Tennessee and His Peculiar Regionalisms
Tennessee Williams…Where do I start?
This playwright has been popping into my head a lot lately. It all started when Guild Hall did their livestream of A Portrait of Tennessee last weekend. Williams has always haunted me as an actor, for I have yet to fully understand much of his work, and I don’t think I ever will. This always confounded me. Me? A southerner? Doesn’t get one of the most important voices of the south?
I’ll start here: coming home is difficult. I’m sure there are many of you out there just like me who have suddenly found yourself back home, living with your family, thrust back into the past. Over here (here is Houston, Texas right now) things operate a little differently from New York. Everyone is much more relaxed, your neighbors say hi, the drivers wave. Social distancing, too, is much more relaxed. Yesterday, I saw people sitting down in my favorite teahouse’s dining room with NO MASKS ON. This was an entirely new level of weird. And still, “here” is very complicated. It’s very hard to understand unless you live inside it. It’s hard for me to understand now after being away for only four years.
Another “here” that confounds me? The Mississippi Delta. Growing up, watching Liz Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Vivien Leigh’s in A Streetcar Named Desire, I was almost appalled. No one talks like that! Who says “bless your heart,” or “what in the devil” nowadays?! Of course, this material was mostly from the 1940s and 50s, but it is still considered to be “modern drama” even by 2020’s standards. This datedness of Williams’ work is what I always assumed was the problem I had with it. In reality, however, Williams frequently employs timeless themes in his work: the fear of living past your prime in Streetcar, the fear of radical exclusion by your loved ones in The Glass Menagerie, the fear of losing- even though you know full well you’re going to lose it- your childhood innocence in Summer and Smoke.
It is not that Williams’ writing is dated that I take issue with; it’s the fact that it is so regionally specific, so personal, so incredibly autobiographical that it becomes almost too close to the writer to become universal truth to the reader, audience, or spectator. John Lahr, who also wrote Williams’ authorized (and 600 page-long) biography, describes Williams as easily “the most autobiographical of American playwrights.” Gore Vidal dubbed Williams’ immediate family as “his basic repertory company.” There was something, indeed, about his childhood that was very dramatic and somewhat off. In his letters, he tells wonderfully painful stories that demonstrate, like many of his plays, something sinister beneath. Let’s look at this one about his (largely rumored) homosexual grandfather, who also happened to be a reverend:
I felt without quite understanding, something that all their lives had been approaching, even half knowingly, a slow and terrible facing of something between them. ‘Why Walter?’ The following morning my grandfather was very busy and my grandmother was totally silent. He went into the tiny attic of the bungalow and took out of a metal filing case a great, great, great pile of cardboard folders containing all his old sermons. He went into the back yard of the bungalow with this load, taking several trips… and then he started a fire and fifty-five years of hand-written sermons went up in smoke… What I most remember more than that blaze, was the silent white blaze of my grandmother’s face as she stood over the washtub… not once even glancing out of the window where the old gentleman, past eighty, was performing this auto-da-fé as an act of purification. ‘Why Walter?’ Nobody knows! Nobody but my grandfather who has kept the secret into this his ninety-six spring.
You can’t make this stuff up. And all I’m thinking about is how amazing this would be on stage.
I’ll continue in this vein later in the weekend, when I’ll discuss National Theatre At-Home’s Streetcar with Gillian Anderson and Vanessa Kirby. Maybe I’ll talk more about Williams’ nearly unrivaled poetry and lyricism and get a little bit more into performative aspects (acting!).
Sources:
Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.
