< Previous20John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. A cage represents security as well as confinement to a bird that has grown used to being in it; and when a theatrical work kicks over the traces with . . .apparent insouciance, security seems challenged and, instead of participating in its sense of freedom, one out of a certain number of playgoers will rush back out to the more accustomed implausibility of the street he lives on . 17 This “cage” of paranoiac security is really Williams’ American blues; this is what the theological individualism, the dichotomy of “moral” spirit and “sinful” body becomes . The measure of paranoia is taken in America by a building whose size, whose great rear wall, dwarfs the village bank, outlooms the town hall, and outattracts the local temples: the Delta Brilliant and Joy Rio movie palaces . For at the motion pictures, America has shouted with Blanche: “I don’t want realism . I want magic .” And it is precisely the movies that have glossed the American schizophrenia behind a securely caged two-dimensional silver illusion . The tension of the Calvinistic disparities and the resulting frustration told in Lawrentian terms is illustrated by the former movie-usher-turned- playwright no more directly than in that expressionistic truth play, The Glass Menagerie . The narrator, Tom Wingfield, as character in the episodic plot is torn between his mother’s interpretation of responsibility and his own personal instinct . The Puritan-Cavalier debate continues in the mouth of mother and son: Tom: Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse! Amanda: Man is by instinct! Don’t quote instinct to me! Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals! Christian adults don’t want it! 18 Amanda’s puritanism is for her a liveable proposition; Tom, how- evermuch forced to Amanda’s mold, feels differently, yet basically submits to her puritan tyranny—with one exception: 17 Ibid ., p . 162 . 18 The Glass Menagerie in John Gassner, A Treasury of the Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p . 1043 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction21 Tom: I go to the movies because—I like adventure . Adven- ture is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies . Amanda: But, Tom, you go to the movies entirely too much! Tom: I like a lot of adventure . For a time the movies divert Tom, relieve vicariously the pressure of his personal tense frustration by the “cavalier” distractions which Stanley Kowalski called all “This Hollywood glamor stuff”; 19 but finally the magnificent opiate of the twentieth century wears too thin to mask the epic malaise: Tom: I’m tired of the movies . . . .All of those glamorous people—having adventure—hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! . . . .People go to the movies instead of mov- ing . Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in the dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there’s a war . That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone’s dish, not only Gable’s! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves . . . .I’m not patient . I don’t want to wait . . . .I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move! 20 As for the women, fed on the national mania for movies and unable to go off to war, their declaration of aggression—and aggres- sion is the psychic emotion subsequent to frustration—is in Wil- liams a characteristic turning to sexual adventure . For instance, it is no unthematic coincidence that in Act Three (entitled significantly “A Cavalier’s Plum”) of Eccentricities, Alma surrenders to John’s physical advances after “going to a Mary Pickford picture at the 19 Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947), p . 41 . 20 Glass Menagerie, p . 1050 . Correlative to Williams’ judging of himself as a playwright who “feels” as opposed to those who “think,” it is interesting to read Erich Fromm on this basic dichotomy in the American psyche . The latter part of the quotation does double duty in supporting both Tom Williams and Tom Wingfield on the movies . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK22John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Delta Brilliant .” 21 For Williams, the dramatist who was once fired by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and whose stage works are amazingly adaptable to and successful as films, sees a reciprocity of disservice between the movie-bred public and the public-bred movies . Gable came a cavalier to the dark-room puritans vicariously adventuring beyond the insecure limits of their inherited Calvinis- tic bias . Calvinism, by dogma, kept man in tension, so that, unsure whether saved or not saved, he had recourse only to the response of blind faith for comfort . The disservice of the movies, with their reneging emphasis on materiality, emotion, and sex, is that they do not solve the tension; they simply confuse and thwart attempts of the collective national psyche to achieve balanced identity . Deprav- ity equalled the body for Calvin and Williams wants to break the equation . Chicken, the unelected Calvinist in Kingdom of Earth says: “Lookin’ at them screen stars don’t close the gates on the body . . . . After the show it’s worse than before you went in . You come back out and there ain’t one inch of you not overrun by those longings .” 22 For him the depravity is complete; he no longer engages the tension of contest . For one, however, who chooses an uncalvinistic optimism, there remains much tension . “The Reverend T . Lawrence Shannon, D .D ., . . .son of a minister and grandson of a bishop, and the direct descendant of two colonial governors” runs headlong in Night of the Iguana against his theological heritage by holding against even the odds of the Baptist Female College a deep “faith in essential . . . human . . .goodness .” 