The "Shakespeare" Treatment

The Great and Challenging Aspects of Staging Classics

by Augustin J Correro

One of the main goals of a TWTC production is to share with the audience a performance that is unique and innovative. We purposefully aim not to restage films, since movies will always do movies better than theatre artists. We like to bend expectations and try new things. We believe that's what will help us to keep theatre relevant and living. The alternative to living theatre is artificial theatre: theatre as an artifact.

We have great reverence for artifacts, don't get me wrong. However, artifacts aren't something we're normally allowed to touch. Just the same, it's hard for artifacts to touch us from the inside of a glass case—and we're interested in theatre that touches people.

Somewhat often, audience members express a feeling of disconnection (of not being touched) when they see classics produced. Moliere falls flat for them, or Sophocles is less of a tragedy and more of a snooze. The folks that share this feeling with me express that they appreciate the plays, but that they really don't derive enjoyment from seeing them. One culprit for this kind of audience exclusion is expectation. Producers and artists alike have to grapple with the expectations of what plays might-or-should look and sound like, sometimes to the detriment of the experience. Whether it's austere Ibsen or fancy-schmancy Shaw, people have expectations about plays and playwrights, and they can be hard to shake.

Several of Tennessee Williams' plays are American classics. Naturally, they come with expectations (conventions like Southern belles wrestling with desire or families battling over inheritance). In addition to informing how the better known plays are staged, the TW classics dictate how the general public views the plays they're not as familiar with. For example, it's hard to find a review of a Tennessee Williams play that doesn't compare the play being discussed to Streetcar, The Glass Menagerie, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 

In addition to fulfilling expectations set down by other plays, some productions of Williams' works seem to mimic conventions from previous stagings, giving the audience some approximation of what they might have come to expect. This creates even more stagnancy in how Williams' plays are staged. 

However, even though many productions err on the familiar side, others blow the lid off of those expectations. They challenge the expectations, toss off the conventions, and create unique iterations of the plays. For the audience, it really can go either way. It can be an absolute thrill to see a complete departure or a style of Tennessee they never expected, or it can be a blazing hot mess. 

When it comes to staging plays, there are those who would say "do it like it's been done before, always", or more pragmatically "give the people what they want". These are valid notions, but to illuminate the other side of the argument, I'd like to draw a comparison between Tennessee Williams and the other greatest English-speaking playwright: William Shakespeare.

There are die-hard purists in both the Williams and the Shakespeare camps, suggesting the actor doesn't breathe or blink unless it's in the script . There are also those who would yank the literary texts out of the library and burn the books, choosing only to stage the heart and soul of the plays, with no regard for the particulars. We at TWTC prefer a more measured approach than either of these, and we're not alone.

There are lots of factors which contribute to the "Shakespeare Treatment", where we universally acknowledge that something is "great", but when we go to see it or pick it up to present it, we can't figure out why it doesn't make us feel "great". It's also hard to express why to those around us because we're afraid to sound unsophisticated when we say "Shakespeare is over my head" or "Tennessee Williams is like grandma stuff". We can feel left out when we're told that Shakespeare is universal and that Tennessee Williams is the poet of the human soul, but that production with those good actors around that lacy table just wasn't our cup of tea. I've been there. Then I saw productions that changed my mind.

Some of the most thrilling iterations of Shakespeare that I've ever seen were reimagined, updated in terms of staging, or non-traditionally cast. Some of them were painstakingly staged to resemble the original productions but focused on the audience's understanding rather than showcasing the esoteric virtuosity of the performers. Either way works, as long as it's audience-centered. By treating Shakespeare's plays as living art, companies are able to engage new audiences, captivate existing ones, and challenge artists—all while respecting the text. Rather than pumping formaldehyde into the plays to preserve them at just below room temperature, these kinds of productions keep blood flowing to the heart and brain of theatre, keeping it alive, hot, and vital.

The same can be said of Williams' plays, and it's our hope that more productions will exhibit daring, innovation, and imagination. We've seen it work (we've seen it not-so-much work, too), and TWTC is committed to sharing new, unique, and enriched stagings with the New Orleans community.

