Saddik, Annette J.

Tennessee Williams and the
T h e at r e o f E xc e s s
The plays of Tennessee Williams post-1961 period have often been

misunderstood and dismissed. In light of Williams centennial in 2011,
which was marked internationally by productions and world premieres
of his late plays, Annette J. Saddiks new reading of these works illu-
minates them in the context of what she terms a theatre of excess,
which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and
laughter. Saddik explains why these plays are now gaining increasing
acclaim, and analyzes recent productions that successfully captured
elements central to Williams late aesthetic, particularly a delicate
balance of laughter and horror with a self-consciously ironic acting
style. Grounding the plays through the work of Bakhtin, Artaud, and
Kristeva, as well as through the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psy-
choanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik demonstrates how
Williams engaged the freedom of exaggeration and excess in celebra-
tion of what he called the strange, the crazed, the queer.
ANNET TE J. SADDIK is Professor of English and Theatre at the

City University of New York (CUNY), where she teaches at the
CUNY Graduate Center and New York City College of Technology.
She is the author of Contemporary American Drama (2007) and The
Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams
Later Plays (1999), the first exploration of Williams post-1961 repu-
tation. She is also the editor of Tennessee Williams: The Traveling
Companion and Other Plays (2008) and has published essays on
various playwrights in journals such as Modern Drama, The Drama
Review (TDR), and South Atlantic Review, as well as in numerous
critical anthologies and encyclopedias. She serves on the editorial
boards of Theatre Topics, the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and
the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, and received the 2015
McAndless Distinguished Professor award to serve as scholar in resi-
dence at Eastern Michigan University.
Tennessee Williams
a n d t h e T h e at r e o f
E xc e s s
The Strange, the Crazed, theQueer
A n n e tt e J . S a d d i k
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107076686
Annette J. Saddik2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publicationdata
Saddik, Annette J.
Tennessee Williams and the theatre of excess : the strange, the
crazed, the queer / Annette J. Saddik.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-07668-6 (hardback)
1. Williams, Tennessee, 19111983Criticism and interpretation.I. Title.
PS3545.I5365Z8335 2015
812.54dc23
2014043068
ISBN 978-1-107-07668-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracyof
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
I think the strange, the crazed, thequeer
will have their holiday thisyear,
I think for just a littlewhile
there will be pity for the wild
Tennessee Williams, Collected Poems1
1 Tennessee Williams, The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Rossel and Nicholas
Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2005),150.
The biologist will tell you that progress is the result of mutations.
Mutations are another word for freaks. For Gods sake lets have
a little more freakish behavior not less.
Tennessee Williams, Something Wild,19482
BEAU: You are toomuch.

VIEUX: Better too much than insufficient, Idsay.
Tennessee Williams, The Traveling Companion,19813
2 Tennessee Williams, Something Wild, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak (New
York: New Directions, 2009), 47. As Bak notes, this essay first appeared in the New York Star on
November 7, 1948, under the title On the Art of Being a True Non-conformist and later as the
introduction to Williams 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1953 (274). In Tennessee Williams, Where I
Live: Selected Essays by Tennessee Williams, edited by Christine Day and Bob Woods (New York:
New Directions, 1978), there is apparently an error in the dating: the editors state that the essay first
appeared in the New York Star in 1945 and served as the introduction for the second edition of 27
Wagons Full of Cotton, in 1949 (7).
3 Tennessee Williams, The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York:
New Directions, 2008),290.
Contents
List of figures pageviii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: sicker than necessary: Tennessee Williams

theatre of excess 1
1 Drowned in Rabelaisian laughter: Germans as grotesque
comic figures in Williams plays of the 1960s and 1970s 22
2 Benevolent anarchy: Williams late plays and the theatre of
cruelty 42
3 Writing calls for discipline!: chaos, creativity, and madness
in Clothes for a Summer Hotel 64
4 Act naturally: embracing the monstrous woman in The
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, and
The Pronoun I 86
5 Theres something not natural here: grotesque ambiguities
in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady, and A House Not
Meant to Stand 117
6 All drama is about being extreme: in-yer-face sex, war,
and violence 138
Conclusion: the only thing to do is laugh 161
Select bibliography 164

Index 173
vii
Figures
1 Jordan Harrison and Larry Coen in The Remarkable Rooming-

House of Mme. Le Monde, directed by Davis Robinson.
Boston, Massachusetts (2009). Photo by Justin Knight. page 9
2 Erin Markey, Regina Bartkoff, Mink Stole, and Everett
Quinton in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, directed
by Jonathan Warman. La MaMa E. T. C., New York
City (2011). Photo by Jonathan Collins. 60
3 Roelof Storm, Jennifer Steyn, and Nicholas Dallas in
The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, directed by
Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer.
Cape Town, South Africa (2013). Photo by Pat
Bromilow-Downing. 101
4 Mink Stole and Penny Arcade in The Mutilated, directed
by Cosmin Chivu. New York City (2013). Photo by
Scott Wynn. 111
5 Nicholas Dallas, Marcel Meyer, and Anthea Thompson in
Kingdom of Earth, directed by Fred Abrahamse, costume
design by Marcel Meyer. Cape Town, South Africa (2012).
Photo by Pat Bromilow-Downing. 123
viii
Acknowledgments
The collaboration among scholars, artists, producers, festival directors, and

publishers who are passionate about Tennessee Williams work is a rare alli-
ance that has created the climate for new, informed productions and pub-
lications to emerge, and I am grateful to these members of the Williams
community who have influenced this book, both formally and informally,
with their energy, commitment, and talent. They have made the often iso-
lated occupation of scholarship an exciting social endeavor. My thanks to
everyone at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, espe-
cially Paul J. Willis and Patricia Brady, and everyone at the Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, especially David Kaplan, Jef Hall-
Flavin, Charlene Donaghy, and Patrick Falco, for the conversations and
performances that allow Williams theatre to thrive. Much gratitude also
goes to the editorial and production staff of Cambridge University Press,
particularly Vicki Cooper, Fleur Jones, and Emma Collison.
Special thanks are due to my traveling companions Thomas Keith,
David Savran, John Bak, David Kaplan, and Jeremy Lawrence who have
accompanied me on both the literal and figurative Tennessee Williams
journeys that have led to this book. Their perceptive insights, generous
assistance, and friendship have been invaluable to me, and I look forward
to many more adventures together.
I would also like to thank other Williams scholars, artists, and aficiona-
dos who have kept the conversation alive and offered helpful observations,
particularly Robert Bray, Philip C. Kolin, Allean Hale, Michael Hooper,
Barton Palmer, Kenneth Holditch, Dirk Gindt, Brenda Murphy, Brian
Parker, Jacqueline OConnor, Sue Tyrrell, Andrew Pinder, Cyndy Marion,
Vanessa Bombardieri, Regina Bartkoff, John Uecker, and Ian McGrady.
Several artists have generously shared their work, production photo-
graphs, and creative insights with me, and I very much appreciate their
talent and friendship. Many thanks to Fred Abrahamse, Marcel Meyer,
Nicholas Dallas, Cosmin Chivu, Davis Robinson, and Jonathan Warman.
ix
x Acknowledgments
Special thanks also to John Guare, Lee Breuer, Maude Mitchell, and John
P. Shanley for their inspiration and support, and to Lanford Wilson, who
sadly passed away on March 24, 2011, just two days before Williams
centennial.
Thanks are also due to students in my CUNY Graduate Center Spring
2013The Grotesque in Theatre course and Fall 2011Tennessee Williams
in Context course, and in my New York City College of Technology
Spring 2014 Introduction to Drama, for lively discussions and valued
commentary on production photos. I continue to owe a debt of gratitude
to my own teachers who have influenced my thinking about drama par-
ticularly Thomas Van Laan, Elin Diamond, and the late George Kearns,
who unwittingly set me on this path years ago with a casual suggestion:
You have some new and interesting ideas about Williams post-1960
plays why dont you write about them? I can only hope to be as much
of an inspiration to my students as these teachers were tome.
Many friends, colleagues, and family members have also provided their
insights, support, and helpful commentary during the preparation of
this book: Martin Halliwell, Beth Bartley, Diana Frame, Clare McKeen,
Ted Kersten, Michael W. Page, Ari Maller, Monique Ferrell, Kathleen H.
Formosa, Michael Formosa, Renee Murad, Eileen Murad-Frank, David
Frank, Morry Murad, and the late Charles Hirsch. Special thanks to my
sister, Orly Saddik, for her ongoing support, and, as always, my deepest
gratitude goes to my parents, Dr.Meir Saddik and Gila G. Saddik, whose
spirits are with me in everythingIdo.
During the 1980s, Tennessee Williams had fallen out of public favor,
valued for a few early plays but considered pass and tragically in decline,
both professionally and personally. Despite his persistent attempts to
present new work and be understood during his last twenty years, when
he died in 1983 he thought it unlikely that he would be remembered as
more than a failed playwright who had some success during the 1940s
and 1950s. He had no reason to think that his centennial in 2011 would
have been celebrated throughout the world with a renewed appreciation
of his work, both early and late. I think the current resurrection of his
reputation would have made him very happy, and he might even have had
a good laugh at it. I am just grateful to have had the opportunity to be a
part of his story. This book is forhim.
My work on this book was supported by PSC-CUNY research grants

and PDAC travel funding, and I wish to thank CUNY, particularly New
York City College of Technology President Russel Hotzler, Provost Bonne
Acknowledgments xi
August, Associate Provost Pamela Brown, and Dean Karl Botchway, for
their support. Many thanks also to Raquel Martinez, Lily Lam, and Laura
Kodet for their assistance.
Some portions of this book, revised here, first appeared in academic
journals and scholarly volumes: The Inexpressible Regret of All Her
Regrets: Tennessee Williamss Later Plays as Artaudian Theater of
Cruelty, in The Undiscovered Country, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York:
Peter Lang, 2002); Introduction: Transmuting Madness into Meaning,
in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New
York: New Directions, 2008); Recovering Moral and Sexual Chaos in
Tennessee Williams Clothes for a Summer Hotel, North Carolina Literary
Review 18 (2009): 5365; Something about the Deep South of America
and Londons East End: Tennessee Williamss Late Plays and In-Yer-
Face Theatre, Valley Voices 10:1 (2010): 5871; Too Grotesque and Too
Funny for Laughter: Publishing the Late Tennessee Williams, in Tenn
at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Kaplan
(East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2011); Drowned in
Rabelaisian Laughter: Germans as Grotesque Comic Figures in the Plays
of Tennessee Williams, Modern Drama 55:3 (2012): 356372; Theres
Something Not Natural Here: Grotesque Ambiguities in Tennessee
Williamss Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady, and A House Not
Meant to Stand, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Brenda Murphy
(London: Methuen, 2014).
Introduction: sicker than necessary
Tennessee Williams theatre of excess
As some things are too sad and too deep for tears, so some things are
too grotesque and too funny for laughter.
George du Maurier, Trilby,18941
It is not, on the whole, the terror of the grotesque that poses critical
problems, it is the laughter.
Ralf Remshardt, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in
Performance,20042
Lately no one seems to laugh at my jokes on paper, perhaps theyre
too black, I dont know.
Tennessee Williams, Memoirs,19753
On November 8, 1980, a triple bill of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams

opened at the Goodman Theater in Chicago under the heading Tennessee
Laughs. The plays, Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, A Perfect Analysis
Given by a Parrot, and The Frosted Glass Coffin, were all examples of the
dark humor that tended to dominate Williams later plays during the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. On April 16, 1982, the final full-length version of
Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, retitled A House Not Meant to Stand:
A Gothic Comedy, opened at the Goodman. A House Not Meant to Stand
was to be Williams last complete full-length play to be produced during
his lifetime.4 House, like the majority of Williams late plays (generally
1 George du Maurier, Trilby (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894),23.

2 Ralf Remshardt, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2004),79.
3 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Bantam Books, 1975),199.
Another full-length play by Williams, Gideons Point, premiered at the Williamstown Festival
4
later that year, in August 1982; the script, however, was still a work in progress and several drafts
exist from 1978 to 1982, with a draft recorded by Linda Dorff as early as 1970 (in the New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts). Several versions of this play, titled Tent Worms, In Masks
Outrageous and Austere, Gideons Point, and Masks Outrageous and Austere, which differ in tone and
style, exist in various drafts in the archives at Columbia University and Harvard, and in the New
York Public Library. The evolution of the play is controversial, as Williams entrusted the script to
Gavin Lambert, who edited and perhaps revised the script, and several others worked on the play as
1
2 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
considered to cover the period from 1961 until his death in 1983), was a
stylistic departure from his most popular earlier work of the 1940s and
1950s. These plays continued to exhibit the kinds of risks that had always
made Williams exciting and inspirational, yet by the 1960s he was starting
to more blatantly ignore the boundaries of social and dramatic conven-
tion, as he boldly embraced excess as a vehicle for artistic expression.
Considering that the celebration of Williams centennial in 2011 was
marked around the world by festivals, publications, conferences, and produc-
tions of his plays, a new exploration of his critical position is timely and sali-
ent. The serious reevaluation of Williams reputation during the past twenty
years or so beginning with David Savrans Communists, Cowboys, and
Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee
Williams, in 1992, and my study, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical
Reception of Tennessee Williams Later Plays, in 1999, as well as excellent work
on the late plays by scholars such as Linda Dorff, Allean Hale, and Philip
C. Kolin has created a new respect for his later works, particularly in the
past five to ten years.5 The relatively recent publication of Williams formerly
unknown plays (both early and late) and world premieres or exciting new
productions of his plays from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in places such as
London, Cape Town, New York, New Orleans, Boston, and Provincetown,
Massachusetts along with the publication of his Notebooks and letters; new
biographies from John S. Bak and John Lahr;6 and new editions of his early
plays, his essays, and his Memoirs indicate that interest in Williams has
been peaking, and there is much left to be said about hiswork.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both Williams published and unpub-
lished post-1961 work was receiving some critical attention from academic
circles. The scholarship on the late plays at that time was often insightful
but scant. Collections and overviews by scholars such as Stephen Stanton,
Felicia Hardison Londr, Jac Tharpe, and C. W. E. Bigsby began to cover
well Williams literary assistant John Uecker, the director Peter Bogdanovich, and Gore Vidal. In
April 2012, a version of the play titled In Masks Outrageous and Austere was produced off-Broadway
at the Culture Project in New York City, opening on April 16 (previews began April 6)and clos-
ing on May 13, 2012. This draft was assembled by dramaturg Joe E. Jeffreys and the plays director,
David Schweizer. Because of the controversial evolution of this play and questions of authorship, it
is A House Not Meant to Stand that is generally considered by scholars to be Williams last complete
full-lengthplay.
5 William Prosser, who directed the premiere of Williams Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
in 1980, was working on a manuscript about Williams late plays before he died of complications
from AIDS in 1991, but his work remained unknown until 2009, when his partner, Eric Stenshoel,
had it published posthumously: William Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
John S. Bak, Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and John Lahr,
6
TennesseeWilliams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014).
Introduction: sicker than necessary 3
the later plays at some level, and were opening the doors to perceiving
them as serious offerings. In 1979, Stanton founded the Tennessee Williams
Newsletter (fall 1979spring 1981), which then became The Tennessee
Williams Review (spring 1981spring 1983). While these ventures were
short lived, they were indicative of the growing interest in Williams stud-
ies during the 1980s and led to a series of festivals, conferences, and jour-
nals dedicated to his work. In 1986, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans
Literary Festival was launched, and in 1989 Kenneth Holditch founded
The Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, which remained active until 2008.
In 1986, Albert J. Devlin edited a collection of interviews, Conversations
with Tennessee Williams, that included much information on the late
material. For the most part, however, scholars and critics did not know
how to relate to the later plays, and the conventional wisdom echoed the
narrative that these were odd and incomprehensible offerings by a once
great but ultimately failed playwright whose talent had tragically declined
by the 1960s, largely due to alcohol and drug abuse.
By the 1990s, the unpublished or unproduced later plays were begin-
ning to receive more serious attention. In 1991, Allean Hale introduced
scholars to a previously unpublished play, The Day on Which a Man Dies,
revealing The Secret Script of Tennessee Williams in Southern Review. In
1993, Philip C. Kolin published The Existential Nightmare in Tennessee
Williamss The Chalky White Substance in Notes on Contemporary
Literature, and in 1998 his essay on Something Cloudy, Something Clear:
Tennessee Williamss Postmodern Memory Play appeared in the Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. It was also during the 1990s that schol-
ars, including myself, were increasingly reassessing the Williams canon
through a variety of new theoretical lenses, and David Savran, John Clum,
Nicholas de Jongh, Robert Vorlicky, and Steven Bruhm were all taking a
new look at the politics of sexuality in Williams oeuvre. In 1995, Linda
Dorff organized a panel on the late plays at the San Francisco confer-
ence of the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), which
included David Savran, Robert Vorlicky, Steven Bruhm, Allean Hale,
and Lyle Leverich, who had just completed volume one of Williams offi-
cial biography, Tom. By the mid-to-late 1990s, George Crandell, Robert
Martin, and Matthew C. Roudan were producing collections that illumi-
nated Williams entire oeuvre in complex ways,7 and Ruby Cohns essays,
George W. Crandell, ed. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (Westport, CT: Greenwood
7
Press, 1996); Robert A. Martin, ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams (New York: Twayne, 1997);
and Matthew C. Roudan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Late Tennessee Williams in Martins volume and Tennessee Williams:
the last two decades in Roudans, were making important contributions
to the scholarship of the late plays.
In 1998, the Tennessee Williams Annual Review was founded by Robert
Bray, and it quickly became an invaluable resource for criticism of Williams
work, both early and late. Dorffs essays in the Review, Theatricalist
Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous Plays (1999) and
All Very [Not!] Pirandello! Radical Theatrics in the Evolution of Vieux
Carr (2000), as well as Allean Hales essays Confronting the Late Plays
of Tennessee Williams (2003) and Tennessee Williamss Three Plays for
the Lyric Theatre (2005), were important in expanding the scholarship on
his late plays, as were Kolins Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin in The
Explicator (2000), The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde:
Tennessee Williamss Little Shop of Comic Horrors in the Tennessee
Williams Annual Review (2001), and A Play about Terrible Birds: Tennessee
Williamss The Gndiges Fraulein [sic] and Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds in
South Atlantic Review (2001). By the early 2000s, interest in Williams late
plays was well established, and a 2002 panel of the Scholars Conference
at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, moderated by
Robert Bray and featuring Allean Hale, Thomas Keith, Ruby Cohn, Philip
C. Kolin, Brenda Murphy, and myself, was dedicated to Looking at the
Late Plays of Tennessee Williams. Three seminal volumes of essays that
addressed the later work, Robert Gross Tennessee Williams: A Casebook,
Philip C. Kolins The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee
Williams, and Ralph Voss Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee
Williams, also appeared in2002.
In The Politics of Reputation, I explored Williams canon in terms of its
relationship to dramatic realism, arguing that his late plays, which had
been characterized as critical and artistic failures, were in fact conscious
departures from the more realistic forms that had established Williams
early reputation, as he increasingly experimented with anti-realistic styles
that had always been part of his artistic philosophy. I compared the recep-
tion of his late plays to that of playwrights who were similarly experi-
menting with the limits of language and the possibilities of anti-realistic
presentation Beckett, Pinter, and Albee, specifically and demonstrated
how critics were still judging Williams late plays according to standards of
realism, unable or unwilling to accept his development as a playwright as
they were limited by their own expectations and assumptions.
Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the
Queer continues my work on Williams later plays and explores in detail
sixteen of these plays between 1961 and 1982 from The Night of the Iguana
(1961), which marks the end of his early period, to A House Not Meant to
Stand (1982)8 in the context of what I call a theatre of excess, which
seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. I
also discuss several other plays throughout his career in order to highlight
the continuum in Williams thinking about style, and I augment my dis-
cussion of the texts with analyses of several productions that successfully
captured the elements that are central to Williams late aesthetic the
delicate balance of laughter and horror, as well as a self-conscious, almost
ironic manner of acting. Williams often saw himself as the patron saint
of freaks, and I took the subtitle of this book from one of his poems
that he used in slightly altered versions in two plays: The Mutilated (first
performed in 1966) and a play that was written between 1957 and 1962
called And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, which premiered in
Washington, DC, at the Kennedy Center in 2004 and was first published
in 2005.9 This book looks at Williams late plays through the theoretical
lenses of Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonin Artaud, and Julia Kristeva as well as
through the sensibilities of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, German
Expressionism, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, in order
to contextualize these plays in terms of a subversive politics of excess and
laughter that celebrates the irrational. Williams later plays often employ
highly theatrical or stylized forms, and use exaggeration and distortion of
reality, humor, and satire as social commentary, going even beyond theat-
rical absurdism. Even though Williams said in 1965 that he could never
make a joke out of human existence,10 many of these late plays do face
lifes tragic elements and laugh at them, a liberating laughter that desta-
bilizes boundaries and breaks through imposed limitations. These highly
irreverent plays employ humor for the purpose of social critique and
resistance, highlighting the tragicomic elements and absurdities of lifes
struggles. In a 1978 letter to Truman Capote, housed in the archives of the
New Orleans Historic Collection, Williams identified with what he called
Capotes period of disequilibrium during a very difficult personal and
professional time, and ended his letter with the advice not to despair, and
to never, never stop laughing.
8 Both A House Not Meant to Stand and The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, which includes
several of the one-act plays I discuss in this book, were only published relatively recently, by New
Directions in2008.
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens appears in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays,
9
ed. Nicholas Moschovakis and David Rossel (New York: New Directions, 2005).
10 Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson, MS:
University Press of Mississippi, 1986),118.
During his later period, Williams often presented an ironic worldview
that was simultaneously comic and bleak rejecting romanticism, blur-
ring high and low culture, and playing indulgently with exaggeration.
Several of the later plays explored in this book embrace a grotesque sens-
ibility, simultaneously repressing and exploding with dark, ambivalent
humor. In keeping with such humor, they can come across as, simply,
too much. The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde (1982),
for example, begins with the entrance of a lasciviously grinning young
man, known as the Boy,11 one of Mme. Le Mondes sons who is hung
like a dray horse and kept on the place for incestuous relations
with his mother.12 He opens the play by dragging Mint a delicate lit-
tle man with a childlike face whose legs are mysteriously paralyzed13
behind the curtain and raping him, a sexual assault14 that Mint seems
to both dread and enjoy. Mints paralysis forces him to swing from hooks
implanted on the ceiling of Mme. Le Mondes attic, the rectangle with
hooks15 where he lives as a tenant.16 When the Boy is finished with Mint,
he tells him that their visitor, Hall, is downstairs with Mme. Le Monde
and will hook him back up if he ever hauls himself out of that ole buf-
falo waterin hole of Moms, alerting him that it takes Mom a long
time to come.17 Throughout the play, Mints desperation is evident and
cruelty permeates the atmosphere, as a world of instability and meager
resources is marked by the ruthlessness of individuals in their fight for
self-preservation.
Upon reading the play several times to try and make sense of the bizarre
excesses, it started to become clear that its uncanny power emerges pre-
cisely from the fact that it is too much and therefore deliberately defies
strategies that seek to construct and control meaning, to make sense in
traditional terms. Williams excesses serve to highlight the ambiguities
and inconsistencies of living in and experiencing the world the excesses
that leak out of closed systems of meaning, that seep through the cracks
of the rational, the stable, the complete, and point toward the essence of
the real. Williams had always been aware that language, images, all forms
of representation are inevitably inadequate and cannot contain emotion,
impulse, desire. As early as 1945, he sought what he called the language
11 Tennessee Williams, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, in The Traveling Companion
and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),91.
12 Ibid.,94. 13 Ibid.,91. 14 Ibid.,94. 15 Ibid.,91.
16 We also see this reference to a room that is described as a rectangle with hooks in Williams novel
Moise and the World of Reason (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975),11.
17 Williams, Rooming-House,91.
of vision,18 which he famously described as a plastic theatre in the pro-
duction notes to The Glass Menagerie.19 In order to illustrate a truth about
reality and release the essential spirit of something, he needed to distort
and exaggerate our experiences of that reality.20 His plays honor the gro-
tesque power of chaos, of the irrational and inexpressible, and the truth
that it reveals. While this is what his work had been doing since his earli-
est plays and short stories,21 in his late plays Williams was taking us to
the brink of unbearable pain and horror, where the only place to go, the
only way of dealing with such intense experience, was laughter. As Ralf
Remshardt writes in Staging the SavageGod:
There are probably two distinct ways in which laughter can work in the
grotesque, and they are dependent on the distribution of the latent and
the manifest element. Simply put, if the horrible aspect is dominant or
manifest, laughter will almost always be a mechanism for counteracting the
horror. When the comical element is dominant, horror becomes a response
to the callousness of ones own laughter. Either way, the grotesque structure
must assure that the distribution of the elements is adequate to guarantee
that neither impulse takes over too quickly and that there is a responsive
interdependence of laughter and horror.22
This interdependence of laughter and horror what Frances K. Barasch
has called ludicrous-horror23 is key to understanding much of
Williams late work. Somehow, in all its perverse ugliness, The Remarkable
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde is a very funny play. It was written
by the man, rumor has it, who would sit in the back of the theatre dur-
ing performances of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and laugh hysteric-
ally at the final scene, when Blanche is taken away to an insane asylum.
Laughter is often unsettling when we dont know why someone is laugh-
ing, especially when it appears to be inappropriate, contradictory to the
situation that inspired it.24 In his Memoirs, Williams explained this sort of
18 Tennessee Williams, The Purification, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VI (New York: New
Directions, 1981),44.
19 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I (New York:
20 Williams, New Selected Essays,24.
21 In Williams first published short story, The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928), for example, the
Egyptian Queen Nitocris takes revenge on her enemies by inviting them to a banquet and, in the
midst of the excesses of celebration, opening a secret wall that allowed the waters of the Nile to rush
in and drown them a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and
horror (The Vengeance of Nitocris, in Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985),8).
Remshardt, Staging the Savage God,85.
22
23 Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque as a Comic Genre, Modern Language Studies 15:1 (1985),5.
24 See, for example, the scene in the 1959 film of Suddenly Last Summer, where Catherine (played
by Elizabeth Taylor) accidentally wanders into the drum of the asylum the recreation area for
excessive, inappropriate laughter as his inevitable substitute for weep-
ing: Laughter has always been my substitute for lamentation and I laugh
as loudly as I would lament if I hadnt discovered a useful substitute for
weeping. Usually I laugh longer than I should, as well as more loudly than
I should.25 For Williams, the comic and the tragic were inseparable.
No doubt due, in part, to both its obscurity and the extreme con-
tent that made it a risk to stage, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme.
Le Monde was not performed until September 2009, by Bostons Beau
Jest Moving Theatre, directed by Davis Robinson for its premiere at the
Charlestown Working Theater in Massachusetts and moving later that
month to the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. When I went
to see this production, I was prepared for the worst. This was not an
easy play. Even if the director, the cast, and the staging did manage to
translate Williams vision truthfully, there was always a risk in terms of
how audiences would react to that vision. Black humor, which requires
a precarious balance between the extremes of the comic and the cruel, is
often difficult to pull off, and I had no idea how audiences, or I, would
react. In order for the play to work on the stage, its ambivalent, grotesque
humor a sort of gallows humor that laughs in the face of horror must
come through. Otherwise, the play is too painful, too ugly, to tolerate.
Yet, as soon as I heard the audience laughing at the plays opening out-
rage, I knew it was going to work. It was not exactly an uncomfortable
laughter, but a strange laughter of both disbelief and relief. Remshardt
points outthat
The key is perhaps that grotesque laughter is not the laughter of humor; it
is always inappropriate laughter, and therefore it both does and does not
belong to the grotesque. One is, in other words, simultaneously in sym-
pathy and out of sympathy with the grotesque; this is an essential part of its
aesthetic definition. The grotesque is literally sick humor, humor too
diseased to allow for easy reconciliation.26
The productions atmosphere of exaggeration and comic-book caricature
was able to get across a sense of heightened, absurd cruelty that filled the
space until it had no place to go and had no choice but to burst into
laughter, a laughter of absurdity and exaggeration that my students, who
generally respond very well to this play, have simply called too crazy.
female patients and the women begin to laugh manically. The close-up of their distorted expres-
sions in contrast to her fear is a perfect example of a menacing, grotesque sort of laughter.
25 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Bantam Books, 1975),ix.
26 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God, 8182.
Figure1 Jordan Harrison and Larry Coen in The Remarkable Rooming-House of

Mme. Le Monde, directed by Davis Robinson. Boston, Massachusetts (2009).
Photo by Justin Knight.
Williams work had never been tame rife with forbidden desire, mad-
ness, castration, rape, cannibalism, all forms of emotional and physical
violence yet the relative innocence and outright censorship of the 1940s
and 1950s was able to keep these themes just barely under control. The
playfully dark humor of Williams late plays was therefore a logical and
mature continuation of his earlier work, employing what he called freer
forms that engaged the madness of political and social chaos during the
late twentieth century.27 Yet with plays such as The Remarkable Rooming-
House of Mme. Le Monde, A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976), and Kirche,
Kche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) (1979), for example, Williams
succeeded in pushing the boundaries of good taste to the extreme, chal-
lenging conventional notions of what can be shown onstage and thereby
revealing a more primitive, primary side of human nature. Making the
rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, the homosexual subtext in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955), and even the cannibalism in Suddenly Last Summer (1958),
the dismemberment in Orpheus Descending (1957), and the castration in
27 Williams, Conversations,218.
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) appear subtle and almost quaint, The Remarkable
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde went still beyond what the public had
come to expect of Tennessee Williams in terms of shock value and violent
imagery.
Extreme, excessive, grotesque, carnivalesque, tragicomic, campy, car-
toonish, pop art, burlesque, slapstick, Grand Guignol these are just
some terms that begin to describe the sensibility of Williams late work.
His late plays reflect the freedom to finally be too much, to laugh at the
absurdity of life and its inevitable suffering with a laughter that surpasses
tears. In Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous
Plays, Linda Dorff discusses several of what she calls Williams out-
rageous plays in terms of a shift toward grotesque parody, and cites
his 1965 preface to Slapstick Tragedy (1966), where he describes the plays
as vaudeville, burlesque, and slapstick, with a dash of pop art thrown
in.28 In his 1996 essay The War against the Kitchen Sink, John Guare
mentions Williams double bill of The Gndiges Frulein (1966) and The
Mutilated that was performed under the title Slapstick Tragedy, pointing
out that Williams showed one way to that part of our brain or our souls.
The part of theater thats vaudeville.29
Indeed, Williams late plays often embrace the spirit of vaudeville, as
well as the liberating transgressions of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed the
carnivalesque the spirit of carnival as social resistance, which includes
comic violence, bawdy language, exaggeration, inversion, and an irrev-
erent mockery of what is held by society to be sacrosanct.30 Remshardt
argues that the true grotesque, that which creates and sustains horror and
ridicule in equal measure, must simultaneously bring into play higher and
lower orders until they become nearly indistinguishable.31 And Geoffrey
Harpham sees the grotesque as, similarly, generating a destruction
of order, provid[ing] an alternative center, which arises in the clash
between the virtuous limitations of form and a rebellious content that
refuses to be constrained, bulging and bursting through the seams of
the rational and the stable. It brings together the margin and the center,
embodying a confusion of type and breaking through the limitations
28 Linda Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss Late, Outrageous Plays, Tennessee
Williams Annual Review 2 (1999),14.
29 John Guare, The War against the Kitchen Sink, in John Guare: The War against the Kitchen Sink
(New York: Smith and Kraus, 1996),x.
30 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Bakhtin began his study of Rabelais in 1934 and submitted it as his thesis in 1940. It was not pub-
lished, however, until 1965 (in Russian) and 1968 (in English).
31 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God,121.
of language, embodying a coexistence of contradictions, a simultaneous
lack and excess neither/nor and both/and at the same time. He
writes that if the grotesque can be compared to anything, it is to para-
dox. Paradox is a way of turning language against itself by asserting both
terms of a contradiction at once. Grotesque, Harpham concludes, is
a word for this paralysis of language, when stable boundaries and defini-
tions fail.32
Wolfgang Kayser, who is widely recognized as the foundational theorist
of the grotesque,33 explores the history of the term tragicomedy in terms
of its interpenetration with the grotesque, and charts the emergence of
the tragicomic as a consistent and independent form rather than a mix-
ture of genres:
Beginning with the dramaturgic practice of the Sturm und Drang and the
dramatic theory of Romanticism, tragicomedy and the grotesque are con-
ceptually related, and the history of the grotesque in the field of drama is
largely one with that of tragicomedy The various modes of interpene-
tration determine the forms and variations of the grotesque in modern
drama.
For Kayser, the apparent contradictions of the tragic and the comic are
fused and intertwined across boundaries in the grotesque, as the gro-
tesque opens the view into a chaos that is both horrible and ridiculous,34
along the lines of Baraschs interpenetrative moments of ludicrous-
horror. Throughout his career, Williams presented himself as a paragon
of contradictions, both a Puritan and a Cavalier,35 an artistic revolutionary
who insisted that his place was always on the margins of Bohemia, des-
pite his status as one of the most commercially and artistically successful
playwrights in the history of American theatre: My place in society
has been in Bohemia. I love to visit the other side now and then, but
on my social passport Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on
my part.36 And, in his late plays, he is rejecting the boundaries imposed
by the bourgeois and the conventional, indulging instead the taboo, the
32 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 6, 38, 7, 6, 1920,6.
33 See James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections
(Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 14 and Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,46.
34 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1963), 5354.
35 Williams writes that Roughly there was a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in my
blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write
about (Facts About Me in Williams, New Selected Essays,65).
36 Williams, Memoirs,127.
outrageous, and the unacceptable, challenging absolutes and embracing
ambiguity and inconsistency in order to write more honestly about life
through a newlens.
These plays that Williams was writing during the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s were his response to a critical establishment that swung from hail-
ing him as Americas Greatest Playwright during the 1940s and 1950s to
viciously dismissing both him and his work after The Night of the Iguana
as perverse, sick, and lacking control. While charges of perversity were
not new with respect to Williams plays, repeated descriptions of both
him and his work as out of control were new, as was the conflation of
the artist and his work, implying that he had finally transgressed his own
boundaries.37 During the 1960s, the critical reception of Williams work
was brutal and often took the form of personal attack, tangentially (and
sometimes directly) targeting both his sexual identity and his drug and
alcohol use. Williams was never exactly in the closet, and his homosexu-
ality was essentially an open secret. Yet his (reputed) homosexuality, as
well as that of other prominent dramatists, was increasingly becoming the
subject of conjecture and surreptitious attack in the press during this tran-
sitional decade. In 1961, Howard Taubman, writing in the New York Times
about the infiltration of homosexual attitudes in the theatre, had this
to say about what he saw as the unhealthy result of these playwrights
distort[ion] of human values:
The infiltration of homosexual attitudes occurs in the theatre at many lev-
els What demands frank analysis is the indirection that distorts human
values. Plays on adult themes are couched in terms and symbols that do
not truly reflect the authors mind. Characters represent something differ-
ent from what they purport to be. It is no wonder that they seem sicker
than necessary and that the plays are more subtly disturbing than the play-
wright perhaps intended The unpleasant female of the species is exagger-
ated into a fantastically consuming monster or an incredibly pathetic drab.
The male is turned into a ragingly lustful beast or into a limp, handsome
neutral creature of otherworldly purity.38
Taubmans description of characters who are sicker than necessary is
curious, as one wonders how much sickness dramatic characters require
and what form this malady must take. His focus on excess and transform-
ation the exaggeration of the female into a fantastically consuming
37 Williams In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) deals directly with this lack of separation between the
artist and hiswork.
38 Howard Taubman, Not What it Seems: Homosexual Motif Gets Homosexual Guise, New York
Times (November 5, 1961), sec. 2,p.1.
monster and the male as a creature of otherworldly purity could be
describing a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and points to an obsession
with the unnatural a label, of course, associated with queer or ambigu-
ous sexualities, and, not coincidentally, a central aspect of the grotesque.
Taubmans readings of these plays seem to say more about his own fears
and projections than about the playwrights constructions. His desire for
the traditional representation of character rejects any ambivalence or flu-
idity, both in the drama and in the playwright(s) themselves.
In 1966, Stanley Kauffmanns now infamous article, Homosexual
Drama and Its Disguises, recounted the principal complaint against
homosexual dramatists that, he declared, was well known: Because
three of the most successful American playwrights of the last twenty years
are (reputed) homosexuals, and because their plays often treat women and
marriage, therefore, it is said, postwar American drama presents a badly
distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general.39
Without naming names, Kauffmann, readers would easily know, was refer-
ring to Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Williams Inge (lesbian
dramatists were not even a consideration). He concluded that self-hating
homosexual dramatists (and there could not be any other kind) had no
choice but to masquerade, resulting in a distortion of marriage and fem-
ininity, since the heterosexual pairs they portrayed were actually pairs of
homosexual men, with the female character essentially in drag, drawn
less in truth than in envy or fear. This vindictiveness, of course, resulted
in a dishonest work, according to Kauffmann, and he lamented its effect
on the basic concept of drama itself and of art in general. He went on to
discuss the connections between homosexual dramatists and camp style
the glorifi[cation] of homosexual exclusion that exalts style, manner,
surface and acts as an instrument of revenge on the main body of soci-
ety. Kauffmann saw a distinct danger, or, at the very least, a gross social
irresponsibility, in camp, and his defense of traditional dramatic form
essentially, dramatic realism is worth quoting, if only for its unmistakable
39 Stanley Kauffmann, Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises, New York Times (January 23, 1966),
sec. 2, p.1. While his article has been criticized as a prime example of the virtual witch hunt of gay
playwrights by New York drama critics during the 1960s, Kauffmann saw the matter differently,
and responded with a follow-up article that addressed his critics (On the Acceptability of the
Homosexual, New York Times (February 6, 1966), sec. 2, p. 1). Kauffmann insisted that he was
actually arguing for homosexuals to be given the same freedom as heterosexuals to write honestly
about their lives. And, in a letter to American Theatre magazine in 1992, he maintained that the
articles were attacks on a society that (at that time) forced a gay writer to masquerade and then
criticized him for doing so (Drop the Masquerade, American Theatre, June (1992), 2). Perhaps
this was in fact Kauffmanns intention, and passages in the article can be read that way; still, the
homophobic language is there.
warning of the homosexual threat. In Kauffmans mind, there is no separ-
ation between artist and art, and he argues that these dramatists transmit
their deviant sensibilities (desire) into their work, thereby destroying the
whole culture and, by extension, the society that producedit:
Theme and subject are important historical principles in our art. The argu-
ments to prove that they are of diminishing importance in fact, ought
never to have been important are cover for an attack on the idea of social
relevance. By adulation of sheer style [i.e., camp], this group [homosexuals]
tends to deride the whole culture and the society that produced it, tends to
reduce art to a clever game which even that society cannot keep them from
playing.
Once again, traditional dramatic form is metonymically tied to traditional
desire, as form and desire feed off, or, at worst, in the case of homosexual-
ity, infect, each other. While Kauffmanns paranoid fears and the distor-
tions that both he and Taubman were referencing are clearly constructions
of their own (distorted) biases, these very types of attitudes would result in
even bolder stylistic revolutions in the theatre during the 1960s and 1970s,
a celebration of that which cannot be defined or contained. For Williams,
rebellion often took the form of irreverent, directly ironic distortions that
became central to his late plays, as he deliberately embraced the camp and
the grotesque, the fantastic and the uncanny, appropriating these sens-
ibilities and giving critics the excesses and ambiguities they most feared.
Excess became his strategy for resistance to convention, both social and
artistic, and a way of reimagining possibilities for relating to the world.
Williams increased use of prescription drugs and alcohol to cope with
depression and anxiety during the 1960s, particularly after the untimely
death of his partner, Frank Merlo, from lung cancer in 1963, led to a
three-month confinement in the psychiatric ward at Barnes Hospital in
St. Louis in 1969. His drug and alcohol use (exacerbated by the vicious
reviews of his new work), along with his coming out on the David Frost
show in 1970 and the publication of his sexually frank Memoirs in 1975,
were prominent in the minds of critics and audiences during the 1960s
and 1970s. When reviewing his plays, it seemed that critics had already
made up their minds that Williams degeneracy had taken its toll on his
talent and that his plays were not even worth reviewing. Richard Gilman
titled his 1963 review of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in The
Commonweal: Mistuh Williams, He Dead40 a playful, yet mean-spir-
ited, paraphrasing of Joseph Conrads Mistah Kurtz he dead in Heart
40 Richard Gilman, Mistuh Williams, He Dead, Commonweal (February 8, 1963).