23 Yet his history of nervous breakdowns tells the tension he feels as his doubts about man’s regenerated nature increase . He views essential goodness and essential depravity as “two unstable conditions [that] can set a whole world on fire, can blow it up, past repair .” 24 Shannon’s vision is the essential violence that from the first has been surface symptom of the deeper American malaise . The Pilgrims had to adjust the theological isolation of Calvinism into a pragmatic 21 Eccentricities of a Nightingale (New York: New Directions, 1964), p . 101 . 22 Kingdom of Earth, p . 100 . 23 Night of the Iguana (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp . 85, 24 . 24 Ibid ., p . 49 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction23 social order that physically saved the individual for individualism . Adjustment in the Age of Discovery was physical survival . Now the period of adjustment has extended to a more subtle try for a balanced identity, and its very subtlety has driven the mass psyche back to superficially simpler times: “Will you look at that?” George points to the television in Period of Adjustment, “a western on Christmas eve, even! It’s a goddam NATIONAL OBSESSIONAL .” “Yep,” Ralph answers, “a national homesickness in the American heart for the old wild frontiers with the yelping redskins and the covered wagons on fire” when everything was simpler: the elect congregation versus the depraved Indians . 25 Thus perpetuated are the myths of the American Eden; thus created are the real American blues: all the romantic promise of the new Adam’s perfectibility clashing with the heritage of a brittle adaptation of imported German theology, and both romantic and theologian in contretemps with four-square reality . From within this tension comes Tennessee Williams’ peculiar and savage gestus—that Brechtian word for the thrust, point, direction, gesture, and timing of the matter in a dramatic work . As a result, Williams’ esthetically articulate examination of the mid-century American sensibility is particularly valid . A playwright, more than any other literary artist, must search for proper forms to fit new subject matter and phi- losophies . . . .No other art form has to depend on technique so slavishly as the drama, for drama is meant to be seen on a stage, not to be read in the quiet of the study . 26 The form of the drama must be immediately communicative; its value of exchange must be judged on the compatibility of the mat- ter and form tendered . A playwright must not only determine the most appropriate form for the subject matter his time suggests to him, “but he must also successfully marry this form to the stage itself—his sole medium of communications with his audience .” The proper marriage can generate great drama; conversely, “the eras of 25 Period of Adjustment (New York: New Directions, 1960), p . 79 . 26 The quotations in this paragraph are from Paul A . Hummert, “Preparing for Godot,” Today (June, 1966), p . 21 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK24John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. poor drama . . .reflect the opposite principle—a divorce of form from subject matter .” In the latter instance, the incompatibility most often arises because the pertinent subject matter has evolved beyond the capacity of the traditional forms . Tennessee Williams, as a University of Missouri undergraduate, caught the Alla Nazimova touring company of Ghosts . “It was,” he recalled later, “one of the things that made me want to write for the theatre .” 27 In addition, like Ibsen, who at Bergen redeemed the artifact of the well-made play to serve realistically the concerns of the time, Tennessee Williams endured a similarly serviceable vagrant apprenticeship which took him from the St . Louis Mummers to Hollywood’s MGM . Again like Ibsen, Williams set out to destroy the rotten edifice convention had reared; but unlike Ibsen (whose time’s proper marriage demanded a well-made realism) Williams has not hesitated to vacillate between, as well as combine in a unit, elements of a more imaginative theatrical form . Modern American realism has tended to blend itself with a poetry of the theatre . The truth of everyday life has recognized the complementary truth of the imagination . Our most significant playwrights [have had] to mediate the requirements of realistic description and of the creative imagination . . . .When our theatre arrived at maturity, it absorbed two originally divergent aims of the modern Euro- pean theatre—that of the realists and naturalists and that of the symbolists and expressionists . 28 The circumstance of this combination is that the Movement of Form away from Realism (that is, the search for the form most expres- sive of the mid-century matter: the re-articulation of the traditional imbalances into terms of modern existential philosophy) in America with Williams has taken a peculiar turn . One expects the resolution to be totally in accord with the brilliantly absurd cannonades of Ionesco, Beckett, and especially Genet, or at least—to keep the deli- cate balance of expression American—on Edward Albee . However, 27 Gassner, op. cit ., p . 1032 . 28 Ibid ., p . 