Our upcoming production of Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams features a diverse cast and is set during the holidays, present day. It's performed very close to the audience in a bar (the setting put down by TW in the script), and you can drink from the very same bar as the characters. These choices are all departures from previous productions, but were made with respect for the text and the audience. See how it makes you feel. We'll see you at the theatre!

Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams

December 10-20, Thursdays-Monday. 8pm Weekdays, 7pm Saturdays & Sundays. 

Performed at Mag's 940 - 940 Elysian Fields (at Elysian & North Rampart)

Tickets can be purchased at www.twtheatrenola.com or by calling 504-264-2580

Tennessee Around Town

TWTC’s Commitment to Our Community

As we gear up for our next show, TWTC wants to share some of the good work we’ve been doing offstage, too! We’re committed to engaging our community and sharing Tennessee with New Orleans and the surrounding area. If you know of a school or organization who would like to learn more, email info@twtheatrenola.com !

Students from Bonnabel High School in Kenner came to see Kingdom of Earth and were treated to a a special discount and got to partake in our first Talking Tennessee session before the show! Above are some of the students after the show with Sean Richmond, who played Chicken.

Co-Artistic Directors Nick and Augustin gave an informative talk about Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, and led a Q&A with students from Cabrini High School in New  Orleans!

Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? was FREE to anyone who wanted to attend, and was hosted by New Orleans Public Library. Pictured above, the show was performed outside on a perfect night for theatre on the lawn of Latter Library.

Look forward to more posts about TWTC in our community!

Public Indecency

Dispelling the High-Brow Tennessee Williams Myth

by Augustin J Correro

Cherri Golden as Sister Felicity in Suddenly Last Summer, Columbus MS Tennessee Williams Tribute

Photo Credit: Hope Harrington Oakes

There’s an ongoing joke between me and a director friend of mine. Chris Bentivegna, who is known in New Orleans for staging campy, knock-your-socks-off theatre events that often leave audiences busting guts and/or covered in fake blood, will at intermission to his shows glibly say to me “Well, it isn’t Tennessee Williams”. He knows this both tickles me and chafes just a little. 

Chris knows that Tennessee Williams is filled with varied and colorful humor alongside poetic pathos, yet our little joke does speak to a larger notion in the zeitgeist about the playwright: that Tennessee Williams’ plays are high-brow entertainment. I’d like to take the time in this post to dismantle that half-baked notion.

The Shakespeare Treatment

To begin, let’s examine another playwright whose work is viewed by some as strictly high-brow: William Shakespeare. At the risk of sounding indelicate, Shakespeare is the source of more penis, breast, and butt jokes than most playwrights in the English language. A kind of hyper-historical preservation of the author’s plays, however, has a chilling effect on the human warmth laid down in them. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare’s poetry is not poignant, or that he didn’t touch on much deeper truths in his drama. Instead, I posit that it’s both—and that without one, the other may suffer from a reputation closer to a relic than a living piece of art and literature.

Putting Shakespeare onstage as if it’s inside a glass case in a museum creates a degree of separation between the play and the audience. The same is true for Tennessee Williams. If the primary concern in a production is replicating what the play “ought to be” based on prior productions or academic correctness, there’s an increased likelihood of a flat, dull production. A viewer may not be able to place why he or she isn’t moved by the production, but it’s very possible that he or she will feel “left out” of the conversation. Rightly so: the museum glass case prevents touching from happening.

Thanks to the efforts of several theatre groups, innovative productions of Shakespeare have been happening for some time (It also helps that the bard’s plays are in public domain, so more companies can perform them). What this means is that while there are still “historically accurate” renditions of Shakespeare’s plays, there are also evocative new productions which bend the collective imagination. These two opposite production types serve a vital purpose in sustaining the poet’s legacy. I would propose Tennessee Williams receive a similar balance in the scope of staging techniques. Globally, companies are already making headway in this vein, but Americans remain concerned with filmic re-presentations. This gives many audiences, particularly young ones, the idea that Tennessee Williams is dated and polite.