of Darkness. Robert Brusteins reaction to Milk Train was that the writing
is soft, the theme banal, the action sketchy, the play unfinished and
since there is no drama, why should there be a review, especially when the
directing, the decor, and the acting are as indifferent as the text?41 By
the late 1960s, critics were reviewing Williams (perceived) lifestyle, rather
than his work once again, in terms of sickness and death. In his May
23, 1969 review of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, T. E. Kalem wrote in Time
magazine that Williams is lying on the sickbed of his formidable talent
and that his work has become increasingly infirm, so grave that the
play seems more deserving of a coroners report than a review.42
Personal attacks on Williams from the reviewers were also becoming
more common, as they used his plays to offer their opinions of the play-
wright himself. Martin Gottfrieds 1966 review in Womens Wear Daily of
the two plays that comprised Slapstick Tragedy was nothing short of cruel,
claiming that Williams is a playwright in trouble, as, having years ago
abandoned his natural inclinations to write money-making self-parodies,
he finds himself wandering in pathetic circles. Gottfried called Williams
instincts themselves confused.43 The apparent incomprehensibility of
the art was, more and more, being imposed onto the artist. Michael Smith
wrote in The Village Voice on March 3, 1966, that the plays of Slapstick
Tragedy are direct metaphorical enactments of Tennessee Williams con-
cern for his own life, as he cant quite distinguish these mutilated
characters from his own self-image.44 And Henry Hewes reported in the
Saturday Review of Literature on May 31, 1969, that the failure of In the
Bar of a Tokyo Hotel was unimportant compared with our concern for
its author.45 By June 1969, Life magazine was describing Williams as a
burned out cinder after taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times
that featured a head-shot of Williams. Printed below in huge type was the
caption: Played Out?46
While some of the reviews of Williams late work did acknowledge his
experimentation with new styles and were insightful, most were extremely
and unfairly negative.47 Several critics were content to accept their own
41 Robert Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965),126.
42 T.E. Kalem, Torpid Tennessee, Time (May 23, 1969).
43 Martin Gottfried, Womens Wear Daily (February 23,1966).
44 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, Village Voice (May 3, 1966).
45 Henry Hewes, Tennessees Quest, Saturday Review of Literature (May 31, 1969).
46 Life magazine advertisement, New York Times (June 10,1969).
47 See David Kaplan, ed., Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams (East Brunswick,
NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2011); Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams; and Annette J.
Saddik, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams Later Plays (London:
Associated University Presses, 1999) for discussions of Williams late reputation.
lack of comprehension and simply lamented Williams abandonment of
the Aristotelian formula on which dramatic realism is based, harping on a
nostalgia for The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. Reviewing
Slapstick Tragedy on February 23, 1966, John McClain acknowledged in
New York Journal-American that, although it was extremely funny much
of the time, he hasnt the foggiest idea of what Mr. Williams has to tell
us, and so he wished that he would give us something old and square
like Streetcar Named Desire.48 Others, such as Norman Nadel in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun, simply called the plays bizarre and
embarrassing, even though he admitted there were times when this out-
landish play is uproarious. His final impression of The Gndiges Frulein
focused on the plays excesses, describing it as, tellingly, something too
pitiful for humor, and too strange for pity.49 Some reviewers of Williams
late plays, however, did acknowledge begrudgingly that Williams work
was headed in a new, relevant direction. Even though Clive Barnes wrote
in the New York Times in 1969 that In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel repelled
[him] with its self-pity, he did believe that the play was avant garde and
would be appreciated and applauded in the theatre of the future.50
In 1996, two plays that Williams completed around 1980, The Traveling
Companion and The Chalky White Substance, premiered in New York City
with the Running Sun Theatre Company on a double bill titled Tennessee
Williams Guignol. It was directed by John Uecker, who was Williams last
assistant and was sharing his two-room suite at the Hotel Elyse in New
York City the day Williams died. Grand Guignol, of course, is a type of
drama that emphasizes the horrifying or macabre the gruesome, the sin-
ister, the dark side of human nature. This genre of short plays depicting
violence, horror, and sadism was popular in twentieth-century French
cabarets and took its name from Le Thtre du Grand-Guignol, which
flourished in the Pigalle section of Paris from 1897 to 1962. The genre was
introduced in England in 1908 but remained essentially a French form.
Guignol was a traditional Lyonnaise puppet character similar to Punch
of the English Punch and Judy puppet shows, and became the arche-
type for puppet theatre in France. Graphic murders, rape, mutilation,
insanity, and the baser human instincts were frequent subjects of Grand
Guignol, and many of Williams later plays embrace this dark sensibility.
In fact, a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the
48 John McClain, The Out and the Abstract, New York Journal-American (February 23, 1966).
49 Norman Nadel, Bizarre, Grim Slapstick Tragedy, New York World-Telegram and Sun (February
23, 1966).
50 Clive Barnes, Williams Play Explores Decay of an Artist, New York Times (May 12, 1969).
archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, announces his plan for what
he calls Williams Guignol. He suggests three evenings in repertoire: I.
Sun Burst and Chalky White Substance; II. Night Waking: Strange Room and
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde; and III. A Monument
for Ercole.51 In a note at the top of the page, Williams writes that: While
these works have been written with as much attention to style as I always
use, I must admit their intention is to shock and so I have called them
my Guignol, and more recent productions of his late work have often
acknowledged and emphasized this sensibility.
Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines, for example, followed their highly suc-
cessful production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which ran at the Comdie-
Franaise in Paris in 2011, with Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister
Play. This piece deconstructs Williams late work in the context of Grand
Guignol, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque styles central to the aes-
thetic of many of the late plays I will be discussing in this book. Directed
by Breuer and co-conceived/adapted by Breuer and Maude Mitchell, Glass
Guignol captures the elements of excess and horror in Williams late plays
that come across as subversion and ironic commentary. The framework
for Glass Guignol is Williams The Two-Character Play (also known as Out
Cry), which is a play-within-a-play that Williams presented in several ver-
sions between 1967 and 1976.52 For their adaptation, Breuer and Mitchell
51 Of the plays proposed, Sun Burst, The Chalky White Substance, and The Remarkable Rooming-House
of Mme. Le Monde have all been published and are included in The Traveling Companion and Other
Plays. Night Waking: Strange Room and A Monument for Ercole exist either in fragments or in mul-
tiple, unfinished drafts.
Williams play was first produced in London in 1967 under the title The Two-Character Play,
52
directed by James Roose-Evans and starring Peter Wyngarde and Mary Ure. After several rewrites,
the play premiered in Chicago in 1971 under the title Out Cry, starring Donald Madden and Eileen
Herlie. Williams revised the script extensively yet again for the 1973 Broadway production (also
called Out Cry), directed by Peter Glenville and starring Michael York and Clara Duff-McCormick.
The Broadway production closed after twelve performances, and Williams maintained that he
always preferred the Chicago script. The Two-Character Play was recently revived in London (in
2010) and New York City (in 2013), directed by Gene David Kirk. In London the production
starred Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan, and received very positive reviews. Kirk brought the
production to the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2011, and it was later staged off-
Broadway at New World Stages, with Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif replacing Cusack and
McEwan. This production opened on June 19, 2013, and closed on September 29, 2013. It had some
success but did not quite communicate Williams vision effectively and was plagued by backstage
turmoil, often canceling performances (see, for example, Michael Riedel, Diva Amanda Plummer
a Nightmare Backstage, New York Post (September 5, 2013)). In the spring of 2014, The Two-
Character Play was presented once again at a small off-Broadway theatre in New York, 292 Theatre,
directed by Romy Ashby and starring Regina Bartkoff and Charlie Schick. This excellent produc-
tion, done on the ground floor of a small East Village tenement with only twenty seats, captured
the intense claustrophobia central to the play and managed to simultaneously bring out both its
humor and its Gothic/Guignol elements.
replaced the central narrative with excerpts from other Williams plays,
focusing on moments in the early work that echo The Two-Character Play,
particularly the brothersister relationship. In the first act, Glass Guignol
uses The Glass Menagerie as its play-within-a-play, and brings in the screen
titles that were omitted from the original production, which emphasized
the irony that is present across Williams oeuvre. The carnival and calliope
music in the piece was particularly effective in getting across the tone, and
the acting done in an exaggerated, self-conscious style highlighted a
particular interpretation that the late work invites, an almost Hammer
Horror excess. The stage hands characters that appear in many of
Williams late plays of the 1960s, such as The Day on Which a Man Dies
(1960) and The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore (1963) added a
sinister element that helped to move the play along with the appropriate
tone. An already deconstructed piece, The Two-Character Play is further
deconstructed by this production, bringing out the many layers of both
Williams early and late work, particularly The Glass Menagerie, which was
much more ironic in Williams original script, before it was edited for its
first production, in order to articulate a connection between the early and
the late plays and to demonstrate that Williams was always striving toward
an anti-realistic style to express his vision of reality.53 Clearly, Williams was
keenly aware of what he was doing when he offered the world these plays.
Rather than the uncontrolled ramblings of a drunk and disordered mind,
many of his late plays are conscious and deliberate constructions, part of
an artistic tradition rooted in controlled excess.
In Chapter 1, Drowned in Rabelaisian Laughter: Germans as gro-
tesque comic figures in Williams plays of the 1960s and 1970s, I cover
what is considered the last of Williams successes, The Night of the Iguana,
along with The Gndiges Frulein, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979),
and Kirche, Kche, Kinder in relation to his representation of Germans
as sinister and grotesque comic figures perverse, excessive, bawdy, and
often menacing. Using Bakhtins notion of the carnivalesque and his
discussion of the new grotesque of German Romanticism in conjunc-
tion with Julia Kristevas theories of the abject, I explore Williams use
53 To date, Glass Guignol has only been presented in workshops and staged readings at Towson
University, Duke University, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2011, and at
the Sundance Theatre Lab at Mass MoCA in 2012, but it has not yet received a full production.
Other recent productions of Williams late work that acknowledge his Guignol aesthetic, such as
Abrahamse and Meyers production of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore from Cape Town,
South Africa (2013) and Beau Jest Moving Theatres production of The Remarkable Rooming-House
of Mme. Le Monde out of Boston (2009), are discussed in detail later in thisbook.
of exaggeration, chaos, and laughter in terms of its relationship to the
grotesque. Chapter2, Benevolent anarchy: Williams late plays and the
theatre of cruelty, continues to analyze The Gndiges Frulein, as well as
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (1981) and This is the Peaceable Kingdom,
or Good Luck God (1981), through the lens of Artauds theater of cruelty
and the liberation from rational constructs that he sought in the chaotic
spectacle of a primal theatre, as I examine the divisions between nature
and culture in relation to specific kinds of theatrical excess.
In Chapter3, Writing calls for discipline!: chaos, creativity, and mad-
ness in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, I explore the power of chaos and excess
in relation to representations of the feminine in Williams last Broadway
play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). In this ghost play about Zelda
and Scott Fitzgerald that focuses on the influence Zeldas madness had
on her husbands work, the excess and instability of madness are linked to
fears of the feminine, manifesting in what Freud characterized as a dread
of being infected by femininity. Chapter4, Act naturally: embracing
the monstrous woman in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The
Mutilated, and The Pronoun I, addresses Williams celebration of the
monster in the context of grotesque female identity and the performance
of natural femininity. This chapter covers recent productions of each of
these plays that employed acting styles that self-consciously avoided any
naturalistic or realistic creation of character and instead developed appro-
priately exaggerated and ironic performances that emerged from the plays
language and rhythms.
Chapter5, Theres something not natural here: grotesque ambiguities
in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady and A House Not Meant to
Stand, continues to unravel the notion of excess in the context of mad-
ness, desire, racial binaries, and the unnatural overlaps between life and
death that play with ambivalence and ambiguity. Finally, Chapter6, All
drama is about being extreme: in-yer-face sex, war, and violence, links
Williams darker vision in late plays such as Green Eyes, or No Sight Would
Be Worth Seeing (1970),54 The Chalky White Substance, and The Remarkable
54 The published text of Green Eyes, which I edited for inclusion in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, is based on the manuscript sent to New Directions by Audrey Wood, Williams agent
at International Creative Management, along with two other plays, The Demolition Downtown and
The Reading, on September 17, 1971, and incorporates revisions that Williams made to a copy of
the manuscript that exists in the archives of UCLA. One of the changes that Williams made on
the UCLA copy was to cross out the title Green Eyes and replace it with No Sight Would Be Worth
Seeing. In order to honor both titles in the final version of the published text, I titled it Green
Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing.Williams apparently made his last set of revisions in 1970
on the copy he gave to UCLA. He signed a letter to UCLA on September 9, 1970, when he sold
Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde with the young British playwrights
who were part of what Aleks Sierz has defined as the in-yer-face thea-
tre sensibility of the 1990s, which thrives on exaggeration, shock value,
physical and emotional violence, and the transgression of social taboos in
order to elicit a visceral reaction and jar audiences out of their compla-
cency. Williams has been cited as an influence by in-yer-face playwrights
Simon Block and Philip Ridley in particular, who admired him for not
being afraid to go to extremes in order to access a truth that provided an
honest glimpse of human relations as we live in and with the world. Just
as several of the in-yer-face playwrights were reacting to reports of relent-
less international violence that absorbed their generation, particularly
the brutality of the war in Bosnia, Williams plays responded to cultural
moments entrenched, first, in the horrors of the Vietnam War, and, later,
the constant nuclear threat of the 1980s. In this chapter, I also discuss
the relationship of both in-yer-face theatre and Williams late plays to the
tradition of Grand Guignol, which relied on shock and graphic violence
to elicit both emotional and physical reactions from its audiences.
In her 1963 book written with Lucy Freeman, Williams mother Edwina
writes that during the early 1940s her son had been convinced that after
World War II was over the world would be ready for new plays, since
the future accepts more readily what the present rejects.55 By the time
Edwinas book was published, Williams prediction could be applied once
again, anticipating, or at least hoping, that the vision of his post-1961 plays
would be understood and appreciated one day. In a 1977 interview with
Barbaralee Diamonstein on About the Arts, John Guare discussed how
American playwrights were being destroyed by the commercial interests of
theatre producers and were not being given the chance to experiment and
grow. When asked for an example, he cited Tennessee Williams:
In our own lifetime, Tennessee Williams, who is our greatest playwright,
after he stopped turning out what they thought were commercially feas-
ible plays, was just dismissed. And his later plays one day will be discov-
ered and appreciated and used and theyll learn how [these plays should] be
performed. Theyre extraordinary pieces of work. But producers stopped
a suitcase of manuscripts to the university (including Green Eyes/No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing)
before traveling to Asia with Oliver Evans, attesting that the writing was all his own. Therefore, the
most accurate date of completion for Green Eyes would be 1970 (since the manuscript that New
Directions received in 1971 was actually the unrevised version). I am indebted, as usual, to Thomas
Keith for clarifying the circumstances surrounding the dating of the manuscript.
55 Edwina Dakin Williams and Lucy Freeman, Remember Me to Tom (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons,
1963),128.
being interested in his work after it stopped being Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Streetcar Named Desire. It was him moving into new fields.56
Guare was ahead of his time in recognizing the value of Williams late
work and in acknowledging that the new fields Williams was moving
into were exciting and worthy of attention. The resurrection of Williams
reputation during the past ten years, with the publication and production
of several of his previously unsuccessful or unstaged plays, has apparently
proved him right. Williams was just as prolific in the last twenty-four years
of his life as he had been in the previous twenty-four; in the forty-eight
years from 1935 to 1983 he completed at least thirty-three full-length plays
and at least seventy one-acts.57 Ultimately, he was not backing down and
he was not going away. He was still here, he was most definitely queer, and
he wanted to make sure that everyone knew it. In his later years, Williams
went beyond the struggle, hope, and tragedy of his early plays, engaging a
kind of laughter that bursts forth through pain to the freedom of exagger-
ation and excess the grotesque, the camp, the irreverent always mov-
ing forward in his celebration of what he called the strange, the crazed,
the queer.58
56 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/dsva.

57 Thomas Keith, Introduction: A Mississippi Funhouse, in A House Not Meant to Stand, by
Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 2008),xv.
58 Williams, Collected Poems,150.
Ch apter 1
Drowned in Rabelaisian laughter

Germans as grotesque comic figures in Williams plays of
the 1960s and1970s
Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to

laughter.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,19841
Forgive me, but now you are becoming fantastic, and we want to
consider only whats realistic.
The Patron in Reinhard Sorge, The Beggar,19122
Finally, I think the German expressionist treatment was right for
my material. I hadnt realized how far I had departed from realism in
my writing. I had long since exhausted the so-called poetic realism.
This, after all, isnt twenty years ago.
Tennessee Williams,Chicago Tribune, 19823
In Williams 1961 play The Night of the Iguana, generally considered to

be his last successful play and the end of his early period, the Reverend
T. Lawrence Shannon, an apparently defrocked Episcopal minister who
works as a Mexican tour guide after having been thrown out of his church
for blasphemy,4 shares his observation that we live on two levels the
realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really. As
Hannah Jelkes points out to him, fantastic does seem to be Shannons
favorite word,5 and his acknowledgment that the realistic may not be a
true representation of the real reflects Williams own suspicions regarding
realistic representation. He himself increasingly began to favor fantastic
modes of presenting reality in his plays after 1961, relying on the more
expressionistic and plastic kind of theatre that he called for as early as
1944 in his production notes to The Glass Menagerie. His experimentation
1 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,66.

2 Reinhard Sorge, The Beggar, in Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, ed. Walter H. Sokel
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963),40.
3 Richard Christiansen, The Pain, Risk, and Tumult of Staging Williams New Play, Chicago Tribune
(May 9, 1982).
4 Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana (New York: New Directions, 2009),54.
5 Ibid.,73.
22
Germans as grotesque comic figures 23
with the fantastic could be seen as early as 1941 in Stairs to the Roof, where
the plays solution to the automatism of the individual under industrial
capitalism is a rejection of social reality, as Ben and the Girl climb up to
the roof and escape to a new star known as World Number Two with
the help of the divine Mr.E.6
Williams interest in the fantastic would naturally lead him to experi-
ment with anti-realistic styles throughout his career. He was particularly
drawn to German Expressionism, believing that its dreamlike distortions
were an effective means of accessing the truths that exist behind the sur-
faces of constructed social realities. He would directly embrace an expres-
sionistic style in several of his later plays, such as A House Not Meant to
Stand his Spook Sonata in the tradition of Strindberg that he subtitles
A Gothic Comedy7 as well as in his other Ghost Plays, most not-
ably Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? (written in 1969 and first
performed in 1980), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and Steps Must Be
Gentle (1980).
Walter Sokel, in his introduction to the Anthology of German
Expressionist Drama (1963), writes that the extremism and distortion of
Expressionist drama derive from its closeness to the dream. In its crude
aspects, Expressionism is dramatized daydream and fantasy. In its sub-
tler and more interesting examples, Expressionism parallels the conceal-
ing symbolism and subliminal suggestiveness of night dreams. He argues
that distortion served the Expressionists as an X-ray eye for detecting the
dynamic essence of their time, the direction in which history was moving.
In caricature and nightmare they approached the truth.8 While The Night
of the Iguana is not itself a play in the German Expressionist tradition,
Williams interest in the fantastic modes of representation characteristic
of German Expressionism, along with his exaggerated, grotesque, and
dreamlike portrayal of Germans in the play, illustrates that he was begin-
ning to more fully engage a German sensibility that he would continue to
develop in his later plays throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
The realm of the fantastic itself operates on several levels in The Night
of the Iguana. As fantasy, it refers to a distortion of the laws of superfi-
cial reality in order to access a truth that can only be grasped through
6 Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof (New York: New Directions, 2000), 9495. For a discussion of
Stairs to the Roof, see my essay Blueprints for the Reconstruction: Postmodern Possibility in Stairs
to the Roof, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 9 (2007).
Tennessee Williams, A House Not Meant to Stand, ed. Thomas Keith (New York: New Directions,
7
2008),xiii.
8 Walter H. Sokel, Introduction, in Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, ed. Walter H. Sokel
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), xiv,xxiv.
metaphor and symbol. At the same time, however, fantasy can indicate
a delusion that denies truth. Yet the fantastic also refers to a sense of the
wonderful or amazing (filling us with wonder, amazement, mystery; as in
Thats fantastic!). Therefore, the fantastic can serve as a description of
the unbelievable in both a positive and a negative sense. In terms of artistic
form, the rejection of mimesis (verisimilitude, the believable) in favor
of the transformation of truth, life, or reality into other forms than
those which were merely present in appearance9 can reveal deeper truths
beyond the surface. On the other hand, indulging fantasy can also be seen
as turning away from an engagement with reality, unable or unwilling to
believe what seems to be the truth of ones circumstances (often depicted
in Williams plays as madness, illusion, delusion). And yet, the seductive-
ness of the fantastic/fantasy as simultaneously something marvelous, a
doorway into the unknown and the awesome, and an escape from what
only appears to be truth is equally present in Williamswork.
In keeping with the fantastic or anti-realistic elements that Williams
more regularly introduced into his later plays, a group of German tourists,
often considered to be minor characters, appears throughout The Night
of the Iguana as symbol, dream, grotesque image. While they are realistic
characters in the most basic sense, their function is more symbolic; they
are larger than life, excessive, operating more on the level of the extra-
realistic in the sense of being beyond realism than on the level of the
anti-realistic. These characters have very few lines in the play, but they do
not rely on language for their effect. Instead, their physical presence and
the great detail of the stage directions devoted to their actions make them
important dramatic figures.
The play takes place at a Mexican resort, the Costa Verde Hotel, during
the summer of 1940, when World War II was well under way but before
US involvement made it a national focal point, and the German tourists
are identified as Nazis, trooping up the beach singing a Nazi marching
song.10 They appear on the scene suddenly, making a startling, dream-
like entrance, walking astride a big inflated rubber horse which has an
ecstatic smile and great winking eyes,11 as Shannon arrives at the hotel. The
Germans are both excessively present and unreal, with smiles of euphoria
on their faces as they move like a dream-image, starting to sing a march-
ing song as they go.12 Maxine Falk, the proprietor and an old friend of
Shannons, explains to him that there are many Nazi tourists vacationing
9 Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.

10 Williams, Iguana,11. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.,110.
there because Mexicos the front door to South America and the back
door to the States. Shannon refers to them as a little animated cartoon by
Hieronymus Bosch, and the stage directions describe them as pink and
gold like baroque cupids in various sizes Rubenesque, splendidly physical.13
Later in the play, when the Germans are tormenting Shannon after Maxine
has him tied to a hammock in order to contain his impending crack up,14
Williams stage directions state that Hannahs indignant protest to let him
alone is drowned in the Rabelaisian laughter of the Germans.15 Excessive
and physically imposing, they dominate scenes with their presence rather
than with language, which ultimately gets drownedout.
The artists whom Williams references in his descriptions of the
Germans in this play the painters Hieronymus Bosch (14501516) and
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (15771640), as well as the writer Franois Rabelais
(14941553) are all Renaissance figures associated with the fantastic, the
mythic, and the grotesque. In The Night of the Iguana, the Germans are
characterized as art or fiction, symbols that float around the margins of
the play like menacing creatures and, like the screen devices in The Glass
Menagerie, they contain an emotional appeal that serves to strengthen
the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing.16
Bosch, known for his use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and
religious concepts, particularly indulges in fantastic exaggerations and dis-
tortions in his most famous painting, the triptych The Garden of Earthly
Delights. The left panel depicts the Creation of the World, while the
right is a depiction of Hell, complete with a bird-headed monster.
Boschs art does not represent the physical world of everyday experience,
as did the art of more traditional painters of his generation. Rather, his
images are known for being gruesome fantasies, as he presents a world
of monsters, grotesque transformations, dreams, and nightmares. Walter
Gibson argues that in Boschs paintings forms seem to flicker and change
before our eyes,17 transformations that suggest the realm of the fantas-
tic and the monstrous. Rubens paintings of mythological and allegorical
subjects, along with his famous depictions of full-figured women, can
similarly be seen as embracing the kind of excess and sensuality associated
with the grotesque.
Consistent with the artistic imagery that Williams evokes, The Night of the
Iguana likewise emphasizes myth and allegory over realistic representation
13 Ibid.,11. 14 Ibid.,99. 15 Ibid.,101.

17 Walter S. Gibson, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973),9.
in its description of the German tourists. There is a mythical element to
their presence that gives them a quasi-religious function as image, in keep-
ing with the art associated with them. Shannon, as is appropriate to his
former vocation, views both the Germans and Hannah through the lens of
mysticism, spirituality, and religion, but the Rubenesque Germans func-
tion as Hannahs antithesis. The angelic Hannah is described as ethereal,
almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but
animated. She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and
yet androgynous-looking almost timeless.18 The German tourists, in con-
trast, are large, excessive, and loud. Both the Germans and Hannah are
art come to life, but, while the Germans are a little animated cartoon by
Hieronymus Bosch,19 Hannah is a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval
saint, but animated.
The Germans are excited by destruction and violence, attracted by
the disturbance of Shannon and Maxine fighting over the liquor cart,20
by the cruelty of Shannons captivity,21 and by the news of the burning
of London22 but the idea of eating the captured iguana, a matter of
human sustenance that the Mexicans do routinely, disgusts them. Frau
Fahrenkopf s exaggerated revulsion at the idea of eating a big lizard is
expressed in a grotesque attitude of terror as if she were threatened by Jack
the Ripper.23 For Williams, her terror is inappropriately excessive, par-
ticularly given her immunity to (and even delight in) cruelty and violence,
resulting in a grotesque image. Hannah, on the other hand, is gentle and
kind, and makes a point of stating that she is not one to reject human
nature: Nothing human disgusts me unless its unkind, violent.24
Yet, while Hannah seems to transcend her body and its basic needs
she is ethereal, saintly, and androgynous the Germans are not only
excessively physical in bodily appearance but also overtly sexual, even
Dionysian. They are constantly drinking, laughing, screaming, or engaging
in physical/sexual play. Williams describes a ribald comment made by
one of the German men that prompts the women to shriek with amuse-
ment, as one falls back into the arms of Wolfgang, who catches her with
his hands over her almost nude breasts.25 Even Maxine proudly asserts that
the Germans appreciate her body: Evry time I go near Herr Fahrenkopf
he gives me a pinch or a goose.26 The Germans celebration of the body
continues as they express delight in scatological imagery, consistent with
18 Williams, Iguana,17. 19 Ibid.,11.

20 Ibid.,74. 21 Ibid., 100101.
22 Ibid.,65. 23 Ibid.,62.
24 Ibid.,124. 25 Ibid.,101. 26 Ibid.,74.
stereotypes of German humor. They laugh hysterically upon finding out
that Shannon make pee-pee all over the suitcases of the ladies from
Texas, and call this gesture vunderbar, vunderbar! Hah? Thees is a epic
gesture!27
Hannah therefore signifies purity, pointing to heaven and a transcend-
ence of the body, while the Germans are lascivious, ravenous devils reveling
in lowly pleasures. Shannon calls them Fiends out of Hell, yet he admits
that they have the voices of angels, an observation that Hannah calls
the logic of contradictions.28 Moreover, since the Germans are identified
as Nazis, this contradiction has particular significance. While The Night of
the Iguana takes place in 1940, when the Nazis were seen by Americans as
ruthless and imperialistic, the most horrendous Nazi crimes were not yet
widely known. Williams, however, was writing the play with the benefit of
hindsight. The scope of the callous and brutal devastation that the Nazis
inflicted upon the world was indeed unbelievable fantastic and yet
often seemed inconsistent with a culture also known for its artistic accom-
plishments, refinement, and love of beauty. This paradox was very much
a part of Americans impression of Nazis well into the 1950s and 1960s,
when Williams was working on the play, often making them seem unreal,
mythic.29 In The Night of the Iguana, they are a cartoonish, fantasical image,
an excessive dramatic device. They close Act II singing exultantly, as they
look on the storm thats coming as a Wagnerian climax.30 Hannahs pres-
ence calms the emotional demons that haunt Shannon, what he calls his
blue devils,31 while the Germans collectively represent a more mythical
kind of demon, a nightmare from hell that revels in contradiction and
ambivalence, both comic and cruel, fiendish and beautiful.
The plays last artistic association with the Germans, the literary allu-
sion to Rabelaisian laughter cited earlier, is arguably the most signifi-
cant in terms of Williams depiction of Germans, not only in The Night
of the Iguana but also in his later work in general. Rabelais, author of
fantasy, satire, and the grotesque, is, of course, most famous in contem-
porary literary theory as the subject of Mikhail Bakhtins Rabelais and His
World. Bakhtins claim that Rabelais novel Gargantua and Pantagruel had
been misunderstood for centuries and must be read within the context of
medieval and Renaissance folk culture, which he associates with the social
27 Ibid.,101. 28 Ibid.,110.
29 For instance, the widespread publicity surrounding Hitlers relationship with his dog, Blondi,
which portrayed him as a kind, gentle man who was a lover of animals, is often cited as an import-
ant example of Nazi propaganda in terms of creating contradictory images of the Nazis.
inversions of the carnival and the excesses of the grotesque body, is cen-
tral to the symbolic function of the German characters in Williams plays.
Bakhtin articulates that carnival is to a certain extent a parody of the
extracarnival life, a world inside out. It constructs a world of continual
shifting from top to bottom, front to rear, of numerous parodies and trav-
esties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.32
Through humor, chaos, violations of social decorum, and the celebration
of bodily excess, the medieval carnival serves to turn values upside down,
mingling high and low culture in order to devalue the privileged discourse
of the hegemony and mock authority. In this way, carnival laughter func-
tions as a form of social resistance. Bakhtins carnivalesque subverts the
dominant culture or style through humor, chaos, excess, and play, thus
offering an alternative to rigid forms of hierarchy that destabilizes the
official worldview.
Bakhtins concept of the grotesque body figures strongly in his charac-
terization of carnivalesque subversion. The grotesque body is indulgent
and excessive in its physicality; it revels in bodily fluids and scatalogical
functions, and celebrates the physical pleasures of eating, drinking, and
sexuality. Bakhtin writes that it is usually pointed out that in Rabelais
work the material body principle, that is, images of the human body
with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life, plays a predominant role.
Images of the body are offered, moreover, in an extremely exaggerated
form. Rabelais was proclaimed by Victor Hugo the greatest poet of the
flesh and belly.33 Bakhtin mentions Bosch in his historical account of
the representation of the grotesque body, arguing that it has been most
fully and masterfully expressed in Rabelais novel, whereas in other
works of Renaissance literature it was watered down. It is represented in
painting by Hieronymous Bosch and the elder Breughel; some of its elem-
ents can be found in the frescoes and bas-reliefs which adorned the cathe-
drals and even village churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.34
According to Bakhtin, Boschs watered down vision of the grotesque was
one that would become fully realized in Rabelaiswork.
In The Female Grotesque (1994), Mary Russo characterizes the grotesque
body as abject, open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and chan-
ging; it is identified with non-official low culture or the carnivalesque,
and with social transformation.35 Julia Kristeva describes the abject as
death infecting life It is something rejected from which one does not
33 Ibid.,18. 34 Ibid.,27.
35 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994),8.
part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary
uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.36
She emphasizes that it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes
abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
For Kristeva, abjection is above all ambiguity.37 Dissolving the bound-
aries between self and world, human and animal, the grotesque is an
ambivalent body that stands on the threshold between, on the one hand,
birth and renewal, and, on the other, death and decay. The grotesque,
argues Bakhtin, discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world,
of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of
the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable.38 In this sense,
the grotesque body has the potential power to renew and regenerate, but
it also destabilizes and disrupts.
In The Night of the Iguana, Hannahs grandfather Nonno who is
ninety-seven almost a century young! is described as a grotesque fig-
ure when he expresses delight in all his own little jokes. Williams states
that, while this quality may once have been charming, now it has become
somewhat grotesque in a touching way, this desire to please, this playful man-
ner, these venerable jokes.39 This juxtaposition of Nonnos cheerfulness
with his advanced age and fallen circumstances makes him seem pathet-
ically touching at these moments, evoking both empathy and disgust,
and thus focusing attention on grotesque contradiction. Even Shannons
image of God touches upon the grotesque, when he describes him as a
senile delinquent.40
Several of Williams late plays, such as Lifeboat Drill (1981) and This Is
the Peaceable Kingdom, or Good Luck God, also recall the grotesque in deal-
ing with the subject of aging and decay.41 In Lifeboat Drill, the decrepit
old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Taske, are described as swaying forward and
backward in grotesque profile.42 And in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, the
octogenarian residents of a nursing home have decayed to the point where
36 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982),4.
37 Ibid.,4,9. 38 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,48.
41 Aged characters are often seen as grotesque in Williams plays. In addition to Nonno and the octo-
and nonagenarians in Lifeboat Drill and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, the ninety-nine-year-old
Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger in Kirche, Kche, Kinder is particularly grotesque in her decaying
sexuality. I address this character later in this chapter during my discussion of theplay.
42 Tennessee Williams, Lifeboat Drill, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New Directions:
New York, 1981),295.
there is nothing left but an open mouth at the end.43 For Bakhtin, the
open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the
nose are all points where the body transgresses its own limits, dissolving
boundaries between self and world.44 The repeated references in This Is the
Peaceable Kingdom to voracious open mouths mak[ing] greedy sounds,
to bodily functions, and to a loss of control (even language is oozing, and
the characters must be careful of what [they] say) creates precisely the
grotesque picture that Bakhtin describes.45
The grotesque body is therefore one of contradictions signifying both
life and death and Rabelaisian laughter is ambivalent. The grotesque
Germans in The Night of the Iguana serve as ambiguous figures signifying
the coexistence of contradictions, simultaneously human and monster,
familiar yet unfamiliar, celebratory yet menacing. They are emissaries of
a world inside out, shaking the foundations of stability both in terms of
their historical reference to World War II and the more personal upheaval
of Shannons spiritual world. While Shannon struggles with his blue
devils and an image of God as a senile delinquent, the Germans are
laughing both at and with him. Their laughter can be read as carnival-
esque subversion, a mockery of dogmatic religious doctrine and a resist-
ance to hegemony that signifies liberation from social restraints, much like
Shannons blasphemous tirade at the pulpit that led to his removal. They
represent freedom in their abandon and excess, and yet they are repul-
sive (in contrast to Hannah, with her gentleness and purity), constantly
interrupting the action (and Shannons search for spiritual redemption)
with their loud, invasive physicality. Like Chance Wayne at the end of
Sweet Bird of Youth they demand your recognition of me in you,46 yet
they are also decidedly alien. The Germans remain celebratory throughout
Iguana laughing at chaos, indulging in their splendid physicality and
in the pleasures of the flesh.47 At the same time, however, their laughter
haunts the play as a reminder of a world where fire bombs and sadistic
cruelty can drown out spiritual longings for tenderness and beauty.
The relationship between Rabelaisian laughter and Germans in
particular is one that Bakhtin addresses in his discussion of the new
43 Tennessee Williams, This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII
(New York: New Directions, 1981),350.
45 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom, 349, 347. See Chapter2 for further discussion of This Is the Peaceable
Kingdom.
46 Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. IV (New York:
47 Williams, Iguana,11.
grotesque of German Romanticism, the gothic or black novel. He
claims that in Germany this subjective form had perhaps the most
powerful and original development, citing the Sturm und Drang dra-
matics and early Romanticism (Lenz, Klinger, the young Tieck), the
novels of Hippel and Jean Paul, and finally the works of Hoffmann, who
strongly influenced the development of the new grotesque in the next
period of world literature.48 E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic
author of macabre tales that embraced the supernatural, horror, and the
grotesque, is particularly known for his blending of realism and fantasy.
He is probably most famous for his short story The Sandman(1816) and
his novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (also 1816), on which the
ballet The Nutcracker is based both tales where inanimate objects come
to life, blurring the boundaries between human and object.49 Bakhtin
explains how the Gothic, or Romantic grotesque, was a reaction against
the elements of classicism which characterized the self-importance of the
Enlightenment. It was a reaction against the cold rationalism, against offi-
cial, formalistic, and logical authoritarianism; it was a rejection of that
which is finished and completed, of the didactic and utilitarian spirit of
the Enlighteners with their narrow and artificial optimism. For Bakhtin,
the most important transformation of Romantic grotesque was that of
the principle of laughter, which was cut down to cold humor, irony, sar-
casm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regener-
ating power was reduced to a minimum.50
This essential difference that Bakhtin posits between the Romantic
grotesque he associates with German literature and the medieval and
Renaissance grotesque the transformation of the principle of laugh-
ter51 is relevant to reading the Germans in The Night of the Iguana.
Ultimately, their laughter is not regenerative but is ironic, sinister, and
mocking. In this play, Williams depiction of Germans is filtered through
a sensibility borrowed from particular German literary traditions pri-
marily Expressionism and the Romantic grotesque that rely on distor-
tion, exaggeration, and, particularly, contradiction, dissolving the binaries
we rely on for certainty and safety and allowing access to a deeper truth
through the fantastic.
48 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 27,37.
49 Ernst Jentschs essay The Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and Sigmund Freuds The Uncanny
(1919) both cite Hoffmans story The Sandman as an exemplary tale of the uncanny, something
both familiar and strange at the same time that leads to cognitive dissonance. This sense of ambi-
guity and a blurring of boundaries that threatens stability can of course be seen in relation to the
abject and the grotesque.
50 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 37, 3738. 51 Ibid.,38.
In several plays that would follow The Night of the Iguana The
Gndiges Frulein, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, and Kirche, Kche,
Kinder, for example Germans continue to function as grotesque comic
figures: perverse, darkly humorous, excessive, and bawdy. The Gndiges
Frulein, as I mentioned in the Introduction, was presented on a double
bill titled Slapstick Tragedy along with another one-act, The Mutilated, a
play that takes place in New Orleans and contains a Bird-Girl remin-
iscent of Boschs bird-headed monster in the Hell panel of Garden of
Earthly Delights.52 While The Mutilated does not deal with a representation
of Germans, it relates to The Gndiges Frulein through the grotesque,
which is realized in a description of Trinket as a mutilated monster ! and
a freak, something peculiar, not natural, morbid.53 Trinket struggles
with the secret of her mastectomy, writh[ing] grotesquely in the grasp of
rough sailors who seek to humiliate her.54 The play centers on her betrayal
by a former friend, Celeste, who blurts out Trinkets secret one night
over a disagreement about whether to have dinner in the Garden District
or the French Quarter. In contrast to the elysian beauty of the Garden
District, the French Quarter recalls the Hell panel of Boschs painting,
as the Bird-Girl, a freak-show attraction who is actually Rampart Street
Rose with chicken feathers glued to her,55 is paraded through the streets
screeching AWK AWK AWK!56 The conflation of girls and birds is a
common one in Williams plays, particularly in those that deal with gro-
tesque imagery. In The Night of the Iguana, Shannon refers to the teenage
girl with whom he had an affair a musical prodigy who declares her
love for him in song as Miss Bird-Girl.57
In The Gndiges Frulein, a sort of giant pelican called a cocaloony
bird appears as a menacing figure that dominates the action and links the
two one-acts. Williams indicates that there is a Bird-Girl in The Mutilated
who could also appear as the cocaloony in this one.58 Linda Dorff has
called The Gndiges Frulein a grotesquely animated cartoon of a play59
and cites Harold Clurmans description of the Frulein as an odd but
52 The Gndiges Frulein starred Zoe Caldwell as Polly and Kate Reid as Molly in its world premiere.
Even though the play ran on Broadway for only sixteen previews and seven performances, Caldwell
won a TONY for Best Featured Actress as well as a Theatre World Award.
Tennessee Williams, The Mutilated, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII. (New Directions:
53
New York, 1981), 89, 90,115.

