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.