Sweet Tea Tennessee

It should come as no shock that audiences don’t all go to the theatre with the expectation of seeing nice people being kind to one another. Even Christmas Pageants have a conflict (“What do you mean ‘No Vacancies’?!”). We seek drama at the theatre, but a flawed image of 20th Century American Southern life leads many to believe that Tennessee Williams should be just that: sweet. But if Steel Magnolias taught us anything, it’s that Southern life is just as complex and fraught with drama as life anyplace else. Williams wrote what he knew. He placed his vivid portrayals of a crushing, ambivalent universe below the Mason-Dixon Line (many of them, anyway), and somewhere along the way, an outmoded view of Southerners as dull, drawling simpletons overtook the bold substance of the dramatist’s works.

The result of this “Sweet Tea Tennessee” is that violence, sexuality, and the uniquely thrilling drama of Williams is stripped out of productions so that they can fit a mold that is more precious and pleasant. It’s not always the case, but it happens frequently enough to bear mentioning. It’s also not something that the companies should necessarily be blamed for. It’s often an oversight, in the interests of putting on a show how it “ought to look”.

Let’s NOT Go To The Movies

When we talk about how a production “ought to look”, usually what determines an “appropriate” production is how closely it resembles the film. As I mentioned in my post on Kingdom of Earth, however, the films were censored to shreds and were presented for a wider and more conservative audience than the playwright was necessarily writing for. In an effort to make it more palatable to the censors, performances also had to be sterilized to a degree, and violence had to be tempered on film in a way that it didn’t on stage.

Furthermore, Williams recognized that film and theatre were not the same medium, and concessions needed to be made for both, and that in some situations, one allotted more freedom than the other. For example: in A Streetcar Named Desire, when Stanley rapes Blanche in the theatre, Stella can still choose to be with him (for better or worse). In film, Stella had to deny her husband, because rape had to be punished to satisfy decency. Conversely, in the film version of Suddenly Last Summer, we are able to see the interior of the asylum and various other locales—a luxury that cannot be afforded to a stage production.

The Lady Ain’t Just

Another wrench in the gears that turn toward progress in Williams’ legacy is that after his death in 1983, the Lady Maria St. Just took Tennessee’s reputation in a choke hold and didn’t let go until she herself kicked the bucket over a decade later. A social climber of the highest caliber, the Lady St. Just (who John Lahr brilliantly describes here) had very strong ideas about how Williams must be preserved and presented. Through blackmail, obfuscation, and probably good old fashioned black sorcery, she kept Williams hostage long after he died. Her zeal for promoting her vision of Williams’ writing was detrimental especially in academic conversation, and she even went so far as to delay the publication of one of the quintessential texts on Williams’ life—Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams—until it was too late in the biographer’s life to produce its second installment.

Without being lofty or scholarly, I provide the above information for this reason: stopping up or limiting the conversation about an author especially in the years after his death does terrible damage to the collective conception of that author. While Maria St. Just may have had noble (albeit demented) intentions for Williams’ legacy, she caused stagnation in the discussion around America’s greatest playwright at a time when he needed kindness. Instead of being permitted to dispel ugly rumors and experiment with his rich texts, scholars and producers had to negotiate with a gatekeeper. Ergo, what was believed of Williams and his plays in 1983 was encircled in a thicket of brambles like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and we’re still hacking through it to this day.

St. Just had her own idea of how Williams “ought to look”, and she defended her conception of the plays like a dragon guards its hoard. She felt that his plays should be immutable, and that they should not grow. This vigilant effort to keep the art static and exclusive played a part in why the aforementioned misconceptions of Williams weren’t discounted sooner.

Literary Criticism
The last point that I feel I have to make is one which I might come under the most fire for: that while Williams' plays are literature, they are dramatic literature. They were meant to be staged and viewed, not just read and ruminated on. Williams wrote novels, short stories, and poems, all of which were meant to exist on a page, but the plays were written for the stage. There are valiant English and humanities departments around the country which are teaching the works of Williams, and I dare not discount the work that they are doing—exposure is paramount. Like with Shakespeare, however, Williams should be staged in addition to more static reading so that it does not gather dust on a library shelf. Historians and professors can only do so much for the reputations of playwrights; the rest is up to the theatre makers in each generation.