54 Ibid.,120. 55 Ibid.,86.
56 Ibid. I discuss The Mutilated in more detail in Chapter4.
57 Williams, Iguana, 12,13.
58 Tennessee Williams, The Gndiges Frulein, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New
Directions: New York, 1981),218.
59 Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,16.
effective mixture of gallows humor and Rabelaisian zest.60 The gro-
tesqueness that is referred to in The Mutilated is more fully realized in
Gndiges through the representation of a German singer who has passed
and long passed the zenith of her career in show-biz and as a B-girl at
the Square Roof and Conch Gardens. She now lives in a boarding house
in Cocaloony Key and has turned her attentions and transferred her
battleground for survival to the fish-docks Shes shamelessly, blame-
lessly, gone into competition with the cocaloonies for the throw-away
fish.61 Williams indicates in the production notes that the role of the
Frulein should be played by a singer, and I think of Lotte Lenya for
this part.62 The Gndiges Frulein, which translates loosely as gracious
miss or honorable woman, was once a lady of genteel circumstances63
who is now a desperate and absurd figure. Like Shannon and Hannah in
Iguana, she has come to the end of [her] rope and is trying to go on
past the end of her rope.64 The fallen Frulein struggles to survive with
quiet dignity but is reduced to competing with the cocaloonies to catch
the quota of fish that will allow her to avoid eviction from the rooming
house.65 The line between animal and human is blurred in this play, as
the giant cocaloonies function in a queer liminal state as both bird and
human and the Frulein takes on their job, as well as that of the seal, in
her own ambiguous roles.
In ibid.,17.
60
61 Williams, The Gndiges Frulein, 217, 238. The setting of The Gndiges Frulein is clearly Key West,
Florida, where Williams stayed in boarding houses since he began visiting in 1941, and bought a
house in 1950, which he owned until his death in 1983. Southernmost a term associated with
Key West as the southernmost point in the United States is used as a comic descriptor throughout
the play, and, in his Memoirs, Williams refers to Key West as the Cocaloony Key (Memoirs,312).
62 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,218.
63 Ibid.,230. 64 Williams, Iguana,128.
65 The figure of the Frulein, particularly her habit of competing for fish on the docks, seems to be
based on the German performer Valeska Gert (18921978), whom Williams knew in New York
and Provincetown, and Madame Pumpernickel, the seventy-year-old dwarf who worked briefly
at Gerts Provincetown establishment. Gert was Jewish and fled Berlin in 1933, arriving in New
York in 1938. In 1941 she opened the Beggars Bar in Greenwich Village, where Williams worked
for her as a waiter. He was fired after he refused to share tips but reunited with Gert in 1944
in Provincetown, where she opened Valeskas and hired Madame Pumpernickel to play the piano
and sing. David Kaplan reports on a conversation with Donald Windham in May 2006 in which
Windham recalls how Williams would see Madame Pumpernickel walking the beach picking up
floaters fish that had died on their own and snacking on them raw. Williams would imitate
Madame Pumpernickel biting into a floater and throwing it away saying: diz vun iz bad (David
Kaplan, Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2007),
64). The story varies to sometimes identify Gert as the one who would scavenge for fish; whether
there is any strict truth to either version is difficult to determine, but it is highly likely that these
eccentric German performers did inspire Williams portrait of the Frulein.
In his Memoirs, Williams recalls that during 1941 he was very briefly employed at a bistro called
the Beggars Bar, owned by a fantastic refugee from Nazi Germany named Valesca [sic] Gert, whom
The owner of the rooming house, Molly, and the visiting Society Editor
of the local paper, Polly, provide the comic relief in this tragicomic play.
They function as clowns, dressing in pelican colors that mirror the coca-
loonies66 and smoking marijuana onstage. In production they often appear
in exaggerated makeup, with painted white faces and bright-red lips. The
Frulein, on the other hand, is more of a dark, contradictory figure, simul-
taneously tragic and comic, both pathetic and poised. The first time we see
her, she has just returned from the docks after being attacked by the coca-
loonies, who do not appreciate the competition and have gouged out one
of her eyes and ripped out her hair. She emerges wearing a curious costume
which would not be out of place at the Moulin Rouge in the time of Toulouse-
Lautrec. One eye is covered by a large blood-stained bandage. Her hair is an
aureole of bright orange curls, very fuzzy. She sits in a pool of her own blood
and opens a big scrapbook, a remnant of her former glory,67 creating an
image that is an ultimately grotesque juxtaposition of glamour and hor-
ror. The plays characters and its situations are decidedly excessive too
much which is central to the grotesque and carnivalesquetone.
The Frulein is not only a grotesque figure in terms of her abject body,
oozing with blood and transgressing its own boundaries, but also in terms
of her role as a transitional figure, sitting on the precipice between life and
death. Asked to describe the Fruleins condition after her last encounter
with the cocaloonies, Polly responds, Shes alive, still in the land of the
living, but this is barely the case. She is now completely blind, since her
other eye has been gouged out (her vision is now zero-zero) and Molly
doesnt even want to give her time to come out of shock and stop bleed-
ing before demanding that she repair the fence she crashed into while
being violently pursued by the cocaloonies.68 The description of her situ-
ation is reminiscent of the exchange in Samuel Becketts Endgame (1958)
where Hamm asks Clov to check on his father, Nagg, who is both figura-
tively and literally discarded in an ashbin. Hamm asks Clov to go check
and see whether Nagg is dead, and Clov announces that Hes crying.
Hamms response is simply, Then hes living.69 Suffering signifies life.
Blurring the boundaries between life and death, the Fruleins ambivalent
body becomes a grotesque site of contradiction.
he refers to as a dance-mime, and gives his account of the night he lost his job after refusing to
share tips (Memoirs, 8990). See also Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New
York: Crown Publishers, 1995) for Williams association withGert.
67 Ibid.,230. 68 Ibid.,244.
69 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958),62.
In A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Germans essentially serve as dark
comic foils. Their lives are presented as unappealing options, and their
tragedy is primarily found in the dreary, practical, and pedestrian exist-
ence they embrace. The play is set in the West End of St. Louis, and the
protagonist is a romantic and attractive schoolteacher, Dorothea Gallaway,
who is encouraged by her roommate Bodey a frumpy, middle-aged
woman of German descent who is hard of hearing to marry Bodeys
awkward, unromantic, but sincere and practical twin brother Buddy after
Dorotheas dream of marrying the man she loves is shattered. Dorotheas
neighbor, Sophie Gluck, another woman of German descent, lives a life of
loneliness on the brink of madness, and represents an equally unappeal-
ing option for Dorothea. Left alone after the recent death of her mother,
Sophie is afraid to go back into her own apartment, believing it to be
spooked.70 She therefore intrudes constantly on Bodey and Dorothea,
sobbing and rolling her eyes like a religieuse in a state of sorrowful vision71
and babbling alternately in English and German.
Tragicomic figures such as Sophie are balanced by more blatantly child-
ish humor, which abounds in adolescent sexual puns and scatological ref-
erences in relation to Germans in this play. For example, Bodeys account
of shopping for chickens at the butchers Mr. Butts speaks for itself:
Mr. Butts always lets me feel his meat. The feel of a piece of meat is the best
way to test it, but theres very few modern butchers will allow you to feel it.
Its the German in me. I got to feel the meat to know its good. A piece of
meat can look good over the counter but to know for sure I always want to
feel it. Mr. Butts, being German, he understands that, always says to me,
Feel it, go on, feel it.72
Later, Sophies attack of diarrhea, which Williams insists must be handled
carefully to avoid excessive scatology but keep the humor, is both comic and
sad. While Dorotheas colleague Helena, a stylishly dressed woman with
the eyes of a predatory bird has no sympathy for Sophie and simply wants
to avoid such scenes in the future, Bodey is more nurturing and appeals
to Dorothea for support, claiming that Dottys a girl that understands
human afflictions,73 a diluted version of Hannahs acceptance of all things
human in The Night of the Iguana.
Yet Dorothea is not as down to earth as Bodey imagines, and is clearly
not interested in a life of drab domesticity with Bodeys brother Buddy:
70 Tennessee Williams, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VIII
(New Directions: New York, 1992),162.
71 Ibid.,154. 72 Ibid.,122. 73 Ibid., 163, 136, 164,165.
Youve been deliberately planning and plotting to marry me off to your twin
brother so that my life would be just one long Creve Coeur picnic, inter-
spersed with knockwurst, sauerkraut hot potato salad dinners. Would
I be asked to prepare these dinners? Even in summer? I know what you
Germans regard as the limits, the boundaries of a womans life Kirche,
Kuche, und Kinder while being asphyxiated gradually by cheap cigars.74
By the end of the play, however, Dorothea is desperate to find a life part-
ner or her life will have no meaning,75 and so she goes off to meet Bodey
and Buddy for a picnic at Creve Coeur (heartbreak) Park in order to
consider a union with the twin brother.
In Kirche, Kche, Kinder, Williams takes this German ideal of church,
kitchen, children and stands it on its head in one of his most outrageous,
irreverent plays. The history of the plays title is worth mentioning in rela-
tion to its depiction of a world turned inside out.76 The title of an earlier
version of the play is Kitche, Kutchen, und Kinder, which Williams later
revised to Kitche, Kutche, Kinder. He finally settled on Kirche, Kutchen,
und Kinder for the plays only production at the Jean Cocteau Repertory
Theatre during its 19791980 season, directed by Eve Adamson. Kitche,
presumably an invented word that refers to kitchen, was eventually
replaced with Kirche, the German word for church, and Kutchen, the
German word for cook, was restored in lieu of the earlier Kutche, a mis-
spelling of Kche, the German word for kitchen. Williams is consistent
with Kinder, the German word for children. Of the three variations on
the title, this last one, Kirche, Kutchen, und Kinder, is closest to the old
German expression that designates the proper role of women: Kinder,
Kche, Kirche children, kitchen, church functionally equivalent
to barefoot and pregnant. Not fluent in German, Williams probably
confused kitchen (Kche) with cook (Kutchen) in wanting to refer-
ence the original expression but initially wasnt sure whether an and was
included. In the definitive version I edited for the volume of late Williams
plays published by New Directions, The Traveling Companion (2008), I
corrected his German spelling, adding the umlaut mark, and removed the
und to conform more closely to the German saying. Williams rework-
ing of the title and the reversal of the word order (from Kinder, Kche,
Kirche to Kirche, Kche, Kinder) corresponds to the plays scenes: we
are first introduced to the action in the Kirche, then the play moves to
the Kche, and finally the Kinder appear. Symbolically, the reversal of the
74 Ibid.,133. 75 Ibid.
expression reading it backward is highly relevant for this particular
play, as Kirche, Kche, Kinder is a comic reversal, turning everything upside
down. Like Camino Real (1953) which the Gypsy in the play insists is
a funny paper read backward!77 Kirche, Kche, Kinder is, in Dorffs
estimation, a theatricalist cartoon78 complete with invisible canaries that
sing as the Wife turns slowly and dizzily about after getting hit over the
head with the Ministers umbrella.79
The plays title is also significant in terms of what can be seen as its
camp reversal. Charles Ludlam, who founded the Ridiculous Theatrical
Company in 1967, describes camp as a sensibility a way of looking at
77 Tennessee Williams, Camino Real (New York: New Directions, 1953), 114. Camino Real, another
Williams play with a carnivalesque sensibility, contains several references to the grotesque. For
example, when Marguerite is trying to escape from the Camino Real, she is persecuted by grotesque
mummers who act as demon custom inspectors and immigration authorities (85). Later on, Williams
describes the Carnival, or Fiesta, as as sort of serio-comic, grotesque-lyric Rites of Fertility with roots in
various pagan cultures, and has Kilroy emerge in grotesque disguise (103).
The Rose Tattoo (1950) obviously embraces the carnivalesque as well, complete with an inter-
ior that is as colorful as a booth in a carnival (in Tennessee Williams: Three by Tennessee (New York:
Signet Classics, 1976), 139), a grotesque little procession featuring a goat and the cackling old
Strega (152) with a mop of wild grey hair (151), a clownish salesman (201), and two female
clowns of middle years and juvenile temperament (167). The plays central reference to clowns comes
in the contradictory figure of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (eat-a-horse), who has the beautiful body of
Serafinas dead husband and the head of a clown (205).
In a 1953 letter to Brooks Atkinson, Williams wrote that In writing fantasy it is terribly hard
to know when you have violated the boundaries of audience acceptance A lot of the grotesque
comedy in the work, and I think that is a dominant element, even though all of it had a serious
import back of it, is traceable to the spirit of the American comic-strip and the animated cartoons,
where the most outrageous absurdities give the greatest delight (To Justin Brooks Atkinson, 3
April 1953, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. II: 19451957, ed. Albert J. Devlin and
Nancy M. Tischler (New York: New Directions, 2004), 469).
In 2012, Davis Robinsons Beau Jest Moving Theatre produced an earlier one-act version of Camino
Real, titled Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, which Williams wrote in the 1940s; it was first staged by
Elia Kazan in a workshop in 1949 at the Actors Studio, and wasnt seen again until it was produced
as a black-and-white film for television in 1966, starring Martin Sheen as Kilroy and Lotte Lenya
as the Gypsy. Robinsons production premiered at the Charlestown Working Theatre (Charlestown,
Massachusetts) in May 2012 and was presented at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in
September 2012. Like his production of The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, Robinsons
Ten Blocks was successful in carefully staging the grotesque qualities of the play and was able to cap-
ture Williams concept of a plastic theatre (Production notes in Williams, Menagerie, 131).
For a discussion of Camino Real in relation to American postmodern plastic theatre, see Annette J.
Saddik, Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), where I explore
the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its social, political, and theoretical
dimensions, focusing on the postmodern performance of American identity on the stage since World
War II. The original working title of this book was Performing Postmodernism: The Struggle for Cultural
Identity on the American Stage, but in keeping with the publishers guidelines for its Critical Guides to
Literature series the title had to be altered to fit the model for the other guides in the series.
78 Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,13.
79 Tennessee Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed.
Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),114.
things, never whats looked at.80 He sees in camp a kind of excess, or
overdoing, in order to make a point, and also recalls Prousts discussion
of camp as an outsiders view of things other people take for granted, a
reverse image incorporating a sly sense of humor because of its inversions
that speak to a particular, usually marginalized, social group.81 Ludlams
Theatre of the Ridiculous resists conventional, formalized notions of art,
preferring instead to allude to icons of popular culture and current events
alongside classical literary texts. These plays combine serious social cri-
tique with a highly self-conscious and playful style.
Susan Sontag, in her 1964Notes on Camp, writes that the essence of
Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration and that
it is a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the
frivolous. Camp, Sontag claims, is art that proposes itself seriously, but
cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.82 Since The
hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance, reactions such as Its too
much, Its too fantastic, Its not to be believed, are standard phrases of
Camp enthusiasm.83 Like the carnivalesque, camp turns the world inside
out, turns values upside down84 and revels in this reversal, erasing the
distinction between high and low art and indulging in an ironic sens-
ibility typical of postmodern aesthetics that is, making a statement and
simultaneously mocking and denying it as the performer/author winks
at the audience members as coconspirators in some kind of culturaljoke.
Kirche, Kche, Kinder epitomizes a subversion of authority and the dis-
missal of good taste, as its pseudo-Germanic characters mock the institu-
tions society tends to hold in high regard: religion, family, education, and
marriage. Even the handicapped are not exempt, as the Man appears in a
wheelchair, which turns out to be a sham since he is able to spring up
and perform cartwheels to demonstrate an excellent state of health, then
[jump] back into the wheelchair.85 Sokel describes the content of German
Expressionist drama as frequently the opposite of Christian: glorification
of murder, blasphemy, pederasty, and the vigorous anti-theism (a term
more fitting than atheism in the context of expressionism).86 Like Bakhtins
80 Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles
Ludlam, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 227. Everett
Quinton a member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Ludlams romantic partner
recalls that Williams was often at Ridiculous Theatre performances. In his novel Moise and the
World of Reason (1975), Williams mentions the Theatre of the Ridiculous aswell.
Ibid.,225.
81
82 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 275, 276,284.
83 Ibid.,283. 84 Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre,226.
85 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,117. 86 Sokel, Introduction,11.
notion of carnivalesque resistance, German Expressionism as a dramatic
form was known for its rebell[ion] against propriety and common sense,
against authority and convention in art and life.87 And, while Williams is
still not writing in the German Expressionist style in this particular play,
his use of a German artistic sensibility is once again evident. He also con-
tinues to embrace a sense of the fantastic in Kirche, Kche, Kinder, not only
through the outrageous and unbelievable comic situations but also in the
fluid presentation of dramatic space signified by the dissolution of bound-
aries between the rooms, which are walls only suggested by huge Venetian
blinds in primary colors yellow, red, and blue.88
The first character to appear, the Man, is a retired hustler who is asso-
ciated with the space of the Kirche and presents his opening remarks
as the organist, Miss Rose, plays an arpeggio.89 We then move into the
Kche, a space of exaggeratedly comic and cartoonish slapstick. The Kche
is presided over by the Wife, a woman inclined to slatternly ways of dress
and behavior, who lets in her father, the Lutheran Minister of the island
known as Staten, a tall and very dour-looking man all in black, bearing
a Bible and an umbrella.90 Since throwing his wife off the Staten Island
Ferry, the Minister has taken up with Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger
(also known as Hotsy), a decrepit ninety-nine-year-old woman dressed
like a groupie chick short-cut Levis and a kind of sweat shirt decorated
with cartoon characters and captions,91 who was played by a man in drag,
Harris Berlinksy, in the 1979 production at the Jean Cocteau Repertory
Theatre. The Frulein sexually services the Lutheran Minister behind the
organ, and she is presented throughout as hyper-sexed and also pregnant.
Blasphemy is probably at its height in this play during the scene where the
Minister throws a paper bag over Hotsys head, plops his huge Bible under
[her] derriere and mounts her [as] members of the press burst in.92 Nor is
the family sacrosanct in this topsy-turvy world. When die Kinder finally
appear, the Man inspects his childrens genitalia before sending them off
to prostitute themselves so that he can avoid going back to work.93 The
children have been expelled from school after fifteen years in kindygar-
ten,94 which is conflated with Yale in a mockery of education,95 and the
only hope for them now is to make use of the instinct and intuition that
more than compensate for deficiencies in the department of intellect.96
87 Ibid.,9. 88 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,112.

89 Ibid., 109110. 90 Ibid., 112, 112,113. 91 Ibid.,122.
92 Ibid.,136. 93 Ibid., 126132. 94 Ibid.,130.
95
Ibid., 125127. 96 Ibid.,130.
Of all the characters, Hotsy is probably the most significant in rela-
tion to the grotesque. Her body is contradictory and ambiguous in its dis-
torted sexuality, existing between life and death, a perfect representation
of the senile, pregnant hags central to grotesque realism that Bakhtin
describes.97 Bakhtin recalls the famous Kerch terracotta figurines of preg-
nant old hags who are, moreover, laughing, which he sees as a typical
and very strongly expressed grotesque in its ambivalence:
It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed,
nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a
senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived
but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it
is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque con-
cept of the body.98
In another sense, even the Sons body blurs boundaries that of gender
as his long hair signifies transvestism to the Man, who sees it as a com-
mon symptom of a society in an advanced state of decadence.99 Social
decay, degeneration, and decadence are present throughout Kirche, Kche,
Kinder, as binaries are reversed, twisted, and blurred in a gesture of resist-
ance to superficial truths.
The German characters in Williams plays are inspired by an aesthetic
rooted in the traditions of German Expressionism and Romanticism that
influenced his writing. He fused these styles with related sensibilities the
carnivalesque, the grotesque, camp that all tend to be associated with
rebellion and a resistance to what is visible on the surface. The plays that
Williams was writing later in his career can also be seen as his own per-
sonal rebellion, a response to a hostile critical establishment that swung
from hailing him as Americas Greatest Playwright during the 1940s and
1950s to viciously dismissing both him and his work after 1961. During
the 1960s, especially, the critical reception of Williams work was brutal
and often took the form of personal attack. Reviews focused on Williams
own alleged physical and emotional excesses, dismissing him as drunk,
hyper-sexed, perverse, and generally grotesque, and insisting that he was at
the end of his talent.100 Williams embrace of contradiction and excess in
his work during his late period seems to reflect his own personal ambiva-
lence regarding the accusations leveled against him in the press, which
97 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,25. 98 Ibid., 2526.

99 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,128.
100 For more on Williams late reputation, see Kaplan, Tenn at One Hundred and Saddik, Politics of
Reputation.
sent him into a tailspin of depression and substance abuse, culminating in
a three-month confinement to the psychiatric ward at Barnes Hospital in
St. Louis in 1969. At the same time, however, he always came back swing-
ing, rebelling against a reductive, biased, and often directly homophobic
public perception of him and his work. He wanted public approval and
was devastated by criticism he felt came out of malice or misunderstand-
ing, yet he simultaneously fueled the fire with more and more outrageous
work, insisting on moving forward with his stylistic and thematic revolu-
tion. He acknowledged this ambivalence in his 1975 Memoirs:
The truth is that I dont know whether or not I can ever again receive a per-
suasively favorable critical response to my theatre work in this country.
But I am not embittered nor even greatly disconcerted by this dilemma
in which I find myself. In a way, it does seem that I have almost asked for
it. There is a duality in my attitude toward an audience now. Of course I
want their approval, I want their understanding and their empathy. But
there is much about them that strikes me as obdurately resistant to my
kind of theatre these days. They seem to be conditioned to a kind of theatre
which is quite different from the kind I wish to practice.
Actually my own theatre is also in a state of revolution: I am quite
through with the kind of play that established my early and popular repu-
tation. I am doing a different thing which is altogether my own, not influ-
enced at all by other playwrights at home or abroad or by other schools
of theatre. My thing is what it always was: to express my world and my
experience of it in whatever form seems suitable to the material.101
In Williams plays of this period, the depictions of Germans represent the
contradictions that allow us to get beyond a binary and literal sense of
reality, freeing the artist from the photographic in art102 and moving us a
step closer to the truth of the fantastic.
Williams, Memoirs,x.
101
Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.

102
Ch apter 2
Benevolent anarchy
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty
In my opinion art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province

of art It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized
society apparently must be based. It is a benevolent anarchy: it must
be that and if it is true art, it is. It is benevolent in the sense of con-
structing something which is missing, and what it constructs may be
merely criticism of things as they exist.
Tennessee Williams, Something Wild,19481
In the true theater a play disturbs the senses repose, frees the repressed
unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which moreover can have
its full effect only if it remains virtual), and imposes on the assembled
collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,19382
My violence is all verbal.
In The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud proposes a theatre of cru-
elty that does not involve
the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each others bod-
ies, carving up our personal anatomies but the much more terrible and
necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And
the sky can fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us
that first ofall.4
Like the grotesque world that Kayser discusses, the unstable Artaudian
universe is and is not our own world. The ambiguous way in which
we are affected by it results from our awareness that the familiar and
apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal

2 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958),28.
4 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,79.
42
Williams late plays and the theatre of cruelty 43
forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence.5 While Artuads cryp-
tic description of his theatre of cruelty has been applied to authors such
as Jean Genet and August Strindberg (his later experimental plays, in
particular), Williams plays, most commonly associated with long, poetic
speeches, do not immediately seem to correspond with Artauds vision of
changing the primary role of speech, of reducing its position, of consid-
ering it as something else than a means of conducting human characters
to their external ends.6 Yet, from his earliest beginnings, Williams vision
of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted
theatre of realistic conventions that he describes in his production notes
to The Glass Menagerie echoed Artuads insistence on a theatre that is not
psychological but plastic and physical,7 highlighting the inadequacy
of language to represent the ambiguities and inconsistencies of human
experience.8
It was with his later plays, however, that Williams finally began to
achieve his vision of this Artaudian plastic theatre that expresses a meta-
physical fear beyond language,9 one that exists to explore what cannot be
expressed in words. The eruption of violence in Williams work is often
a manifestation of the fear and frustration of being trapped in language,
and so the physicality of the theatre creates a space for emancipation, one
where we can begin to explore the chaos signified by that violence. It is
precisely this chaos beyond rational constructs the excess of the primal
scream with which Artauds theatre of cruelty concerns itself. Artaud is
not directly interested in violence per se but rather in the impulse behind
the violent act, the primitive instincts and desires in their purest states
before they become repressed by culture and emerge in what he sees as
distorted, sublimated forms. Honoring, capturing, and presenting these
impulses in ritualistic spectacle are key to the theatre of cruelty, and there
are clearly elements of this philosophy in several of Williams later one-
acts, such as The Mutilated, The Frosted Glass Coffin, and Lifeboat Drill, for
example. While it would be difficult to say that any one play corresponds
exactly to Artauds vision of a theatre of cruelty, The Gndiges Frulein,
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom
5 Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature,37.

Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,72.
6
Ibid.,71.
7
8 While Williams is not usually associated with Artaud, C. W. E. Bigsby points out in Modern
American Drama: 19451990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) that Mary Caroline
Richards translation of Artaud uses the same term a plastic theatre that Williams used for the
new theatre he desired to create.
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,44.
9
succeed in liberating the spectator from a reliance on plot and its linguis-
tic constructs, creating through sound, gesture, and spectacle the cruelty
of the real that remains linguistically untranslatable.10 One key element
that links Artauds work with Williams later anti-realistic plays is precisely
a revelation of the metaphysical cruelty that lies beyond logical represen-
tation, marginalizing language and instead taking advantage of the phys-
icality of the theatre.
In The Gndiges Frulein, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This
Is the Peaceable Kingdom, Williams moved beyond psychological charac-
terization and conventional moral ideology, beyond theatre as mimetic
representation, often emphasizing the physical presence of the sexualized
body and the illusive energies of the spirit. All these plays share an element
of the grotesque, a sensibility that is consistent with Artauds technique
of exaggeration. Representation in these plays, therefore, becomes sym-
bolic and ritualistic representation without a mimetic referent outside
immediate repetition. The Gndiges Frulein, for example, relies heavily
on the aural, the visual, and the physical, articulating the world of the
outcast through ritualistic spectacle. While the familiar Williams theme of
survival of going forward in the midst of personal and social adversity,
echoed by the famous En Avant! with which he signed his letters is
certainly present in this play, the mode of representation is very different
from that of his earlier works. The characters are presented as two-dimen-
sional rather than as human beings with complex psychological histor-
ies, and the form Gndiges takes is certainly more physical and much less
reverent than the moments of psychological realism we see in plays such
as A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie, functioning more as
metalinguistic expression that laughs sadly at the inevitability of cruelty,
rife with irony and using parody as its backdrop.11 In this sense, Gndiges
comes across more like Williams stylistic departure of the 1950s Camino
Real than any of his earlier, successful work. The 1960s gave Williams
a freedom and a style to explore what had been taboo and unaccepted
10 Ibid.,71.
11 Since the screen devices and other anti-realistic elements were omitted from the original produc-
tion (and most subsequent productions) of The Glass Menagerie, the plays sense of irony has often
failed to come through, and it has therefore typically been been read as psychological, sentimen-
tal realism. In his article The Two Glass Menageries: Reading Edition and Acting Edition (in
Modern Critical Interpretations: Tennessee Williamss The Glass Menagerie, ed. Harold Bloom (New
York: Chelsea House, 1988)), Geoffry Borny reads the play as highly ironic, citing the playful dis-
tance that the titles and images (inspired by Piscator, Brecht, and film) create. See Saddik, Politics
of Reputation for a discussion of how The Glass Menagerie deals simultaneously with realistic and
anti-realistic conventions.
in America during the 1940s and 1950s, and he was able to finally realize
his opinion of art as a kind of anarchy that he had discussed in 1945. In
Chapter1 I discussed grotesque ambiguities in Gndiges, as well as in The
Night of the Iguana, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, and Kirche, Kche,
Kinder, primarily in terms of German Romanticism, the comic grotesque
or grotesque body, and Bakhtins theories of the carnivalesque. In contrast,
here I shall focus more on these ambiguities as they relate to the culture
nature binary associated with Artauds primal spectacle and the complex-
ities of signification through gesture versus language.12
This excess of benevolent anarchy that Williams claimed as the role
of theatre was very much in line with Artauds sense of a virtual revolt
that lay at the core of dramatic representation. For both, artistic rebellion
was effective precisely because it was not reality but a true image laden with
symbolic status that begged to be read as spectacle, not a mere random
event. Representation and, therefore, mimetic repetition have no place in
the theatre of cruelty, as the theatre exists to create something new and
explore a terror beyond rational expression. As Kayser points out, Over
and above the ridiculousness suggested by absurdity and distortion, the
grotesque inspires a fear which grows out of the sudden recognition that
mans position is precarious.13 Jacques Derrida usefully untangles Artauds
explanation of the primitive and prelogical nature of the theatre of cru-
elty as not representation but life itself, in the extent to which life is
unrepresentable. Life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation.14
For Artaud, cruelty is manifested in the theatres disruption of all the
audiences prior conceptions, and it is that disruption that leads to social
awakening, forcing us to experience in the theatre what civilization does
not allow. Theatre then becomes the transformative and the real. Like
Artaud, Williams was never primarily interested in the exploration of psy-
chological problems of individuals, commonly associated with realism,15
nor was he particularly committed to the politically charged emphasis
12 See Chapter1 for a detailed discussion of the comic grotesque in this play. For more on The Gndiges
Frulein, see Una Chaudhuri, Awk!: Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkwardness in
Tennessee Williamss The Gndiges Frulein, and Allean Hale, The Gndiges Frulein: Tennessee
Williamss Clown Show, in The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, ed.
Philip C. Kolin (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
13 Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature,154.
14 Jacques Derrida, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, in Mimesis,
Masochism, and Mime, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997),
42. For a more complex discussion of the theatre of cruelty as nonrepresentative, see this essay.
15 Even in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, probably Williams most realistic play, he clearly states that the
bird [he] hope[s] to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one mans psychological problem.
on social transformation through the motivations of intellect that other
critics of realism, such as Bertolt Brecht, emphasized. Instead, Williams
Artaudian plays are concerned with aspects of theatre connected to the
unconscious mind, favoring intuition, feeling, and experience over reason
and the cataclysmic celebration of these sensory functions through ritual-
istic presentation.
Artauds theories can probably best be seen in practice in the plays of
Genet, who, although he had read little of Artuads work, shared his goals
for a primarily ritualistic theatre that focused on accessing prelogical con-
sciousness and primitive existence through the symbolic, where action is
separated from function. Both writers sought to invert the conventional
moral code of good and evil, and, therefore, what was deemed good in
traditional society (culture, repression, self-control, obedience to the law)
became universally evil and what was considered evil (nature, sexuality,
violence, power) was encouraged as good. While I have found no evidence
that Williams was directly familiar with Artauds work, he was well read
in theatre history and theory, and it is likely that he encountered Artauds
theories during his studies at the New School in New York City during the
1940s. He was certainly familiar with Genets work. In fact, in an essay that
appeared in New York Magazine in 1960, Williams cited Camus, Genet,
Brecht, Anouilh, Ionesco, Durrenmatt, and Albee as his fellow defend-
ants in writing honestly about life.16 His late plays Kirche, Kche, Kinder,
The Pronoun I (c. 1975), and THIS IS (An Entertainment) (unpublished,
1976)contain moments of remarkable similarity to Artauds and Genets
work. The scene in Kirche, Kche, Kinder that I described in Chapter1,
for example, where the Minister throws a paper bag over Hotsys head,
plops his huge Bible under [her] derriere and mounts her [as] members of the
press burst in17 is reminiscent of the same dismissal of good taste in Count
Cencis violent pursuit of his daughter as he seeks to rape her in Artauds
The Cenci (1935), an adaptation of the texts by Shelley and Stendhal. In
THIS IS, the role-playing of the Count and Countess that opens the play
is strikingly similar to that in Genets The Maids (1947), and the invasion
of the hotel by the revolution outside, with the Countess lover, General
Eros, leading the way echoes the ending of Genets The Balcony (1956). A
similar siege of the Queens palace by revolutionaries ends The Pronoun
I, and Queen Mays multiple masked personas (she is a young queen
Rather, he seeks to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering,
evanescent fiercely charged! interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis
(1971:114).
16 Williams, New Selected Essays, 109110. 17 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,136.
masquerading as an old, mad queen, moving from Fair Queen May to
Good Queen May to, finally, Mad Queen May) also recalls the costumed
role-playing of The Balcony.18
Like Nietzsche, both Artaud and Genet want characters to be judged
outside good and evil, and Artauds theatre of cruelty forces the spectator
to confront the harsh facts of a cruel world and his or her own isolation.19
These writers explore the contradictions and hypocrisies of bourgeois
society and often champion the primitive impulses of the socially mar-
ginalized. Williams well-known focus on the world of outcasts or social
outlaws, beginning as early as his 1937 play titled Fugitive Kind (not to be
confused with the film version of Orpheus Descending, titled The Fugitive
Kind), was typically expressed in a much more romanticized manner in
the pre-1961 work than one would normally associate with Artaud or
Genet. While he often valorized the overtly sexual outcast as charismatic
and spiritually alive, there is clearly a split in his sympathies, stemming
from what he has often claimed to be the combination of Puritan and
Cavalier strains in [his] blood.20 The paragons of an animalistic desire in
his earlier plays Val Xavier, Stanley Kowalski, Chance Wayne, Sebastian
Venable, for example are morally problematized and are often pun-
ished for their transgressions. In the later plays I mention above, however,
this moral split virtually disappeared as Williams committed to a more
starkly anti-realistic, physical, and morally inverted theatre characteristic
of Artaud and Genet.
The Gndiges Frulein overtly resists realistic coherency from the begin-
ning, yet, although the title of the double bill that included both Gndiges
and The Mutilated (Slapstick Tragedy) indicates a strong reliance on the
physical, slapstick is hardly a sufficient description of the action. This is
a play that is meant to be seen. It opens with Polly, the Society Editor of
the Cocaloony Gazette, introducing the scene to the audience among the
swooshing of the cocaloony birds above. We then encounter Molly, the
caretaker of a boarding-house for drifters, mopping up blood. Hungry
18 Moreover, Michael Paller points out in his book Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams,
Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 211,that
THIS IS seems to have been inspired by Genets Splendids. Splendids was one of Genets earliest
plays, apparently written while he was in prison. The manuscript was rediscovered only in 1993 and
produced in London in 1995, so it is unclear whether Williams would have known it, but the simi-
larities are there. John Bak also sees similarities between the work of Jean Cocteau and The Pronoun
I, which I discuss in my exploration of the play in Chapter4.
19 The relationship of Artaud and Genet to the Nietzschean reversal of cultural values is articulated in
more detail in Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre 18921992 (London: Routledge, 1993).
for publicity, she offers Polly material for an intense story of human inter-
est and proceeds to tell the tale of her most tragic boarder, the Gndiges
Frulein. We find out that the Frulein once performed before European
royalty as part of a famous artistic trio, the other two being a trained seal
and the trained seals trainer, a beautiful Viennese Dandy who was the
object of the Fruleins unrequited affections. One day, in order to gain
his attention, the Frulein suddenly leaped into the air and intercepted
the fish that was thrown to the seal by catching it in her own jaws. This
absurd novelty was popular for some time, until one day the seal rebelled
and attacked her in defense of its territory. Molly tells us that, after this
failed career in show business, the Gndiges Frulein just drifted, until
she finally wound up lodging in Mollys big dormitory.21 As I recounted
in Chapter1, when it became clear that the Frulein was not earning her
keep, the business-minded Molly, aware of the Fruleins acrobatic past,
sent her off to the fish-docks to compete with the cocaloony birds for
fish, just as she had competed with the seal for attention. The cocaloo-
nies, however, like the seal, did not appreciate the competition and would
increasingly terrorize the Frulein, chasing her from the docks. By the end
of the play, the cocaloonies have gauged out both her eyes and ripped
out most of her hair, and her skirt and legs are streaked with blood, but
still she takes her fish bucket and runs to the docks to compete for fish as
the scene closes. This is the degraded condition to which the once great
Frulein has been reduced, but her survival in the face of lifes cruelties
makes her an honorable woman for Williams. After all, high station in
life, Williams tells us, is earned by the gallantry with which appalling
experiences are survived with grace.22
Language as a means of direct expression is not at all primary in
Gndiges, and even the long speeches are impressionistic rather than nar-
ratively coherent, interrupted by lapses of lost concentration with Molly
and Polly star[ing] blankly for a couple of moments.23 Words are not
important in terms of rational signification, so it becomes easy, even inev-
itable, for Molly and Polly to forget what they were saying in the mid-
dle of a sentence. Narrative is also frequently interrupted by gesture, as
Pollys long opening speech is punctuated with loud swooshes of the
cocaloony birds, countered by her cries of OOPS! amid bits of gos-
sip. Throughout the speech, the term southernmost is used more as a

rhythmic mantra than a crucial signifier, even though it does locate the
action in the Florida Keys, particularly Key West (see Chapter1). The spe-
cific setting (Cocaloony Key), however, is the fantastic arena where birds
called cocaloonies dominate and dictate the cruelty of a survival of the
fittest social order, where human and beast are on equal terms and the
metaphysical cruelties imposed on us, both by others and by the ways
of the world, are highlighted. The pathetic pretenses of a civilized world,
such as gossip columns, social position, or Pollys proclamation that a
lady never steps out of her house, unless her house is on fire, without a pair
of gloves on become meaningless.24 When Polly suggests that she could
interview the Gndiges Frulein and ask her opinions, Mollys reply is
that Shes long past having opinions.25 Since opinion relies on cultural
context and social exchange, the primary physical predatory world that
the Gndiges Frulein now occupies entertains no such illusions.
Although Linda Dorff sees the cocaloony birds as unlike the preda-
tory black birds of Suddenly Last Summer, having degenerated to a two-
dimensional cartoon image of natural life grotesquely and comically
disfigured by the presence of civilization and its everpresent garbage,26
the picture of the cruel cycle of the black birds devouring the sea turtles in
the Encantadas still comes to mind,27 even as Williams turned from sen-
timental horror to liberating mockery. The fact that he moved from using
the birds as a metaphor for the offstage, never-seen devouring of Sebastian
to employing them in a more literal, onstage mutilation of the outrageous
Frulein makes the image in Gndiges much more cartoonish; unlike the
characteristic response to violence in cartoons, however, the audience does
not typically laugh freely as the Fruleins eyes are ripped out of their sock-
ets and her hair is torn out. In keeping with theories of the grotesque, this
laughter is more ambivalent. Whenever I have seen the play, this image
has been undeniably sad and tragic, even as (or maybe because) Molly and
Polly dismiss the Fruleins condition somewhat comically. We can laugh
all we want, but this is still a world where Artaudian nature and culture
clash and where the cruel superiority of nature unquestionably wins out.28
24 Ibid., 250,219. 25 Ibid.,229.

26 Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons, 1718.
27 Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. III (New
York: New Directions, 1971), 356357.
28 I have only seen two productions of this play: Arnold Barkus production at the off-Broadway Ohio
Theatre in New York City in 1999 (see my essay The Inexpressible Regret of All Her Regrets, in
Kolin, The Undiscovered Country) and Michael Pages production at the Provincetown Tennessee
For Artaud, culture is synonymous with repression and artificiality,
and imposed unhealthy boundaries that have never been coincident with
life, which in fact has [sic] been devised to tyrannize over life. He con-
siders it right that from time to time cataclysms occur which compel us
to return to nature, i.e., to rediscover life.29 Nature is liberating, primi-
tive, and perhaps cruel but also inevitable and healthy. It is the repression
of our natural impulses (in the most basic, primitive, instinctual sense)
through culture and not giving the dark forces any respect nor acknow-
ledgment through even the ritual of theatre that Artaud believes is at the
root of a sick and destructive culture. In 1933, as the winds of World War
II were stirring, Artaud prophetically articulated the real violence that
he felt must result from cultures repression and denial of our inevitable
natures and its refusal to pay homage to these forces through the celebra-
tion of ritualistic violence:
It is a matter of knowing whether now, in Paris, before the cataclysms which
are at our door descend upon us, sufficient means of production, financial
or otherwise, can be found to permit such a theater to be brought to life
it is bound to in any case, because it is the future. Or whether a little real
blood will be needed, right away, in order to manifest this cruelty.
He called for a theatre whose object is not to resolve social or psycho-
logical conflicts, to serve as battlefield for moral passions, but to express
objectively certain secret truths, to bring into the light of day by means of
active gestures certain aspects of truth that have been buried under forms
in their encounters with Becoming.30 The secret truths of human domi-
nation, cruelty, and survival are brought to light absurdly, yet poignantly,
in The Gndiges Frulein without them ever being directly articulated.
The clash of nature and culture plays itself out everywhere in this
play in the natural world of the cocaloonies versus the society with
which Molly and Polly are so concerned, for example; or the seal (albeit
a trained seal), which represents nature in contrast to the high society
of the Viennese Dandy and the Frulein is always caught in between,
trying to retain her social dignity while her physical senses deteriorate
and she is reduced to competing in nature for basic survival. She can
no longer see both her eyes having been gouged out and she reads
clips of her scrapbook from memory.31 Her hearing is going as well, as
Williams Theater Festival in 2007. Both shows, done in very different theatrical spaces, did an
excellent job of honoring the grotesque in their ownways.
29 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 7,10.
30 Ibid., 88,70. 31 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,246.
Molly and Polly must use a megaphone to address her, and her vocabu-
lary is essentially limited to reciting from memory on command.32 The
Fruleins use of language reading it, hearing it, speaking it has broken
down and is replaced primarily by gesture and onomatopoeia. She can
still sing, but even her singing is interrupted by those moments of lost
concentration.33
In The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance,
Elin Diamond writes that Artaud sought an immediate and physical lan-
guage (Artauds words)that
would penetrate its spectators, act upon [them] like a spiritual therapeu-
tics. Artaudian cruelty is a theater of total spectacle intended to destroy
barriers between analytic theater and plastic world, mind and body a
theater composed of and addressed to the entire organism For Artaud,
the bubonic plagues of Europe provided the best metaphors for physical,
psychical and cultural transgressions.34
Artaud felt that the theater is a formidable call to the forces that impel
the mind by example to the source of its conflicts andthat
if the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious,
but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exte-
riorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse
possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are local-
ized We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly identi-
fied with sexual freedom, which is also dark, although we do not know
precisely why.35
Sexuality is represented in The Gndiges Frulein primarily through the
erotic fantasy of Indian Joe, who is emblematic of the culture of mimetic
representation described as blond and dressed like a Hollywood
Indian,36 yet with a dancers sense of presence and motion onstage.37
The cruel competition over access to Indian Joes sexuality is one example
of the struggle for domination in the natural world in this play. Not only
is there competition between Polly and the Gndiges Frulein (who con-
fuses Indian Joe with the memory of her love, Toivo, the Viennese Dandy,
who, similarly, did not pay her any attention) for the attentions of Indian
Joe but also his sexuality is linked to a macho sense of domination and
32 Ibid., 229,247. 33 Ibid.,233.