785 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction25 if proportion be kept, Williams—who hardly springs to mind as a dramatist of Absurd Theatre—has done a more than creditable service in evolving the marriage of “American Existentialism” to the most suitable dramatic form . He writes in his Preface to The Slapstick Tragedy: I believe that the peculiar style of these two short play is accurately defined by their mutual title . They are not “The- atre of the Absurd”; they are short, fantastic works whose content is a dislocated and wildly idiomatic sort of tragedy, perhaps a bit like the feature stories in that newspaper, the National Enquirer, which I think is the finest journalistic review of the precise time that we live in . The style of the plays is kin to vaudeville, burlesque and slapstick, with a dash of pop art thrown in . . . .I think, in production, they may seem to be a pair of fantastic allegories on the tragicomic subject of human existence on this risky planet . 29 Despite such recent statement about his plays’ possible themes, Williams had earlier stated: I have never been able to say what was the theme of my plays and I don’t think I have ever been conscious of writing with a theme in mind . . . .Usually when asked about a theme, I look vague and say, “It is a play about life .” 30 This vague generality if not particularly informing is nonetheless serviceably true . Williams is concerned with life, but not with life in the American social tradition of Odets, Hellman, and Miller . “They are concerned with [more exterior] social problems, with how man gets along with the world around him . Williams is worried, as is O’Neill, with how man gets on with the world inside him . 31 Specified even more, this reads how the mid-century American gets on with the old interior world for which the post-war existential 29 Esquire (August, 1965), p . 95 . 30 Tennessee Williams, “Questions without Answers,” New York Times (October, 1948), sec . 2, pp . 1,3 . 31 William Sharp, “An unfashionable View of Tennessee Williams,” Tulane Drama Review (March, 1962), p . 171 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK26John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. awareness has given him new names . Alighting on this interiority, Williams in his inductive dramas confronts the tense substance of the times . He has spoken of “a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in my blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in my characters .” 32 The characters in turn express the tension which exists between the puritan conscience and the fugitive cavaliers; sometimes even the New England allusions are maintained, as when Sandra says to Myra: “They’ve passed a law against passion . . . .Whoever has too much passion, we’re going to be burned like witches because we know too much . 33 In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Brick’s “big howl against American life is ‘mendacity’ which includes his greedy brother, the church, the lun- cheon clubs, and his wife’s craving to have a baby .” 34 Through all the disparately imbalanced ideals of all the American institutions Brick fumbles, trying to rip his way to the graver questions of the balanced interior self . The mendacity he despises is the lived lie forced by the unreal but existent forces of a puritanism and cavalierism which deny the balance in human nature . “Mendacity is a system that we live in . Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other .” 35 Both ways he knows well, the one from his own experience and the other from the death of his friend, Skipper . For interior reasons he rejects “twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the Valley Nile,” 36 just as Kilroy, the “young American vagrant” 37 of Camino Real, and Tom Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie had both more vaguely rebelled “against something in America that might be described as the crass American dollar . 38 Despite Signi Falk’s wisecracking about “the grim valley of greenbacks” which drives these boys into an indulged “self-pity and lovemaking,” 39 their reaction to the mercantile mores 32 K . M . Sager, op, cit., p . 149 . 33 Battle of Angels (New York: New Direction, 1940 and 1958), p . 215 . 34 Signi Falk, “The Profitable World of Tennessee Williams,” Modern Drama (Decem- ber, 1958), I, 175 . 35 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (New York: New Direction, 1955), p . 111 . 36 Ibid ., p . 70 . 37 Camino Real in Three Plays, p . 192 . 38 Falk, op . cit ., p . 192 . 39 Ibid . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction27 of a materialism that slights the graver questions of the self received a lamenting and reluctant confirmation as far back as Cotton Mather who saw the paranoiac sport that the Calvinistic view of the human condition had most unhumanistically sprouted . Consequently Tennessee Williams’ plays, inductively representa- tive of his view of the American culture, can most easily be classed as dramas of failure; for failure is the great American bugaboo which belies the ethic that the virtuous are here and now rewarded; the wider and more terrible implication in the concept of failure is that it carries within itself the realization, the admission even, that Eden has once again not been found . Williams captures this modern claustrophobia and it is no accident that the form to which he seeks to wed his contemporary matter is a curious mixture of stage and film techniques . In fact, one often feels that the majority of his works makes better scenarios that plays; for the film can literally approxi- mate the poetic synapses of the creative mind with more facility than can the stage, itself encumbered by space and time . Individual stage versions notwithstanding, the reading imagination needs only a brief comparison to determine that the filmy gauze of the memory play Glass Menagerie or the episodic reportage of the dream play Camino Real withstand—at least technically—the rigors of impersonation better as films than as stage pieces . 