This brings us back around to the notion of dusty old high-brow Williams. Let's shelf that notion, and explore instead a high-and-low-brow Tennessee. As a playwright for the people, Williams was not just writing for Broadway matinees. He always had some concern for the commercial viability of his longer plays, but at the same time, he didn’t pull punches. He packed in violence, shame, humiliation, ecstasy, hilarity, grotesquery, and so much more. Nevertheless, all too often high schoolers groan upon being made to crack open Streetcar  or The Glass Menagerie. In 2015, Williams runs the risk of being viewed as archaic, out-of-date, super-formal, academic, and exclusive. The work of organizations and companies who advocate for Williams through exciting presentation and drumming up enthusiasm (the half-dozen Tennessee Williams festivals including New Orleans’s own comes to mind) is invaluable to breaking these stereotypes about Williams. TWTC is committed to doing this, and we look forward to sharing our daring with our local community and visitors.

Tennessee Williams: Better Late Than Never

Kingdom of Earth is considered a unique—if not risky—first production choice.  Since its premiere more than four decades ago, Kingdom has been described several ways including poorly derivative of earlier works, lesser-known, and even outright bad Williams. While the reception so far of our production has been good, I'll put that aside to pose the question: what qualifies “bad Williams”?

by Augustin J Correro

Kate Kuen as Myrtle & Sean Richmond as Chicken. Photo by: James Kelley

Logically, to decide what makes some Williams “bad”, we begin by assessing what’s considered “good Williams”. We turn to the commonly produced canon, which includes (in no particular order): The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and arguably Vieux Carre and Camino Real. Much of why a small portion of Williams has been put into the “good” pile is the critical response to the plays at the time of their debuts on (or off) Broadway. Kingdom, or as it was known in its first Broadway iteration, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, was not a smash. Maybe it was the uncomely name. Maybe it was a largely homophobic critical community who wouldn’t have been pleased with anything Williams turned out. We may never know for sure. Whatever the case, Myrtle was a flop in 1968, so it must be bad (Right?).
  What made Streetcar, Menagerie, and the like good, then? Nowadays, it’s taken for granted that the plays were the typical, formulaic fare of the day when they premiered. This isn't true. These plays were cutting edge at the time. They were at the forefront of theatrical innovation, blending concepts Williams learned from film and techniques he learned at the New School under such teachers as Erwin Piscator (a mentor of Brecht in Germany), interspersed with traditional methods he’d seen in his lifetime. If they seem “safe” now, it’s because they influenced what came after. Even Arthur Miller acknowledged the role Williams played in paving the way for Death of a Salesman and his other plays. What designates the later works as “bad” is that they weren’t just on the edge—they were ahead of their time—at times even over the edge. I’d like to assert that this isn’t by its definition a bad thing.
  The grotesque, occasionally overdrawn aspects of Williams’ late plays were shocking to the audience. The elements worked against the plays’ receptions, because audiences and especially critics did not know what to do with the brave, new material. Because it did not exist in what was already designated as the “good Williams” box, a “bad Williams” designation came into play. After a certain point (a Night of the Iguana tipping point, it could be called) most of the playwright’s new material would be dumped into the “bad Williams” box. Genre confusion was coupled with the stigma attached to Williams’ very public humiliations as he struggled with countless deaths of loved ones and contemporaries, drug addiction, anxiety, alcoholism, and a society which would punish him for living outside the closet. He wrestled for about thirty years with managing the expectations placed on him by early successes, at once wanting to move on from topics and tropes he’d already explored, forging ahead toward new truths and conventions of interest to him, while at the same time needing validation from the reviewers and viewers. He had immense difficulty writing what he found fulfilling and true while grappling with the suffocating pressure of being told what he should write by merciless and obdurate critics.
    They were clamoring for Stanley. They pined for Maggie. Williams didn’t give them reproductions of these characters, so they projected their needs (and continue to) onto characters that—while they share some similarities—are vastly different. Myrtle is not Maggie or Blanche: no other character in a full-length play is a washed up showgirl and likely hooker, with a voice like Bette Midler. Stanley and Chicken both have rippling biceps and shout a little, but their histories, flaws, and actions are divided by a gulf deep with differences. Calling Kingdom a lesser Streetcar is an unfair comparison because they’re more different than they are similar. Going that one step further in comparison, some will assert that Williams wrote himself into his plays. Still, if you think Lot is definitively Tennessee Williams, reconsider: you can’t say he doesn’t have just as much in common with Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Speaking of black and white film, we mustn’t forget that much of what Tennessee Williams is in the greater social consciousness is more influenced by films based on his plays than by the plays themselves. Common practice for theatre is to prop up a facsimile of the famous film onstage and call it art. But as Williams put down in his production note to The Glass Menagerie:

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.