34 Elin Diamond, The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance, in Performativity
and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge,
1995),165.
36 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,239. 37 Ibid.,218.
competition with both the Frulein and the Giant Cocaloony, coupled
with a breakdown of rational language in a vocabulary limited essentially
to Ugh and Pow. Indian Joe squares off several times with the Giant
Cocaloony, in a manner described in the text as a standoff in panto-
mime, leading to the Cocaloonys eventual retreat. The scene involves
Indian Joe and the Cocaloony menac[ing] each other, as Indian Joe
wav[es] his tomahawk over his head with steady, pendulum motions and the
Cocaloony bird pok[es] its gruesome head backward and forward in spastic
rhythm.38 Later, when the Giant Cocaloony appears once again screeching
AWK. AWK, Joe merely has to utter Ugh and shake his tomahawk at
the window to ensure victory. In Postmodernist Culture, Steven Connor
writesthat
In the influential work of Antonin Artaud the theatre is seen as a colo-
nized or dispossessed cultural form, dominated as it is by written language.
Artaud argues that the theatre should abandon its fealty to the authority
of Text and learn to speak its own intrinsically theatrical language of light,
colour, movement, gesture, and space. This is not to say that language
should be banished from the theatre, though Artaud anticipates a return
to popular, primal theatre sensed and experienced directly by the mind,
without languages distortions and the pitfalls in speech and words, but
language is to be made physical too, communicating as pure sound and
sensation rather than through abstract correspondence.39
At the close of scene ii, Joe runs out onto the porch drumming his bare
chest and proclaiming the most articulate sentence he utters throughout
the play I feel like a bull! to which Polly can only reply lasciviously
several times MOOOO! MOOOO!40 This primal utterance of animal
sound is what closes the scene. By the end of the play, Molly snatches the
fish that the Frulein has caught and lovingly prepared for Indian Joe,
leaving him shouting at her NO FISH IN SKILLET! as he pushes aside
both Molly and Polly and sits down at the table to eat the fish that Molly
had snatched. Polly is left offering him the wine, as the Gndiges Frulein
responds to the whistle that calls her back to the docks with a desperate,
blinddash.
The guttural utterances beyond rational language communication as
pure sound and sensation rather than through abstract correspondence
the primacy of sexual dominance, and the heartless competition in the last
38 Ibid.,240.
39 Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997), 143144.
scene articulate through action the cruelty of a world in which language
cannot begin to address the natural forces that drive us. The Gndiges
Frulein presents a dialogue that is constantly interrupted by gesture and
sound and, therefore, does not (re)present any logically coherent referent,
thereby resisting repetition. Artaud puts forth the notion that the stage
is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its
own concrete language to speak and this concrete physical language
to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it
expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language.41 He calls for an
aspect of pure theatrical language which does without words, a language
of signs, gestures and attitudes having an ideographic value as they exist in
certain unperverted pantomimes, which he describesas
direct Pantomime where gestures instead of representing words or sen-
tences represent ideas, attitudes of mind, aspects of nature, all in an effec-
tive, concrete manner, i.e., by constantly evoking objects or natural details,
like that Oriental language which represents night by a tree on which a bird
that has already closed one eye is beginning to close the other.42
Artauds unperverted pantomime is clearly manifested in Williams
Giant Cocaloony bird, which terrorizes the Frulein along with Molly
and Polly. Similarly, the Fruleins penetrating scream, which Molly
describes as the inexpressible regret of all her regrets43 and Polly calls
the saddest soliloquy on the stage since Hamlets, is expressed regret-
fully through three instances of AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! and is
one of the most powerful and poignant moments I have ever seen on the
stage. Surely this moment articulates Artauds emphasis on the difficulty
of communicating in mere words the feeling of a particular sound or the
degree and quality of a physical pain and a movement toward a more
organic and hieroglyphic language in space, language of sounds, cries,
lights, onomatopoeia.44 Diamond discusses a similar moment in Helene
Weigels performance in the well-known scene in Bertolt Brechts Mother
Courage in which Mother Courage is forced to identify the corpse of her
son. Diamond writes that In Brechts text, Mother Courage refuses,
twice, to identify the corpse. In performance, when the questioners left,
Helene Weigel completed the moment by turning her head with mouth
extended fully and mimed, silently, the cathartic scream her character

42 Ibid., 3940.
44 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 46,90.
could not utter.45 Diamond goes on to quote George Steiner, who wit-
nessed this silent scream at the first Berliner Ensemble production in
1949 and compared it to the screaming horse in Picassos Guernica:
The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description that
I could give of it. But in fact there was no sound. Nothing. The sound
was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through
the whole theatre so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of
wind.46
Although their social and political goals for the theatre were certainly
very different, the written text was not primary for either Artaud or
Brecht, and Artaud repeatedly stated the importance of particular produc-
tions that demonstrate what can be determined only on the stage47 as
in Weigels silence which screamed in a moment beyond descrip-
tion as he called for a theatre beyond representation that displaces the
text, what we now see in terms of Hans-Thies Lehmanns conception of a
postdramatic theatre.48 In Williams later one-act play, The Frosted Glass
Coffin, a similar outcry that defies language occurs at the very end. The
final moment of the play focuses on the physically and mentally deterio-
rated Mr. Kelsey, who has slowly come to realize that his wife is dead, as
he closes his cataract-blinded eyes and opens his jaws like a fish out of water.
After a few moments, a sound comes from his mouth which takes the full
measure of his grief.49
This reliance on gesture is also evident throughout the Fruleins reci-
tations of old songs, attempts at repetition that never fully succeed. She
has fallen from show business and is now trapped into performing failed
and absurd representations of herself. During one of her musical numbers,
she interrupts herself and initiates a non-sequitur gesture of opening and
closing her mouth like a goldfish, which Molly explains as demonstrat-
ing. When Polly asks what, specifically, the Frulein is demonstrating,
45 Diamond, Shudder of Catharsis,162. 46 Inibid.

48 While a discussion of postdramatic theatre in relation to Williams is beyond the scope of this
project, Williams did appear to be moving toward what we now see as the postdramatic in some
of his later plays. While I wouldnt argue that the plays discussed here necessarily fit this category,
compared to Williams earlier work, the later work does begin to rely less on language and the
dramatic text and more on the physical, immediate aspects of theatre. See Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Postdramatic Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) for Lehmanns theory of what he
has termed the postdramatic.
Tennessee Williams, The Frosted Glass Coffin, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New
49
York: New Directions, 1981), 214. For more on The Frosted Glass Coffin, see Philip C. Kolin,
Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin, The Explicator 59:1 (2000), one of the fullest commentaries I
have found on this much-neglectedplay.
Molly replies, Either a goldfish in a goldfish bowl or a society reporter
in a soundproof telephone booth50 representations of both animal and
human trapped by cultural artificiality. This scene strongly echoes modern
and postmodern ideas of alienation, and, among other things, represents
on a physical level Val Xaviers sad realization in Orpheus Descending that
Nobody ever gets to know no body! Were all of us sentenced to solitary
confinement inside our own skins, for life!51 This ability to express alien-
ation in rational language breaks down in The Gndiges Frulein, as the
Frulein is reduced to an absurd gesture of signification that is beyond
rationality and signifies nothing that can be absolutely located or deter-
mined. Similarly, the pantomime scene between Harry and Tom in Susan
Glaspells The Verge (1921), where Harry attempts to communicate to Tom
through the glass door of the greenhouse that he wants him to go fetch
salt for the breakfast eggs, prompts Claire to comment that It was all
so queer. He locked out of his side of the door. You locked in on yours.
Looking right at each other and52 Claires interpretation of the moment
recalls the incommunicability of the human condition, where we are all
trapped, be it inside our own skins, goldfish bowls, telephone booths, or
greenhouses, trying desperately to connect through word or gesture, but
the signifying universe failsus.
Artauds emphasis on gesture over language in the theatre, like Williams
similar emphasis in Gndiges Frulein, does not offer us an escape from
the futility of trying to make connections, but it does powerfully highlight
the illusion of rational language that this connection (communication,
expression) can occur unproblematically. Artaud sees a rupture between
things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their
representations53 at the root of social and metaphysical confusion, and,
like Williams, who aimed to present the cruelties of the human condi-
tion through his slapstick tragedy, seeks a theatre that will address that
rupture orgap.
Although I focus here on the Artaudian aspect of cruelty in this play,
Dorff reads Gndiges, along with Williams later plays THIS IS (An
Entertainment), Kirche, Kche, Kinder, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,
and an unpublished fragment titled The Everlasting Ticket (1981), as

51 Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. III (New York:
52 Susan Glaspell, The Verge, in Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present, ed. Walter Levy
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 233234.
metadrama, appropriating the aesthetics of the cartoon to parody the
state of contemporary theater.54 She argues that the outrageous qualities
of these plays have often led critics to view them as uncontrolled excesses
on Williams part, ignoring the violent critique underneath. As I discussed
in Chapter 1, the Bakhtinian grotesquely comic nature of the play is
undeniably present and is not at all incompatible with a more Artaudian
reading. The operation of the grotesque on the everyday world, trans-
forming it into a terrifying one alien to man, which Dorff cites from
Bakhtin,55 is akin to the goals of Artauds theatre of cruelty, a theatre that
aimed to present life in an exaggerated, unfamiliar form in order to shock
and liberate. The significance of Gndiges lies precisely in its multifaceted
nature, in the contradictory layering of style that marks it as a postmodern
work, and in the ambiguities that characterize it as grotesque. Both the
tragic and the comic aspects of this play stress its anti-mimetic and exag-
gerated foundation, but an Artaudian reading can certainly incorporate
the comic grotesque aspects of the play and yet go further in exploring
the inexpressible tragedy and underlying metaphysical cruelty of a cosmic
pain beyond language, the primal scream that defies rational comprehen-
sion and embraces the prelogical utterances of unadulterated nature.
Similar to The Gndiges Frulein, Williams 1981 one-act, Now the Cats
with Jewelled Claws, an interesting play that critics have not quite known
how to address, becomes much more accessible when viewed through a
nonlinear Artaudian lens of spectacle and inverted moral logic. At the rise
of the curtain, a cinema marquee appears and the attraction offered is titled
Defiance of Decency, setting the stage for an Artaudian debacle. Violence,
wailing, singing, dancing, disjointed language, vulgar sexual gestures and
remarks, chanting, and Brechtian placards come together in a spectacle of
the senses in this play. The first third of scene ii is sung in the style of a
Gregorian chant, and the music, as well as the style of singing, change for
the remainder of the scene. In the first performance in 1935 of The Cenci,
Artauds gruesome drama based on Stendhals and Shelleys fictional adap-
tations of historical events, Artaud himself played Count Cenci, and his
ritual chanting of the text was an attempt to get beyond the rational sig-
nification of language and reach what he saw as the mythic space between
and beyond it. Although this approach did not succeed with the audience,
and led the play to financial failure, it does aid in highlighting the plays
importance as spectacle, as presenting an immediate reality beyond logic
and psychological understanding. Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws takes
Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,13.

54
Ibid.,16.
55
place in a luncheon restaurant, centered first around two women, Madge
and Bea, using the commotion of the after-Christmas sales as, eventu-
ally, a metaphor for social relations.56 Like the language of another late
Williams one-act, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, the language of Now the
Cats with Jewelled Claws is truncated and fragmented, with incomplete
sentences and thoughts that are cut off with a period and then completed
by another character. The following lines from scene i are typical of this
sort of symbiosis in theplay:
BEA [sitting down and placing the rabbit beside her]: Oh, yes, the rabbit was
wrapped, but the wrapping was torn off in a riot of shoppers at Guffles.
The after-Christmas sales have created.
MADGE: An atmosphere of hysteria in the department store.57
Not only are attempts at rational, linear communication broken down in
this example but also thematically these lines set the stage for the atmos-
phere of hysteria and riot that is always just below the surface of
thisplay.
Both the riots of Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws and the looting in
This Is the Peaceable Kingdom are emblematic of Artauds description of the
spectacle of human reaction to the plague, since once the plague is estab-
lished in a city, the regular forms collapse and the dregs of the popula-
tion, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses
and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. For Artuad,
this is the moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate
gratuitousness invoking acts without use or profit.58 The chaotic frenzy of
rioting and looting, evident in the plague scene, is Artauds perfect meta-
phor for theatre. Artaud saw his theatre of cruelty, like the plague, as the
great leveler destroying the veneers of civilization and forcing us to con-
front a more primitive state, undermining the rational discourse of the
audience.
References to unleashed sexuality and the threat of death, violence, fear,
and anarchy are scattered everywhere in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws.
When the Waitress first appears, she is pregnant and has a black eye.
Later, Madge wails, histrionically59 in the style of the Gndiges Fruleins
soliloquy of the pain beyond language, discussed above. In the mid-
dle of scene i, the Manager performs a furious dance, around the ladies
56 Tennessee Williams, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII
(New York: New Directions, 1981),299.
57 Ibid. 58 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,24.
59 Williams, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws,305.
table, Dionysian and vulgar, which he interprets linguistically to mean
that the porno show is directly across the street.60 Madge suggests that
a massacre could occur as a result of the different preferences in televi-
sion channels at the hotel, and the panic to buy, which has been stimu-
lated by recession, has caused the streets to be stampeded with panic
purchasers.61 Perverse sexuality is introduced with the entrances of the
First Young Man and Second Young Man, amid their discussions of love,
death, and sexual/social degeneration, as the First Young Man exclaims:
Did I ever tell you that Im a social alien? Anarchist?62
In this play, as well as (less blatantly) in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom,
Williams combines Brechtian and Artaudian anti-realistic/alienating elem-
ents, as different as the two are ideologically, in an effort to marginalize lan-
guage on several levels. Brechtian placards are used to identify key points
in the performance, first with the title Trivialities63 followed shortly by
Bea and Madges dance, to which the Manager sings64 another Brechtian
trademark to break up realistic illusion, found, of course, in plays such
as The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Good Woman [Person] of Setzuan
(19381943). This particular song emphasizes a chaotic excess of sensual
frenzy, and the banalities65 of life are discussed shortly afterward. Once
again, in true Brechtian fashion, lines suddenly are sung a cappella, break-
ing up any rational coherency of plot, in a discussion of sexual kink and
hustling.66 The next placard is worn by a hunched man labeled Mr.
Black, an obvious symbol of death, whom several characters deny they
see. More interpretive dance and singing duets carry us into the second
scene, which begins with dialogue sung in the style of Gregorian chant
that changes after a shattering crash is heard out on the street. After the
violence of the car accident and the removal of the body, the chaotic end-
ing is performed, like Artauds plague scene, outside language:
Outside the great window they form a tight circle, milling about in confusion,
shoving each other with their huge purchases their hats are knocked awry and
they begin to exchange kicks and punches. Then there is a sound like the roar
of an ogre in the sky. They disperse, screaming, running. The street is dark and
silent.67
The Waitress then proclaims that she will not be back at work ever again,
since she was attacked on the subway (a likely scenario in New York City
in 1981)and theres no other way for her to get to work, as the taxi fare
Ibid.,312.
60 61
Ibid.,314. 62 Ibid.,317.
63 Ibid.,306. 64
Ibid.,308. 65 Ibid.,309.
66 Ibid.,320. 67
Ibid., 328329.
is too high. The Manager leads a lyric on the subject of spectacle and its
audience (the cats with jewelled claws) full of ineffectual disdain:
And now the cats with jewelledclaws
glide down the wall ofnight
softly to crouch with bated breath
and glare at all below,
their malice on each upturnedface
descending cool as snow.68
There is a social message in this play concerning the civilized city in a
state of anarchy, violence, and chaos and the muted spectatorship of the
privileged who sit and watch the pain of the dispossessed without action
or comment beyond malice.
Ultimately, this play could be seen as containing both Artaudian and
Brechtian elements in terms of its form and content. The refusal to priv-
ilege rational linguistic constructs and the interruption of mimetic illu-
sionism with song, dance, and slogans are devices common to both
theorists, and the emphasis on the chaos of our unleashed nature, typified
by Artauds plague scene, is paired with an (albeit vague) social commen-
tary on violence, fear, and the inaction of those in power. Spectacle inter-
rupts any attempt at rational coherency, and, once again, it is the basest
forms of our natures that are revealed and presented as inevitable in true
Artaudian fashion. What makes this play different from The Gndiges
Frulein, however, is the refusal to celebrate this chaotic nature fully in
an embrace of moral reversal and a dismissal of culture, instead curbing
the chaos with a Brechtian message of social contempt. It could be argued
that the Brechtian moment occurs most strongly in the ambiguity of the
ending, as the Manager leads the Young Man out toward the revolving
door, offering to introduce him to his future, which, although presum-
ably dark and already determined, still remains unknown, undisclosed,
and possibly malleable, the state of his world sliding into the fate of the
world not final, but left for the audience to determine.
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws finally premiered in 2003 at Hartford
Stage in Connecticut, but a more recent 2011 production at La MaMa
E. T. C. in New York (which originated at the Provincetown Tennessee
Williams Festival that same year) highlighted the camp and carnivalesque
tone of the play, bringing out its grotesque humor. Directed by Jonathan
Warman and starring Everett Quinton (a core member of the Ridiculous
68 Ibid.,329.
Figure2 Erin Markey, Regina Bartkoff, Mink Stole, and Everett Quinton in Now the Cats
with Jewelled Claws, directed by Jonathan Warman. La MaMa E. T. C., New York City
(2011). Photo by Jonathan Collins.
Theatrical Company), John Waters film actress Mink Stole (also known
as Nancy Paine Stole; she is considered one of the Dreamlanders, a dis-
tinction given to the cast and crew of regulars that Waters has used in his
films),69 and downtown actress Regina Bartkoff, the production brought
out the psychedelic aspects of late 1970s and early 1980s glam culture.
Warmans choice of actors was in keeping with his playful yet dark vision
for the play, and, while the apocalyptic and Brechtian elements are muted,
the frivolous excess, tinged with an underlying element of sinister greed
and frenzy that Williams was presenting in this black comedy, came across
well in this imaginative production. In a review of the play for Stage and
Cinema, Gary Larcan writes that As the manager of the seedy caf, Everett
Quinton channels his Ridiculous Theatrical Company style (with a bit of
the Emcee from Cabaret). He twists and turns to elicit humor and horror
by squeezing out every bit of grotesqueness he can muster.70
Written the same year as Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, the one-act
This Is the Peaceable Kingdom continued Williams plea for social action
69 Mink Stole also starred in a production of The Mutilated that was presented at the 2013 Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Theater Festival and went on to a successful run in New York City later that
year. I discuss this production in Chapter4.
Gary Larcan, Tennessees Lesser Known Cats, Stage and Cinema (November 1, 2011). www.
70
stageandcinema.com/2011/11/01/jewelled-claws-lamama.
in the midst of chaos, as Man becomes God cultures only hope by
the end of the play. Yet this play is much more pessimistic in its vision of
the role of culture and, while nature is not entirely celebrated over cul-
ture here, it is certainly exhibited as the ugly, primary force that drives
us and reveals itself more fully the closer we get to death. Williams picks
a very specific and realistic location for his setting a nursing home in
one of the drearier sections of Queens during the nursing home strike in
New York City in the spring of 1978 marking its social context from
the beginning. The residents are starting grimly out at us as the curtain
rises, and for the first half-minute no word is spoken during a panto-
mimic performance that should provoke the two tragic elements of pity and
terror.71 While the element of tragedy here is strong, as in The Gndiges
Frulein, there are moments of bizarre humor, which Williams describes
as gallows humor. This is a place where decent existence is ended and
indecent existence begins,72 with the natural impulses drowning out
cultural restraints. In this play, the living conditions of the aged and the
infirm are presented as so tragic that they cross a line into perverse com-
edy; rather than face the uncomfortable degeneration and helplessness
to which we are all potentially susceptible, we laugh at their excesses and
outbursts.
As in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, Hysteria is the condition of
this place, the city, the world!73 and the action of the play is marked by
riots and the explosion of grotesque gestures that point to desire outside
linguistic expression. The residents are starving, and cultural niceties are
mocked in a scene where a gloved matron offers charitable food contribu-
tions. A lengthy history of the Colonial Dames of America is presented,
however, before any food is given out, and the cultural cachet becomes
meaningless in a world where basic needs are not met. The residents riot
wildly, taking food by force. One woman, Lucretia, ends scene i by bang-
ing her head against the wall [with] despairing outcries,74 the frustrated
expression of human pain beyond language presented in this spectacle
of human suffering. Moreover, the self-consciousness of the spectacle
throughout the play is made evident by the journalists and photographers
who chronicle and display all the events on television, the ultimate cul-
tural manipulator of the real. The violence of human nature is repackaged
and re-presented to society in a more palatable, distancedform.
71 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom,333. Ibid., 333,335.

72
73 Ibid.,353. 74 Ibid.,358.
Of all Williams plays discussed here, the physical degeneration, tragi-
comic elements, and loneliness, along with a Strange Voice that period-
ically announces that This is the Peaceable Kingdom and sets the mood,
make this play the most Beckettian in content and form, and certainly
bring it in line with Artauds theories. In the play, Sauls observation that
humans are ultimately defined by desire and lack Nothing but an open
mouth left at the end75 can easily be associated with both Becketts Not I
(1972) and Sebastians ultimate fate in Suddenly Last Summer, recalled here
in the greedy sounds, mouth open made by Bernice. Mrs. Shapiro simi-
larly smacks her mouth repeatedly open and shut for more food, with the
grotesque gesture of her head lolling this way and that.76 As I discussed
in Chapter1, the protruding, open mouth is one of the central elements
in Bakhtins description of the grotesque body, one that blurs boundaries,
denying the classical body and dissolving the controlled divisions between
self and outside world. This intense reliance on the body and on gesture
signifies one of the most notable elements of this play, the undisguised fear
and suspicion of language on several levels. Not only is language unreli-
able and inadequate, often giving way to pantomime, but also a constant
awareness of the danger of language in warnings to be careful what you
say,77 with a rather realistic social context of the fear of antisemitic lan-
guage, runs throughout. Like Suddenly Last Summer, this play deals with
the threat of babbling78 of language gone out of control. Ultimately,
however, the linguistic, social, and religious struggles created by culture
become irrelevant we are all equal in the end, as we fall to the chaotic
powers of nature. The character Ralston, another resident in the nursing
home, names himself God at the end, a declaration that is eventually con-
firmed by Lucretia. Unlike in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, however,
hope seems extinguished, as God the savior becomes just an old man in a
nursin home in a wheelchair.79
What distinguishes Williams later work discussed above from his earl-
ier forms is primarily the anti-realistic marginalization of language and an
emphasis on the physicality of the theatre, while the more specific ideo-
logical elements of the presentation of ritualistic spectacle, a reversal in the
primacy of nature over culture, and a revelation of inevitable metaphysical
cruelty that occur throughout these plays mark them as much more specif-
ically Artaudian in their goals. Therefore, while I would hesitate to argue
that these plays fulfill Artauds philosophical vision the total spectacle
75
Ibid.,350. 76 Ibid., 350,351. 77 Ibid.,342.
78 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, 367. 79 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom,361.
that he articulated (one that would liberate the spectator from mimetic
representation) I would argue that a movement toward this vision is
most effectively present in Williams plays that rely strongly on gesture,
dance, song, color, and lighting. In that sense, informed productions of
The Gndiges Frulein, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This Is the
Peaceable Kingdom are able to powerfully achieve a chaotic liberation from
the rational that Artaud sought, a return to the popular, primal theatre
sensed and experienced directly by the mind, without languages distor-
tions and pitfalls in speech and words.80
80 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 8283.

Ch apter 3
Writing calls for discipline!

Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for
a SummerHotel
Man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected by her

femininity and of then showing himself incapable.
Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity,19181
Writing calls for discipline! Continual!
Scott Fitzgerald in Clothes for a Summer Hotel,19802
Gore [Vidal] had told Oliver Evans, the professor, that The Bird
Thats what he calls me, The Bird had just gotten to be too, too
much, and that you couldnt very well introduce The Bird to any-
body in polite society anymore. I love it. I just loveit.
Tennessee Williams, interview with Don Lee Keith,19703
As Williams approached the 1970s, he was becoming increasingly preoccu-

pied with degeneration and decay, the ultimate inevitabilities of aging and
death. His meditations on the twilight state between living and dying, as
he metaphorically floated in the liminal worlds where past, present, and
future seem to merge, created an ambiguous space where ghosts began to
take center stage in his work. The plays that he was writing during this
period are haunted by memory, desire, regret, and the hope of second
chances. The 1970s was a decade of coming out for Williams, not only
in the sense of his homosexual identity but also as far as openly facing and
exorcizing the concerns of his past. Ghosts appear in Will Mr. Merriwether
Return from Memphis?, A Cavalier for Milady, and The Youthfully Departed
(an unpublished manuscript that, along with A Cavalier for Milady and
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, forms a trilogy titled Three Plays for
1 Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),271.
2 Tennessee Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play (New York: New Directions,
1983),13.
3 Williams, Conversations, 155156.
64
Chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a SummerHotel 65
the Lyric Theatre, which Williams was working on in the mid-1970s).4 In
Steps Must Be Gentle, the ghosts of Hart Crane and his possessive mother
rehash the conflicts they experienced in life. Williams also returned to the
ghosts of his past in plays such as Vieux Carr (1977), Something Cloudy,
Something Clear (1981),5 and A House Not Meant to Stand, where spectral
children haunt the stage.6
In Williams last Broadway play, the ghost play Clothes for a Summer
Hotel, he brings back the ghosts of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who meet
once again at Highland Hospital, the facility in Asheville, North Carolina,
where Zelda died in a fire just after midnight on March 10, 1948. She was
locked in a room on the top floor when flames consumed her, along with
eight other women. Zelda had been at several sanitariums and hospitals
since her first mental breakdown in 1930 and was in and out of Highland
from 1936 until her death, often voluntarily electing to go, an issue that
Williams brings up in the play. Clothes for a Summer Hotel opens with
4 Williams submitted Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre to his publisher, New Directions, in 1980. Will
Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? and A Cavalier for Milady were published in 2008 in The
Traveling Companion and Other Plays.
5 In Something Cloudy, Something Clear, the writer August observes that Life is all its just one time.
It finally seems to all occur at one time (Tennessee Williams, Something Cloudy, Something Clear
(New York: New Directions, 1995), 59). Even more so than The Glass Menagerie, Something Cloudy,
Something Clear (which was finally published by New Directions in 1995)and a related play, The
Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer (1962), which Williams began in 1940 and completed
(aside from a few possible minor revisions) in 1962 see my note in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, where a definitive version of the play was finally published (Williams, The Traveling
Companion and Other Plays, 308) are his most directly autobiographical plays.
The world premiere of The Parade was presented by Shakespeare on the Cape at the First Annual
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival on October 1, 2006, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin
and Eric Powell Holm. Something Cloudy, Something Clear, which premiered in 1981 at the Bouwerie
Lane Theatre by the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York City, directed by Eve Adamson, seam-
lessly shifts between past and present, weaving in autobiographical details that also form the plot
of The Parade, a play about Williams experience of his first great (and tragic) love affair, with a
young Canadian dancer named Kip Kiernan in the summer of 1940. At the Provincetown Tennessee
Williams Theater Festival in September 2011, The Parade, directed by Grant Kretchik, and Something
Cloudy, Something Clear, directed by Cosmin Chivu, were presented together on the beach in
Provincetown, the actual setting of both plays, using some of the same actors in overlapping roles.
This brilliant paring highlighted the autobiographical elements and revealed these pieces, particu-
larly Something Cloudy, Something Clear, as among Williams most beautiful plays; this was one par-
ticular instance where seeing an insightful production was crucial to doing justice to the latework.
For the epigraph to his introduction to the 2008 New Directions edition of A House Not Meant
6
to Stand, Thomas Keith quotes Williams from his draft notes for the play: I am offering you my
Spook Sonata, and probably it would astonish Strindberg as much as it does you and me (Williams,
A House Not Meant to Stand, viii), and in the plays opening stage directions Williams describes the
genre of the play as his kind of Southern Gothic Spook Sonata (3). For further discussion of
ghosts in Williams late plays, see Jessica Knight, When Reality Becomes Too Difficult to Bear:
Tennessee Williamss Artist Ghosts, Valley Voices 10:1 (2010).
Scott, who looks just as he did before he died of a heart attack in 1940,
visiting the asylum and waiting for Zelda to appear. As Ive argued was
common to Williams representational style from his earliest beginnings
to, increasingly, his later plays, in Clothes for a Summer Hotel he eschews
realistic representation and takes extraordinary license with time and
place in order to allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is
truth of character.7
Clothes for a Summer Hotel shifts back and forth in time from Sarah
and Gerald Murphys 1926 party at their villa in the south of France to
Zeldas years in Highland Hospital. The French aviator Edouard Jozan,
with whom Zelda had an affair in 1924, also appears as a character in the
play, as does Ernest Hemingway, whose relationship with Scott and Zelda
is presented in Williams play as an important factor in Fitzgeralds emo-
tional struggles. Fitzgerald had seen some of Hemingways work in 1924,
and Hemingways name begins to appear with greater frequency in 1925
in letters to Fitzgeralds friends at home.8 Hemingway and Fitzgerald first
met in Paris in 1925, and Fitzgerald had recommended Hemingway to
his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Hemingway strongly disapproved of Scotts
marriage to Zelda and held her responsible for Scotts professional and
personal decline. The last time Hemingway and Fitzgerald saw each other
was in 1937, when Fitzgerald was working in Hollywood.
Williams had met Hemingway, but in 1970 he told Don Lee Keith that
Hemingway and I never established a rapport Hemingway seemed shy
to me; we didnt have much to talk about. In a way, it was embarrassing.9
However, asked in 1973 about what writers exerted a special influence on
Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Authors Note. This edition incorporates Williams last
7
changes to the play. For criticism on the play, see Thomas P. Alder, When Ghosts Supplement
Memories: Tennessee Williams Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Southern Literary Journal 19:2
(Spring 1987); Jackson Bryer, Entitled to Write About Her Life: Tennessee Williams and F.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, in Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, ed. Ralph
F. Voss (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); George W. Crandell, I Cant Imagine
Tomorrow: Tennessee Williams and the Representation of Time in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, in
Kolin, The Undiscovered Country; Linda Dorff, Collapsing Resurrection Mythologies: Theatricalist
Discourses of Fire and Ash in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, in Tennessee Williams: A Casebook,
ed. Robert F. Gross (New York: Routledge, 2002); Norma Jenckes, Lets Face the Music and
Dance: Resurgent Romanticism in Tennessee Williamss Camino Real and Clothes for a Summer
Hotel, in Kolin, The Undiscovered Country; and John S. Baks excellent study, Homo americanus:
Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2010).
William Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries (New York: World Publishing
8
Company, 1963), 156157.

Williams, Conversations, 155. See Bak, Homo americanus, for a detailed discussion of the meeting
9
between Williams and Hemingway in Havana.

his work, Williams answered that Hemingway was, without any ques-
tion, the greatest; he had a poets feeling for words, economy. Fitzgeralds
early books I thought were shit I couldnt finish Gatsby but I read
Tender is the Night several times.10 And, in a 1981 interview, he identified
with the dreadful endings of American writers: Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
Hart Crane, Inge oh, the debris! The wreckage! Toward the end of an
American writers life its just dreadful. Hemingways last years were a
nightmare Fitzgeralds end was not much better, although it was less
dramatic.11
Williams never met the Fitzgeralds, but he said in a 1979 interview that
he felt akin to Zelda.12 His own forced commitment to the psychiatric
ward at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for the treatment of drug and alco-
hol dependence in 1969 realized the threat of institutional confinement he
had dreaded throughout his life. Zeldas experiences were also particularly
symbolic for Williams because his sister, Rose, was institutionalized for life
after a prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 left her unable to live independently.
In fact, both Rose and Zelda had first been committed largely because
of their sexual frankness, perceived by their families and their doctors
as excessive and out of control. Scott committed Zelda shortly after she
confessed to a possible homosexual attraction to her ballet teacher, Mme.
Egorova, an obsessive anxiety that Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks
argue she projected onto Scott,13 and she would also be caught masturbat-
ing in the asylum. Rose, diagnosed with dementia praecox, was similarly
noted by her psychiatrists as sexually aggressive and a frequent masturba-
tor. She would torment her puritanical mother with sexually explicit out-
bursts and used to claim that she and the other girls at her college would
abuse themselves with altar candles stolen from the chapel. Both Rose
and Zelda were victims of a psychiatric establishment of the 1930s that
was particularly impatient with women who openly defied social conven-
tion or challenged prescribed sexual boundaries.
In his biography of Williams, The Kindness of Strangers, Donald Spoto
writes that the producer of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Elliot Martin,
claimed that the play was not about the Fitzgeralds, its about a brother
and sister, about Tennessee and his sister, with the image of the asylum
looming over all. And its a play with a certain transferred paranoia for
the situation of Rose to that of Williams himself who was blaming the

11 Ibid.,352. 12 Ibid.,321.
13 Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and
Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002),88.
critics and the media for his own failures.14 Spoto agrees that Clothes
for a Summer Hotel had been a last cry of pain and apology for Rose. He
believes that the tortured and alcoholic Fitzgerald was clearly mod-
eled on Williamss experience15 and notes that Williams also overtly
linked himself to Fitzgerald: At one point I went through a deep depres-
sion and heavy drinking And I, too, have gone through a period of
eclipse in public favor [The Fitzgeralds] embody concerns of my own,
the tortures of the creative artist in a materialist society They were close
to the edge. I understood the schizophrenia and the thwarted ambition.16
Given the personal parallels between Williams and the Fitzgeralds, the
assumption that Clothes for a Summer Hotel is thinly disguised autobiog-
raphy using the story of Scott and Zelda to loosely cover up Williams
own concerns has some merit. Williams never had a problem with the
personal kind of writing, and in 1972 he defended it as inevitable, insist-
ing that a playwright must put his persona into his work in order for it
to ring true.17
Closer analysis, however, reveals that Williams choice to write about
the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway was not simply a convenient device
for engaging in a struggle with his personal demons. While the play
does address the numerous ghosts that haunted Williams, Clothes for
a Summer Hotel is, on another level, concerned with the relationships
between gender, sexuality, writing, and control. Issues of gender ambiguity
and homosexuality famously surrounded both Fitzgerald and Hemingway,
and in their work they both conflate homosexuality with a lack of stable
gender boundaries a condition of androgyny that represents a general-
ized lack of control, or what Angus P. Collins has called moral and sexual
chaos.18 This condition of chaos, a lack of boundaries, is then seen as
negatively affecting the work ethic and discipline of the male writer, who
must struggle all the more to maintain masculinity in the face of his cho-
sen (not characteristically masculine) profession. The fear of both sexual
and professional inadequacy that is attributed to this relationship between
gender instability and creative work is expressed in part through a fear of
the feminine, or what Freud describes as the fear of being infected by
14 In Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1985), 384. While Martin is echoing familiar narratives regarding Williams paranoia,
Williams later critical reception demonstrates that blaming the critics for his failures was not
entirely paranoid.
Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 389,384. 16 Williams in ibid.,384.
15
17 Williams, New Selected Essays, 166,167.

18 Angus P. Collins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homosexuality and the Genesis of Tender Is the Night,
Journal of Modern Literature 13:1 (1986),170.
femininity,19 a well-established notion in psychoanalytic and Greek mis-
ogynist discourse.20
The anxiety surrounding feminine influence is primarily the anxiety of
losing power, of being erased, of becoming invisible. Behind the fear of
homosexuality is the dread of transformation into something else, of ceas-
ing to be men and therefore no longer being capable or disciplined. In
the case of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, this dread extends to a fear of pro-
fessional and even moral failure. This connection between sexuality and
gender ultimately generates a terror of androgyny, of a third sex a crea-
ture that blurs the boundaries between male and female so as to erase the
binary and obliterate any stable sense of identity.
In Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Williams recovers Zeldas voice by con-
juring her ghost as she floats freely throughout the play, defying time
and place and resisting the attempts to silence and contain her excess by
means of institutional confinement, one of Williams own self-professed
worst fears. In giving Zelda a voice and recovering the influence of the
unbounded feminine, Williams celebrates the chaos of androgyny and
defies the fears of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. One of the most prolific
writers of the twentieth century, Williams believed that what Virginia
Woolf (referencing Coleridge) called an androgynous mind21 and Michel
Foucault referred to as a hermaphrodism of the soul22 was actually an
asset to the creative process. When Williams came out on national tele-
vision in an interview with David Frost in 1970, he denied that anyone
could be all man or all woman and told Frost that everybody has some
elements of homosexuality in him, even the most heterosexual of us.23
John Bak calls Clothes for a Summer Hotel Williams encomium to sexual
ambivalence,24 and, in this play, Williams not only defends the women
he identified with Zelda and, by extension, his sister Rose but also
defends androgyny as an asset rather than a liability for the writer, and
allows Fitzgerald and Hemingway to make their peace with the androgyn-
ous sensibilities within themselves.25
19 Freud, The Taboo of Virginity,271.

20 For a thorough discussion of such metaphors in the history of Western discourses of sexuality, see
Donna C. Stanton, ed. Discourses of Sexuality from Artistotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1993).
21 Virginia Woolf, Selected Works of Virginia Woolf (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2005),624.
22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978),43.
23 Williams, Conversations,146. 24 Bak, Homo americanus,166.
25 I want to clarify that the notion of androgynous sensibilities or an androgynous mind is not the
same as homosexual desire or behavior, and I am aware of the heterosexist bias articulated by
critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example (see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of
the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990)) inherent in the idea of androgyny.
In many ways, however, it was not only Zelda but also Scott Fitzgerald
with whom Williams identified. Both Williams and Fitzgerald suffered
from critical disfavor later in their careers and feared a loss of their cre-
ative powers. Fitzgeralds years of disappointment and despair during the
mid-1930s, what he called his dark night of the soul,26 were akin to what
Williams often called his stoned age of the 1960s. Both were plagued by
heavy drinking, real or imagined heart problems, and the guilt of having
a loved one confined to a psychiatric institution. In Clothes for a Summer
Hotel, Williams has Scott present Zelda with a ring that he pleads with her
to take as a symbol of the covenant with the past,27 just as Williams him-
self had given such a ring to Rose. Both writers had worked in Hollywood
and neither was particularly impressed with Hollywood culture. And,
although Fitzgerald (unlike Williams) identified as heterosexual, he con-
tended with doubts surrounding his sexual identity: Zeldas accusations
of sexual impotence (she complained to Scott that he was sexually inad-
equate, called him a fairy, and often questioned his sexual orientation)
as well as Hemingways portrayals of Fitzgerald as effeminate, androgyn-
ous, a girl.
In the work of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, masculinity is stereotypically
equated with stability and control, while the feminine is portrayed as a dis-
ruptive, disorienting, and chaotic force, generating an unstable condition
of androgyny in the male writer that stands in opposition to discipline
and power. Both authors depict in their writing a struggle between work
and personal life, and see homosexuality and androgyny conditions or
influences that could contradict a fixed masculinity as distracting from
creative work, from the necessary discipline that writing demands. For
these two writers, Zelda Fitzgeralds destabilizing influence feminine,
chaotic, mad disrupted the fantasy of masculine control that they imag-
ined was necessary to the life of a professional writer. In this sense, Zelda
could be seen as representing what Kristeva has described as the semiotic
dimension of language outside rationality such as signification rooted
Here I am arguing that what androgyny and homosexuality have in common for Fitzgerald and
Hemingway is a misogynistic fear of feminine influence as undermining the perceived need for
control and stability in order to produce creative work. Williams is, of course, not saying that all
good writers must be homosexuals; his point is more subtle in his estimation that androgynous
sensibilities in a writer assist, rather than hinder, creative work. Moreover, I am not claiming that
Fitzgerald and/or Hemingway were necessarily misogynists or homosexuals these debates will
continue but that the deeply embedded cultural fears of the feminine emerged in their writing,
even as they (Hemingway in particular) freely explored issues of androgyny and polysexuality.
26 In Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries,221.
27 Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel,77.
in poetry or psychosis that disrupts the linear and the rational. Judith
Butler reads the semiotic as expressing that original libidinal multipli-
city within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic lan-
guage in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In
effect, poetic language has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and dis-
place the paternal law that structures the Symbolic, which is the domain
of rational discourse. She argues that the semiotic is a dimension of lan-
guage occasioned by [the] primary maternal body, which serves as a
perpetual source of subversion within the Symbolic.28
As a woman out of control who, by all accounts, did not observe
boundaries very well and who represented chaos and irrationality in light
of her documented schizophrenia,29 Zelda embodied the personal and
professional fears of failure that haunted Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Hemingway famously disliked Zelda mainly for what he saw as her
disruptive influence on Scott, as well as because of her own ambition,
which Hemingway decided was the jealousy of a woman who wanted
to compete with Scott and ruin him. Hemingway strongly disap-
proved of Scotts marriage to Zelda and believed that she was responsible
for his professional and personal decline. In 1934, Hemingway wrote to
Fitzgerald:
Of all people on earth, you need discipline in your work and instead you
marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you
and ruins you. Its not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the
first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with
her and, of course youre a rummy.30
Even though Hemingway acknowledges that the reasons for Fitzgeralds
ruin were not simple, he still largely blames Zelda and suggests that
Fitzgeralds downfall was accelerated by her captivating influence over
him his being in love withher.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel opened in January 1980 at the Eisenhower
Theater in Washington, DC, to decidedly negative reviews that led Williams
28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),
101102.
29 Nancy Milford notes that the doctor who first diagnosed Zelda had later put aside that original
diagnosis, stating that certain symptoms or behaviors are called schizoid and this does not mean
that the person is schizophrenic (Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 399).
Elaine Showalter has also pointed out that, while Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she
did not meet most of the criteria for the illness (Unwell, This Side of Paradise, The Guardian
(October 5, 2002), www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/05/biography.fscottfitzgerald).
30 In Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries, 166167, emphasis added.
to make cuts and rewrite the play. It moved to Chicago in February and
received somewhat better reviews. Claudia Cassidy, who had helped launch
Williams career with her review of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago in 1944,
was positive about the play. It then moved to Broadway, where it opened at
New Yorks Cort Theatre on March 26, 1980 (Williams sixty-ninth birth-
day), and starred Geraldine Page and Kenneth Haigh. Audiences liked it
but, as was typical for Williams from the 1960s onward, the critics did not,
and the show closed three weeks later. Working on cuts and rewrites of
the play was a very intense emotional experience for Williams, and he was
depressed and irritable and had to be coaxed out of his hotel room for
rehearsals and press engagements. Once rehearsals began in New York, the
press was forced to go to his Manhattan Plaza apartment to locate him.31
In 1981 Williams said that Clothes for a Summer Hotel was, of all his plays,
the most difficult play to write because of the documentation that
he had to do. Williams research for the play was intensive, and he spent
several months reading about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.32 Like most of
Williams plays, Clothes went through several significant rewrites, and his
choice to highlight the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway
was one he felt strongly about. He claimedthat
the scene the critics objected to most violently was that between Hemingway
and Fitzgerald. But thats an integral part of the play because each was a
central figure in the life of the other. I thought the confrontation between
them indispensable. Now Ive rewritten the play again [in 1981], and Ive
built up that scene, not so much in length of playing time, but in content,
making it more pointed.33
31 Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers,380.