40 Today’s quest for appropriate form revolves around whether the dramatist is to be confined to the traditional boards; or whether in his search for new and relevant forms in which to vitalize his matter, he be allowed to evolve into the physical extensions of his art which the technology of his age affords . Never minding Marshall McLu- han, however, Tennessee Williams is, and would call himself a writer for the “vulgarity of the boards .” This should not be construed that the filmic thrust which may bring the American drama to a quite interesting parturition is not very much present in Williams; on the 40 Although Williams has adapted several of his dramas into film scenarios, Baby Doll was his first “original” screenplay . His feeling for this dramatic form, most indig- enous to the time, is patently obvious in the technical fluidity and literary easiness of the shooting script, published as written . It might also be noted that while at MGM he finished a shooting script called The Gentleman Caller: MGM read it and fired him . In its second form, Glass Menagerie, Warner Brothers outbid MGM for the play written, ironically, on Metro’s time . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK28John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. contrary, the film, with its vast technology, is the (so-far) ultimate art form, synthesizing all previous arts not only into unity but into recorded permanence . Indeed, Williams’ very filmic sensibility is one of the clearest indications of the slow and evolutionary match- making being done to drama’s matter and drama’s form . This however, is to be read as comment on Williams rather than on the evolution of the film; in short, maugre Williams’ eventual influence of the motion picture, the fact is that the film has influ- enced Williams . The reality of the films would have delighted Ibsen; the facility of reduplicating irreality would have delighted Strind- berg; in either case the medium in a kind of latter-day compliment underwrites with a certain ease of expression the particular sensibil- ity of each playwright; in either case, the film yet may record only what is placed before the camera, so that, as always, the form makes bow, albeit only reciprocal, to the informing matter . It is safe to say that Williams’ matter is contemporarily indig- enous; for his documentation of failure, his dramatization of the frustrations of failure are both quite typical of modern existential drama . It is important to an understanding of Williams to recall Brustein’s evolutionary theory of theatre: In the last stage of the modern drama, existential revolt, the dramatist examines the metaphysical life of man and pro- test against it . . . .The drama of existential revolt is a mode of the utmost restriction, a cry of anguish over the insufferable state of being human . . . .Existential revolt is the dominating impulse behind the plays of Williams, Albee, Gelber, and Pinter—not to mention Beckett, Ionesco, and the entire “theatre of the absurd .” 41 Brustein, therefore, does keep Williams separate from the species of absurdity but does not subtract him from the genus of existen- tial revolt . This is quite revelatory of Williams’ attitudes towards and selection of his matter . If the existential revolt is founded on the “fatigued and hopeless, reflecting the disintegration of idealist 41 Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), pp . 26-27 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction29 energies—[their] exhaustion and disillusionment,” 42 then it should come as no surprising psychological bent in a playwright whose region’s ideals had been physically and morally destroyed by civil war, whose country—beyond a too confining regionalism—had found the new Eden’s promise as poisoned as the old . The clue revealing the disintegration is the tension; and it is at this cardinal point of Angst that Williams has set stake as dramatist; for he records the fail- ing messianism which promised a free new Eden just as he records its opposite, the frustrating and unbreakable reality of the human bondage in as wasteland of space and time and mostly in death . Existential revolt represents Romanticism tuned in on itself and beginning to rot . . . .One of the strongest identify- ing marks of the existential drama is its attitude towards the flesh . . . .Gusto, joy, and sensuality give way to dark brood- ing and longings after death—[the tension arises between] the ideal of human perfectibility [and] . . .a vision of human decay . 43 Williams, whose romantic affinities have often been explicated, is more than romantic; he is neo-romantic: he affirms the gusto and sensuality of the life force in order to cavalierly counteract the predominantly puritan denial . However, neither extreme rings true: man is neither totally perfectible nor totally depraved . As a result, from out of this schizophrenic stand-off Williams dramatizes the arising tension using the basically Chekovian drama of attrition— people are not always eventfully destroyed, but they are eroded . Williams’ major people bear this out: the Wingfields, Amanda and Tom, in their continual debate between puritan responsibility and cavalier long distance, personify both unsatisfactory extremes at a draw; Blanche, like Amanda, is a woman who has out-lived her times . Both are extinct romantic characters, wandered in from some archetypal Chekovian orchard . Puritan Blanche and Cavalier Stanley, however, do not sustain the draw; they do not part ways as do Amanda and Tom . Blanche and Stanley, typifying the extremes, 42 Ibid ., p . 27 . 43 Ibid ., pp . 27-28 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >