Dangerous Ladies (If They Need To Be)

Women Who Win in Williams

by Augustin J Correro

  In one of Tennessee Williams’ most famous plays, Maggie ponders the titular question: “What its the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?” She muses “…Just staying on it, I guess, as  long as she can…” The notion of survival as a kind of victory reoccurs in Williams’ plays. It’s a sometimes cynical, sometimes encouraging idea: when faced with a world that designates us all as fugitives in our own skins, to get out of bed each day and confront the ambivalent old universe takes courage and gumption. The victory is elevated when we overcome severe circumstances and insurmountable foes. Williams smashed his characters’ backs against walls which, like a booby trap in an arcane temple, inched closer and closer to the ledge of the abyss. His characters are made to chose between leaping into oblivion or clawing up the wall. No characters are faced with more unbeatable odds than the three women who headline the one acts in our current production, Tennessee Williams: Dangerous Birds (If Agitated). When it comes to uphill climbs, these women scale Everest. 

One such indomitable character is Miss Sylvia Sails in Sunburst, a retired actress who has recently suffered a stroke, and has holed herself up in a hotel room to lick her wounds. After a couple of days, the buzzards begin to circle. A pair of devious young crooks admit themselves into her suite one night and hold her captive. Their singular focus is the Sunburst Diamond on her finger, which they unhappily learn is stuck on the digit. As they plot ways to dismember Miss Sails without stirring suspicion, she allows them to succumb to their own foolishness, and stalls them until escape is possible. In the broadest strokes, Miss Sails overcomes her plight by letting the criminals wear themselves out. Even when immobilized, helpless, and endangered, she exhibits poise, patience, and cunning to avail herself of the situation.

The diamond on the finger could easily be compared to Williams’ own fortune and fame, which became the object of concern for multitudinous hangers-on later in his life. Perhaps what he was indicating in this text is that while he may have appeared to be easy pray for sycophantic ne’er-do-wells, he wasn’t a sitting duck. 

Another powerhouse femme fatale featured in Dangerous Birds is Queen May in The Pronoun “I”. This rarely staged piece for the lyric theatre looks nothing like most viewers’ perceptions of Williams’s theatre. It takes place centuries ago and centers on an aging, despised queen who is considered to be a maniacal despot, simply for having up-ended the patriarchy. She chooses her sexuality over the demands of others, and soon enough there are pitchforks and torches at the palace gates. She boldly, even ironically stares down her adversaries with a fatalistic wit, and through cunning and ruthlessness manages to come out on top (literally and figuratively). It’s a striking reversal, but one might wonder if it be so surprising if it were a male character using similar traits to outwit his opponents.

With Queen May as a surrogate, Williams took a sledgehammer to the wall of expectations, pulverizing the idea that he needed to stay inside of a pleasant, predictable cell. He did so in this lyric piece, tinkering with both style and subject. Without spoiling the play, the chameleon act of Queen May could also be a greater metaphor for Williams’ ability to adapt to new challenges and cleverly dodge critical slings and arrows.

The most mystifying and metaphorical of the three women our night of plays chronicles is the bedraggled showgirl known only as the Gnädiges Fräulein. The symbolism in the play named after the hapless heroine has a life of its own. On its surface, the cartoonish burlesque deals with two women named Polly and Molly as they get stoned on the porch, are harassed by a menacing bird, and molest and marvel at the Fräulein, who is a tenant at Molly’s guesthouse. The comedy of this piece is entirely situational, since the characters are not much changed by its conclusion. Instead it feels like a hamster wheel of cruelty and slapstick.

The symbolism can offer insight, but isn’t a necessity. Breaking the characters down to their most basic desires, we see that Molly, the landlady who sells standing room to her rooming house and whose business focuses on quantity over quality is an obvious allusion to Broadway producers. Polly is a society reporter, so she obviously represents the press. With a little bending of the imagination, it’s not hard to see that the vicious Cocalooney Birds stand for social rabble who wish to gobble up rotten bits and pick on easy targets—a cynical view of the uninformed public, perhaps; and the character named Indian Joe is a sort of American ideal who is interested in nothing and who nobody can keep interested for long. So where does that leave our champion, the Gnädiges Fräulein?

If the showgirl is dependent upon the landlady, and the landlady is dependent upon the press, and both press and landlady have a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the rabble. The showgirl, then, must represent the artist. Simultaneously, everyone is obsessed in one way or another with the ideal that is Indian Joe, but nobody can draw a bead on him. If this all seems complicated and heady, that’s because it is—and completely unnecessary to one’s enjoyment of the slapstick tornado that is The Gnädiges Fräulein. The poop jokes and sight gags more than prop this play up—they elevate it to high low comedy interspersed with poetic brilliance. If one wants to delve deeper, the metaphor can be further plunged, of course—the showgirl’s signature trick featured catching a fish in her jaws, a trick that the landlady demands she repeat several times a day. It speaks to Williams’ frustration with being expected to crank out brilliant reproductions of earlier plays for a general audience, or else be treated as a washed-up pariah. The woman is pecked over by the bird, ignored by the Indian, and treated as a pitiful novelty by the press. She endures repeated beatings and indignities, but even to the last moment, her fierce spirit refuses to be extinguished.

Hers is the ultimate victory of a cat on a hot tin roof. She stays on, long beyond expectation and reason, because to give up is to be defeated. The Fräulein, like the Queen and Miss Sails, obliterate the odds and press on. They defy the ambivalent universe and claim their victory against relentless adversity. While they’re not as often celebrated as Blanche, Maggie, or Amanda, these three ladies featured in Dangerous Birds are the epitome of the fighting, unflagging women Tennessee Williams idolized.

      Whether you come for low-brow fun, lofty metaphor, or a night spent watching an incredibly talented cast, join us for Dangerous Birds (If Agitated), and watch these women of Williams kick some cosmic ass.

Dangerous Birds (If Agitated) Now Playing through Nov 20

Friday - Sunday 8pm at Phillips Bar Uptown (733 Maple at Cherokee)

www.twtheatrenola.com

Photo Credits: Bunny Love as the Gnädiges Fräulein, Mary Pauley as Miss Sylvia Sails, & Abby Botnick as Queen May by Ride Hamilton / Abby Botnick & Pearson Kunz by James Kelley

A Playwright In Reviews

Part Two: This Is What It Looks Like

Welcome back. We have been on a short break as this blogger recently lost a close family member, but here we are with Part Two in our triptych series on Williams critique!

Last post, we deconstructed a real review of a production of Summer and Smoke. This time, we've constructed a fictional review of an imaginary production of King Lear by William Shakespeare, a brilliant play considered to be one of the "Big Four" tragedies. This way, we're not selecting an unknown playwright or a living one to be our prototype for a faux-critique; instead we're going to let into another indisputably great playwright who is also dead, that way we won't be taking any more cheap shots than one might when eviscerating Mr. Williams. To highlight how it comes across when scholars, reviewers, critics, and commentators compare all of Williams to A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, we will spend almost all of this review comparing Lear to "better works" of Shakespeare: comedies. Who doesn't like a comedy better, right?!

    King Lear has it all: mistaken identity, familial turmoil, duels, and that signature Shakespeare flair. This production, however, lacks the romantic, star-crossed sparkle of Romeo and Juliet or the Bard’s other triumph A Midsummer Night’s Dream, leaving something sweet to be desired of England’s foremost playwright. Lear blows until it cracks its cheeks, but with no love-lorn payoff. To be fair, it seems the playwright was experimenting with a decidedly un-romantic form when he set pen to paper, and rumor has it his life was fraught with suffering and fear of his own mortality, so it’s no wonder the work is unfocused. Still, there are some moments that make this current production worthwhile.

  Gabrielle Onion’s direction tries to salvage a rusty old ship which should have stayed sank on its maiden voyage. If it were not for her efforts and the work of the scenic designer Saul Giamatti and lighting designer Katya Rasputin, the two-and-a-half hour slog would be unwatchable. This writer feels that the playwright might have better stuck to his tried and true skills before delving into foreign territory.

Kitty McGee as Cordelia is laudable as Cordelia, Lear’s daughter most like Juliet, or perhaps even Hermia. McGee can be seen mining the sub-par interactions at the top of the play for all it’s worth, carving out a genuinely likable portrayal of a character we wish we could see more of. In her scene, she’s forced to make a Sophie’s choice between flattering her father, muscularly played by Bill Beau Baggins, and telling him the truth and earning his scorn. Tugging at our heartstrings, McGee elects truth over flattery, professing her true devotion to her father, thus setting him at odds with her. He banishes her, and we hope to see more of McGee’s Cordelia as she tries to win her way back into her father’s good graces. But our hopes, like Cordelia’s, are dashed.

Rather than following Cordelia’s journey as we do the lovers in Midsummer, R&J, or even the farcical Twelfth Night, Shakespeare instead opts to parade before us a gross procession of figures we can’t imagine we could associate ourselves with. The playwright’s less savory notions find a voice in this throng of damnable buffoons. Jerry Jones as Kent and Tony Braxton as Gloucester are two of the only lights in the dark tunnel that is this narrative of degradation, but that’s come to be expected of the two veterans. Another promising performance is that of Edgar, played by P. Michael Jackson, as he carves his way through the mire of a plot-line. 

While Shakespeare is no stranger to a sub-plot and he’s shown some agility with maneuvering them before, Lear lacks the fluidity of Romeo & Juliet that you might expect, as it jumps from place to place with no regard for helping the audience to understand the passage of time. At once we are at the castle of Goneril, the lascivious and over-done daughter of Lear—written with a heavy hand and little nuance, and the next we find ourselves at Regan’s castle (she is the other daughter of Lear, and it is hard to distinguish whether we like her character less than Goneril, or if it’s a plodding and self-aware performance by Charlotte O’Dair).

The playwright uses the husbands as set-dressing, trotting out his old trick of placing women at the fore, but the women we meet are detestable. Therefore, we’re left to watch the titular role of Lear bombast his way through excruciatingly indulgent speeches. At the end of the day, after the storm has passed (an unwieldy metaphor which Shakespeare attempts but does not see through), everyone is either dead or miserable, and we lack the pathos and uplift of seeing our Montagues and Capulets seeing the error of their ways or of the frolicking lovers ultimately seeing their wedding days, with all the strange magic undone.

If Lear is an attempt to cast such magic, perhaps it’s less of a spell and more of a curse. Congratulations to the cast and creative team for the hard work they’ve done attempting to breath life into sub-par Bard.

As you might have guessed by now, the goal here has been to illuminate the way this single standard of style for a playwright is unfair. It's not used for any other playwright, but for Williams it is extremely common? Why might that be?

The final post in our triptych of reviews will be after we open our upcoming show The Rose Tattoo! Get your tickets now!

www.twtheatrenola.com

A Playwright in Reviews

Part One: Williams vs. Williams
by Augustin J Correro

Thanks to everyone who's been following our blog during our Inaugural Season. We're kicking off season two in the same vein as our very first post back in August of 2015. This is the first of a three-post series about the critical reception of Tennessee Williams' plays, focused specifically on reviews.

There's something that happens to writers when reviewing Williams plays that can only be described as a phenomenon. Whereas in most situations, a production will be considered by its own flaws and merits, reviewers almost reflexively beat up on the playwright if that playwright is Tennessee Williams. This "Tennessee Williams Punching Bag Syndrome" is probably rooted in a multitude of factors: his iconic works being so widely known, his besmirched celebrity during the 1960s, his refusal to adhere strictly to one style as an artist, and perhaps the notion that attacking him is less of a low blow than attacking a member of any given artistic community (who is still living and needs to eat).

This isn't to say that reviewers and critics don't write thoughtful reviews, or even that a review can't be thoughtful and include some of these over-arching factors. What TWPBS does, however, is create a lopsided context for the reader. It creates a passively hostile environment in which it's vaguely clear that the playwright should have stayed in his corner instead of writing plays in a style less familiar to the reviewer. It invites the reader to dinner party with Williams but makes it *just a little* uncomfortable for everyone. If that sounds convoluted, that's because it is. It's systemic. 

Picking out one of these micro-biases will help to illustrate. Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire. These are considered "The Big Three". Branching out from the Big Three, there's a slightly more expansive canon which (depending on the level of fandom) may include between five and seven other plays. It is widely accepted that the Big Three are the standard against which all Williams plays be measured. Returning to the dinner party metaphor, consider the awkward feeling you might have if the parents kept bragging on your date's ex-lovers while you try to enjoy your meal. This is problematic. 

It's problematic because Williams wrote over a hundred plays, thirty-three of which were full-length, and only a handful of which are, or truly resemble, the Big Three. If these three are the standard, it's easy for a reviewer to downplay the virtues of other spectacular plays simply on the merit that they're dissimilar to Cat, Streetcar, or Menagerie. While this may strike the writer as particularly damaging (it's only one review, after all) — incrementally and over time, it has been extremely unhelpful in identifying and criticizing the hundred-plus other plays in a fair and balanced way.

This phenomenon began in Williams' lifetime, once his Big Three had already made their marks. Critics expected him to turn out more of the same. When he didn't do so, it became fashionable to berate him for it. Without a Blanche to cling to, critics felt duped and betrayed, and chose to take it out on Williams, the seeming perpetrator of this diabolical and un-Streetcar-ly ruse. This continued after his death, and few writers have dared to challenge the convention. What I hope to do here is to challenge the reviewers, present and future, to look at Williams' plays not exclusively as lesser versions of the Big Three, but instead on their own virtues and failings.

HEY! ARE YOU SAYING YOU THINK CRITICS ARE DUMB???!!!
I should probably take a moment here to point out reviewers and critics are vital to a theatre landscape. They are often unsung heroes who, amid deadlines, deluges of requests to see multitudinous productions, and paltry word count edicts, still commit to helping further the discourse on theatre and inform audience members about what's happening in their communities (read: get people into seats). With that said, many critics and reviewers welcome conversation about what they write, as art is an ongoing conversation.

As an example, below are some excerpts from a review of a production of Summer and Smoke from Richmond, Virginia, in which I am boldfacing every overt comparison to Cat, Menagerie, or Streetcar or the style thereof, and underlining the less apparent comparisons, or comparisons to other plays. Fred Kaufman, whose astute review neither pulls punches nor shows any intention of detraction from Williams' brilliance, is a great example of a mindful review which is still informed by a climate of underlying bias toward the more canonical works.

Virginia Rep’s ‘Summer and Smoke’ is a masterful production of a troubled play

by Fred Kaufman

After becoming the toast of Broadway with the staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams went to work on his next play, Summer and Smoke.  Almost as soon as Williams finished the play, he realized that it was too diffuse, murkily metaphysical, and melodramatic. He ripped into the script, abandoning subplots and allowing the poetic tragedy of his heroine to emerge and to flower.

But this massive rewrite of Summer and Smoke was finished too late to use as a replacement—rehearsals for the London production were well under way—so the original play was doomed to hold the stage and, predictably, to fail.  The rewrite was retitled as Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  By the time he released Eccentricities, Williams’ star was on the wane and the play succumbed to disinterest.  It has been thankfully revived in the years since and, for me, is the gem he was looking for when he originally sat down to write Alma’s tale.

...

Even though Essentricities is a much better play, Summer and Smoke is still pure Southern Gothic Tennessee Williams.

The play takes place in turn of the century Mississippi.  The plot concerns Miss Alma, an overly proper and overly nervous Southern spinster who lives with her harsh clergyman father and her mentally ill mother.  She lives next door to young Dr. John who has just returned home from medical school to practice with his father.  The stodgy Alma has been in a suppressed love and lust fantasy with the free spirited John ever since they were children.

We find out that John is more than carefree, he is self-destructive.  He is addicted to alcohol and risky sexual behavior.  Despite her own nervous condition, Alma makes excuses to spend time with him.  Each episode ends badly with Alma resisting John’s boozy flirtations.  John takes up with a low class Mexican tart in furtherance of his need for raw sexuality and risky personal behavior (no stereotypes there).

Alma seeks the aid of John’s father when she learns John intends to marry his tart.  The tart’s father shoots John’s father in a pretty far-fetched scene.  Of course this tragedy sobers John who does a 180, loses the tart and finds respectability.

By this time Alma, having been rejected and afraid of dying alone cloisters herself in her father’s house and refuses to see John for months.  We can assume she has had a nervous breakdown.  When she recovers she is stripped of her good manners and seems to have been philosophically and morally changed.  She goes to John and attempts to seduce him, but it is too late.  He is now the prim and proper gentleman engaged to a good girl.  Their ships have passed in the night and Alma is devastated to the point where she displays risky sexual behavior at the end of the play.  The roles have been reversed.

...

Williams is never clear as to why John is so self-destructive.  We know his mother died when he was a boy and can assume his father’s reputation is near impossible to live up to.  Whether this justifies his behavior is speculative.  Williams abandons John’s dilemma in Eccentricities but finally finds the answer to this character problem in his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  We know why Brick self-destructs.  We understand it is a mixture of repressed homosexuality and the inability to live up to his youthful glory football days.

We’re also are never fully satisfied with why John and Alma just miss being happy together.  Their dramatic arcs overshoot each other, leaving both of them unhappy and unfulfilled.  This is also Tennessee Williams’ style.  No one goes home happy.  But it doesn’t feel completely honest.

The job of making it honest belongs to the actor.  Even problematic Williams is rich material to mine and an actor’s delight.  And the actors in this production take great delight in playing Williams and as a result they are delightful to watch.

...

Carolyn Demanelis is a wonderful Alma.  She is a different Alma than I have seen before.  She focuses on a stronger, less fragile and less “eccentric” Alma.  It only half works.  While I liked moments of that choice, she forgoes any indication of an emotional fragility which will lead to her nervous breakdown later in the play.  Alma, like Laura in The Glass Menagerie or even Blanche in Streetcar all have a break-ability factor that makes watching them deteriorate very sympathetic and painful to watch.  Ms. Demanelis finds the neurotic characteristics to play but they are the second best choice in terms of watching this delicate flower wilt.  When she emerges from her house after a long hibernation, it is hard to justify her shift in character without seeing the vestiges of that breakdown.

...

All of the younger actors succeed very well playing their age but not as well playing the older, commonplace people of this Mississippi.  Such roles are more difficult as Williams imbues them with the prejudicial, stubborn, gossip filled characteristics that he hates.   With one exception.  Trace Coles is wickedly spot on as young John.  You can see the genesis of all the problems that will plague John in his older years.  He also hits the mark as a very awkwardly dull Roger, a very second rate suitor to Alma.  This is a young actor to watch.

...

The review goes on to praise what appears to be a very nicely executed production of a Williams classic, directed by Richmond theatre great, Bruce Miller.

What stands out in the paragraphs above is that that the only time the play is allowed to stand on its own without comparison is in its summation. Any critical reference to the play is almost exclusively in comparison to Cat, Streetcar, Menagerie, or Eccentricities of a Nightingale — a later play and a permutation of Summer and Smoke. Even as the author launches into his synopsis of Smoke, he prefaces with Eccentricities being a superior play. While comparison absolutely has its place in criticism, there could also be space to judge the play based more on the material itself. 

Fred was a great sport and very gracious to allow me to use this review as an example, and for that I'm very grateful. He understands that Williams is not infallible, and that the play about which he's writing has some dead spots, potentials for pitfalls in production, and a capacity for being languid.  You can read his full review here. He also recognizes the skill of Williams to create rich roles for actors, an ability to wield ambiguity masterfully, and a powerful ability to render emotional expression.

I thank Fred and his fellow critics and reviewers for the commitment to the communities which they serve.

In our next post on this discussion, I will be inventing a review of a production of King Lear in which I compare the entire production to Romeo & Juliet to highlight the incongruity in reviews of Williams when matched against other great playwrights who chose to write in different styles. 

World Premiere Tennessee Williams: How It's Possible

Our next production, Tennessee Williams: Weird Tales is an evening of delightfully bizarre one-act plays by America's Greatest Playwright. Two of these plays, Ivan's Widow and The Strange play have never before been staged. Very regularly we get asked by folks who haven't heard, "What's your next show?", and when we tell them that we're giving two Williams plays a world premiere, we're generally met with astonishment and the question, "How is that even possible?"

The question is asked so frequently that we thought it best to articulate it in a blog post, so the news and the details can reach even more people who are interested in Tennessee Williams' plays.

So much writing!
Tennessee Williams wrote a lot. It's probably safe to say that we have more of Williams' writing than any other significant American playwright. Between plays, short stories, poems, screenplays, and novellas, his body of work is considerable. However, if you count his collected journals, letters, notebooks, essays, and memoirs, there's even more to read about the playwright than you could have guessed (there are also paintings!). Williams wrote daily, prolifically, and compulsively. He left behind about as many clues as to his inner workings and his creative life as a person could. In an age before around-the-clock tweets and twenty-four-hour news, he was setting everything down on paper, providing future generations with a wealth of information about himself and his writing.

How do we have so many of these private clues?
So proud of her "writing son", the playwright's mother Edwina was as obsessive about collecting his work as her son was about producing it. From her collection, the writings found their ways into various archives, libraries, and collections. Draft after draft of famous Williams plays can be compared and contrasted, as he was dedicated to making every syllable count. His notes can be found  scrawled on the edges of typed sketches. They'e still pored over by dedicated scholars, dramaturgs, and lovers of Williams today.

But wait, there's more...
Williams didn't just leave behind previously produced, plays, though. There were also new ones — plays which had not been published or, in some cases, staged during his lifetime. In the three decades since his death at age 71, a number of Williams plays received their first performances, and TWTC is excited to be numbered among the companies given the privilege of staging the master's work for the first time.

En Avant!

Some of the plays premiered posthumously are from early in the author's career. The Strange Play (c. 1939) is an early, experimental work. Other plays such as Ivan's Widow (c.1982) showcase the playwright's mature, later-lifemusings. 

If you'd like to join us to toast our two never-before-seen Williams plays, Tennessee Williams: Weird Tales opens this Friday, April 1st in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.

We'll see you at the theatre!

www.twtheatrenola.com

Photo Credits: (above) Alexandra Kennon in Ivan's Widow and Emily Russell in The Strange Play, photographed by James Kelley.

10 Myths About Tennessee Williams

We see a lot of clickbait online these days with titles like "Twenty-Six Dogs Who Don't Have Their Lives Together" or "Five Tips For a Better Workout Without Exercising" or "More Than One Way To Skin a Cat". In traditional clickbait fashion, today we'll be debunking...

10 Myths About Tennessee Williams (and Some About His Plays)

#1) Tennessee Williams is from Tennessee.
False. Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. There are various rumors as to how he came to adopt the nom-de-plume, but the fact is, while he was a Southerner...he was not a Tennesseean.

Left: Tennessee's first home in Columbus, Mississippi.

#2) Tennessee Williams found religion late in his life.
False. At any point in his life, Tennessee knew just where to find a church. In his early childhood, he was raised by his mother and his loving grandparents—a minister and his wife. They instilled in young Tom, as he was known then, a solid understanding of Christian scripture and practice. Eventually, Tennessee would break away from strictly organized religion, but he always had a respect for what went on in houses of worship. His plays frequently included religious themes and references, showcasing Williams' understanding and fascination with the spiritual. This myth is perpetuated by the idea that his brother Dakin "saved" Tennessee after a difficult period during the 1960s. Tennessee allowed his brother to "convert" him to Roman Catholicism, but the playwright would then go on to say that it didn't really stick.

#3) Tennessee Williams hated his family.
Very False.  Tennessee loved his sister Rose dearly, and ventured to take care of her for his entire life. His relationship with his mother, while strained at times (whose isn't?), was one of devotion and understanding between two complex people. His brother Dakin was never his closest sibling, but the two got on well enough, it would seem. Of course his relationship was wonderful with his grandparents, going so far as to travel with his elderly grandfather all over the world. The most troublesome relationship, perhaps, is that with his father, Cornelius. They'd never see eye to eye in their lifetimes, but upon Cornelius's death, Tennessee wrote a touching essay exploring his feelings about his father. In "The Man In the Overstuffed Chair", Tennessee expressed a touching understanding of the troubled patriarch of the Williams clan.

#4) Tennessee Williams lived his life in the closet.
False. While Tennessee didn't wear his sexuality on his sleeve in the same way as Gore Vidal or Truman Capote, he certainly didn't work to hide it. In the 1960s and 70s, he came under fire for not being as proactive as some activists thought he should be. He was accused of demonizing his gay characters or writing covertly gay characters in the guise of women. The truth is, he wrote gay character just as raw, broken, and magnificent as any of his other characters. However, in the films based on his plays, gay themes would often be cut out or whittled down by the studios for censorship purposes. All the more reason to see his plays in a live theatre!

#5) Tennessee Williams choked on a bottle cap and died.
False. Tennessee didn't choke to death. If you want to know more about this myth, John Lahr's biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is a good place to start. But I won't spoil the surprise.

#6) Tennessee Williams only wrote about Southern belles.                              Below - TW & Anna Magnani.

False. Tennessee wrote some of the most famous Southern belles in cultural memory—Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat, Amanda Wingfield...but he wrote about so much more. From Mexico to Rome; Russia to the bottom of the sea—Tennessee's plays spanned the globe, always filled with colorful and contrasting characters.

#7) Tennessee Williams was a misogynist.
Extra False. Many of Williams' richest, most developed characters were women. He basically set the standard in eroticizing the male body through the lens of the female character—which is the opposite of say, a Bond film, in which women are set dressing and men rule the world. Even in a world where the men hold the power, which is often the case in the symbolic and realistic worlds in Williams' plays, the female voices are some of the most pointed and poignant.

#8) Special Super-Southern Myth: Tennessee Williams paints a negative portrait of the South.
Well, yes and no. If by "negative" you mean "not sugar-coated", then yes. Tennessee wrote the South the same way he wrote every other locale: with brutal, unflinching honesty. The heroes have flaws, the antagonists can be charismatic, and society looks like society—at best, dysfunctional. What some might be unused to seeing is the South drawn in such a way that's not precious, sweet, and slow. That South is two-dimensional. Tennessee's is not.

#9) Tennessee Williams detested St. Louis, Missouri.

Below: The infamous shoe factory alluded to in The Glass Menagerie.

Qualification: Sometimes. Young Tom Williams and even young-ish Tennessee expressed a strong distaste for "the city of St. Pollution". He was dragged from an idyllic Southern landscape into a cramped urban setting where he was poked fun at for his accent and, more importantly, was made to live in a hostile environment at home, where his mother and father were constantly at odds. Later in his life, however, Tennessee would come to accept that St. Louis was part of his artistic journey. While it was never his favorite place, Tennessee would forgive St. Louis for what he came to understand were offenses committed not by the place, but by circumstances.

#10) Tennessee Williams is America's Greatest Playwright.

TRUE! Not a myth! ...Well, we think so, anyway. And we hope you agree. But whether you love Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, August Wilson, or whomever—we hope your life has been or will be enriched by Williams' unique contribution to the American theatre landscape.

www.twtheatrenola.com