32 Williams, Conversations, 359. One of the books on which Williams relied for information about
Zelda, in particular, was Nancy Milfords 1970 biography Zelda, the first full-length treatment of
Zeldas life. Williams research in the play, however, is not always correct. In the opening stage direc-
tions to Clothes, he writes that Zelda was burned to indistinguishable ash in the autumn of 1947.
Milford, in line with other sources, clearly documents Zeldas death as March 10, 1948 (Milford,
Zelda, 383384). Williams may have been confused by the paragraph just before Milford discusses
Zeldas death, which explains how Zelda (who was run down and feeling ill) returned to Highland
Hospital on November 2, 1947, and told her mother that she was not afraid to die (382). Peter L.
Hays also references Nancy Milfords biography and, like Williams, incorrectly documents Zeldas
death as occurring in November 1947, probably for the same reason as Williams did (Tennessee
Williams Outs Scott and Ernest, in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in
Western Literature, ed. Paul Franssen and A.J. Hoenselaars (London: Associated University Presses,
1999), 262). He also erroneously calls the hospital Highlands in that same paragraph. Hayes is
correct when he writes that Zelda returned to Highland in early 1946, but at the end of the summer
she traveled to the east coast to visit her newly born grandson and then went to Montgomery to
stay with her mother, going back to Highland in November1947.
Part of making the scene more pointed lay in Williams focus on
the homoerotic anxiety of the relationship between Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. Williams told interviewer Dotson Rader that Hemingway
had a remarkable interest in and understanding of homosexuality, for a
man who wasnt a homosexual. I think both Hemingway and Fitzgerald
had elements of homosexuality in them. I make quite a bit of that in my
rewrite of Clothes for a Summer Hotel.34
In F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homosexuality and the Genesis of Tender Is the
Night, Collins argues that references to homosexuality in Fitzgeralds let-
ters, particularly one to Richard Knight in 1932 where he apologizes for
calling Knight a fairy, as well as in his novel Tender Is the Night (1934),
characterize homosexuality as unequivocally synonymous with moral
irresponsibility because it is Fitzgeralds private emblem of the moral care-
lessness he was then trying to repudiate in himself.35 Collins reads two
homosexual sequences in early drafts of Tender Is the Night as suggesting
tensions within Fitzgerald of a fundamental and immobilizing kind. In
them the homosexual is not just a symbol of moral and sexual chaos, but a
projection of vocational insecurity Thus Fitzgeralds notorious sensitiv-
ity about his masculinity, as well as the acute homosexual doubts attested
to in him by observers such as Morley Callaghan, may well derive not just
from the fact that he was so often the self-confessed woman of his mar-
riage, but from the Achilles heel of his insecure masculinity as it related to
matters of craft: Fitzgerald in these years appears to have suspected that he
himself was the true homosexual in his choice of vocation.36
This notion of moral irresponsibility, moral carelessness, or moral
and sexual chaos echoes the guilt Fitzgerald often felt over his lifestyle of
decadence and excess, typified by his 1925 Paris summer of 1000 parties
and no work.37 Collins concludes that Fitzgerald, then, was both drawn
to and repelled by the homosexual because the homosexual embodied an
ethic of release yet signified a lack of discipline with respect to his craft.38
In Tender Is the Night, the notion of an intrusion or infection of the
disruptive feminine is alluded to in the relationship between Dick and
Nicole, whom Fitzgerald, of course, modeled on himself and Zelda.
When Dick tells Nicole toward the end of the novel that he is trying to
save [himself ], Nicole responds by asking From my contamination?39
Nicoles sense of being contaminating refers primarily, of course, to her
34 Ibid., 347. 35 Collins, F. Scott Fitzgerald,168.

36 Ibid., 170171. 37 In ibid.,169.
38 Collins, F. Scott Fitzgerald,171.
39 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995),253.
mental illness, but it could just as easily relate to her feminine nature,
which, like mental illness, has been represented in psychoanalytic discourse
and Western culture in general as excessively emotional, wild, out of con-
trol, and messy. Margery Hourihan, analyzing the hero paradigm in the
adventure story, cites Kristevas discussion of the perceived liminality of
woman, who is imagined at the boundary between nature and culture, or
wilderness and civilization. Hourihan writes that The heros fear is that
to submit to a woman, to turn away from rationality and self-control in a
moment of sexual surrender, is to risk being permanently overwhelmed by
nature, by chaotic, messy physicality and illogical emotion.40 This fear of
submission to the feminine is similarly articulated by Freud in his essay
on The Taboo of Virginity (1918). Freud provides an explanation for the
generalized dread of women observed in the customs of certain primi-
tive races:
Perhaps this dread is based on the fact that woman is different from man,
for ever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently
hostile. The man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected by her
femininity and of then showing himself incapable The effect which coi-
tus has of discharging tensions and causing flaccidity may be the prototype
of what the man fears; and realization of the influence which the woman
gains over him through sexual intercourse, the consideration she thereby
forces from him, may justify the extension of this fear.41
Similarly, Robert Stoller points out that the construction of masculinity
often rests on its adverse relationship to (a contagious) femininity: Much
of masculinity, as is well known, consists of struggling not to be seen by
oneself or others as having feminine attributes, physical or psychologic.
One must maintain ones distance from women or be irreparably infected
with femininity.42
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the New Woman, homo-
sexuality was often linked with a femininity that was deemed unnatural
and transgressed its accepted boundaries a type of androgyny. Goldhurst
writesthat
the homosexual episodes in [Hemingways The Sun Also Rises, Dos Passos
The Big Money, Lewis Dodsworth, and Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night] sug-
gest the atmosphere of sexual license, excess, or aberration that characterizes
40 Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Childrens Literature (New York:
Routledge, 1997),188.
41 Freud, The Taboo of Virginity,271.
42 In Christine L. Williams, Gender Differences at Work: Women and Men in Nontraditional Occupations
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991),14.
the conduct of the New Woman. In Hemingways novel, Bretts mannish
clothes and bobbed hair provide an additional clue to her unnatural sexual-
ity and her loss of true femininity.43
According to Goldhurst, the New Woman, or modern woman of the
1920s and early 1930s represented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other
writers of the period, is aggressive, domineering, sexually indulgent
(either promiscuous, adulterous, or in some way aberrant), idle, and ego-
centric44 in other words, both male and female, an androgynous figure.
Hemingways oeuvre is replete with homoerotic suggestion and gender
exploration in stories such as A Simple Enquiry (1927) and The Sea
Change (1933), narratives that Williams references in Clothes for a Summer
Hotel. But the two most significant works where he famously introduced
homosexual themes, blurring gender roles and exploring androgyny in
particular, are his memoir of expatriate life in Paris, A Moveable Feast
(published posthumously in 1964), and his unfinished novel, The Garden
of Eden, edited by Tom Jenks and published in 1986. In A Moveable Feast,
Hemingway writes about himself as sexually stable and is disturbed by
what he sees as Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Steins unstable sexuality. In
The Garden of Eden, on the other hand, Hemingway questions the very
notion of sexual stability and depicts a more androgynous and fluid type
of sexuality. Hemingways mockery of Fitzgeralds feminine allure is noto-
rious, as is his own ambiguity surrounding homosexual themes. His (in)
famous depiction of Fitzgerald in the chapter on Scott Fitzgerald in A
Moveable Feast is usually read as mean-spirited and marks Fitzgerald as
androgynous:
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome
and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly
eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been
the mouth of a beauty The mouth worried you until you knew him and
then it worried you more.45
Williams recalled this description in a 1981 interview: Hemingway said
that Fitzgerald was pretty. He had a mouth that troubled you when you
first met him, and troubled you more later.46 Hemingways homosexual
themes and his accounts of Fitzgeralds androgynous appeal, along with
Zeldas taunting and Fitzgeralds own treatment of gender and sexuality
43 Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries,191.

44 Ibid.,196.
45 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1964),149.
in his work, were essentially responsible for the widespread speculations,
by now ubiquitious, about Fitzgeralds and Hemingways sexuality that
Williams addresses in Clothes for a Summer Hotel.47
In Hemingways Gender Trouble, J. Gerald Kennedy argues for the
ineluctable influence of androgyny upon Hemingways gendered iden-
tity as well as his literary imagination.48 As Kennedy notes, it is less the
notion of homosexuality as a practice than it is the destabilization of fixed
gender boundaries that homosexuality carries with it that Hemingway
takes issue with in A Moveable Feast: homosexuality disturbs Hem, less
because it involves alternate erotic practices than because it subverts his
fundamental assumptions about sex, gender, and desire.49 Yet, in The
Garden of Eden, Hemingway goes on to question these assumptions, blur-
ring gender roles and exploring polysexuality. Kennedy therefore points
out that while the memoir [A Moveable Feast] portrays a writer secure in
his gendered identity and advances a rigorously heterosexual view of rela-
tionships, the novel [The Garden of Eden] conversely explores the unstable
terrain of sexual ambivalence, exposing the multiple forms of desire and
the seemingly arbitrary nature of gender.50 Aside from their common con-
cerns regarding sexual identity, however, the two works also both explore
47 In Tennessee Williams Outs Scott and Ernest, Peter L. Hays claims that Williams imposes on
Fitzgerald and Hemingway his own homosexual identity and concerns with androgyny, outing
them as homosexuals despite not one shred of real evidence to suggest that Hemingway, for one,
had ever had any covert homosexual desires or overt homosexual relations (Jeffrey Meyers in
Hays, Tennessee Williams Outs Scott and Ernest, 259). He concludes that Williams creates
a bond between himself, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and claims that all three are homosexual,
but that only he, Tennessee Williams, is sufficiently self-confident to admit that truth, citing as
evidence Williams comment that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald had elements of homosexual-
ity in them (261). While Hays argument that in Clothes for a Summer Hotel Williams was paying
a compliment to himself, insisting that it was his homosexuality, his ability to respond to the
feelings of both men and women that made him the artist that he was, and conversely, denying
artistry to writers who lacked such androgyny (256) is understandable in light of Williams sup-
port in both the play and interviews for the androgynous impulse in writers, I see Hays reading
as extreme. To say that Hemingway and Fitzgerald had elements of homosexuality in them is not
the same as saying they had acted out any homosexual behaviors or even had any overt homo-
sexual desires. Williams certainly does not imply in Clothes that they had a physical homosexual
relationship, nor that only writers with androgynous or homosexual sensibilities are worthwhile. It
is true that the Fitzgerald and Hemingway of Clothes are not always biographically accurate, and
their concerns with androgyny are somewhat exaggerated for the purposes of hypothetical explor-
ation, but Williams was writing fiction a fantastic ghost play, in fact and not autobiography.
And he was certainly not alone in his conjectures regarding Fitzgeralds and Hemingways sexu-
ality, which, by now, have become commonplace. Williams was much more subtle than Truman
Capote, for example, who called Hemingway the greatest old closet queen to ever come down
the pike (in Thomas M. Inge, ed. Truman Capote: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi, 1987),166).
48 J. Gerald Kennedy, Hemingways Gender Trouble, American Literature 63:2 (1991),200.
49 Ibid.,191. 50 Ibid.
tensions between the activity of writing and the distractions of the writ-
ers personal life and see the life of writing as hard work demanding
enforced loneliness.51
In his carefully argued essay, Kennedy goes on to analyze an unpub-
lished and unfinished fragment from the Hemingway Collection, clearly
drafted for the memoir, to which he assigns a composition date of 1957 or
1958.52 Kennedy argues that the fact that Hemingway discarded this frag-
ment is significant for both A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden in
terms of a focus on androgyny. The married couple in the sketch Hem
and Hadley decide to get identical haircuts and blur the boundaries
of their identities, acknowledging that this would make them bohe-
mian, damned, and savages,53 living outside the boundaries of social
law. At the same time, however, they will become free from social and
sexual constraints, approaching the Edenic happiness suggested by the
title.54 According to Kennedy, Had the sketch been incorporated into A
Moveable Feast, it would have subverted the masculine, heterosexual image
of the young Hemingway, who would have been in no position to mock
the uncertainty of Fitzgerald or the lesbianism of Stein and Toklas.55
Kennedy concludes:
The potentially scandalous manuscript thus betrays both the wish to reg-
ister the allure of androgyny to display that radical fascination with sexual
difference and gendered otherness which infused some of [Hemingways]
best writing and the need to deny that compulsion as an emasculating
perversion. By suppressing the story of Hem and Hadleys androgynous
experiment, Hemingway sought to reinforce the distinction between
A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden, which is to say the difference
between a seemingly controlled, heterosexual sphere of being and an appar-
ently unbounded playground of androgynous desire.56
This unbounded playground of androgynous desire is akin to the
sense of moral and sexual chaos or moral irresponsibility that Collins
attributes to Fitzgeralds depictions of the transgression of gendered and
sexual boundaries, albeit with a somewhat more positive connotation.
While this chaos or excess this playground proves seductive in its
promise of freedom and release, it is this very freedom that is feared as
potentially destructive. Therefore, despite this ambivalence surrounding
instability, for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway androgyny, polysexuality,
51 Ibid., 188189.
52 Ibid., 195. Item 256 in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library.
53 Ibid., 195196. 54 Ibid.,197.
55 Ibid.,199. 56 Ibid.,202.
and a lack of gender or sexual boundaries are ultimately related not only
to a lapse in morality but also to a sense of waywardness and a lack of
discipline or productivity in their writing. Once again, gender or sexual
instability is linked to the emotional, intellectual, and moral instability
that destroys creative work. Androgyny signifies play while masculinity is
the domain of serious work.57
Williams noted the androgynous overtones in the work of Fitzgerald
and Hemingway, and in Clothes for a Summer Hotel he tries to rescue the
androgynous and the playful, offering his own voice as a champion of
androgyny in a writer. He often stated that an androgynous sensibility was
necessary to the writer and that it enriched rather than thwarted creative
gifts. Referring to his own characters in 1973, he told C. Robert Jennings
I can identify completely with Blanche we are both hysterics with
Alma and even with Stanley, though I did have trouble with some of the
butch characters I can understand the tenderness of women and the
lust and libido of the male Thats why I seek out the androgynous, so
I can get both.58 In 1981 Williams told Dotson Rader: I dont think the
sexuality of writers is all that interesting. It has no effect. I can tell you
that. In very few instances does it have any effect on their ability to por-
tray either sex. I am able to write of men as well as women, and I always
project myself through whichever sex Im writing about.59 Williams him-
self, despite periodic problems with alcohol and drug dependency, depres-
sion, and anxiety throughout his life, never had an issue with productivity
or discipline when it came to writing. He reportedly wrote every day of
his life, and he was highly prolific until his death.
Unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Williams was free from the hetero-
sexual male writers anxieties surrounding masculinity, even as, accord-
ing to Tom Buckley, he was boastful of his masculinity.60 Although
Williams work often does portray the potentially destructive effects of
unbounded sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, in his own life he
was quite happy with his sexual orientation and didnt see his sexuality as
57 For a discussion of hetero-masculine identity politics in the work of Hemingway and Williams, see
Bak, Homo americanus.
58 Williams, Conversations, 228229. While Williams gender stereotyping is somewhat problematic,
his particular views of gender identity are not the core issuehere.
59 Ibid., 348. This statement could be seen as Williams response to critics such as Stanley Kauffmann,
who accused Williams and other homosexual dramatists of not being able to write accurately and
honestly about women and heterosexual relationships (see Introduction).
Ibid.,170.
60
a destructive distraction from work.61 Yet Williams did not entirely escape
the influence of conventional Christian attitudes regarding sexuality and
often remarked that he was born in [an] Episcopal rectory and grew up
in the shadow of the Church.62 His maternal grandfather, an Episcopal
clergyman, was actually quite supportive of Williams relationships and
sexual orientation, but Williams did recognize his own ambivalence
regarding prescribed codes of sexuality, morality, and behavior. In contrast
to his mothers side of the family, his paternal ancestry boasted pioneers
of the state of Tennessee (one theory as to how he chose his name), and
his father, by Williams account, was an often violent drinker and a gam-
bler who, unfortunately for his puritanical wife, openly enjoyed sex and
carousing. Williams believed that this was the source of that combination
of Puritan and Cavalier strains in [his] blood which may be accountable
for the conflicting impulses he represented in his characters.63
Ultimately, however, Williams said that he was never particularly
embarrassed by public reports of his homosexuality, adding in a 1979
interviewthat
Ive never been a promiscuous person or a person who has used his sex-
ual tastes in a way that I thought was wanton or an exploitation of other
people. I never felt much conscious guilt about it. I think that society has
imposed upon homosexuals a feeling of guilt that makes them somewhat
neurotic, that makes all of us somewhat neurotic. Right now, I dont think
about it too much because, at 68, it is not longer a paramount issue in ones
daily or nightly life.64
While sources such as Williams own sexually frank Memoirs indicate
that he was engaging in revisionist autobiography when he claimed he
was never a promiscuous person, this contradiction is not necessar-
ily problematic. It is important to keep in mind that Williams recollec-
tions were not only unreliable when he said he wasnt promiscuous but
also unreliable when he said he was. He wrote the Memoirs in part for
money and to spark publicity, and so his sexual pursuits are often exag-
gerated. Moreover, the definition of promiscuity is a fluid one that
depends on historical period, religious influences, and prevailing moral
61 For discussions of sexuality and disruption in Williams work, see, for example, Annette J. Saddik,
The (Un)represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williamss Desire and the Black
Masseur and Suddenly Last Summer, Modern Drama 41:3 (1998) and David Savran, Communists,
Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
Williams, Conversations,55. 63 Williams, New Selected Essays,65.
62
standards. From the point of view of the 1970s, a time of sexual freedom
in the United States, it was easy for Williams to deny that he was promis-
cuous. In fact, by Williams account, his sexual awakening came late (he
was a virgin until he was twenty-eight years old), and often the impression
we have of ourselves is formed early and from our purest intentions. And
so, just as Blanche DuBois insisted that she didnt lie in [her] heart,65
Williams ultimately felt he was sexually conservative, despite some of his
actions that may indicate otherwise. In any case, in 1981 he described his
first experience in the gay world as a happy and playful one, an adven-
ture: I didnt think of it as coming out. I thought of it as a new world, a
world in which I seemed to fit for the first time, and where life was full of
adventure that satisfied the libido. I felt comfortable at last. And that was
a happy time.66
Unlike Williams, the character Scott Fitzgerald sets up a clear distinc-
tion between work and play in Clothes for a Summer Hotel. In Act I, Scott
is struggling to work, exclaiming to Zelda that Writing calls for discip-
line! Continual!67 as she keeps interrupting him, trying to discuss her
art, but the wind blows [her] voice away.68 Desperate to control and
contain her, Scott demands that she stop play acting [and] come here!
According to Scott, he is working, she is playing. The first time we hear
Zeldas voice she is engaging in her own creative work, counting off ballet
steps: Un, deux, pliez, un, deux, pliez. Referring to her dance number,
she asks an intern, How shall I play it?69 Zeldas playing is related to
the practice of ballet her most cherished form of creative expression
after she saw herself being denied a literary career, despite the publica-
tion of Save Me the Waltz in 1932. In Clothes, Gerald Murphy reminds
Scott that he made her promise not to publish Save Me the Waltz till
[Scotts] Tender Is the Night had come out, and Scott is unapologetic.70
Later, Scott scolds Zelda once again, and speaks to her as if she were a
child: Zelda, you are interrupting my work! Mustnt do that, thought it
was agreed you wouldnt! Her response What about my work? is
met with a lack of comprehension: Your ?71 Scott is relentless: I do
have to get on with my work. Did you hear me? I must GET ON WITH
MY WORK!72 This construction of Zeldas artistic activities as play in
65 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I (New
York: New Directions, 1971),147.
68 Ibid.,12. 69 Ibid., 13,5,7.
70 Ibid.,5. 71 Ibid.,33. 72 Ibid.,34.
contrast to Scotts insistence on disciplined work dismisses Zeldas cre-
ativity as childish and unimportant, as opposed to Scotts more serious
professional efforts. She is finally reduced to a voyeur rather than a par-
ticipant in creative work, creep[ing] into his room against orders to
admire [Scott] at work.73
Clothes implies that it was not only Zeldas jealousy of Scott, as he and
Hemingway have claimed historically, but also Scotts jealousy of Zeldas
possibly superior talent that tormented him. In the play, Scott tells Sara
Murphy that Zelda is jealous of his work,74 but Dr.Zeller later tells Scott:
Your wifes novel, Save Me the Waltz Im sure you wont mind my say-
ing that there are passages in it that have a lyrical imagery that moves me,
sometimes, more than your own Mr. Fitzgerald, I think you suspect as
well as I know that Zelda has sometimes struck a fire in her work that Im
sorry to say this to you, but I never quite found anything in yours, even
yours, that was equal toit.75
It was actually Williams who felt this way, stating in a 1979 interview that
Zelda has as much talent as her husband did. Its true she was schizo-
phrenic, but, very often schizophrenic people can write beautifully. And
she did write a beautiful book called Save Me the Waltz There are pas-
sages in it that have a brilliancy that Fitzgerald was unequal to.76 While
it is not my intent here to debate the relative merits of Scotts and Zeldas
writing, Williams portrayal of Scott as defensive and threatened by Zeldas
art lays doubt upon Scotts faith in his own work in the play. He is angry
with Zelda, calling her a pathetic creature and blatantly blaming her
for his decline.77 He tells Dr. Zeller that it was he, along with his pub-
lishers, who edited Zeldas book and tried to make it coherent. Their
next exchange is telling with respect to the value Williams places on the
instability that Zelda symbolized:
DR. ZELLER: Im not depreciating your work; I wouldnt think of depreciating
your work, but I stand by my belief that
SCOTT: That none of my desperately well-ordered understood writing is
equal tothe
DR. ZELLER: More desperately somehow controlled in spite ofthe
SCOTT: Madness.
Scott breaks down when he realizes that the disciplined order he felt
was necessary for great writing is surpassed by the prose of his mad,
73 Ibid.,29. 74 Ibid.,52. 75 Ibid.,55.

incoherent wife, and so he sways and uses the bench for support.78 He
finishes Dr.Zellers sentence, agreeing with what he predicted Dr.Zeller
was about to say rather than questioning it. Scotts revelation that Zeldas
writing was somehow controlled in spite of her madness is too much
for him to bear as his belief in order and discipline breaks down, surpassed
by the chaotic play of Zeldas language.
Zelda knows that she transgresses boundaries she describes herself
as too much for her mother and the conventions of Montgomery,
Alabama79 to explain why she keeps voluntarily returning to Highland,
and Edouard is frightened by her intensity.80 Milford documents that,
while working on Save Me the Waltz, Zelda wrote to Scott: I am proud of
my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written, and she
called her style of writing more ecstatic than Scotts.81 In the play, Scott
tries to contain her ambition to the traditional duties of the home Your
work is the work that all young Southern ladies dream of performing some
day. Living well with a devoted husband and a beautiful child but she
finds that role to be too confining.82 Zeldas excess cannot be contained
in traditional roles, nor in rational language, and Williams is aware of
this. Much of what she communicates is through physical performance
through gestures and her eyes, as her words are mostly blown away by the
wind. When Zelda rises and attempts to communicate, Her eyes make it
apparent she is about to attempt to make a meaningful statement. Williams
adds in the stage directions:
In this scene Zelda must somehow suggest the desperate longing of the insane
to communicate something of their private world to those from whom theyre
secluded. The words are mostly blown away by the wind: but the eyes implor-
ing though proud the gestures trembling though rigid with the urgency of
their huge need must win the audience to her inescapably from this point
through the play: the present words given her are tentative: they may or may not
suffice in themselves: the presentation performance must.83
By putting the word insane in quotation marks, Williams illustrates his
own attitude about the use of the pejorative term and sympathizes with
Zelda and her excesses.
In Act I, Williams suggests that Zelda was correct in her estimation of
Scotts lack of physical passion, as Scott tells her that their carnal long-
ing was never really the important thing between [them].84 She calls
78 Ibid.,55. 79 Ibid.,11. 80 Ibid.,49.
81 Milford, Zelda, 215, emphasis added.
83 Ibid.,26. 84 Ibid.,11.
Scott prettier than she is, and he protests that the adjective pretty
is for girls, or pretty boys of ambiguous gender.85 He interprets Zeldas
comment as a disparagement of his virility. Yet Zelda does not see her
observation as disparaging, and echoes Williams when she defends the
androgynous mind of writers as inspirational: I think that to write
well about women, theres got to be that, a part of that, in the writer.86
Williams developed this theme in Act II, during the scenes between Scott
and Hemingway. Zelda suggests that Scott is magnetized, infatuated with
Ernests somewhat too carefully cultivated aura of the prizefight and the
bullring and the man-to-man attitude acquired from Gertrude Stein. She
sees Hemingways masculinity as essentially false, as too carefully culti-
vated, a performance, in fact, of Steins lesbian sexuality. Zelda reinforces
the masculinefeminine binary associated with homosexuality through her
estimations of Scotts polarity (he is magnetized, attracted by an oppos-
ite) and Steins manliness, and Hemingway retorts that he is acquainted
with the other side of the coin, a comment referring to the polarity of
excessive praise and envy experienced by the writer, but it certainly sug-
gests sexual and gender polarity as well.87
When Scott and Hemingway are alone, Hemingway accuses Scott
of wanting to appropriate [Zeldas] identity, calls him a bitch, and
announces that duality of gender can serve some writers well.88 Scott
acknowledges that We do have multiple selves as well as what you call
dual genders. These exchanges are Williams vision of what was never
overtly admitted between the two writers, and at one point they are on the
verge of a confession that never materializes. Scott tells Hemingway, Lets
admit were but stops short, prompting Hemingway to push him:
What? But Scott retreats, finishing his sentence with Friends.89 When
Scott reminds Hemingway of an incident (described in Hemingways A
Moveable Feast) where Hemingway cared for him with tenderness while
he was ill, Hemingway recalls his memoirs description of Scott, telling
him You had the skin of a girl, mouth of a girl, the soft eyes of a girl,
you you solicited attention. I gave it, yes. I found you touchingly vul-
nerable. But Hemingway, who was not afraid to explore sexual plurality
in his writing, tells Scott that he would rather not examine the reason
why these features were disturbing to him personally.90
George Monteiro has observed that the exchange that follows between
Fitzgerald and Hemingway regarding androgyny and polysexuality all
85 Ibid.,30. Ibid.,31.
86
Ibid.,57.
87
88 Ibid.,64. Ibid.,65.
89 90
Ibid.,66.
kinds of human relations that Hemingway claimed he must observe as a
serious writer91 contains some inaccuracies, as Williams misremem-
bered Hemingways titles and plots. In the play, Scott tries to recall a
Hemingway short story where An Italian officer [asks] a young orderly
waiting on him, a boy with the sort of androgynous appeal that you said I
had, a provocative question. According to Scott, the officer asks the boy
whether he is engaged, and the boy says he is married.92 The story that
Scott refers to is titled A Simple Enquiry and Williams did not quite
recall the plot accurately. The officer in the story asks the orderly whether
he has ever been in love with a woman, not whether he is engaged. The
boy replies that he is in love with a girl, not that he is married. Hemingway
does not correct Scott in the story, but he then mentions another story that
he says is called Sea Change, which concerns a couple, young man and
older young man, on a ship sailing to Europe and at first the younger
man is shocked, or pretends to be shocked, by the older ones attentions
at night. However the sea change occurs and by the end of the voyage, the
protesting one is more than reconciled to his patrons attentions.93 This
story that the character Hemingway says is called Sea Change is actu-
ally an untitled short story from the author Hemingways Death in the
Afternoon (1932) and it takes place in a Paris hotel, not on a ship. The Sea
Change is a different Hemingway story about a woman who leaves a man
for another woman.94 After the discussion of sexual play in Hemingways
stories, the scene ends with Hemingway exclaiming that he has to stop
this game because its gone soft, cant play it any longer! He tells Scott
that he finally had to blast [his] brains out because his strong, hard
work was finished.95
The material surrounding the relationship between Hemingway and
the Fitzgeralds illustrates that both men saw Zelda as an interference, a
destabilizing force inspiring moral and sexual chaos in contrast to the
masculinized discipline strong, hard work necessary to the life of a
professional writer. As they struggled with their own doubts surrounding
creative talent, the question of masculinity, and the limits of control, they
often blamed Zelda for Scotts professional and personal failures, even as
she was discouraged from pursuing an independent creativity. While the
91 Ibid.,67. 92 Ibid.,67. 93 Ibid.,67.

94 Williams makes a similar, although less significant, mistake in a 1981 interview, where he recalls the
plot of A Simple Enquiry. He describes the officer asking the orderly whether he is interested in
girls (which is closer to what happens in the story), but the boys reply that Williams recalls, Oh,
yes, Im engaged to be married (Conversations, 347), is inaccurate.
famous questions of whether Zelda drove Scott to drink or whether Scott
prevented Zelda from achieving professional creative success are ultimately
reductive and unanswerable, in Clothes for a Summer Hotel Williams sets
out to explore the issues surrounding these unanswerable questions. He
rescues Zelda by celebrating the fire and excess of the madwoman the
uncontrollable, the unstable, the chaotic, the playful, the excessive, and all
that would disrupt and disorient the fantasy of disciplined masculinity
as fueling creative expression in the writer, and reimagines Fitzgerald and
Hemingway attempting to work out their own contradictions so that they
may rest in peace.
Ch apter 4
Act naturally
Embracing the monstrous woman in The Milk
Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated,
and The PronounI
to be natural is such a very difficult pose to keepup.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband,18951
Stop talking. Be still. Act naturally.
Celeste in The Mutilated,19662
Mrs. Goforth is a dying monster.
Blackie in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore,19633
Are you still living on blood transfusions, Connie? Thats not good,
it turns you into a vampire.
Mrs. Goforth in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore,19634
While Blanche DuBois may be Williams most (in)famous female char-

acter to be socially ostracized and brutally punished for her perceived
excesses the performance of that fifty per cent illusion that she insists is
part of a womans charms5 and the transgression of riding on that streetcar
named desire Alexandra Del Lago, the unabashedly desiring Princess
Kosmonopolis of Williams 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, triumphs at the
end. While her victory is not unambiguous in this play about time, aging,
and the souls corruption, she does thwart all attempts by the young,
handsome Chance Wayne to blackmail her into promoting his film career,
turning the tables and dismissing him when he is no longer useful, leaving
him to his (literal) castration as she goes off to celebrate the success of her
new film, the greatest come-back in the history of the industry.6 Like
Williams in the later part of his own career, the Princess, a self-defined
monster, will not be stopped. She leads the unapologetic, self-consciously
performative female characters we would see more and more in Williams
1 Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (London: Methuen and Company, 1899),15.

2 Williams, The Mutilated,127.
3 Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams,
Vol. V (New York: New Directions, 1976),29.
4 Ibid.,45. 5 Williams, Streetcar,281.
Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth,118.
6
86
Embracing the monstrouswoman 87
plays beginning in the 1960s, women who embrace and use their excesses
to fight for survival, and win, emphatic that When monster meets mon-
ster, one monster must give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BEME.7
In the program for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams eighth annual
Theater Festival, whose theme was 50% Illusion: Tennessee Williams and
Women, David Kaplan writesthat
The assignment of strength to women, not to mention sexual desire or the
pleasure of the chase, in any of his plays, early or late, brought on the accus-
ation that Williams had created unreal monsters: male desires with female
appendages. If a woman strong in desire or strong in any way is mon-
strous, some strong women in Williams [sic] plays are unashamed to pro-
claim themselves monsters, as do the Princess in Sweet Bird of Youth and Flora
Goforth in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore with her griffin flags.8
In plays such as The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated,
and The Pronoun I, the deconstruction of grotesque or mutilated
female identity in terms of the role of the monster is taken even fur-
ther with regard to gender stereotypes. Not only do these plays blur the
distinctions between natural and culturally constructed conceptions of
woman but they also perform female identity, desire, and desir(ability)
as an ongoing negotiation between lack and excess, swinging between
the two poles, embracing the ambiguous, monstrous woman who often
embodies these poles simultaneously. These women are unstable in the
most celebratory sense, and they maintain their power through leading an
unapologetic life that allows room for the complex coexistence of contra-
dictions, defeating those who seek to exploit their instability in order to
take advantage of them and living passionately in the face of death. After
all, Blanche reminds us, the opposite of death is desire.9
7 Ibid., 43. Similarly, Miss Sylvia Sails in Sunburst (c. 1980), a lady of somewhat advanced years who
is in retirement from a long career as an actress (Tennessee Williams, Sunburst, in The Traveling
Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008), 211), foils the
plot of two scheming young men who try to steal her priceless sunburst diamond. She humorously
resists her captors, who try to manipulate and subdue her, by stalling them and reciting excerpts
from Shakespeares plays. We see this sort of triumph of the aging artist throughout the late work,
and with Williams gay male characters as well. Vieux in The Traveling Companion, for example,
stands up to his handsome young companion, demanding (and achieving) dignity and respect. And,
in Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, the aging Southern belle, Louise, waits on the front
portch for her lover, Mr. Merriwether, who has promised to return for her, and he does return.
8 David Kaplan, 50% Illusion: Tennessee Williams and Women, program for the Provincetown
eighth annual Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (2013), 12. See my Introduction for a discussion
of these sorts of accusations by critics that Williams created female characters who were fantastic-
ally consuming monsters.
Williams, Streetcar,120.
9
In his Authors Notes, Williams describes The Milk Train Doesnt Stop
Here Anymore as an allegory and a sophisticated fairy tale.10 He specifies
that the cast includes a pair of stage assistants that function in a way thats
between the Kabuki Theatre of Japan and the chorus of a Greek Theatre.11
These stage assistants, who explain themselves as a theatrical device of
ancient and oriental origin, begin the play by self-consciously announ-
cing the event that is about to take place, informing the audience that
they will be assisting in the presentation, play, masque, or pageant
of the two final days of Mrs. Goforths existence and raising Flora Sissy
Goforths flag, a golden griffin A mythological monster, half lion, and
half eagle, yet wholly and completely human.12 The play is rife with such
monstrous constructions: wolf-like watchdogs lupos13 that guard Mrs.
Goforths mountain fortress; a sea full of Medusas that sting;14 a Witch
whom Williams describes as a creature out of a sophisticated fairy tale
living on blood transfusions;15 and a cold snapper dish (dentice freddo)
for supper that the Witch refers to as a monster of the deep with a hor-
rid expression on its face.16 Even the sun is an angry old lion.17 While
Mrs. Goforth is described by her secretary, Blackie, as a dying monster
who eats nothing but pills: around the clock,18 her appetites are still very
much alive. Having survived four husbands,19 she remains ravenous in her
desires, declaring that more than all the shots and pills in the pharma-
ceutical kingdom what she needs most is a lover, since the dead are
dead and the living are living!20 Her excess is clear not only in her erotic
desire and life of mad parties that set the record for madness21 but also
in her proclivity for marriage; it seems unclear, however, how many times
she has been married, since she claims that her fourth husband was the
last one22 and that all four husbands are memory now, but a moment
later announces that she has had six.23 Blackie, on the other hand, is in a
liminal state of mourning over her only lover, the husband she lost last
spring, and sees herself as not dead and not living.24 In several respects,
the world of this play, which is set on Mrs. Goforths mountain in Italys
10 Williams, Milk Train,3. 11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.,7. 13 Ibid.,20. 14 Ibid.,44.
15 Ibid., 42,45. 16 Ibid.,45. 17 Ibid.,86.
18 Ibid., 29,30. 19 Ibid.,10. 20 Ibid.,35.
21 Ibid.,36. 22 Ibid.,10.
23 Ibid., 47. This contradiction may, however, have been a copy-editing error in the published reading
version; in the Dramatists Play Service acting version of the play, the line from the reading version,
The only husband Ive had, of the six Ive had (47), was changed to The only husband Ive had,
of the four Ive had(36).
24 Williams, Milk Train,35.
Divina Costiera in summer,25 exists in a sort of twilight, populated by
vampires teetering on the precipice between life and death.
This is a play that deals with the inevitability and acceptance of death,
but, like Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer, who insists that she
DID NOT HAVE A STROKE!,26 Mrs. Goforth appears to be in denial
about aging and her declining physical state, insisting that she do[esnt]
have a chest abscess! yet howling in pain throughout the play a long,
anguished, human cry.27 Despite the fierce life in her, Mrs. Goforth
is dying, and she acknowledges that Its my turn, now, to go forth, and
Ive got no choice but to do it.28 In this play, desire outlives the body,
and Williams epigraph, a quotation from William Butler Yeats Sailing to
Byzantium, sets thetone:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gatherme
Into the artifice of eternity.29
This particular summer, her last, Mrs. Goforth is involved with dictating
her memoirs to her secretary over a loudspeaker at all hours of the day and
night, when she is visited by Chris Flanders, a reasonably young poet of
thirty-five30 who has traded in poetry for the new vocation of construct-
ing mobiles.31 Noticing that Chris is not bad-looking, in a wild sort of
way,32 Mrs. Goforth decides that she needs male company and that he
might be O.K. for a while.33 Chris, however, has different intentions. He
has been christened the Angel of Death, having earned this nickname
through his reputation of coming to call on dying old ladies just a step
or two ahead of the undertaker.34 Having heard that Mrs. Goforth was
dying that summer and may need his assistance crossing over to the other
side,35 Chris has climbed up her mountain, enduring an assault by her
watchdogs, which Mrs. Goforth tries to justify by claiming that he should
have heeded the Beware of Dogs sign a warning that, in actuality,
never existed but that she ordered her security guard to post after the fact
in order to avoid legal repercussions.36
Mrs. Goforth is not a nice person, and describes herself as a bitch, a
swamp-bitch, a devil bitchy, a female devil.37 References to bitches
25 Ibid.,4. 26 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer,391.

27 Williams, Milk Train, 34, 55,8. 28 Ibid., 119,117.
29 Ibid.,1. 30 Ibid., 71,37. 31 Ibid.,27.
32 Ibid.,20. 33 Ibid.,21. 34 Ibid., 4950.
35 Ibid.,117. 36 Ibid.,17. 37 Ibid.,85.
seem to populate her social world, and a visit from Witch of Capri, a
local socialite known as the Marchesa Constance Ridgeway-Condotti, or
Connie, is a comic showdown between a witch and a bitch who must
dress up for each other in order to avoid the havoc that would ensue if
one were to upstage the other.38 Williams describes the Witchs costume
as something that might have been designed for Fata Morgana. Her dress is
gray chiffon, paneled, and on her blue-tinted head she wears a cone-shaped
hat studded with pearls, the peak of it draped with the material of her dress.
Her expressive, claw-like hands are aglitter with gems.39 Mrs. Goforth is
similarly adorned in a fantastic costume, described in the stage direc-
tions as gorgeously bizarre,40 that causes the Witch to halt dramatically,
opening her eyes very wide for a moment, as if confronted by a frightening
apparition.41 She wears a a black Kabuki wig with fantastic ornaments42
and a Kabuki dancers robe, humming weirdly while executing some
Kabuki dance movements, creating an effect that Williams describes as
having a sort of grotesque beauty.43 Williams alludes to Mrs. Goforths
bizarre appearance earlier as well, when he describes her sunbathing cos-
tume as a silk robe covered with the signs of the zodiac, and harlequin sun-
glasses with purple lenses.44 Her presence does indeed emit a theatrical,
over-the-top quality, and we learn that she is a former chorus girl she
hit show-biz at fifteen in a carnival show, and later made star billing in
the Follies.45 In her Japanese kimono and headdress, she may seem to be
presenting a portrayal of demure femininity, but thats not quite the case.
Her costume is too ornate and excessive for that delicate image, and yet
her appearance is not deliberately or overtly ironic either, not exactly a
drag performance. The meeting of these two fantastic creatures centers
on discussions of illness, death, and bitchy gossip the Witch is also in
ailing health, and it is she who brings Mrs. Goforth the uncanny46 news
that Chris is the infamous Angel of Death,47 not the Chris(t) figure his
name implies but a contradiction offering comfort and destruction, sal-
vation and oblivion.48
Having built a shell of bone around her heart, Mrs. Goforth lacks
the kindness that Blackie assumes is natural, just automatic in women.49
Chris, on the other hand, sees misunderstanding as the natural human
condition, telling Mrs. Goforth that they dont understand each other,
38 Ibid., 4142. 39 Ibid.,43. 40 Ibid.,41.

