as a reflection of his own and even left instructions, which were ignored, that his body should be buried at sea near where Crane is believed to have drowned.  In the 1937 one-act play Escape (presented under the title Summer at the Lake for its 2004 New York première; see my report, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” 5 March 2011), Williams depicts a young man who swims out into the sea to his death, a clear reference to Crane’s suicide, an act with which Williams was preoccupied.  All this is gone from Eccentricities and I suspect that Kubie’s treatment had something to do with why Williams deemphasized the poet’s watery death—perhaps because he’d come to know himself better. 

Williams consistently identified two conflicting strains in his nature: the Puritan, representing the gentler, poetic side of his character, inherited, he felt, from the Dakin line of his family, as embodied by his mother, versus the Cavalier, vital, dynamic, even violent, side passed down through the Sevier-Lanier-Williams line, personified by his father.  One reason, I think, that Summer and Smoke  and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale were such important works for Williams, plays for which he had such a constant and irrepressible commitment, is that though this internal war plays out in most of his dramas (Blanche Du Bois-Stanley Kowalski; Lady Torrance-Val Xavier, Princess Kosmonopolis-Chance Wayne), in no texts other than the Alma plays is this conflict so front-and-center—dramatically, thematically, scenically, symbolically.  Dakin Williams even asserts that the Alma plays “would haunt him all his life.”  None of Williams other plays, including the autobiographical Glass Menagerie, is the dramatization of the playwright’s own inner struggle.  Kubie’s psychoanalysis may have shifted Williams’ allegiances to one side of his nature or the other, but the fundamental focus on the conflict remained from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities.  Alma Winemiller may have been Williams alter ego, his soulmate, but the plays were, quite literally, about the writer’s own soul.  No wonder he couldn’t let them go.