The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights
Edited by Philip C. Kolin
McFarland. 239 pages, $39.95
THE ESSAYS collected by Philip Kolin in this volume expand upon historian David Bergman’s observations concerning “the genealogy of transformation that occurs as successive generations of gay writers work through each others’ material, transfiguring a homophobic trope into a somewhat celebratory one.” The essays on William Inge, Edward Albee, and Tony Kushner demonstrate how Tennessee Williams’ representation of homosexuality on stage blazed a trail followed by others, and, conversely, how the later Williams was himself influenced by the continued developments wrought by Inge and Albee. More provocative, however, are the essays that demonstrate how straight playwrights have struggled to fill the space opened on the stage by the deliciously queer Williams for the socially marginalized, the sexually aggressive, and the poetically rich but ultimately ineffective characters who are not interested in pursuing “the American dream.” In effect, these playwrights reversed the process analyzed by Bergman, as the history of American theatre following Williams has proven to be, in part, the tale of straight playwrights struggling to match Williams’ poetic and sexual audacity.
The three strongest essays in this collection are those that map Williams’ influence on other gay playwrights. Initially Williams was William Inge’s mentor, helping him get his plays produced (and possibly engaging in an early sexual relationship with him). Michael Greenwald analyzes the extent to which Inge’s depiction of Lola’s desire for Turk in Come Back, Little Sheba was indebted to Williams’ depiction of Blanche DuBois’s desire for Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. Inge’s alcoholic decline in the 1960’s provided Williams with an example of the besieged artist who, unlike Williams himself, was unable to survive the physical ravages of time and changing audience tastes. Similarly, David Crespy’s essay demonstrates the ways in which Williams’ plays opened the door for Edward Albee’s depiction of characters who created a personal mythology, even as Albee’s introduction of French absurdism to the American stage inspired Williams’ later, relentless experimentation.
Perhaps the most surprising essay in the collection is Susan Koprince’s analysis of Neil Simon’s oft-stated regard for Williams’ plays and Simon’s implicit denigration of his own work by comparison. This analysis calls attention to Williams as a comic writer and goes far to define, by way of contrast with Simon’s achievement, Williams’ particular comic dynamic.
Unfortunately, even while offering insights into the nature of Williams’ achievement, too many of the remaining essays document plausible parallels, not actual influence. A similarity of thematic concern and/or stage technique is not necessarily a mark of indebtedness, but might just as plausibly indicate a cultural Zeitgeist in which both Williams and the later playwrights participated. For example, a number of the essays fail to take into account of what conventions subsequent writers share with both Williams and Anton Chekhov, but assume that Williams mediated Chekhov for everyone who followed. Likewise, while Williams’ plastic devices in Glass Menagerie went a long way in toppling the walls of realism that American theatre had previously upheld, there’s no evidence that John Guare was inspired specifically by Williams in his “revolt against the kitchen sink” style of realism. One might more effectively argue that by the late 1960’s Williams’ brand of poetic realism had become so completely absorbed by the American stage that Guare’s pursuit of a plastic theatre did not depend specifically on Williams’ own.
Indeed, some of the essays in this collection strain so hard to make connections between Williams and later playwrights that the reader can smell the sweat of the authors’ effort and hear the grinding of this collection’s cumbersome gears. The “influence” attributed to A. R. Gurney, Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Beth Henley, Christopher Durang, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks seems forced in one way or another, raising doubts about Williams’ staying power when his proponents were driven to protest so much. The collection might have more profitably pursued Williams’ influence on Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally.
On a more pedestrian note, the reader should be aware that this is the most sloppily edited and badly proofread book that I’ve had to trudge through in a long while. Exasperating errors in punctuation repeatedly lead the reader astray, and some sentences are reduced to gibberish either by sloppy writing or by the failure of the editors to catch it. Williams deserves a great deal more consideration than McFarland has devoted to this book.
Raymond-Jean Frontain’s essay on Williams’ representation of anal intercourse appears in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review (2007).