41 Ibid.,43. 42 Ibid.,40. 43 Ibid.,43.
44 Ibid.,32. 45 Ibid., 6768. 46 Ibid.,48.
47 Ibid.,49. 48 Ibid., 5152. 49 Ibid., 117,31.
which is natural.50 In a letter to Elia Kazan, explaining the characters
motivations in A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams insisted that the plays
best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no good or
bad people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated
more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on
in each others hearts.51 While she may indeed be a victim of misunder-
standing, Mrs. Goforth still prioritizes taking care of herself first and fore-
most with a survival of the fittest mentality, claiming that her animal
instinct is a very valuable asset.52 She give[s] away nothing, proudly
asserting that she sell[s] and buy[s] in her life and always wound
up with a profit, one way or another.53 When Blackie announces that it
would be undignified of her to go through Chris personal belongings
while he naps, Mrs. Goforth advises her to take care of your own dignity
and Ill take care of mine and insists that its a perfectly natural, legit-
imate thing to do, to go through the luggage of a trespasser on your place
for possible, weapons, and so forth.54 For Mrs. Goforth, suspicion, pre-
caution, and self-preservation are the natural instincts that will ensure
survival.
Throughout the play, Mrs. Goforth cruelly withholds comfort and
nourishment; despite being old enough to be Chris mother and having
a daughter of her own, she is quite the opposite of the nurturing mother
figure.55 She starves Chris, even going so far as to remove the tray of food
that Blackie had sent to his room,56 and continues to deny him any sus-
tenance throughout the play57 because she herself cant stand the smell
of food now.58 She does, however, want his attention and his company,
seeing him not as a young man in need of comfort and care but as an
object to satisfy her own desires. She is determined to make sure that she
is nobodys fool59 and, like Stanley in Streetcar, wants the world to know
that no one will pull any wool over [her] eyes,60 again believing that the
only way to survive is to grab, fight, or go hungry! Nothing else works.61
Once she makes it clear that she is not to be taken advantage of, Mrs.
Goforth seems to shock Chris with her ferocity62 and directness in her
unsuccessful attempts to seduce him, telling him that frankly she has
50 Ibid.,78. 51 Williams, Selected Letters, Vol. II,95.

52 Williams, Milk Train,36. 53 Ibid.,89. 54 Ibid.,35.
55 Ibid., 103. See Chapter5 for a discussion of a similar sort of cruelty in withholding food and drink
in The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde.
56 Ibid., 52,56. 57 Ibid., 72,74. 58 Ibid.,83.
61 Williams, Milk Train,85. 62 Ibid.,84.
been very lonely this summer and that he is attractive to [her], hav-
ing deliberately set out to be attractive to her, so he shouldnt be a
freeloader.63 As she is dying at the end of the play, he reminds her of
her cruelty You knew I was hungry but it was black coffee or else
and she decides that this is the reason why he wouldnt come into her
bedroom.64 The perpetual and various states of hunger food, erotic
desire, blood create an equivalency in this play that makes consumption
the foundation of human relations. Love and hate become, as Catherine
announces in Suddenly Last Summer, all about use-value: we all use each
other and thats what we think of as love, and not being able to use each
other is whats hate.65 In Suddenly, consumption certainly serves as the
central metaphor, as Sebastian who, like Mrs. Goforth, lives on little
white pills66 consumes the young boys on the beach in Cabeza de
Lobo, and is literally consumed in return.
Mrs. Goforth, however, is not Sebastian, in as far as we can ever gather
Sebastians motives. And, despite their similarities as desiring women, she
is certainly no Blanche, having gone past pretenses.67 She openly resists
the idea that desire and decay (or at least maturity) cannot coexist: theres
this worship of youth in the States, this Whistlers Mother complex, you
know what I mean, this idea that at a certain age a woman ought to
resign herself to being a sweet old thing in a rocker.68 Rather, she is more
like Stanley, who puts his cards on the table69 and wants to make sure
Blanche is aware that some men are took in by this Hollywood glamor
stuff and some men are not and that he belong[s] in the second cat-
egory.70 Being taken in and made to seem a fool is one of Mrs. Goforths
greatest fears she cant stand to be made a Patsy71 and is indignant
when Chris suggests her publishers flattery is a snow job. She admits
that, while a lover might snow [her], a business associate would not
be able to get up that early in the morning to fool her.72 The fact that
she knows she is vulnerable to lovers, however, is telling. Despite the
hard shell of calcium grown around her heart,73 she needs Chris. He
respects and acknowledges the strength of her excess I think if that old
Greek explorer, Pytheas, hadnt beat you to it by centuries, you wouldve
sailed up though the Gates of Hercules to map out the Western world,
and you would have sailed up farther and mapped it out better than he
63 Ibid.,88. 64 Ibid.,110.
65 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer,396.
66 Ibid., 414,415. 67 Williams, Milk Train, 72. 68 Ibid.,83.
69 Williams, Streetcar, 279,281. 70 Ibid.,279.
71 Williams, Milk Train,81. 72 Ibid.,91. 73 Ibid.,14.
did. No storm couldve driven you back or changed your course but
sees her vulnerability and lack as well, telling her that shes still a fool if
she doesnt realize that sooner or later she will need someone or some-
thing to mean God to [her].74
Mrs. Goforths cruelty, however, is her protection, rooted in the war-
ring poles of pride and insecurity, as she cannot bear the possibility of
being seen as a desperate old woman taken advantage of by a beatnik
trespasser, a professional house guest with charm75 out to scam a
meal and a place to stay from an easy target. She has had experience with
charming free-loaders, having been besieged by writers that dont write,
painters that dont paint,76 and does not see any romantic liaison with
Chris emerging out of honest, mutual desire or affection but rather from
a more mercenary mentality, even advising him later to not work on the
young ones or anybody attractive. Theyre not ripe to be taken. And not
the old ones either, theyve been taken too often. Work on the middle-
aged drunks, thats who to work on, Chris.77 She therefore wants to make
sure that Chris knows she is aware of his trick[s] if she does in fact yield
out of loneliness or desire, never giving more than she thinks she canget.
The fear of being tricked also emerges in this play as an anxiety sur-
rounding the stability or authenticity of identity. Chris reveals that he has
lost his sense of reality and proposes that one persons reality can seem
like madness or chaos to another when they are too disturbingly dif-
ferent, causing some to hang labels, tags of false identification on people
that disturb their own sense of reality, like the bells that used to hang
on the necks of lepers!78 This notion of false identification is ech-
oed in Mrs. Goforths complaint that she has been plagued by imposters
lately imposters of celebrities, writers, actors, and so forth the false
Truman Capote, the false Mary McCarthy. Their convincing appearances
caused her to be taken in by them, before learning the truth and cast-
ing them into her Oubliette, which she refers to as a medieval institu-
tion that, in her personal opinion, was discarded too soon a dungeon,
where people were put for keeps to be forgotten. The punishment for
collapsing the line between seeming and being is banishment to Mrs.
Goforths little grass shack on the beach, where she puts these imposters
to forget them and thereby forget her vulnerability. Yet, while authenti-
city and the location of a stable self may be impossible to determine with
any certainty, it is not until she is indeed convinced that Chris is not the
74 Ibid., 112113. 75 Ibid., 33, 71,72.

76 Ibid.,19. 77 Ibid.,117. 78 Ibid., 7071.
false Chris Flanders that she feels safe enough to begin her direct seduc-
tion.79 Therefore, while Mrs. Goforth may seem callous and predatory, her
ferocity is her self-proclaimed armor against inauthenticity and betrayal,
confirming that the mythological monster, half lion, and half eagle is in
fact wholly and completely human.80
At the end of the play, Chris does what he came to do and offers Mrs.
Goforth the comfort and companionship she needs in order to meet
death, despite her declaration that she doesnt want to be escorted and
wants to go forth alone.81 Blackie, however, hesitates before going inside
to comfort her dying employer, blaming her own insensitivity on Mrs.
Goforths lack of kindness, which has apparently become contagious.
Fearing that Mrs. Goforth has made [her] inhuman! 82 she sees herself
as a monster too now, infected by Mrs. Goforths cruelty, a victim of
vampiric transformation, and no longer the naturally kind woman she
was at the beginning of the play. All Mrs. Goforths employees, in fact,
mirror her callousness, stealing from her while she is dying83 and putting
on a show of concern by crying theatrically when they are actually only
concerned with who will pay [them] if she dies today.84
In the final scene, We see MRS. GOFORTH seated. She wears a majestic
ermine-trimmed robe to which she has pinned all her most important jewels,
and rings blaze on her fingers that clench the chair arms.85 As she staggers
from her chair, her internal instability is now physically realized. Unsteady,
she engages in a game that the stage assistants play with her: they snatch her
chair, moving it farther and father away, as she staggers dizzily after it and
finally sits down with a cry of fury and resumes her fierce contest with death,
after a reserve of power, triggered by the adrenalin, begins to reanimate her.86
In her decay, however, she still makes a valiant, yet grotesque, last attempt
to seduce Chris, who does admit that she has a beautiful body and that
it was a privilege to be permitted to admire it, as it makes [him] think
of one of those great fountain figures in Scandinavian countries.87 Mrs.
Goforth, however, both affirms and denies the classical body, opting for
desiring flesh and telling him that a fountain figure is a stone figure and
my body isnt a stone figure, although its been sculpted by several world-
famous sculptures, its still a flesh and blood figure.88
Until the last moment, Mrs. Goforth rages against the dying of the
light, staring at death, and trying to outstare it.89 She put[s] on all her
79 Ibid.,8182. 80 Ibid.,7. 81
Ibid.,117.
82 Ibid.,101. 83 Ibid.,102. 84
Ibid.,101.
85 Ibid.,105. 86 Ibid.,106. 87
Ibid.,109.
88 Ibid.,110. 89 Ibid.,105.
rings so they wont be stolen, since shes more afraid of being robbed
of her jewelry than her life.90 As a last comforting gesture, Chris helps
her take off the rings, which cut her circulation, and describes her bed as
the catafalque of an Empress.91 He leaves her rings under a pillow like
a Pharaohs breakfast waiting for the Pharaoh to wake up hungry.92 Like
a pharaoh or a vampire in her coffin, Mrs. Goforths hunger lives on after
death, and nothing can kill all that fierce life in her.93
The world premiere of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore was
presented at the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in
Spoleto, Italy, in 1962, directed by Herbert Machiz and with Hermione
Baddeley as Mrs. Goforth, Paul Roebling as Chris, and Mildred Dunnock
as the Witch of Capri. In 1963, the play moved to Broadway with Baddeley,
Roebling, and Dunnock reprising their roles, but it lasted for only ten
previews and sixty-nine performances. A revised version then opened in
Abingdon, Virginia, later in 1963 and received some promising reviews.
They were encouraging enough for Williams to present the play once
again on Broadway in 1964, this time starring Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs.
Goforth, Tab Hunter as Chris, and Ruth Ford as the Witch; this produc-
tion ran for only two previews and five performances.
When I first wrote about Milk Train in The Politics of Reputation,94 I
was not convinced that its allegorical elements worked within the con-
text of the semi-realistic story line and agreed with Williams that, while
he wanted to make [the character of Chris] deliberately ambiguous,
he had made him too ambiguous.95 At the time, I didnt fully appre-
ciate the play, and it was not until years later, when I reconsidered it
in the context of ambiguity and grotesque excess, that I understood its
potential for production, a potential finally realized in the Abrahamse
Meyer production of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore from
Cape Town, South Africa. Their show premiered at the Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in September 2013 and went on to an
award-winning production in South Africa, presented at Artscape (Cape
Towns premiere theatre venue) in October of that year (in English), and
in an Afrikaans translation by Saartjie Botha at the US Woordfees and
Vryfees, also in 2013. This production, directed by Fred Abrahamse with
costumes by Marcel Meyer and starring Meyer as Chris, Jennifer Steyn
as Mrs. Goforth, Nicholas Dallas as Stage Assistant One/the Witch
of Capri, and Roelof Storm as Stage Assistant Two/Blackie, effectively
90 Ibid.,104. 91 Ibid.,118. 92 Ibid.,120.

93 Ibid.,119. 94 Saddik, Politics of Repulation, 110115.
captured the grotesque and Gothic power of this play in ways I had
hoped possible but had not been able to fully imagine. It was nomi-
nated for three Fleurs du Cap Theatre Awards in South Africa: Jennifer
Steyn as Best Actress for her role as Flora Sissy Goforth, Charl-Johan
Lingenfelder for Best Score, and Marcel Meyer for Best Costume Design,
with Jennifer Steyn winning the award for Best Performance by a Lead
Actress in aPlay.
In this production, Abrahamse and Meyer literalized the language and
imagery of vampires and consumption in the plays subtext, magnifying
the relationship between beauty and decay. This was a highly imaginative
interpretation and yet one that not only remained completely faithful to
the text but also enriched it and brought its spirit to the surface, high-
lighting the Japanese-inspired elements that Williams specified. The notes
to the production program explain the Japanese aesthetics in more detail,
describing the influential concept of wabi-sabi, which defines
the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Things in
bud or in decay are more evocative of wabi-sabi than things in full bloom
because they suggest the transience of things. As things come and go, they
show signs of their coming and going and these signs are considered to be
beautiful. In this, beauty is an altered state of consciousness and can be
seen in the mundane and simple.
Therefore,to
a conventional western audience Mrs. Goforth can seem to be a grotesque
old woman obsessing about her career as a great international beauty
which she thinks she still is. But according to the principles of wabi-sabi it
is in fact her decay that transforms her into an object of great beauty.96
Jennifer Steyns performance was another reason why this production
succeeded so well in capturing the plays allegorical approach, as she
was not acting naturally. Her acting style paralleled the rhythms of
the text and stood out as a fitting interpretation in that her character
was not presented realistically or in a style suited to naturalism. A real-
istic or Method acting technique would not have brought out the
plays powerful sensibility and would have clashed with the anti-real-
istic functions of the other characters. Yet, at the same time, Steyn was
not performing camp, and her style was not overly ironic or distan-
cing. The effect of her character was simultaneously comic and tragic,
96 Program of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, Artscape, Cape Town, South Africa
(2013), 6.
yetalways authentic, and the interpenetration of laughter and horror97
came across effectively, a very difficult balance to realize. She was able to
maintain the requisite distance for an allegorical presentation yet sim-
ultaneously inspired sympathy and, at some key points, identification.
Comic lines, such as the assertion that she doesnt trust humans, just
dogs. All except poodles, I never trusted a poodle,98 which could easily
have been overlooked, stood out without seeming forced. Her dazzling
yet bizarrely comic appearance in the kimono scene with the Witch99
and her outrageous costume in the sunbathing scene,100 for example,
were juxtaposed with her more dignified costumes, and this vacillation
between the two poles must somehow be integrated and realized in the
acting in order for the production to evoke the ludicrous-horror101 cen-
tral to the emotional effect of the play, which it did.102 Steyn was able to
describe her process articulately, explaining that the style of acting is in
the music of the text, but working from the real and not being afraid to
shift without explanation.103 The performance, however, went beyond
any linguistic descriptions, transgressing the boundaries of any one par-
ticular style, weaving itself through various approaches to find Williams
voice, and Steyns own, in the music of the text.
David Kaplan has written that Staging Williams The Milk Train Doesnt
Stop Here Anymore has AbrahamseMeyer pursuing Williams vision of
theater past kitchen-sink realism to poetry onstage: a South African fulfill-
ment of an American authors lifework.104 Indeed, Abrahamse and Meyers
interpretation of Williams text effectively supported the goal of access-
ing the poetry onstage. Williams instructs that the two stage assistants
will be sometimes appearing in costume for small parts,105 but the parts of
Blackie, the Witch of Capri, Rudy (a watchman), Giulio, and Simonetta
are apparently separate roles. He writes that the Japanese Kabuki assistants
serve as a theatrical expedient and therefore
97 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God,85.

98 Williams, Milk Train,99. 99 Ibid.,40.
100 Ibid.,32. 101 Barasch, The Grotesque as a Comic Genre,5.
102 In this production Mrs. Goforth appeared in a sunbathing costume and reflector that recalled
aliens and outer-space travel, perhaps inspired by her earlier comment that the mock up of a
portable X-ray machine that Dr.Lullo wheels in looks like a baby-buggy for a baby from Mars
(Williams, Milk Train, 11). The effect was brilliantly comic, yet we were always able to take her
character seriously.
103 Jennifer Steyn, in the talk-back presentation after a performance of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop
Here Anymore in Provincetown, Massachusetts (September 28, 2013).
104 Geen Kommentaar, The Milk Train Stops at Artscape, Dekat (August 13, 2013), www.dekat.
co.za/the-milk-train-stops-at-artscape.
work on stage during the performance, shifting set pieces, placing and removing
properties and furniture. Now and then in this play they have lines to speak, very
short ones that serve as cues to the principal performers They should be regarded,
therefore, as members of the cast. They sometimes take a balletic part in the action
of the play. They should be dressed in black, very simply, to represent invisibility
to the other players. The other players should never appear to see them, even when
they speak or take part in the action, except when they appear in costume.106
While practical economy may dictate that the stage assistants take on some
of these smaller roles, such as Rudy, Giulio, or Simonetta (which they did
in this production), Abrahamse took this a step further, having the major
parts of Blackie and the Witch played by the stage assistants, Roelof Storm
and Nicholas Dallas, respectively, as cross-gendered roles. Since Williams
specified that his excuse, or reason for including the assistants was that
the play will come off better the further it is removed from conventional thea-
tre,107 Abrahamses choice was consistent with Williams intentions in this
respect, and in fact added to the allegorical presentation of the play by
supporting the verfremdungseffekt necessary for it to succeed.
While the 1963 and 1964 Broadway productions of the play cast women
(Mildred Dunnock and Ruth Ford) in the role of the Witch of Capri, in
the 1968 film version of The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, reti-
tled Boom!, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor as Mrs.
Goforth and Richard Burton as Chris, the Witch was played by a man
Nol Coward dressed in a tuxedo.108 The choice to have this part played
by a man (and also not in drag) was replicated in the 2011 off-Broadway
revival, directed by Michael Wilson and starring Olympia Dukakis as Mrs.
Goforth and Darren Pettie as Chris. In this production, Edward Hibbert
played the Witch in a campy echo of his role as Gil Chesterton on the
television sitcom Frasier. While having a male actor play the role of the
Witch (in both instances as a stereotypical bitchy queen) does add a
comic element and highlight the gender ambiguity of the play, it didnt
quite fulfill the Witchs specific function as a fairy-tale creature.109
In Abrahamses production, Dallas, as the Witch of Capri, appeared as
an androgynous figure not quite male or female, but indeed a creature
with a wicked laugh,110 whose heart pumps blood that isnt [her] own
blood, its the blood of anonymous blood donors.111 In an embellished top
hat and jacket, the Japanese samurai trousers he wore as a stage assistant,
106 Ibid.,3. 107 Ibid.

108 For more on the film adaptations of Williams plays, see R. Barton Palmer and William Robert
Brays excellent study, Hollywoods Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 2009).
110 Ibid.,50. 111 Ibid.,78.
high-heeled pumps, and with a long, sharp fingernail that accentuated the
gestures of his claw-like hands,112 Dallas did appear to be some kind of
witch, performing the role as an almost otherworldly fiend who, in his
fantastic and bizarre costume, was both sexy and creepy, grotesque
in his/her frightening lack of stability or definition (see cover photo). As
Blackie, Storm was similarly ambiguous in a black wig and with convin-
cingly demure mannerisms, simultaneously comforting and alienating.
Moreover, the choice to make Mrs. Goforth the only biological woman
onstage not only made her the focus of this presentation but also high-
lighted her difference, emphasizing her identity as an Empress113 sur-
rounded by objects of desire. As stage assistants, the men appear in black, as
per Williams stage directions, but bare chested (a costume choice not spe-
cifically indicated in the script), and can be seen, in effect, as Mrs Goforths
harem a gesture that supported the tone of theplay.
In the last scene, Mrs. Gorfoth emerged half-naked in layers of white
transparent fabric that had, until then, been part of the set. Her costume
seemed to serve as both wedding gown and shroud conflating begin-
nings and endings, desire and decay, love and death in an evocation of
the grotesque. Her red wig was gone (until then, it appeared to be her
natural hair, in contrast to the black Kabuki wig she wore when in cos-
tume), traded in for thinning and tangled grayish hair that revealed parts
of her scalp in all her decay. She did, however, have on all her jewels, and
was drowning in the excess of their weight, including an upside-down
diamond tiara, which could be read as a symbol of reversal and inversion,
echoing various mythologies. It recalled the reversal of fortune signified
by the king on the Wheel of Fortune in the medieval tarot tradition (the
mobile that Chris presents to Mrs. Goforth in the play is in fact titled
The Earth is a Wheel in a Great Big Gambling Casino).114 Additionally,
the inverted cross a popularly misunderstood symbol, co-opted as one
of Satanic worship was originally a trademark of the martyred St. Peter,
who requested to be crucified upside down because he felt unworthy of
dying the same way Jesus had. It is therefore sometimes used by Catholics
as a symbol of humility or unworthiness (Chris may, after all, be an
ambiguous or unworthy Christ figure). The upside-down diamond tiara
112 Ibid.,43. 113 Ibid.,118.

114 Chris first announces the title of his mobile to Blackie on page33, then later on to Mrs. Goforth
on page110, in the last scene, as she is in decline. In medieval times, the fortune of earthly exist-
ence was represented as a spinning wheel, where a king can be on top one day and at the bottom
as a pauper the next, and vice versa, signifying that a reversal of fortune is always imminent. The
Earth is a Wheel in the Great Big Gambling Casino (emphasis added) is the title of an unpub-
lished short story Williams wrote in January 1940 (see Bak, A Literary Life,78).
can even be seen as a reference to (or perhaps a mockery of ) Blanches
rhinestone tiara, along with the crumpled white satin evening gown, that
she wears in scene x of Streetcar, when her luck has run out along with her
pretenses and she descends into madness and destruction, beginning to
lose touch with reality right before Stanley rapes her and seals her doom.115
Mrs. Goforth, having shed the elaborate kimono costume and put on this
interpretation of a regal white robe, reveals her true self and fulfills her
promise to Chris that there will be no more pretenses at all.116 The effect
is, like that created by the Witch, an unsettling conflation of sexuality and
decay, evoking the eroticism of vampire imagery.
Finally, Mrs. Goforth retires to her bed, an upright coffin-like struc-
ture she backs into, as Chris removes the rings from her fingers. The two
assistants appear on either side of the catafalque that will serve as her
final resting place, lowering her to the ground as she implores Chris to be
here, when [she] wake[s] up.117 The effect in the AbrahamseMeyer pro-
duction was simultaneously chilling, poignant, and erotic but unquestion-
ably thrilling, a perfect coexistence of decay and beauty, lack and excess.
The allusion to resurrection in conjunction with the plays Christ or
pharaoh imagery, emaciated, cadaverous figures,118 and reanimation119
reinforced the choice to apparently highlight the figure of the vampire
as central to this production, which was designed in black, white, and
red.120 Toward the end, Mrs. Goforth even makes reference to breaking a
blood vessel in [her] throat.121 This production also brilliantly picked up
on Williams reference to the bed as a catafalque to highlight the confla-
tion of Mrs. Goforths casket/bed again, like the shroud/wedding gown,
a collapse of the boundaries between death and desire. This image evoked
the particular sensuality of vampires or angels of death, calling upon their
representation as attractive/sexy emissaries of the underworld, particularly
in the past twenty years or so on the screen with films such as Meet Joe
Black, Interview with the Vampire, and the Twilight Saga, an aesthetic that
seems to have influenced Abrahamses direction.122
115 Williams, Streetcar,391. 116 Williams, Milk Train, 110,72.

117 Ibid.,118. 118 Ibid.,114. 119 Ibid.,106.
120 Even the secretarys name, Frances Black, or Blackie, can be seen as part of this color scheme.
121 Ibid.,109.
122 In response to my question about vampire imagery in the talk-back with the director and cast at a
Provincetown performance on September 28, 2013, as well as in an email to the author (April 21,
2014), Fred Abrahamse generously discussed his process, highlighting the sensibility of these films
in terms of the image of the vampire and death as sexy (played by actors such as Brad Pitt, Tom
Cruise, and Robert Pattinson) as opposed to more traditional vampire figures (Lon Chaney and
Christopher Lee, for example). He sees Williams as having done this years before Hollywood
did, particularly in Milk Train.
Figure3 Roelof Storm, Jennifer Steyn, and Nicholas Dallas in The Milk Train Doesnt
Stop Here Anymore, directed by Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer. Cape
Town, South Africa (2013). Photo by Pat Bromilow-Downing.
After Mrs. Goforths death, both stage assistants come out of charac-
ter and move to the forestage, along with Chris, who removes his wig
and kimono, sheds his American accent, and becomes a stage assistant
himself. This is not specified in the script, yet it completely supported
the essence of the play, and, in fact, enriched it. In that moment, we see
that Chris too was simply a device in this allegory to help Mrs. Goforth
along her journey, and his moniker as the Angel of Death is even more
apt at that point. Moreover, the revelation of Chris as a stage assistant lent
even more complexity to Meyers gentle and layered interpretation of the
character, which could have been reduced to the con-man Mrs. Goforth
fears he is, but Meyer refused to go there. These choices resulted in a
believable and moving performance, which can be very difficult for this
character to accomplish, particularly in terms of the nonrealistic frame-
work. Abrahamse recalled discussions in rehearsal where the cast consid-
ered the possibility that the two stage assistants were in fact lesser angels
who came to make preparations for the more senior angel, Chris. This
interpretation helped them to make sense of the roles of the stage assist-
ants, particularly in terms of Blackies subservience to Chris, and establish
a hierarchy among the three male players. As far as I know, Abrahamse
is correct in stating that this particular explanation of the role of the
assistants has never been alluded to in the scholarship on the play, and I
found that it did illuminate the roles symbolic construction. The produc-
tion makes this concept apparent at the end, when Chris too removes his
wig and garments and the three men/angels stand stripped of all artifice
before us, the audience, having successfully completed the mission.123
The play therefore ends ritualistically, with the (now three) stage assistants
on the forestage, as the assistant who played Chris drinks from a gob-
let that the assistant who played Blackie passes to him (a gesture speci-
fied in the script). Finally, they refer to the sound of the sea, which is the
name of Chris next mobile Boom! Asked for an explanation, Chris,
like the play, resists any stable definitions, as he recites the final lines: It
says Boom and thats what it means. No translation, no explanation, just
Boom. [He drinks from the goblet and passes it back to her].124
While Milk Train ends with the death of a powerful monster-woman
who simultaneously embodied excess and lack, The Mutilated fragments
the mutilated woman into two characters, who triumph over death
(Jack in Black) through their Christmas reunion at the end of the play.
Celeste and Trinket are a symbiotic pair of friends who have had a falling
123 Discussion with Fred Abrahamse in emails to the author, April 21,2014.
out and must therefore spend the holidays alone. They complement each
other in terms of the negotiation between excess and lack, represented
primarily by their bodies through a classic marker of feminine identity:
breasts. Celeste is a short, plump little woman of fifty with an uncon-
querable spirit and a large bosom of which she is excessively proud, wearing
low-cut dresses by night and day.125 She is embodied excess, both in her
physical appearance and in her hyper-sexual behavior that, however, is no
longer able to attract the attention she craves, no matter how enthusias-
tically she displays her bosom to passersby. Despite her height, everything
about her is big: the pearls around her neck, her giant purse, her person-
ality, even her loud, drunken voice.126 By contrast, Trinket has undergone
a mastectomy, the source of her secret shame, and experiences a pain in
[her] breast127 as a constant reminder of her lack. Trinket appears more
refined and subtle in her sexuality, yet she too craves passion, love, and
companionship; the insecurities she experiences over her mutilation,
however, have led her to go without love for three years.128 When she
does find the possibility of relieving her loneliness for one night with a
drunk sailor, the encounter is, not surprisingly, fraught with violence and
anxiety, and fails to satisfy. While Trinkets mutilation is primarily phys-
ical, Celestes is emotional, but Celeste knows that we all have our mutila-
tions, some from birth, some from long before birth, and some from later
in life, and some stay with us forever;129 none of us are complete. Both
women openly perform their lack, their desires, in a search for some illu-
sion of completion or wholeness, someone or something to mean God
to them.130 And, while they are ultimately unable to fulfill these desires
with any sort of stable or ideal union, they are, however, not afraid to
acknowledge them, and in the end are able to defeat the loneliness of a
solitary Christmas, finding solace in their friendship, however chaotic and
fraught with conflict. Another source (or result) of the womens mutila-
tion is that they are both social outcasts what Williams called his fugi-
tive kind and need each other in order to belong, seeking a public
place where their names are not unknown.131 Even though their reunion
may not provide the necessary completion that would make them whole,
it does serve to temporarily heal their physical and emotional mutilations,
bringing on a Christmas miracle and allowing them to forget death for
a little while.132 For Williams, temporary solace and reprieve is all we can
ever ask for. Death may have been postponed, but it will be back one day;
125 Williams, The Mutilated,82. 126 Ibid., 82,108.

127 Ibid.,128. 128 Ibid.,101. 129 Ibid.,87.
130 Williams, Milk Train,113. 131 Williams, The Mutilated,102. Ibid., 128130.
132
and, in any case, death has never been much in the way of completion
anyway.133
The play, set in New Orleans, is a celebration in the face of death.134
Music plays a significant role, as carols are sung by a chorus that, in the
final scenes, includes Jack in Black. It begins with a Christmas carol, a
variation on the poem that celebrates the strange, the crazed, the queer
that I quoted at the beginning of this book and from which I took the sub-
title.135 The alternative version in the play is worth quoting here infull:
I think the strange, the crazed, thequeer
Will have their holiday thisyear
And for a while, a little while,
There will be pity for thewild.
A miracle, a miracle!
A sanctuary for thewild.
I think the mutilatedwill
Be touched by hands that nearlyheal,
At night the agonized willfeel
A comfort that is nearlyreal.
The constant star of wanderers
Will light the forest where theyfall
And they will see and they willhear
A radiance, a distantcall.
A vision and a distantcall.
At last for each someone maycome
And even though he may notstay,
It may be softer where hewas,
It may be sweeter where helay.
Stones may soften where he lay.136
133 One Arm, in Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 198. This
short story, written in 1945 and published in 1948, about a former boxer who winds up as a street
hustler after the loss of one arm in a car accident, deals with a much more obvious physical mutila-
tion and the psychic fragmentation that results from it. Another story that deals with an attack on
the wholeness of the body (but in a very different manner) is Desire and the Black Masseur, writ-
ten in 1946 and published in 1948. This story is linked to Suddenly Last Summer in terms of cannibal-
ism and a punishment for transgressive sexuality (see Saddik, (Un)Represented Fragmentation).
134 David Savran, Tennessee Williams Institute lecture/discussion, Provincetown Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival (Provincetown, Massachusetts), September 28,2014.
135 See Williams, Collected Poems, 150 for the version of this poem that I quoted at the beginning of
this book, which differs significantly from the version in The Mutilated, quoted below.
136 Williams, The Mutilated, 8182.
The focus here on the temporary, as well as on approximate substitutes for
what is truly needed or desired (particularly in the repetition of nearly
and for a while), sets the tone of this play, another allegorical presen-
tation, play, masque, or pageant137 that deals with the inevitability
of death and the loneliness of the human condition. Williams vision for
the set was that it would appear as delicate as Japanese line drawings so
abstract, so spidery that the audience will accept the nonrealistic style of
the play,138 echoing, albeit on a much smaller scale, the Japanese aesthetic
of Milk Train.
Like Mrs. Goforth, Celeste and Trinket mirror social codes by locating
identity and self-worth in their bodies, in representations of traditional
feminine beauty. Large breasts are a source of pride, while their lack is a
source of shame,139 perhaps even a loss of identity. Trinkets mutilation is
the mastectomy that has destroyed her status as a natural, socially accept-
able woman a trinket or pretty object, albeit one of little value. Yet she
experiences this loss not only via her operation but also through the proc-
esses of time and aging. She even goes so far as to undergo her mastectomy
under an assumed identity, Agnes Jones.140 Knowing this, Celeste gives
the police that same pseudonym when she is arrested for shoplifting141 and
later uses it as her alternate identity for the potential employment that her
brother has set up for her, since hes got kids growing up in the same
city and doesnt want her using his name anymore.142 The name originat-
ing in Trinkets mastectomy therefore becomes a shameful and clandestine
identity attached to social exclusion and shame, and the ugly, cowardly
bitter-old, winter-cold voice of Agnes Jones becomes a demon that
possesses Trinket. She concludes that it is the lack of what [she] need[s]
most, love, that allows that voice to dictate her identity, and yet it is that
very voice that she must exorcize in order to find the miracle of love and
become Trinket Dugan once again. Trying to regain her confidence and
sense of self-worth, Trinket dissociates herself from the name associated
with her mutilation, asserting that she is not Agnes Jones and perform-
ing a ritual of walking around a bench, repeating her name three times in
order to drive her out143 in her quest to become whole.
As in Milk Train, this plays philosophy on the satisfaction of desire is
rooted in an overt system of exchange: love and friendship are for sale,
just more cravings to satisfy in return for something else in this mercenary
137 Williams, Milk Train,7. 138 Williams, The Mutilated,79.

139 Ibid., 82,101. 140 Ibid., 92,100. 141 Ibid.,92.
142 Ibid.,83. 143 Ibid., 100101.
economy, rather than relationships based on expressions of kindness, car-
ing, or genuine mutual interest. Encouraged by Bernie, the hotel desk
clerk, to give up, Celeste declares that she still has longings, and as long
as you have longings, satisfaction is possible. Appetites? Satisfactions
always possible, Bernie. Cravings? Such as a craving for sweets or liquor or
love? Satisfaction is still possible Bernie, and on a give-and-take basis.144
Food, liquor, and love merge in an equivalency of longing, with satisfac-
tion granted on a give-and-take basis. Trinket, similarly, has no inten-
tion of giving up, not a bit in the world, wouldnt dare to or care to!145 She
expects her horde of friends in financial trouble to remain loyal to her,
as she gives gifts called loans, expecting no repayment, except in friend-
ship. Trinket is financially well off as a result of her familys three oil wells
in West Texas she never walks out of the Silver Dollar Hotel without a
wad of money that you can choke a horse with146 and the display of her
wealth is part of her particular excess. Even though she can afford to stay
in a first-class hotel, she stays at the dilapidated Silver Dollar out of loy-
alty and friendship.147 She is constantly bringing up her use-value in this
system of exchange, reminding people of her superior economic status and
recalling all the favors she has done for them, the gifts she has bought, and
tips she has handed out.148 She pities transients at Christmas, but, even
though she is not a derelict herself, having the financial means to stay in
a better hotel, she still lives as a transient in a hotel and must depend on
the kindness of strangers, whose friendship shebuys.
Although she denigrates Celestes desperate lifestyle and assumes a
superior attitude, when a sailor first mistakes her for a whore, Trinket
claims that shes not insulted but flattered,149 apparently since he has
confirmed her economic worth. In response to Celestes request that she
and Trinket make up and bury the hatchet for Christmas in honor of
the wonderful times they have had together, Trinket insists thatthey
werent wonderful times. We bummed around town together, I took you
to breakfast, I took you to lunch, I took you to dinner. I took you to the
movies. In return for all those favors, I just got envy, resentment, and sly
insinuations that if I didnt go on sucking up to you, just for company in
my time of despair, youd give away my secret.150
Realizing that her threats did not have the desired effect, Celeste tries to
use guilt and shame to manipulate Trinket into making up with her, telling
144 Ibid.,94. 145

Ibid.,100. Ibid.,96.
146
147 Ibid.,95. Ibid., 9596.

148
149
Ibid.,107. 150
Ibid.,88.
her that People are kind at Christmas!151 Trinket, however, refuses to act
like people and show kindness, aware that Celeste only wants to come
to her room because she sees the wine and shes a wino. Trinket threatens
to call the police on this merciless monster, prompting Celeste to retali-
ate by labeling her a freak! and threatening to get even.152 Monster has
met monster, and at this point neither plans to giveway.
Celeste sees her possession of Trinkets secret as her ace-in-the-hole
for getting what she wants out of her, since she views her as rich and self-
ish. Purse-proud. But mutilated, and Celeste is the only one who knows
it,153 a fact she lords over Trinket. She keeps reminding Trinket of her
mutilation, in much the same passive-aggressive way Amanda constantly
refers to Lauras mutilation being crippled in The Glass Menagerie.
While Trinkets value now lies in her financial situation, Celeste sees her
own value in her ability to know and keep secrets, using the threat of
exposure to survive and get by: she even asks Maxie, the con-man parad-
ing around the Bird-Girl the worlds greatest freak attraction! to give
her five dollars (later bartering down to two dollars and twenty cents)
to buy a bottle of cheap wine in exchange for keeping his secret that the
alleged Bird-Girl is only Rampart Street Rose with chicken feathers glued
to her.154 Yet Maxie too threatens Celeste with trouble and the commo-
tion attracts police attention. Celestes attempts to exercise her power are
ultimately met with indifference, resentment, or counterthreats, failing to
get her what she wants. In any case, it is not in Celestes nature to keep
secrets; she cannot contain herself, and confidences overflow in all their
excess. In her first address to the audience at the beginning of the play,
she apparently cannot wait to reveal her power, what she knows: that
Trinket, although proud, is mutilated, oh, yes, ha ha, shes a mutilated
woman.155 Yet, while Celeste cannot stop expressing herself, Trinket strug-
gles to communicate her pain. She explains how she COULDNT get
the words out! to confess her mutilation to a potential lover, and, when
she speaks of love, she makes a sound like a hooked fish would make if
it could make a sound, fighting despair and instead giving way to some
inner convulsion which makes her produce these dreadful soft cries. They are
accompanied by abrupt, indecisive movements to rise or reach out.156 Desire
and longing are beyond language, and, even though she does stop talk-
ing,157 her nature must express itself.
151 Ibid.,89. Ibid., 8990. 153 Ibid.,84.

152
154 Ibid.,86. Ibid.,84. 156 Ibid.,101.

155
Ibid.,107.
157
Once Trinket decides to end her self-punishment and search for com-
panionship again, she uses her money to attract a sailor up to her room.158
She does, however, have specific standards, and is not as desperate as one
may expect her to be. When one of the sailors, Bruno, attempts to have
sex with her outdoors, complimenting her nice little body, she rejects
him, claiming that he must be talking about alley cats.159 Trinket refuses
to be an animal and insists that her problem is a human problem,
explaining that she is attracted to Brunos young friend, Slim.160 It is
Celeste whom she sees as an animal, referring to her as Madame Goat,
an awful demented creature.161 Once she gets Slim alone, however, he
treats her horribly and abuses her generosity. The scene ends with Trinket
writh[ing] grotesquely in the grasp of both sailors, before they leave and
her pain returns.162 Despite Slims treatment of her, however, she does
maintain some dignity in her pride, standing up to him and asserting that
no one can frighten her.163
Celeste, on the other hand, is concerned less with pride and more with
personal gain and economic survival. While she acknowledges that she
has no false pride, her brother insists that she do[esnt] have pride true
or false about anything, ever.164 When Trinket decides to forgive Celeste
and invites up her to her room for a glass of wine, claiming to realize that
Celestes behavior is that of a child acting impulsively and that she there-
fore cannot be held responsible for her actions,165 Celeste initially refuses,
protesting that she still [has] pride! and would sooner die! Without
hesitation, however, she gathers her coat and proceeds upstairs.166 She
not only begins to drink Trinkets wine but also asks for some vanilla
cream wafers Trinket used to have, and is not bothered by the discovery
of a dead cockroach in the box. She responds to Trinkets protest that she
mustnt eat after a cockroach with the wisdom that in the best restau-
rants people eat after cockroaches,167 an ultimate acknowledgment of the
grotesque creeping into all our lives, regardless of social status.
As older, unattached women with desires for the love and passion they
lack, Celeste and Trinket are a pair of old bitches,168 grotesque monsters
who signify something peculiar, not natural, morbid.169 Celeste is seen
as absurd170 in her overt and predatory quests for sex, companionship,
food, and drink, using her breasts, her only apparent value besides her
158 Ibid.,110. 159

Ibid.,108. 160 Ibid.,107.
161 Ibid.,109. 162
Ibid., 120121. 163 Ibid.,116.
164 Ibid.,83. 165
Ibid.,123. 166 Ibid.,124.
167 Ibid.,125. 168
Ibid.,85. 169 Ibid.,115. 170 Ibid.,98.
questionable ability to keep secrets, as bait. Trinket calls her a whore
which may justly identify Celestes actual occupation of hustling men
for the price of a bottle or a couple of drinks but it is also an insult
that Trinket associates with Celestes status as a monster.171 Yet their fall-
ing out, which was apparently over where to have dinner, was actually
precipitated by Celestes attack on Trinket, calling her a mutilated mon-
ster.172 Trinket is also denigrated several times as a whore a mutilated
whore, a morbid hooker, an unnatural slave173 by the sailor she
brings up to her room. He refuses to drink out of her glass, not wanting
to catch somethin morbid; claims to have had experiences with other
freaks; and ignorantly accuses her of stealing his wallet, even though she
insists that her problem is not economic.174 Women with uncontained
desires can only be seen as monsters, dismissed as unnatural, morbid
whores; as some kind of freak to be avoided; and as undeserving of love
or respect, lest their grotesqueness prove contagious and leak out of their
open bodies to contaminate the rest of society.
The play, however, ends with a celebration, as Celeste and Trinket
are reunited and experience the invisible presence of Our Lady, who
appears to Celeste just when she is cut off forgotten homeless and
alone in the world. In order to receive the holy spirit, however, Celeste
insists that they must Stop talking. Be still. Act naturally175 the natural
woman is therefore a performance, silent and immobile. When the Lady
does appear (a manifestation indicated only in the change of light in the
room through stained glass windows176), she finally heals Celestes lone-
liness and removes the pain in Trinkets breast the miracle for which
they have been waiting.177 Despite the suggestion, however, that these
mutilated women must perform stereotypical expectations of behavior in
order to receive the blessing, the plays deus ex machina is ultimately a
powerful, unbounded feminine presence that defeats Jack in Black who
warns them to expect him, but not yet, not yet!178 and the chorus pro-
claims the miracle that will allow them to forget him for a little while.179
In The Mutilated, Williams comments on societys reductive views of
fugitive women who do not fit traditional molds, and saves the women
through the healing magic of a divine and invisible feminine agent. Celeste
and Trinket are two sides of the same coin, together representing human
171 Ibid., 117, 91,120. 172 Ibid.,89.