The real mire one falls into when taking cues off of film versions, however, is the horrific hacking away at the meat of the plays done by censors to appease Puritanical production codes. Perhaps the most rancid example is that in the film version of Menagerie, Laura gets a happy ending. The films were watered down, to say the least. So when you photocopy water, you just make a mess.
  Countless replicative stagings paraded before squirming audiences, the negative factors in Williams’ personal life which prompted critical and social scorn, and every half-baked, insensitive review: these are the lenses through which many critics still judge Williams. With other historical figures, we’re quick to jump on the bandwagon anytime fresh information is uncovered detailing the intricacies of their lives. Even with other playwrights, who would experiment endlessly received some grace from the critics for their audacity. On this topic, Marcel Meyer of Abrahamse/Meyer Productions, an award-winning South African theatre company had this to say:

No one speaks of “good Ibsen” and “bad Ibsen”--stylistically Peer Gynt’s  a million miles away from Hedda Gabler and no one chastises Ibsen for being a “bad” playwright for writing in a different style – same with Shakespeare – you couldn’t find plays more different than Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Twelfth Night or A  Winter’s Tale and no one ever speaks of “good Shakespeare” and “bad Shakespeare”…Tennessee Williams IS and always WAS a great playwright. Period. He wasn’t good up to a point and then suddenly became a bad playwright. He IS and WILL always be one of the world’s greatest playwrights. …But on the other hand Eugene O’Neill is praised and lauded for all is experiments in drama! Strange Interlude is nothing like Desire Under the Elms which is a million miles away from the Hairy Ape which is nothing like The Iceman Commeth – but yet critics in the USA are willing to praise each of these plays on THEIR OWN TERMS and are willing to see what O’Neill was trying to do… 

    Now is as good a time as ever to say that we at TWTC are not a cult. We don’t think that Tennessee could do no wrong. We don’t think that he, as a person or playwright, was infallible. As an individual he was just as flawed as any of us. Regarding Williams as a writer, there is some work that isn’t “production-ready”. Most of what has been published has proven to be production ready. We encourage our audiences and colleagues to take a more thorough look at his work in content and context.For some reason, more than three decades after his death, Tennessee Williams is still in the bog of bunk information. Scholars like Thomas Keith, David Kaplan, Karen Kohlhaas, Annette Saddik, and many others are tireless in their efforts to shed light on the late-life smear campaign led against Williams by the unkind media. John Lahr in his recent biography Tennessee Williams: A Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh spends dozens of pages on the topic. Still, in the eyes of many critics and reviewers, Tennessee Williams was a washed-up drunk who didn’t turn out a good piece of theatre after 1962. Production after production is proving this idea wrong. Audiences are today more willing to go on these wild adventures with Williams once they’re in their seats. It’s up to theatre producers and lovers of Williams to build the framework for these productions.
    Perhaps the sentiment most frequently echoed in critical reception of this play is encapsulated in this 1968 review: “There is no rational explanation of The Seven Descents of Myrtle except that Tennessee Williams is burlesquing himself, if that is rational. Williams’ exercises in southern degradation have sometimes illuminated the human condition, but this one is narrow, obsessively petty, and essentially ludicrous.” (Edwin Newman, NBC News). Of this, David Kaplan, Curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival wrote in Tenn Years, his new book of essays: “What was called burlesque—Williams’ reconfiguration of his earlier themes under the light of his later experience—is now recognized as the widening of his vision as a creative artist.”
  Regarding its outlandishness when compared to Cat or Menagerie, Kingdom is not so far-out as some of Williams’ writing from the 1970s, so it’s just a taste of what he was capable of. Our aim as a company is to begin to build a Williams vocabulary with our community so that we can begin to break down the wall that separates “good Williams”, or trusted canonical Williams, from “bad Williams”, which we feel is just more uncharted Williams.
    We hope our daring, supportive New Orleans audience will be brave with us as we go on these frontier adventures. As Lord Byron says in Camino Real before setting off into the great unknown: “Make voyages!—Attempt them!—There’s nothing else.”