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
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| 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.”