173 Ibid., 107, 121,118. 174 Ibid., 116, 113,107.
175 Ibid.,127. 176 Ibid.,128. 177 Ibid.,128.
178 Ibid.,129. 179 Ibid.,130.
complexity in their embodiment of the simultaneous poles of excess and
lack: abundance and scarcity, display and restraint, revelation and con-
cealment, brazenness and discretion. In play after play, Williams reveals
that the selfless, nurturing woman desired but never desiring is a con-
structed fiction, or at least not the whole story. Although in the 1960s this
led to the accusation that Williams had created unreal monsters,180 his
sometimes extreme, often exaggerated, and over-the-top character presen-
tations were completely in line with a tradition of excess, satire, and simi-
lar artistic modes that used exaggeration to question cultural assumptions,
in this case the cultural assumptions behind natural constructions of
femininity that contemporary thinking, more and more, has recognized
and accepted as fantasy.
The Mutilated premiered on Broadway in 1966 with The Gndiges
Frulein, in a double bill titled Slapstick Tragedy. It starred Kate Reid as
Celeste and Margaret Leighton as Trinket, and ran for only sixteen pre-
views and seven performances. In 2013, however, Cosmin Chivu directed
a touchingly lyrical, bizarrely funny, and highly successful production of
The Mutilated at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival,
starring Mink Stole as Trinket and performance artist Penny Arcade as
Celeste.181 This casting was a perfect choice, particularly in terms of under-
standing the plays themes and the subtly self-conscious, ironic acting style
it requires. Both of these women have worked with Charles Ludlam and
the Theater of the Ridiculous, have made their mark as performers in
works that celebrate societys misfits, and occupy a prominent space in
the history of transgressive film and performance of the past 40years.182
The production went on to an off-Broadway run in New York City later
that year, presented by Beth Bartley Productions and Thomas Keith at
the New Ohio Theatre, and earned a Drama League nomination for Best
Revival.183
180 Kaplan, 50% Illusion,12.

181 Mink Stole also starred in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws in 2011 (see Chapter2).
182 Rebecca M. Alvin, The Marvelous, the Miraculous, and the Mutilated: Penny Arcade and Mink
Stole Share the Stage in the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, Provincetown
Magazine (2013), http://provincetownmagazine.com/2013/10/09/the-marvelous-the-miraculous-
and-the-mutilated.
183 The Drama League Awards include both Broadway and off-Broadway shows; the other nominees
for Best Revival were all productions with much larger budgets: The Cripple of Inishmaan, The
Glass Menagerie, Of Mice and Men, A Raisin in the Sun, Twelfth Night (or What You Will), and
Waiting for Godot were all presented on Broadway; and The Good Person of Szechwan was presented
at the Public Theater (after an initial run at La MaMa E.T.C.). The much-lauded revival of The
Glass Menagerie, starring Cherry Jones, Zachery Quinto, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Brian J. Smith,
won in this category.
Figure4 Mink Stole and Penny Arcade in The Mutilated, directed by Cosmin Chivu.
New York City (2013). Photo by ScottWynn.
Like Milk Train, The Mutilated is a late play that reveals itself most
effectively in production. Theatremanias review of the 2013 New York pro-
duction commented that this lost gem of a play excels in placing those
sublime feelings of loneliness and regret in a musical and vibrant under-
world inhabited by vagrants, whores, and pious queens Director Cosmin
Chivu leads an 18-person cast in fully realizing Williams vision.184 Arcade
and Stole were appropriately excessive and unnatural in their perform-
ances, remaining true to the tragicomic tone of the play by eschewing real-
istic acting styles and maintaining the balance of humor and heartache,
hope and despair, necessary for its ambivalence to come across. Similar
to Lauras recurring tune in The Glass Menagerie the unsettling circus
music that is the lightest, most delicate music in the world and perhaps
the saddest, which still manages to simultaneously express the surface
vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible
sorrow185 this production captured the simultaneous beauty and sadness
of being alive. Even though the specter of death was rightly emphasized
184 Zachary Stewart, The Mutilated: Penny Arcade and Mink Stole Star in This Haunting Revival of
a Lost Tennessee Williams Gem, Theatremania (November 10, 2013).
(the plays reference to the death of a bar patron who died here tonight.
Screamed and fell off that barstool an hour ago186 makes it clear that
death is omnipresent), the tone was still highly humorous and celebratory,
laughter in the face of fear and sorrow. This production opened with the
presence of New Orleans street life onstage with an energy that spilled out
into the theatre. A live band led by the actor/musician who would later
emerge as Jack in Black (Jesse Selengut) played while actors danced and
playfully interacted with each other as the audience waited for the per-
formance to begin. The choice to make the celebratory band leader also
play the emissary of death highlighted the plays binary collapses: in the
Provincetown production Selengut turned around to reveal a large white
skull on the back of his long black coat in a moment that was brilliantly
chilling; the skull was not used in the New York production, yet Jacks
menacing identity was still clear, and the triumph over death just as satis-
fying as he joined the revelry. We were able to laugh at death, and death,
for just this moment, laughed withus.
The heroine who cheats death in The Pronoun I, Mad Queen May a
deceitful reproduction of Queen May of England, Williams fictional
monarch formerly known as Fair Queen May and, later, Good Queen
May is probably the most obviously and aggressively fragmented char-
acter in his oeuvre, as her unstable and ambiguous identity is overtly pro-
nounced through an overlapping of labels and masks.187 This play about
the slipperiness of identity and the overcoming of egoism opens with the
queen on her throne, as her young lover, an indolent and petulantly pretty
youth named Dominique, who is also an enormously vain poet who can-
not begin a poem without the pronoun I,188 sprawls upon cushions at her
feet, with only his genitalia clothed. While Dominique (a unisex French
name suggesting androgyny or sexual ambiguity) is the obvious egotist, he
186 Williams, The Mutilated,105.

187 In his biography of Williams, John Bak makes a good case that The Pronoun I was probably
inspired by Jean Cocteaus Laigle deux ttes, pointing out some key similarities. He also cites
Gilbert Debusschers observations that Cocteaus play seemed to have served as an inspiration for
Milk Train as well, and concludes that, while there are resemblances, Williams was not interested
in plagiarism. Rather, he was moving closer to a European aesthetic in his drama, which proved to
be detrimental to the reception of his work at home. Bak reminds us that Williams had written
admirably about French playwrights just a few years previously and that Cocteaus play cer-
tainly intrigued Williams, perhaps because of its ability to play with European history in ways no
American playwright could do (Bak, A Literary Life, 195197). I too see Williams possible over-
laps with the work of European playwrights as evidence that Williams remained current and aware
of world theatre and emerging dramatic forms, rather than as a case for imitation. See Chapter2
for my commentary on similarities between Williams late plays and the work of Jean Genet.
188 Tennessee Williams, The Pronoun I, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette J.
Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),79.
is also a blank page for the queens desires, a pretty fool. Queen Mays
own excessive self-regard and indifference to her subjects in her refusal
to make important alliances with various foreign princes to whom [she]
was neither sexually nor spiritually attracted and her lack of involve-
ment in the domestic and political affairs of the empire which has
survived wars only by grace of a surrounding sea has led not only to
her unfavorable reputation but also to an impending revolution, a very,
very serious insurrection.189
Queen Mays identity is a layered masquerade imposed upon her, as
Mad Queen May is also Despised Queen May who had to be hid-
den away when Fair Queen May the First could not be passed off any
longer as young and fair. The egotistical woman is therefore mad and
must be removed from public view, even though she insists that she never
despise[d] her subjects.190 Williams specifies in the opening stage direc-
tions that the part of Mad QueenMay
should be performed by a young actress, lovely of face and figure. Since she is
required on all public occasions and most private ones to play a part old enough
to be her grandmother, age must be simulated by an artfully designed mask over
which is usually drawn a veil suspended from the tip of her medieval, cone-
shaped hat, which is gleaming and glittering with pearls and jewels.191
Similar to Williams description of the Witch of Capri in Milk Train,
Queen Mays costume involves a cone-shaped hat, an interesting choice
in Williams later work that references the witch/queen of fairy tales
both evil and good, both ugly and beautiful, but always powerful in her
conflations. As the mad queen, she is out of control and uncivilized,
yet, at some level, she is simultaneously a fair and acceptable representa-
tion of a woman, her labels only impostures.192 In her various imposed
incarnations she is simultaneously old and young, desiring and desired,
too much and not enough a representation of a monarch and a mys-
tery, yet not a real woman. The riotous mob burns her image in effigy,
as obscene drawings, representations of someone she was supposed to
be, are carried about in the streets while she claims that this incarnation
of herself is long gone.193
The revolutionaries believe that their revolt is against the mad queen,
and the Young Revolutionary who slips into her palace is stunned when
she removes the mask, revealing herself as Fair Queen May. He came to
assassinate a demented old hag, a crowned witch on a throne, not the
189 Ibid., 80,81. 190 Ibid.,81. Ibid.,79.

191
192 Ibid.,81. 193 Ibid.,84.

beautiful young queen who now captivates him. She asks him to drop his
weapon, which he does, and she then tries to dismiss Dominique, a pretty
little obstruction, with a critical comment on his verse, declaring the
bal masque nearly over.194 The revolutionaries, however, suddenly enter
the palace grounds. At that point she realizes that her throne is a mockery
of what she is now195 and tries to save both herself and Dominique. She
accepts his narcissism as a defect that was imposed upon him, as we are
all victims of things that are not chosen but imposed.196 Yet, when she
offers to shield him from the revolutionaries, since the relation between
[them] is known and they are condemned together, he denies her, claim-
ing that she alone should suffer the consequences of using her ridiculously
inappropriate position to indulge [her] lunacy.197 Insisting that he is still
young and can escape in disguise, he leaves her to the mob, running off
in the shadows.198 Queen May pretends to encourage him yet immediately
goes to the window and betrays him in her revenge, calling out the win-
dow, identifying him to the waiting mob. We then hear a shrill cry from
the fugitive boy as the mob howls wildly. Labeling him a young fool,
the queen proclaims her victory over his narcissism: Hes done with the
pronoun I, not just with me.199 The Young Revolutionary then reappears,
tears her regal clothes off and strips her naked, destroying her social per-
sona, her masquerade, and deciding that the revolutionaries will say she is
dead when the mob comes looking for her. The magic of her transform-
ation is accomplished through her own secret assassin in her heart200 that
annihilated her multiple, false personas, allowing her to return to an inte-
grated whole, the original Fair Queen May. It is the queens layered iden-
tity that allows her to hide and survive a much more effective disguise
than the monks cloak and cowl Dominique dons201 and she is saved by
shedding her performance, revealing her true self, devoid of pretenses in
her (literal) nakedness. The play ends in her union with the Revolutionary,
as they embrace and deny egoism in the final word: You.202
194 Ibid., 83. The exchange that follows between Dominique and the queen can be seen as Williams
commentary on the narcissism that he himself was accused of by critics who repeatedly declared
his work too personal (see, for example, his 1972 essay Too Personal? in Williams, New Selected
Essays, 165167, where he answers this charge). In the play, the queen refers to critics who find
[Dominique] unduly infatuated with the enormity of personal concern, disregard of all others
on earth. Dominique insists, however, that his narcissism is true, since life commences with
the pronoun I and probably ends with it, too (Williams, The Pronoun I, 84). Later, when the
queen is besieged by the revolutionaries who seek to destroy her, she decides to try and flee, since
our defenders do nothing(85).
195 Ibid.,85. 196 Ibid.,83. 197 Ibid.,85.
198 Ibid.,86. 199 Ibid.,86. 200 Ibid., 8687.
201 Ibid.,86. 202 Ibid.,87.
As a rebellious woman who refused to play by the rules she denied mar-
riages and declined to play the game demanded of her, choosing instead
lovely and gifted young courtiers203 she was no longer considered fair
but rather mad or despised, and had to be hidden away, suffocated by
the multiple labels imposed upon her that created her instability. She was
then required on all public occasions and even most private ones to play
this role. Dominique points out that, as queen, she call[s] herself we
but she insists this is only on public occasions; privately she is I,204 her
fragmented identity only a performance. Despite being a victim of her
own desires hereditary inclinations or defects fueled by arrogance,
pride, and the eroticism that runs riot in [her] veins she insists that
her clever[ness] is entirely [her] own205 and has accepted her desires,
remaining true to them and refusing to pretend.206 Although this choice
has resulted in social rejection and prompted the performance of instabil-
ity that had permitted her to survive only in the shadows, it is finally
the very slipperiness of her public identity that helps her to escape the
mob, allowing her to reveal her most authentic self. It is her fidelity to her
monstrous qualities that saves her, as her true self is fair and grotesque-
ness is discarded as the social role she was forced toplay.
The Pronoun I had its world premiere at the 2007 Provincetown
Tennessee Williams Festival, staring New York-based burlesque per-
formers Julie Atlas Muz as Queen May and James (Tigger!) Ferguson as
Dominique, her young lover and a poet. It was also directed by Muz, with
Jerry Stacy and Jon Pacheco designing the set and costumes and Megan
Tracey designing the lighting. Casting burlesque performers in these roles
highlighted this short pieces playful camp tone, which needs to come
across in order to understand its excess and irony. Muz and Fergusons
awareness of the requisite tone came across well in their acting styles, lead-
ing to a successful realization of Williams sketch of desire and rebellion,
the triumph of the old queen.
The monstrous, unnatural women in these plays challenge the
very notion of what it means to be natural or real in the truest sense,
in much the same way unconventional or anti-realistic dramatic forms
challenge realistic representations of reality. Just as naturalism or realism
as dramatic styles are highly artificial forms that depend on illusion and
appearance for their effect, offering us hegemonic representations of what
203 Ibid.,81. 204 Ibid.,80. 205 Ibid.,83.

206 This, too, can be seen as Williams defense of his own public persona, the inclinations for which
he was attacked in the press.
reality looks like (or ought to look like, according to the dominant ideol-
ogy) on the surface, the notion of the natural woman is a superficial
social construction, an image or representation of what a woman should
be, according to particular social ideologies. Therefore, Williams unnat-
ural female characters, like the anti-realistic plays they populate, are in
fact truer, more natural portraits, going beyond surface appearances
and social performance, defying expectations in order to present deeper
and more complex identities and ways of being that reflect the real no
good or bad people207 but passionate women whose strengths, in fact,
are often rooted in that chaotic power of nature that Sebastian observed in
the spectacle of the black birds in the Galapagos Islands, the unconquer-
able spirit of survival.208
Williams, Selected Letters, Vol. II,95.

207
Williams, The Mutilated,82.
208
Ch apter 5
Theres something not natural here

Grotesque ambiguities in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier
for Milady, and A House Not Meant toStand
It is not the essential dignity of man but the essential ambiguity of

man that I think needs to be stated.
Tennessee Williams, New York Times Magazine, June 12,19601
I wish you would sublimate these desires.
Apparition of Vaslav Nijinski in A Cavalier for Milady, c.19762
I know how to be outrageous.
Williams continued to embrace the spirit of the grotesque that occupies

the ambivalent spaces of the in-between in his late plays Kingdom of Earth
(1968, 1975), A Cavalier for Milady, and A House Not Meant to Stand,
rejecting strictly delineated binaries such as natural/unnatural, life/death,
male/female, human/animal, animate/inanimate, sane/insane, and reality/
fantasy to instead create monstrous ambiguities and instabilities that are
potentially dangerous in their threat to an imaginary wholeness and com-
pletion. These plays challenge the Enlightenment fantasy of completion
and stability the artifical optimism Bakhtin discusses4 and instead
continue to highlight the complexities of incompletion and instability:
the essential ambiguity ofman.
Williams Kingdom of Earth, also known as The Seven Descents of Myrtle,
opens with the threat of the overwhelming powers of nature an impend-
ing flood in the muted warning of the river and the whining wind.5

2 Tennessee Williams, A Cavalier for Milady, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed. Annette
J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),72.
4 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 37. See Chapter1.
5 Tennessee Williams, Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle), in The Theatre of Tennessee
Williams, Vol. V (New York: New Directions, 1976), 126. Unless otherwise noted, I refer to Williams
1975 version of the play printed in this edition. The one-act version of Kingdom of Earth (1967) was
published in Williams, The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, ed. Thomas Keith (New York:
New Directions, 2011).
117
The central characters Myrtle, Chicken, and Lot all serve as symbolic
figures rather than representations of complex human beings, and, while
there is a basic plot in the traditional sense, it is not where the strength
of this play lies. Myrtle and Lot, now married, return to Lots childhood
home, where his half-brother Chicken lives and of which Chicken hopes
to take possession, if he can withstand the flood that threatens to destroy
the house along with those who occupy it. As Lot brings Myrtle to his
home for the first time, he insists that she become accustomed to her social
position as the lady of the house. As much as she wants to embrace her
new role, however, Myrtle is not quite comfortable with it, responding that
It dont seem natural to me.6 We eventually learn that Myrtle a loud-
voiced and rather fleshy7 young woman used to be a professional per-
former, the last surviving member of The Four Hot Shots from Mobile,
the other women all having come to rather cruel, violent, and even gro-
tesque ends one womans mutilated corpse was found under a trestle.8
Myrtle has retired from show business but continues to perform parodies
of herself in gaudy outfits that emphasize her sexuality and vitality. Lot,
by contrast, is a frail young man who is obsessed with the memory of his
dead mother, Miss Lottie, as Myrtle tries to affectionately, yet subtlely,
dominate him. Her domination of Lot, however, is not the driving force of
the play, and multiple power struggles operate simultaneously. The overtly
sexual Chicken, who is described as being like a crouched animal, seems a
suitable antagonist to a flooding river9 and, apparently, to Myrtle aswell.
The central struggle for dominance in this play is grounded in the rela-
tionship between Lot and Chicken; yet this struggle is not so much rep-
resented by the simple battle between the two brothers as by the battle
between what they symbolize as emissaries of culture and nature, death
and life, respectively with Myrtle as the virgin/whore who shifts back and
forth between them, caught in the struggle between the cultural and the
natural. Myrtle initially comes on the scene as a maternal figure, protecting
Lot as her husband/child and insisting that she finds his inability to perform
sexually and his refined appearance attractive, superior to a man. She
claims that his impotence touches the deepest chord in [her] nature, which
is the maternal chord and informs him that she is not just [his] wife but
also [his] mother.10 Chicken, the perfect contrast to his invalid brother,11
6 Williams, Kingdom of Earth,138. Ibid.,127.

7
8 Ibid.,145. 9 Ibid., 127,125.

10 Ibid., 135,130. 11 Ibid.,140.
Grotesque ambiguities 119
appears to upset Myrtle at first, as she objects strongly to his sexual innuen-
does and filthy talk, and insists that we should all talk and act like gentle-
men anladies.12 She refers to Chicken as that man, that animal,13 unsure
whether he is human or beast but certain he is not part of the civilized world
of gentlemen, and approaches the kitchen downstairs, where he waits for
her, as if approaching a jungle.14 In fact, before she meets Chicken, Myrtle
hears him in the kitchen and mistakes him for a dawg.15 With each des-
cent down the stairs to Chicken, however, she descends deeper into his
world, the lower order antithetical to society. By scene iv of Act I, they
are singing and drinking together in what appears to be true comradery,
until eventually Myrtle, who knows lots of church songs but cant think
of any in the presence of Chicken,16 is forgetting the repressions of cultured
society. Myrtles rational coherency breaks down and degenerates into phys-
ical instink [sic], a term she uses repeatedly.
Myrtles duality is further complicated by her reaction to Chickens
mixed racial heritage the union of his white father and a mother with
black blood marginalizes him and forces him into the position of social
outcast. Lot makes it clear that, although he and Chicken share the same
father, they had Very diffrent mothers!17 Lot and Chickens father seems
to have been a part of nature, as he wouldnt let Mother build a dining
room onto the house, presumably having no use for the social functions
of a dining room. He died howling like a wild beast, but still a win-
ner, since even though Mother was free to transform this place or tear
it down to the ground, life was cruel to Mother. It gave her no time to
carry out her plans18 and defeat the wild forces of the natural world that
overtook her home. Yet, while Lot is primarily his mothers child, he cant
deny the little animal within himself. He tells Myrtle that the little
animal has to make a home of its own,19 but his comment is ambigu-
ous and its not quite clear whether he is referring to himself, Myrtle, or
both. Chicken, however, with his savage, wolfish grin20 is the product
of parents who both lie outside culture: an animalistic father and a mother
who is already dismissed as bestial by virtue of her race. He embodies an
aggressive hybrid of animal and human ambiguous and unnatural yet
intriguing and seductive.
12 Ibid.,147. 13
Ibid.,155. 14
Ibid.,161.
15 Ibid.,131. Ibid.,175.
16 17
Ibid.,138.
18 Ibid.,129. 19
Ibid.,130. 20
Ibid., 129,184.
Myrtle, at first, denies being disgusted by Chicken, claiming to be
pleased an relieved that he wanted to kiss her.21 Michael R. Schiavi
points out that, in the 1968 version of the script, Myrtle reveals that she
has borne five children whom she, in her destitution, had to sacrifice to
adoptive parents. Five such accidents would suggest further evidence that
she can control neither her bodys receptivity nor its productivity.22 Her
sexuality, like her uncontrollable voice, which Lot attempts to curtail at
various points,23 is characterized as chaotic and beyond repression. Her
appearance is over-the-top, and she presents herself in a sort of grotesque
drag, explaining to Lot that all [her] dresses are made over from cos-
tumes.24 Myrtle tells the brothers that one of her jobs in show business
involved a performance as the headless woman in a carnival: I been the
headless woman in a carnival show. All a fake, done with mirrors! Sat
in a chair and pretended to have no haid, it was done with mirrors!25
In The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, the 1970 film of Kingdom of Earth,
Lynn Redgrave portrays Myrtle as a particularly grotesque carnival figure,
appearing in the bright yellow Mardi Gras gown of Lots mother with a
whitened face and shocking red curls, like a living doll in a sideshow, blur-
ring the boundaries of the artificial and the real. By virtue of her sexuality,
her speech, her outrageous costumes, and her Rubenesque body,26 Myrtle
is simply too much and cannot be contained. She describes herself as a
warm-natured woman whose doctor prescribed her some pills to keep
down the heat of [her] nature, but alas, they had no effect.27 The terrific
attraction between the hysterical Myrtle and the constantly masturbating
Chicken culminates in the fellatio scene suggested between scenes ii and
iii of Act II, with Myrtle crying as Chicken, like Lot before him, calls her
a whore.
After their crude union, however, Myrtle is indeed disgusted by her
relations with Chicken, as she moves her chair back from the table like a
monster was on it.28 Williams stage notes explain that she has the typical
Southern lower-class dread and awe of negroes,29 and so she is apparently
not sure how to process the unnatural (both in terms of the sexual act
21 Ibid.,201.
22 Michael R. Schiavi, Effeminacy in the Kingdom: Tennessee Williams and Stunted Spectatorship,
Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2 (1999), 111112. For more recent criticism of the play, see
Alexander Pettit, The Queer Mockery of High Expectations: Comic Closure and the Texts of
Kingdom of Earth, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 14 (2013).
Williams, Kingdom of Earth,137.
23
24 Ibid.,156. 25 Ibid.,143.
26 Ibid., 127. This is indicated in the plays stage directions, but Redgrave is hardly plump in thefilm.
27 Ibid.,201. 28 Ibid.,205. 29 Ibid.,204.
and its object) expression of natural desire. She returns to virgin mode
as she asks Chicken not to talk crudely to her. But her cultured (i.e.,
learned) revulsion of Chickens race, which signifies his bestial, natural
sexuality, is discarded as she opts for a life of physical indulgence, priding
herself on noticin an appreciatin a mans appearance. Physical, seeking
salvation in Chickens sexuality and brutal strength as he look[s] like a
man who could hold back the flood of a river!30 Together, they will meet
the forces of nature head on, celebrate the cataclysm, and survive, drink-
ing warm chicken blood to keep them alive. Chicken even asks her to
produce a son for him, a child from an all-white woman, who would
presumably dilute his own ambiguity.31
Lot, however, is the picture of sterile civilization, taking pains to trans-
form himself into the perfect mimetic representation. He carefully bleaches
his hair so that it appears natural, and is very proud of his artistic ability,
learned, of course, from his mother. He spends the play dressing up, first
in his mothers white silk wrapper, posing with her ivory cigarette holder,
then progressing to full drag in a gauzy, white dress, blond wig, and wide
picture hat trimmed with faded flowers in an attempt to recapture his
mothers image.32 Yet, like Chicken, there is something menacing in his
performance, as by Act II his Mona Lisa smile is more sardonic and the
violet shadows about his eyes are deeper.33 This entire play, in fact, is laden
with a menacing tone. At the end, Lots cross-dressing transforms him
into both a mimetic image and a sinister parody of his dead mother, Miss
Lottie. Lots drag incorporation of his mother, a performance that not
only blurs boundaries of gender but also those of life and death, highlights
the excess and ambiguity that is central to the grotesque. Obsessed with
the past and refusing to move forward, Lot, like his Biblical namesakes
wife, looks back and becomes frozen in representation, an object of art
transformed in his own death by the sexless passion of the transvestite.34
Chicken, by contrast, embraces survival in the present and aligns him-
self with the earth, the land, waiting with his home to take on the chaos
of the flood, a natural act of God.35 Here, God is not the spirit cultivated
by organized religion and glorified in the church songs Myrtle can no
longer remember but a force of nature and chaos, more like Sebastians
conception of God in Suddenly Last Summer another play about desire
that cannot be contained and the, perhaps, unnaturally close bond
between a mother and son as he watches the sea turtles being devoured
30 Ibid.,208. Ibid.,214.
31 32
Ibid.,211.
33 Ibid.,177. Ibid.,212.
34 35
Ibid.,200.
by giant black birds in the Encantadas.36 Chicken chooses reality over
representation, life over art, nature over culture, and a life with Myrtle,
who, although no match for the centerfold on the wall,37 is real, not a
two-dimensional image frozen in time once again, recalling Sebastian,
whose mother Violet insists looks the same in two photographs taken
twenty years apart.38 The struggle between the spiritual gates and the
lustful body39 is resolved, and the body dominates and incorporates the
spirit as the forces of nature become the way to salvation. The mind (the
rational, the logical) is pushed aside, and the spiritbody split, which must
be destroyed in order to celebrate natural life, collapses. Kingdom of Earth
echoes the familiar Lawrencian tension that often appears in Williams
work sexuality is equated with nature and the life force, in a struggle
against the cultured repression that seeks to destroy it. In a note to his
one-act play about D. H. Lawrence, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
(1951), Williams wrotethat
Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex, as the primal life urge, and
was the life-long adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked
away in the cellars of prudery. Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by
tangent obsessions... but all in all his work is probably the greatest modern
monument to the dark roots of creation.40
The celebration and presentation of the dark roots of creation are what
lie at the core of Kingdom of Earth. The last words of the play Up!
Quick! carry a sexual connotation of triumph that serves to completely
drown out the civilized impotence symbolized byLot.
A recent production of Kingdom of Earth, presented by Abrahamse
Meyer Productions from Cape Town, South Africa (the same company
that produced The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in 2013), pre-
miered at the September 2012 Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, and went on to open at Artscape in Cape Town later that
year. This production powerfully captured the spirit of lifes primal urges
and the irrepressible forces of nature and desire that mark this play. While
this Williams play, which takes place in the very particular setting of the
American South, may seem an unlikely choice for South Africans, its prob-
lematic racial stereotypes and the symbolic cultural assumptions associated
36 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, 356357.

37 Williams, Kingdom of Earth,209.
38 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, 359360.
39 Williams, Kingdom of Earth,210.
40 Tennessee Williams, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol.
VII (New York: New Directions, 1981),56.
Figure5 Nicholas Dallas, Marcel Meyer, and Anthea Thompson in Kingdom of Earth,
directed by Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer. Cape Town, South Africa
(2012). Photo by Pat Bromilow-Downing.
with them make it an understandable choice for a nation that has strug-
gled with such widely publicized racial issues. As Marcel Meyer, found-
ing producer of AbrahamseMeyer Productions and the actor who played
Chicken, stated for Provincetown Magazine: I think there are so many rea-
sons that this work resonates in South Africa in regards to issues of land
ownership and race It felt like a South African play, but then at times it
felt like an American play. Our countries have a lot in common. We know
the people in this play. We know the issues. We know the pain.41
Directed by Fred Abrahamse, the plays three central characters were
able to work together to achieve the balance that the play needs in order
to succeed. As Myrtle, Anthea Thompson played her role with perfect
comic restraint, bringing out the humor in her character yet never allow-
ing parody to overwhelm the performance. Chicken (Marcel Meyer) and
Lot (Nicholas Dallas) were formidable adversaries struggling for domin-
ation, and, when Myrtles sensual instinct overwhelms her more civi-
lized inclinations, the choice is clear. Both Meyer and Dallas were able
to fully realize their characters while allowing Myrtle to take center stage,
as she moved between them in the battle between nature and culture,
descending further into Chickens world. Meyers portrayal of the socially
marginalized Chicken was performed with pure animal sex appeal; he was
always menacing, yet he was clearly wounded and, at times, even tender,
making him and the life force he represents appear seductive rather than
simply crude or violent. As Lot, Dallas delicate refinement was balanced
by the masculine competitiveness and sinister frustration that informed
his performance at the most desperate moments, a performance that
seemed inspired by Williams short story The Kingdom of Earth (1954),
on which the play is based.
Williams short story differs somewhat from the play in tone and plot
yet still maintains the requisite ambiguity and excess that inform the play.
The story is narrated from the point of view of Chicken, and, while Lot
is still a lustful creature determined on satisfaction,42 he is more aggres-
sively masculine as well. He does not have any problems with his sexual
performance with Myrtle, and in fact spends the story having animalistic
41 In Steve Desroches, From Cape to Cape: South African Theater Company Returns to
Provincetown, Provincetown Magazine 36:24 (2013), 32. Meyer also played Chris in The Milk Train
Doesnt Stop Here Anymore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Cape Town, South Africa, in 2013,
a production that I discuss in Chapter4. Additionally, he designed the costumes for both Kingdom
of Earth and Milk Train.
42 Tennessee Williams, The Kingdom of Earth, in Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine Books,
1985),399.
sex with her, described by Chicken as panting like two hound-dogs
and grunting together like a pair of pigs in a sty.43 The story also ends
with Chicken and Myrtle getting together; however, Chicken goes on to
explain how they got hitched up that December and are expecting a
baby, which they will name Lot if it turns out to be a boy, in memory of
[his] brother,44 and Lottie if its a girl. Unlike their renegade and rebel-
lious union in the play, Chicken and Myrtles relationship in the story is
socially sanctioned, and they aspire to honor the more civilized side of the
family lineage.
Yet another lustful creature determined on satisfaction can be seen
in the character Nance in A Cavalier for Milady. Like Chickens aggres-
sive lust, Nances desire is characterized as grotesque, but for very different
reasons.45 Played by an actress between twenty-five and thirty,46 Nance is
described as a young woman dressed as a child going to a party in Victorian
costume, and she is treated as if she were a child.47 While she isnt retarded
in the clinical sense, she is obscene,48 and her mother supposes that she
has a morbid derangement that defies diagnosis. She reads adult fiction
and she expresses herself in the language of a refined, grown-up young
lady, except its twisted, depraved, so shocking that Ive stopped taking her
out.49 Yet her mother explains that Nance is simultaneously pure, as she
ignores all language beneath the purity of the dream world she lives in.50
Kept in the house in her nursery51 and locked in the image of a doll-
child, Nances desire oozes outside natural boundaries as she sits with
her eyes bugging out, clinging onto a picture book of Vaslav Nijinsky
and staring at a nude male statue in the hallway while she masturbates
43 Ibid., 390,392. 44 Ibid.,399.

45 The world premiere of A Cavalier for Milady was directed by Gene David Kirk in London in 2011.
This production did not quite capture Williams vision; the pacing and the focus on unstable,
grotesque desire delicate yet excessive did not come across clearly, although I did appreciate
the lyrical set design and found the characterizations of the Mother and Mrs. Aid to be heading
in the right direction. Unfortunately, reviewers tended to, once again, blame the play and the
author, applauding the director for salvaging what he could from this play by trying to concen-
trate on familiar Williams themes even though the play is no masterpiece (Michael Coveney,
A Cavalier for Milady, Cock Tavern, London, The Independent (April 7, 2011)). Fiona Mountford
claimed the play was far from classic Tennessee Williams and wondered whether it would have
made it as far as the London stage if it had been written by an unknown playwright (A Cavalier
for Milady is far from Classic Tennessee Williams, London Evening Standard (April 4, 2011)). This
beautiful play is still awaiting a production that will understand its powerful subtleties and realize
its potential.
46 Williams, Cavalier,49. 47 Ibid.,49. 48 Ibid.,74.
Ibid., 75. Nance can be seen as a composite of Williams, whose father called him Miss Nancy,
49
and his sister Rose, who was chastised by her mother for inappropriate expressions of sexual
desire.
50 Ibid.,67. 51 Ibid.,50.
discretely, her hand in her lap with the fingers movin.52 Her tenuous
grasp on reality is confirmed as the statue transforms for (only) her into
the apparition of Vaslav, who appears for an intimate conversation53 but
rejects her ravenous lips and hungry flesh54 throughout the play, insist-
ing that IT WILL NEVER BE REAL! You can only dream!55
The mother and her friend, Mrs. Aid, both in their sixties, regularly leave
Nance with a sitter while they go on nightly excursions with young male
escorts. Although they are clearly women, they are strange women
shameless.56 Their desire is depicted in terms of a specific stereotype of
gay male desire; they are predatory and pay young men to satisfy them
sexually, even going so far as to have their rendezvous in the Ramble, a
section in Central Park where gay men infamously go cruising, which
adds another layer to their ambiguous drag. Like Nance, their actions
and their desire are portrayed as excessive, inappropriate, and grotesque,
as are their self-images and obsession with youth.57 Mrs. Aid, admiring
herself before going off to meet the gentlemen, pirouettes flirtatiously
before herself in the pier-glass at the opening of the play, prompting the
newly arrived sitter, Miss Josie, to remark that theres something not nat-
ural here.58
Josie sees Nance as a disgusting idiot a creature and insists
that she wont sit with nothing morbid, nothing unnatural.59 Nances
mother finds this attitude limiting,60 canceling out any room for human
ambiguity or expression. Yet Josie is herself grotesque, a stocky, fiftyish-
looking woman who enters glumly61 and is called an old creature62
by Mrs. Aid. Nances hallucinatory indulgences make Josie sick, and
she flatly announces that she is going to the bathroom,63 presumably to
engage in more natural human functions. Disgust for what the charac-
ters consider inhuman or unnatural comes up repeatedly, and the contrast
between that attitude and what Nance sees as natural human desire64
figures strongly throughout the play.65 The conflict between sick desire
and pure spirit66 is central to the grotesque contradiction in Cavalier.
52 Ibid., 52,55. 53 Ibid.,56. 54 Ibid.,64.

55 Ibid.,65. 56 Ibid.,72. 57 Ibid.,76.
58 Ibid., 49. The same line appears in The Mutilated (114); see Chapter4.
59 Ibid., 57, 56,50. 60 Ibid.,50. 61 Ibid.,49.
62 Ibid.,66. 63 Ibid.,58. 64 Ibid.,64.
65 We see a more subtle, romanticized version of this contrast in The Night of the Iguana, when
Hannah tells the story of the salesman who asked her to remove her underwear and began to
masturbate with it. While Shannon sees the story as a sad, dirty little episode that should inspire
disgust, Hannah insists that nothing human disgusts [her] unless its unkind, violent (117).
66 Williams, Cavalier,59.
Nance spends much of the play imploring Vaslav, who is intent on being
pure and above flesh!,67 to deny his disgust and allow her to satisfy her
hungry flesh. He repeatedly resists her advances, crying out Stop it! I
am Spirit! 68 and threatening to leave her if she continues to pursue him,
explaining that apparitions are contradictory, paradoxical things: maybe
only possible on a stage, in a play written by a madman. He exclaims
that In becoming an apparition, I rise, I rise, above flesh! He does not
even eat, since apparitions cant, no digestive tract.69 Nances entreaties
to remember the flesh, it cries to be remembered are repeatedly met
with disgust: Youve defiled me! Im not yet entirely free from the mem-
ories of my body and the disgust of being exploited as a body when I
existed as a great dancer and wanted only that. I told them and wrote in
my diary that I am spiritual food. Yet Vaslav is also, simultaneously, spirit
and flesh, both man and Christ.70 He sees Nances desire as degrading71
and finally disappears as the women return from their dates and are left
to deal with Josie, who insists on double pay for the insult to decency
that she had to endure.72
After Josie leaves, the mother and Mrs. Aid discover blood on the fig-
leaf of the statue.73 Jessica Knight argues that, while Nances goal was
to seduce Nijinsky, it is ultimately his seduction of her that forces her
past her limits of self-control.74 Nances body transgresses its boundar-
ies, as her fluid, her blood, finally touches the representation of Vaslav in
the statue. His body, however, remains closed, classical, as she meets hard
stone, colliding with the sculpture and cutting her forehead.75 Mrs. Aid
decides that Nance is obscene, salacious, and that the mother is har-
boring a monster in [her] house, a travesty of a child in a ruffled white
skirt and pink sash and Dotty Dimple curls!76 In Nances presence, they
decide that the only place for her is a real asylum77 and ignore her pleas
to notice her and stop discussing her as if she herself were an apparition
she is emphatic that she is not spirit but desiring flesh. Since Nances
desire cannot be defined she defies diagnosis they make plans to
have her committed as they exit to discuss the next evenings rendezvous.
Nances morbid derangement is rooted in sexual frustration, and her
mother wants to commit her for the same depravity in which she her-
self indulges. In fact, Nance is competition for her mother and Mrs. Aid,
as Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer is for Violet, who is also intent on
67 Ibid.,63. 68 Ibid.,64. 69 Ibid., 59, 63,60.

70 Ibid., 6364. 71 Ibid.,73. 72 Ibid.,66.
73 Ibid.,73. 74 Knight, Too Difficult to Bear,80.
75 Williams, Cavalier,73. 76 Ibid.,73. 77 Ibid.,74.
shutting up the truth of human desire. The mother insists that she did
not let Nance seduce the chauffeur because she herself had priority there
till his wife made him quit.78 The play ends with Nance desperately call-
ing one of her mothers escort services to demand that they send her an
escort cavalier that looks like him! Nijinsky! immediately, and she waits
on the steps with a candle for him to arrive.79
Grotesque ambiguities and the blurring of boundaries that threatens
stability in this play can also be related to another key aspect of the gro-
tesque, what Freud famously described as the uncanny: something both
familiar and strange at the same time that leads to cognitive dissonance.
Both Ernst Jentschs essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and
Sigmund Freuds The Uncanny (1919) cite E. T. A. Hoffmans story The
Sandman as an exemplary tale of the uncanny. As I discussed in Chapter1,
Hoffmann, known for his blending of realism and fantasy in tales such as
The Sandman and his novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, blurs
the boundaries between human and object in bringing inanimate objects
to life. In Cavalier, the (offstage) statue in the hallway that comes to life
as Nances fantasy of Nijinsky can be seen as uncanny, particularly later,
when blood is said to appear on the fig-leaf as she gets Vaslav confused
with the statue in the hall.80 Similarly, Nances incongruous costume
presents her as a figure in the genre of Hoffman, not quite human and
not quite Victorian doll. Even the humananimal binary is deconstructed
in this play; Mrs. Aid recalls an evening at a private sex show in Havana,
where, for the finale, the actors got down on all fours, hand and knees,
and started barking Wow, wow, to imitate dogs, you know, while indis-
criminately mounting each other.81 And Vaslav remarks that, as a luna-
tic, he was led about in grotesque mockery of a human being, watched
over, treated like a pet monkey on a chain!82
In some sense, therefore, all of the plays characters can be seen as gro-
tesque, even Vaslav, despite his insistence on spiritual purity. The contrast
between Nances incongruous childlike appearance and her aggressive and
undisguised desire make her the most obviously grotesque, and the mother
and Mrs. Aid, with their illusions of youth and beauty they insist that
they are attractive enough to settle only for the best83 in contrast to
the reality of their paid predatory indulgences, are similarly grotesque
figures. Miss Josie is grotesque in a different manner; her stockiness,
dour personality, intolerance, rough language, and ill manners make her
78 Ibid.,75. Ibid.,76.
79
Ibid.,75.
80
81 Ibid.,69. Ibid.,64.
82
Ibid.,72.
83
pretensions of elegance and decency come across as absurd and contra-
dictory. She repeatedly remarks Shit84 in the presence of Nance and the
women, announces her bathroom visits, and tries too hard to come across
as refined and respectable. And Vaslav, in spite of the closed, classical body
that the statue in the hall implies (the mother informs Josie that the statue
is a classic statue and that classic statues are called nude, not naked85),
sees his body as disproportionate, grotesque. He confesses to Nance that
his beauty was just an illusion:
Actually, I was short. Slant-eyed, my hair receded early. My legs were so
muscular that my upper torso, while hairless and well-formed, seemed
inadequate to them. However, costumes and light and the creations of
Bakst and my passion for my art, and, I must admit it, the possessive care
that Diaghelev gave me till I defected to matrimony and madness, made
me appear to have beauty.86
Vaslavs madness, like Nances, is another aspect of grotesque contradic-
tion, on the boundaries between sane and insane. He is perfectly coherent
but claims that his talk is madness and that the licenses of mad-
ness are almost unlimited87 excessive, incoherent, unbounded. Even
Vaslavs memory of Diaghelev is grotesque: he is disgusted by the sight
of Diaghelevs black hair dye staining the pillowcases, not only a symbol
of impurity the black dye infecting the clean, white sheets but also a
blurring of the real and the artificial, compounded by the instability of the
oozing body transgressing its own boundaries.88
A House Not Meant to Stand, another play haunted by apparitions, is
subtitled A Gothic Comedy, already setting up the coexistence of (possibly)
opposing forces. Williams referred to House as his Spook Sonata in the
tradition of Strindberg89 and calls it my kind of Southern Gothic spook
sonata in the opening stage directions.90 Not only are there actual ghosts
in this play, but even the living are characterized as existing in a twilight
state nothing but the disposition of the living remains.91 Williams
1969 play Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? is similarly engaged
with apparitions and begins with a Voice belonging to a tiresome
old man, apparently the ghost of the playwright, who debates the mer-
its of the play with the characters in the prologue. Throughout the play,
the apparitions of Vincent Van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, and Cornelius
84 Ibid.,67. 85 Ibid.,52. 86 Ibid.,60.

87 Ibid., 5859. 88 Ibid., 6364. 89 Keith, Introduction,xiii.
90 Williams, House,3. 91 Ibid.,25.
Waddles92 the dead husband of Louise, the central character all make
an appearance. Merriwether is indeed a play that operates in the fantas-
tic realm of a grotesque twilight, with outrageous characters, desires that
cannot be contained, and a fantastic cakewalk at the end.93 Yet, while
this play is certainly over-the-top, its grotesque aspects and characters are
not quite Gothic, unlike A Cavalier for Milady or A House Not Meant to
Stand, and its comic excesses far outweigh any tragic component (there
is even a happy ending, and Louises romantic interest, Mr. Merriwether,
does return from Memphis), making it less ambiguous in style and tone
than the other plays I discuss here. Knight quotes William Prossers the-
ory that Mr. Merriwether seems to be a hallucination and that what we
are witnessing is a final release into madness,94 positing that in contrast
to his other ghost plays such as Steps and Cavalier, Merriwether is a more
cheerful and artistic depiction of seduction into madness.95 Yet, regard-
less of whether Mr. Merriwether is a hallucination or not (and we have
no way of knowing), she notes that the play seems lighter in mood than
Cavalier96 even though underlying the gaiety of the dancing should be
something of a different nature savage.97
A House Not Meant to Stand presents us throughout with grotesquer-
ies of excess and ambiguity: spectral children who float around its mar-
gins, borderline madness that runs rampant, explosive demonstrations of
religious ecstasy, obsessions with youth and plastic surgery, conflations of
sex and death, and repeated references to alcoholism and gender confu-
sion. Claudia Cassidy came full circle in reviewing A House Not Meant to
Stand when it opened in Chicago, the same city where she first recognized
Williams talent in his Menagerie debut. As Thomas Keith points out in
the introduction to his published edition, Cassidy elaborated on Williams
use of the term Gothic to describe theplay:
If we take the term in the sense of the mysterious, the grotesque, and
the desolate, then A House Not Meant to Stand is a gothic structure, and
Southern gothic at that. But it is Tennessee Williams Southern gothic and
it is shrewd as well as bitter, often sharply, acridly funny as well as sad
a rotting house as on the edge of an abyss, a kind of metaphor for the
92 Both ghost plays House and Merriwether include a character (or apparition of a character)
named Cornelius, which was the name of Williams father, who died in1957.
93 Tennessee Williams, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? in The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),285.
94 In Knight, Too Difficult to Bear,83.
95 Ibid. 96 Ibid.,80.
97 Ibid., 8081.
human condition inside [The play] is indeed mysterious, grotesque and
desolate but whoever said that theater is none of those things? There is here
the acute compassion Tennessee Williams has always had for the victims of
the world we livein.98
Similarly, Gregory Mosher, who was artistic director of the Goodman
Theatre in Chicago when the finalized script of the play was produced in
1982, describes what he calls its gothic savagery in the foreword to the
published version: Replacing a tone of haunting grace with one of gothic
savagery, [Williams] summoned echoes of The Glass Menagerie, bringing
the absent Mr. Wingfield down from his photo as grinning, tempestuous
monster, and transmogrifying a mothers dreams of gentlemen callers into
hallucinations of missing children. Best of all, he gave this nightmare a
distinctive comic force.99 The comic and the tragic continually shift and
merge in House as the audience negotiates its monstrous conflations.
Keith describes a soliloquy, for example, where Jessie Sykes, senior citizen
and recent plastic-surgery patient, speaks in her frilly pastel negligee to
the audience, rambl[ing] from flirtation to death to agony:
It is a forgivable, understandable sort of deception in a woman with my
sometimes I think almost unnatural attraction to desire for sex with
young men. Spud at the Dock House, he understands the looks I give him
and the large tips, he knows what for expectation! [She lowers her voice
confidingly as she continues speaking to the audience.] He knows my name,
address, and phone number! and so does Mr. Black thats what I call
death Oh, I didnt give it to him, but of course he knows it. Everyones
address is jotted down in his black book, but some for earlier reference
than others. Still, I refuse to take cortisone till the pains past bearing, since
it swells up the face which would undo the pain and expense of all those
lifts at Ochsners.100
The connection between desire and death is a familiar paradigm through-
out Williams work, but what makes Jessies speech interesting is both her
directness and the coexistence of these opposites in the same space, a style
much more characteristic of Williams late work. The object of her desire
Spud at the Dock House is conflated with Mr. Death, and both have
her number. Moreover, Jessies speech is lent a grotesque tone by the per-
sonification of death as Mr. Black (we also see this moniker in Now the
Cats with Jewelled Claws, and with Jack in Black in The Mutilated), the
98 In Keith, Introduction,xvi.
99 Gregory Mosher, Foreword, in Tennessee Williams, A House Not Meant to Stand, ed. Thomas
Keith (New York: New Directions, 2008),xi.
100 In Keith, Introduction, xxvii.
overt anxiety surrounding her desire as excessive and unnatural, and a
simultaneous and unapologetic disregard for these concerns. While there
may have been a subtle grotesque quality to Blanche DuBois and her
outcry that the opposite [of death] is desire101 or even to Amandas
spectacular appearance as she emerged with her hair in ringlets in her
girlish frock, which she wore several years before when she led the cotil-
lion102 in her youth Jessie is not subtle about her demands, nor is she
girlishly flirtatious or hiding in shadows and avoiding a bare lightbulb to
preserve her illusions. She is quite open about the fifty percent illusion
that makes up her charm103 and has no problem discussing her rejuvina-
tion104 and enhancements such as her new contact lenses, insisting that
she has a right to lie about her age.105 Her entitled embrace of excess and
her acknowledgment of the mask she constructs to defy death (in a speech
delivered in a negligee, no less) are part of what makes her situation so
bizarrely grotesque.
Death, decay, and degeneration are central themes of A House Not Meant
to Stand, set in a crumbling house that also reflects a society in decline, as
the dilapidation of this house is a metaphor for the state of society.106 It opens
with Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, a couple in their late-sixties or early-
seventies,107 returning home from the funeral of their gay son, Chips. Their
daughter, Joanie, has recently been admitted to an insane asylum for a
little nervous break down after a tragically disappointing love affair,108 and
their younger son, Charlie unemployed and broke, once again has,
without their knowledge, come back home and is upstairs having sex with
his pregnant, born-again fiance, Stacey. Confusion sets the overall tone
of the play, and, while Bella is in shock and mourning, drifting between
past and present and merging the identities of her dead and living sons,109
her husband refuses to mourn for a son who indulged in sex confusion110
and disgusting practices, designing womens clothes and playfully dress-
ing in drag.111 Even on the day of his funeral, Cornelius mocks the apparent
mix-up in the class annual that led to Chips being voted the prettiest girl
at Pascagoula High.112 He is primarily concerned with getting his hands on
a large amount of family money Bella has inherited and that is supposed
to be hidden somewhere inside their home. Bella, who seems lost in a fog
of her own, has forgotten the location of the cash and, at times, denies
101 Williams, Streetcar,120. 102 Williams, Menagerie, 193, 203, 193,193.

103 Williams, Streetcar,41. 104 Williams, House,77.
105 Ibid., 78, emphasisadded. 106 Ibid.,3.
107 Ibid.,4. 108 Ibid.,71. 109 Ibid., 2122.
110 Ibid.,8. 111 Ibid.,7. 112 Ibid.,22.
any knowledge of it at all, leading Cornelius to continually threaten her
with commitment for being out of her mind and gone in the head,113 a
vague pseudo-diagnosis that questions her sanity yet falls short of marking
her as insane. He is unsuccessful in his threats, however, and keeping the
moneys location a secret is Bellas insurance against institutionalization.
The plays action is interrupted throughout by their neighbors, Emerson
and Jessie Sykes, who serve as absurd comic foils to an already absurd situ-
ation. Toward the end of the play, the ghost of Chips appears to Bella to
remind her where the money is hidden.114 She recovers it but tells Jessie
that she wont let Cornelius put her away till all three children are back,115
since the house and the money belong to them. Shortly afterward, ghostly
children appear in her memory,116 and their outcries fill the stage. She
dies at the end of the play, surrounded by the specters of Chips, Charlie,
and Joanie, who appear as young children and take their places around the
dining table to say grace.
Despite superficial parallels with Sam Shepards family dramas (his
1978 full-length play Buried Child comes to mind), House is distinctly late
Williams in tone and style.117 A dark sense of play dominates House, and
comic reversals are everywhere in this world inside out.118 At the begin-
ning of the play, Cornelius switches on the living-room light and a string
of colored light bulbs, thrown over the banisters, lights up. Bella utters a sharp
cry, covering her face,119 an apparent parody of the colored lights and
smashed lightbulbs that thrilled Stella on her and Stanleys wedding night
in Streetcar.120 Mockeries of sex and gender abound not only in Jessies
obsessive and unnatural attraction to young men and Chips drag per-
formances, for example, but also in Williams description of Charlie and
Staceys coupling, which he refers to as orgasmic rutting,121 a term more
appropriate to the sexual activity of animals. Moreover, the sex is painful
for Stacey,122 and she later complains to Charlie about the unnatural, or
at least inappropriate, nature of it: What we done, it hurts me. Thats
for boys, not123 creating ambiguity around Charlies sexual inclinations.
Excess and confusion are blamed for the characters failings, an apparent
113 Ibid., 34,12. 114 Ibid.,69.

115 Ibid.,77. 116 Ibid.,82.
117 The plays connections to Williams biography are overt. For more on the biographical connec-
tions see Thomas Keith, A House Not Meant to Stand: Tennessees Haunted Last Laugh, in Kolin,
The Undiscovered Country.
118 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,11. 119 Williams, House,5.
Williams, Streetcar, 64, 109,112. 121 Williams, House,6.
120
122 Ibid.,4. 123 Ibid.,12.

sickness that Cornelius locates in the Dancies, Bellas side of the family
outrageous public behavior was not just accepted but cultivated among
em. Considered essential!,124 and lunacy, he announces, runs rampant
among them.125 Bellas Uncle Charlie has been in a lunatic asylum for
thirty years,126 and Cornelius describes the time when Bellas sister walked
naked out of the house at high noon with just a hat on and the hat was a
mans, more evidence of the sex confusion that existed among them.127
Cornelius declares that now Bella has fallen victim to indulgence,128 like
the rest of the Dancies, and he even blames Joanies confinement on sexual
excess, telling Charlie that the family problem is over indulgence either
in food like Bella or liquor like Grannie Dancie. Over indulgence is the
Dancie sickness. Your older sister, Joanie, indulged in too much fornica-
tion, such a scandal had to throw her out.129 He declares that both Chips
and Charlie were also insatiable for the sex thing, even though their
desire took on different objects.130 Finally, he blames the death of Chips
whom he calls a pathetic creature on the excesses of terminal alcohol-
ism at thirty-one!131 but also, more indirectly, on his sexual indulgences.
Even Emerson, fifteen years [Jessies] senior,132 is not free from the
sex thing, and confinement to an institution threatens him throughout
the play as well; in this case, however, his wife succeeds in having him
committed. She claims that he suffers from senile dementia of a sexual
nature and tells the audience that it was hilarious as it was disgusting
when he insisted to the manager at the hotel he is building that they hire
a sexy young looker as a housekeeper.133 True to grotesque ambivalence,
disgust and humor are not incompatible in this play, and Keith writes
that, while Emerson seems rational enough, his compulsive sexual fix-
ation, ignited when he meets Charlies sexy and fantastically pregnant
fiance, causes him to shake uncontrollably134 in a bizarrely comic, yet
disturbing, scene: his voice quiver[es] with the hunger that possesses some
of the elderly for the young and lovely.135 The excesses of sexuality, madness,
food, liquor, and general outrageous behavior all merge together under
the mantle of over indulgence, permeating the entire atmosphere of the
play, both inside and outside the house. At the plays opening, Cornelius
is denouncing the consumerism and avarice insatiable avarice that
124 Ibid.,8. 125 Ibid.,17. 126 Ibid.,71.

127 Ibid.,17. 128 Ibid.,19. 129 Ibid.,18.
130 Ibid.,35. 131 Ibid., 17,61. 132 Ibid,10.
133 Ibid.,10. 134 Keith, Introduction, xviii.
135 Williams, House,44.
pervade society,136 and Jessie, more than once, expresses her concern that
a sex-fiend is running around at large on the Gulf Coast highway.137
Keith calls the style of this play hyper-realism138 and sees excess
and extremes operating throughout: Emerson and Stacey swing from
unlikely extremes of the cartoonish to the conventional. Cornelius and
Emerson carry on dialogue that verges on the absurd,139 and Jessie and
Emerson play out two extremes of old age; Emerson the feeblest kind of
simpleton, is incapable of survival while Jessie is the most aggressive sur-
vivor in the play.140 In the stage directions, Williams indicates that Bellas
body is excessive, her way of moving suggests more weight than the actress
needs to carry as she shuffles ponderously, and Cornelius claims that
she pants loudern an ole yard dog.141 Cornelius too is characterized as
somewhat grotesque, slight in comparison to his distended abdomen, and
crude in behavior as he scratches his ass, and, later, lumbers to his easy
chair and flops exhaustingly into it, massaging his belly.142 In Act II, they
stagger back inside from the storm, transformed into representations of
chaos: Cornelius looks like an outraged and bedraggled old monster while
Bella, who ran out of the house in a state of delirious passion, is now
wildly disheveled, suggesting an element of nature.143 In another version
of the play, Williams was even more specific about Bellas status as a gro-
tesque, contradictory figure, already implied in the incongruity between
her appearance and the beauty that her name would suggest. Keith
quotes from a draft fragment of House, titled Our Lady of Pascagoola,
where Williams describes Bella as a grotesque but heart-breaking Pieta,
an abstraction of human love and compassion and tragedy. She
should come across as, simultaneously, ethereal and Rubenesque an
unearthly apparition with a quality of grace and loveliness despite the
great accretion of flesh.144 And, as Keith points out, making [Bellas]
character overweight allows an actress to more readily exploit the comic
potential of her lines.145
Yet perhaps the most bizarrely comical character in the play is Stacey,
as she performs extremes in both appearance and behavior. While Bella is
dying, Stacey is visibly pregnant with new life, her belly distended and
136 Ibid.,5. 137 Ibid., 11,70.

138 Keith, Introduction,xxvi. 139 Ibid.,xxvi.
140 Keith, Tennessees Haunted Last Laugh,214.
141 Williams, House, 4, 6,16. 142 Ibid., 4, 8,15.
143 Ibid., 47, 42,46. 144 Keith, Introduction,xxii.
145 Keith, Tennessees Haunted Last Laugh,209.
protuberant with late pregnancy.146 She emerges downstairs at the end of
Act I, covered in a fantastic beach towel that shields her body from view
from shoulders to knees. The faded towel is patterned with beautiful, stylized
creatures of the sea: fan-tail fish of many colors, sea-horses, crustaceans, shells,
etc. and her face has an ingenuous wide-eyed charm.147 In Act II, her reli-
gious fit is made even more bizarre by her fantastic appearance. And, like
Bella, Staceys name can be seen as a subtle pun, containing the ecstacy
that possesses her. She is beside herself with hysteria, speaking in tongues
and rolling on the floor,148 a scene worth quoting inpart:
OH, IT IS COMIN ON ME! WAIT, ITS COMING, I FEEL IT, THE
GIFT OF TONGUES! WHAHOOOOOOO! BE-BE, YAIS, BAH! OH,
BLESSED! BE, BE, BE, BE, LIEVE! ALL, ALL, ALL COME FORTH!
BAH! BOW! WALLAH, YAIS WALLAH! SALVAREDEMPTION IN
ME, DEEP, DEEP SALVAREDEMPTION, GLORY IN ME, AH,
GLORY, GO DEEP IN ME IN GLORY, AH, AH, GAH, WALLAH,
WOMB! WOMB! WOMB [As if arrived at orgasm, she falls back onto
the carpet].149
Her bawn-again150 parody is, of course, overtly sexual and mockingly
pornographic, as she uncontrollably cries out for ALL, ALL, ALL to
COME ! and implores the spirit to GO DEEP in her WOMB!
Her post-orgasmic exhaustion does not last long, however; she is repos-
sessed by rapture shortly afterward, as Cornelius dismisses her as a preg-
nant lunatic.151 This pregnant lunacy is at the core of A House Not
Meant to Stand a potential chaos, located in grotesque contradiction
and ambiguity, that permeates the play and opens up the possibility of a
new kind of rebirth, one that relies on an ambivalent sort of laughter that
has always been central to the grotesque. In The Grotesque as a Comic
Genre, Barasch writesthat
The comic element in the grotesque is that saving element, a creative vision
in face [sic] of destructive forces. To ignore the comic element in the gro-
tesque or to fail to perceive the grotesque as a comic genre is to miss the
affinities of meaning between early writers like Voltaire or Rabelais and
moderns for the grotesque genre has always been a reflection of creative
possibility, of hope overlying human anguish; in our era, it is perhaps the
only positive expression in a potentially self-destructive world.152
146 Williams, House, 60,59.

147 Ibid.,42. 148 Ibid., 6467. 149 Ibid.,65.
150 Ibid.,64. 151 Ibid., 65, 66,67.
152 Barasch, The Grotesque as a Comic Genre,9.
All three plays discussed above revel in the ambiguity of the human con-
dition that Williams engaged in his later plays, exploring the potentially
regenerative power of the grotesque. By the late 1960s, Williams had
overtly rejected realisms failed fantasies of stability and completion the
straight human heart that Blanche rallied against in the film version of
Streetcar and instead asked us to consider the potential of new, unfamil-
iar possibilities that could be created through the coexistence of contra-
diction. Although these are certainly not happy or hopeful plays in
any conventional sense, neither are they pessimistic or despairing. Going
beyond such artificial binaries, they present, and even celebrate, life in all
its complexity, exhibiting the spirit of going on that Williams was famous
for championing. Chicken and Myrtle choose life over death in the union
of their desire and their determination to survive the impending chaos of
natural disaster, while Lot dies, frozen in representation, as he embodies a
parody of civilized elegance. Nance, in fusing emotional fantasy and phys-
ical reality by acting to realize her desire in an escort who looks like
Nijinsky, embraces life in Lawrencian fashion, if only for the short time
she has before confinement limits her choices. She is not left staring at the
statue in the hall in madness, nor is she pathetically waiting on the front
porch for someone who will never come. She lucidly creates her own com-
promise and, in all likelihood, the escort she ordered will arrive to satisfy
her longing. And, even though House ends with Bellas death, Charlie and
Staceys new baby will ensure that all the life Bella was searching for
will go on153 exactly under what circumstances is unclear, but the point
is that there is no need to know for sure. We are far from the closure and
conventional moral optimism, or pessimism, of domestic realism, heading
toward the undiscovered country of creative, and perhaps unimagined,
human possibility. At the end of the play, even Bellas own children return
as ghostly figures to continue the cycle of renewal and rebirth, releasing
their mother with a prayer.154
Williams, House,35.
153
Ibid.,86.
154
Ch apter 6
All drama is about being extreme

In-yer-face sex, war, and violence
Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme

action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,19381
I have an instinct to shock. Hit them with something.
Tennessee Williams,19622
In essence, all drama is about being extreme: thats why people go
to the theatre.
Anthony Neilson3
In the first book-length study devoted to in-yer-face theatre, Aleks Sierz

defines it as a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors and spectators out
of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking alarm. Often
such drama employs shock tactics, or is shocking because it is new in tone
or structure, or because it is bolder or more experimental than what audi-
ences are used to.4 Sierz was the first to identify and theorize this type
of drama in his 2001 book, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, but
the phrase was being used casually by British theatre critics during the
1990s to describe a new wave of drama. While in-yer-face theatre was a
relatively short-lived phenomenon, declared over by 2002, its passionate
energy spoke for a generation in ways that were powerful and innova-
tive, provoking strong and salient reactions from the international theatre
community.5
1 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,85. 2 In Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,13.

3 In Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001),88.
4 Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4.
5 During a two-day conference on in-yer-face theatre held at the University of the West of England,
Bristol (September 67, 2002), Sierz, the keynote speaker, called in-yer-face more of a sensibility
or an arena than a movement, and declared it over. Sierz was responding to criticism from
some academics and theatre practitioners that labeling these plays in such a way simplified and lim-
ited the rich and varied styles of drama emerging in Britain during the 1990s; he insisted, however,
that in-yer-face was only one style among many during the 1990s, one that reflected the frustrations
of the post-Thatcher, working-class generation.
138
In-yer-face sex, war, and violence 139
While the plays that Williams was writing during the 1970s and 1980s
retained many of his earlier concerns with physical and emotional vio-
lence, the predatory nature of human beings, the ravages of time, and
the inevitable struggle to survive and endure, these late works, as I have
discussed, were often much more direct than the early ones, both in con-
tent and in form. He continued to write about the cruelty of the world as
he did in the earlier plays, but he depicted this cruelty more graphically
and literally. Several factors, including a new social permissiveness, made
it possible for Williams to dismiss the subtlety of symbolism and meta-
phor that marked the early plays and instead turn to the outrageous and
the extreme in dealing with intersections of the personal and the political,
to present what he saw as the chaos of a society on the verge of a nervous
breakdown. The shocking excesses and perverse comic elements we see
in Kirche, Kche, Kinder and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le
Monde, for example, as well as the emotional, sexual, and physical vio-
lence in plays such as Green Eyes and The Chalky White Substance, express
the brutality of human nature stripped of cultural artifice. In essence, the
approach of much of Williams late work, particularly during the 1970s
and 1980s, is therefore more directly in-yer-face, anticipating the social
frustrations and stylistic rebellions that would emerge from young British
playwrights during the 1990s.
According to Sierz, in-yer-face theatre thrives on shock value in order
to elicit a visceral reaction and jar audiences out of their complacency,
defamiliarizing the cruelties that we live with everyday. He argues that the
best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under
our skin. In other words, it is experimental, not speculative, in contrast
to the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we
see in detachment.6 Characteristics of the in-yer-face sensibility include
filthy language, nudity and sex onstage, physical and emotional vio-
lence, humiliation and abuse, and the transgression of social taboos. In
terms of content and form, the subject matter is often beyond the scope
of what is considered acceptable material for the theatre (or for public dis-
course). The style is typically anti-realistic and seeks to subvert traditional
dramatic forms. Politically, these young playwrights focus more on the
personal politics born out of their own observations than on more formal
or organized political ideologies. Dominated by British playwrights Sarah
Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Anthony Neilson, it is a theatre that reflects
6
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4.
the chaos of working-class, post-Thatcher Britain and the young people
who grew up in its wake.7
Influenced, like Williams, by writers such as Artaud and Genet, as well
as by Jacobean theatre, Greek tragedy, and the avant-garde theatre of the
1960s, in-yer-face theatre questions moral norms and affronts the rul-
ing ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more
primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating
discomfort8 and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in order
to question current ideas of what is normal, what it means to be human,
what is natural, or what is real.9 These Generation X playwrights, there-
fore, blatantly eschew in both form and content the conventions of domes-
tic realism what Williams dismissed as superficial, the photographic in
art, favoring instead a closer approach to truth a more penetrating
and vivid expression of things as they are.10 Both Williams late plays and
in-yer-face theatre owe a debt to the work of Artaud, in particular, who
pushed for a theatre of honesty and visceral involvement.11
While it is doubtful that the playwrights involved with in-yer-face
theatre would have known the very late Williams plays that had received
limited productions (or were not produced at all),12 they were certainly
familiar with his classics of the 1940s and 1950s such as A Streetcar Named
Desire, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of
7 Sierz also includes Patrick Marber, Simon Block, Philip Ridley, Jez Butterworth, David Eldridge,
Nick Grosso, Tracy Letts, Martin McDonagh, Phyllis Nagy, Joe Penall, Rebecca Pritchard, Judy
Upton, Naomi Wallace, and Richard Zajdlic among the practitioners of in-yer-face theatre.
8 Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4. 9 Ibid.,5.
Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.
10
11 See Chapter2 for a discussion of Artauds theatre of cruelty in the context of Williams late plays.
12 Kirche, Kche, Kinder was first presented at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York City in
September 1979, where it ran in repertory until January 1980. It was first published in 2008 in the
collection The Traveling Companion and Other Plays. The Chalky White Substance was originally
published in issue 66 of Antaeus in 1991 and received its first production in 1996 by the Running
Sun Theatre Company at Center Stage in New York City, directed by John Uecker (a definitive
version of the play is published in The Traveling Companion). The Remarkable Rooming-House of
Mme. Le Monde was originally published in a limited edition in 1984 by the Albondocani Press
in New York (and in The Traveling Companion in 2008). The probable composition of the play
is 1982. According to George Bixby, publisher of Albondocani Press, in 1982 he requested per-
mission of Williams agent, Luis Sanjuro, to publish a limited edition of the play The Travelling
[sic] Companion, which was written in 1980 and published in Christopher Street magazine in 1981.
Sanjuro conveyed to him Williams feeling that, if Bixby wanted to publish something in a lim-
ited edition, it might as well be something new and previously unpublished. Williams instructed
Sanjuro to send Bixby The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde. It was only first produced
in 2009, at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival (see the Introduction to this book for a
discussion of the premiere). Green Eyes was also published in 2008 (in The Traveling Companion)
and received its first production at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in 2008, directed
by Jef Hall-Flavin.
Youth, which shocked audiences both at the time they were presented and,
to a lesser extent, for generations to come. In-yer-face playwright Simon
Block cites Williams as an influence for his 1995 play Not a Game for Boys,13
and Philip Ridley, also influenced by Williams, claims a curious connec-
tion with Williams Southern sensibility in spite of the apparent differ-
ences in their cultural backgrounds: Something about the Deep South
of America and Londons East End produce dynamic, strong women and
sexually confused males.14
Williams plays of the 1970s and early 1980s take the exploration of
shocking truths that marked his earlier plays to its logical extreme, embra-
cing the possibilities that came with this eras new freedoms in the thea-
tre.15 Although I am not suggesting that Williams late work in the United
States had a direct or immediate effect on the young British playwrights
who emerged to create the controversial in-yer-face plays, I am arguing
that these late plays were often similar in sensibility to this working-class,
youth-inspired style of theatre that would soon erupt, illustrating that
Williams was still culturally relevant and in touch with the social frustra-
tion and anger that would carry into the next decade and inspire casualties
of the Reagan/Thatcher era to virtual revolt16 in the theatre. Like these
playwrights, Williams saw himself as a social and artistic revolutionary,
one whose politics was born more out of his own observations of human
suffering than on more formal or organized political ideologies, and his
late plays share the spirit and tone of the courageous, rebellious drama on
the fringes that would soon be presented by young British artists. Both
tend to expose the violence and cruelty that are masked by polite, civilized
discourse and organized codes of social behavior in order to challenge
hypocrisy and resensitize us to the daily onslaught of emotional and phys-
ical violence we live with in our personal and social relationships.
Sierz discusses the history of provocation in the theatre that he locates
as beginning with Greek tragedy, with its extreme states of mind: brutal
deaths and terrible suicides, agonizing pain and dreadful suffering, human
sacrifice and cannibalism, rape and incest, mutilations and humiliations,
moving through Jacobean drama and, later, gothic fantasy, melodrama,
Grand Guignol (great punch), and the horror story.17 He sees in-yer-
face theatre as part of this tradition of provocative drama, and, indeed,
13 Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,170. 14 In ibid.,45.

15 In 1972, Williams declared that he was very interested in the presentational form of theater, where
everything is very free and different, where you have total license (Conversations,218).
16 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,28. 17 Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, 10,11.
Williams had embraced this extreme sensibility of excess and provoca-
tion in both his fiction and his drama from his earliest days as a writer to
the end of his career.
As I discussed in the Introduction, Williams had planned an evening
of Williams Guignol in 1982, which included The Remarkable Rooming-
House of Mme. Le Monde and The Chalky White Substance. According to
Mel Gordon, Guignol presentations relied on the alternating tensions
between comedy and horror, what he described as the hot and cold
shower or laughter and tears format.18 Richard J. Hand and Michael
Wilson explore laughter as a very complex response in a Grand-Guignol
performance and point out the potentially destructive laughter of the
Guignol,19 characterizing the form as primarily focused on the alternating
of terror and laughter with a certain seductive eroticism.20 They see the
specific skill of the Grand-Guignol actor as negotiating the precarious
journey between horror and comedy.21
Gordon cites a March 1963 edition of RAGE, a sensationalist New York
magazine, as asserting that The most sick, perverted, and pornographic
drama on Broadway can never hope to match the thrillers staged at the
Grand Guignol.22 Hand and Wilsons succinct account of typical Grand
Guignol plots certainly seems to support this assertion:
A prostitute is trapped in a bedroom with a psychopathic killer A doc-
tor replaces medicine with poison and injects his unsuspecting patient
A man embraces his daughter before blowing out her brains Another
father strangles his son to death A womans face smokes and melts as
it is covered in vitriol A man amputates his own hand with an axe A
woman is skinned alive while another watches in sexual ecstasy.23
Woven through the technical and psychological aspects of the genre,
moreover, is an underlying critique of bourgeois convention and moral-
ity, an acknowledgment of instability that reveals itself in the failure of
the rational and the stable and in a loss of trust in those social institutions
that are supposed to protect us primarily the patriarchal structures rep-
resented by the nuclear family, the medical establishment, and the law.
This serves to highlight an instability and unpredictability that is central
18 Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997),18.
19 Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2002),39.
20 Rivire and Wittkop in ibid.,22. 21 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol,38.
22 This quotation is from Gordon, Grand Guignol. Gordon offers this quotation as an epigraph to his
volume.
23 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol,2.
to the Guignol sensibility: The psychological motivation of the Grand
Guignol protagonist/antagonist in the comedies as much as the hor-
ror plays is dictated by the primal instincts, or unpredictable mania,
the plots obsessed with death, sex and insanity and exacerbated or com-
pounded by grotesque coincidence or haunting irony.24 Fear in the Grand
Guignol tradition, therefore, is generated primarily by acknowledging and
embracing an abject world of irrationality and chaos that we must deny
in order to maintain our illusions of security and order. Along these lines,
Williams darkest late plays can be seen as similarly exposing the failure of
rationality he witnessed in the chaos of late twentieth-century culture a
period characterized by war, drastic social upheavals, and political betray-
als marked by a destruction of the very institutions that were supposed
to make us secure.
Viewed within this larger tradition of the history of extreme violence
in the theatre, even Williams most shocking plays seem restrained, drawn
more from the puritanical side of his nature than the aggressive and rebel-
lious cavalier sprit that he often claimed influenced the other side of his
split sensibility. In this respect, while his The Remarkable Rooming-House of
Mme. Le Monde and The Chalky White Substance, for example, do exhibit
elements of the Grand Guignol or in-yer-face plays, they do not come
close to the psychological terror, horror, and direct violence that charac-
terized these popular forms, and hardly deserve to be condemned as too
sick or violent in the context of late twentieth-century theatre.
By 1972 Williams had insisted that he was finished with the long play
form for Broadway and was growing into a more direct form, one that
fits people and societies going a bit mad, going so far as to say that he
wouldnt even mind having a young collaborator now on a thing or two.25
He admitted in 1975 that his work had become darker and that people
find it painful.26 Politically and socially, American society was changing,
and Williams late plays respond to and address these issues. During the
1970s, the Vietnam War had absorbed the United States, which was also
struggling with difficult economic times and tumultuous social revolu-
tions: gay rights, the Womens Liberation Movement, the Black Power and
civil rights movements, as well as race riots throughout major US cities.
While Williams had always resisted positioning himself as an overtly pol-
itical writer, his plays throughout his career do engage the political sphere
in terms of how it can affect the social and personal relations between
human beings, and they demonstrate his awareness of political issues from
Ibid.,x.
24
Williams, Conversations,218.
25 26
Ibid.,287.
his earliest beginnings. In what have become known as two of his appren-
tice plays, Candles to the Sun (1937) and Not About Nightingales (1938),27
he addressed themes such as the plight of Alabama coal miners and the
inhumane treatment of prisoners in a large American prison during the
summer of 1938.28 In the foreword to the published edition of Candles,
William Jay Smith, who knew Williams at Washington University (they
met in 1935)and attended the play, points out that Reed Hynds, review-
ing Candles to the Sun for the St. Louis Star-Times, contended that it was
certainly not a propaganda play, as some lobby critics had thought, but
rather an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set
out in human and dramatic terms.29 In an interview for the same paper,
Williams explained that the play ends as a tragedy for individuals, for in
the end they realize they cannot achieve success and happiness apart from
the group but must sacrifice for the common good,30 and Smith contends
that the play must be read as a closely unified and carefully developed
metaphor.31 In the opening stage directions to Nightingales, which Hale
calls a very American play in its reflection of the Great Depression of the
thirties, its references to President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal, its
apprehension about Hitler and Mussolini and the approaching threat of
war,32 Williams focuses on the widespread human costs of institutional-
ized inhumanity, remarking that the conditions which the play presents are
those of no particular prison but a composite picture of many.33 Even The
Glass Menagerie begins with Toms monologue on the social background
of the play, commenting on the Revolution in Spain and the political
situation in the United States: In Spain there was Guernica. Here there
were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peace-
ful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis.34
Williams outrage at systematic human injustice seemed to reach its
height later in his career, during the years of the Vietnam War. Once
27 For more commentary on the grotesque elements of Not About Nightingales, see Allean Hales
Editors Note to the published version of the play, where she describes its nightmarish, grotesque
quality, pointing out that its climactic scene was performed center stage, with the circle of prison-
ers writhing on the steel grating of trapdoors, as bursts of hot steam assaulted them, suggesting
the Hell Williams intended, a vision by way of Hieronymus Bosch (in Tennessee Williams, Not
About Nightingales (New York: New Directions, 1998), xxv). See also Chapter1 for a discussion of
Bosch and the grotesque in Williams plays.
28 Williams, Nightingales,1.
29 William Jay Smith, Foreword, in Candles to the Sun, by Tennessee Williams (New York: New
Directions, 2004),xv.
30 In Ibid., xvxvi. 31 Ibid.,xvi.
32 Allean Hale, Introduction: A Call for Justice, in Not About Nightingales, by Tennessee Williams
(New York: New Directions, 1998),xiii.
33 Williams, Nightingales,1. 34 Williams, Menagerie,145.
again, it seemed to be the specific human costs, rather than the larger
political policies, that hit home with him and inspired him to speak out.
In Warring Desires: Sex, Marriage, and the Returning Soldier, Michael
Hooper points outthat
If it is possible to make a distinction between them, Williams was always
more troubled by military aggression than by the political decisions that led
to war and ensured its continuance. In a 1966 interview with Walter Wager,
he observed that the military cruelty burnings and napalm spraying
constituted something incomprehensibly evil and confidently foresaw
that there would be no gains worth the life of a single man.35
In December 1971, Williams spoke against the Vietnam War at the
Remember the War Benefit, held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
in New York City. According to Dotson Rader, Williams was inspired
to speak after being briefed on the statistics of the war, the dead and
wounded, the bomb tonnage, troop numbers, the count of the antiwar
Americans still in jail.36 Accounts of the dead and the wounded on both
sides were too much for Williams to bear, and he wondered by whose
secret schedule this mass slaughter [will] end, this shamefully criminal
war stop?37 In his speech, he called Vietnam an evil, immoral war and
declared that, although he was too old to march anymore, he would
march on paper.38 Similarly, in 1975 he maintained that, while his thing
is revolution, personal and artistic, it is not militant and not under-
ground, since [his] violence is all verbal.39
In Green Eyes, Williams addressed the intimate and ambivalent rela-
tionship between aggression and desire, particularly wars effect on sexu-
ality and human relationships during the Vietnam era. Hooper sees both
Williams 1960 play Period of Adjustment and Green Eyes as addressing the
issue of the returning soldiers rehabilitation during the Korean War and
the Vietnam War, respectively, partly with a sense of moral outrage but
mainly with a view to charting the breakdown of marital relations and
the impact of war on sexual desire.40 In the original manuscript of Green
Eyes, Williams had consistently crossed out the word Vietnam in the
35 Michael S. D. Hooper, Warring Desires: Sex, Marriage, and the Returning Soldier, Tennessee
Williams Annual Review 10 (2009),33.
36 In Dotson Rader, Cry of the Heart: An Intimate Memoir of Tennessee Williams (New York: New
American Library, 1985),107.
37 Ibid.,108. 38 Ibid., 113114. 39 Williams, Memoirs,301.
Hooper, Warring Desires, 31. For a discussion of the interplay between desire and politics in
40
Williams work, see Michael S.D. Hooper, Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire
Over Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which resists recent arguments that
Williams was a fundamentally political writer, pointing out that his disaffected characters tend to
dialogue, replacing it with the curious term Waakow, which, as I pointed
out in an editors note to the text, seemed to be the characters slang for
Vietnam, probably derived from whacked out or whacko.41 The point
here is that, even though Williams clearly had Vietnam in mind, in choos-
ing to instead locate the war in a mythical place, he seemed to want to
move from the particular to the general, to make a comment about all
wars and their effects rather than on the specific politics of any particular
war just as Not About Nightingales takes place in no particular prison but
a composite picture of many.
In Green Eyes, what begins as rape ends in sexual satiety.42 The play
opens in New Orleans with a young honeymooning couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Claude Dunphy (or Boy and Girl), waking up and arguing over who
will order breakfast. Claude, a soldier on leave,43 demands to know where
his wife got the tooth an claw marks on her body, like shes been t bed
with a wildcat. She claims that it was he who squeezed an bit [her] las
night in [his] sleep and that it was his sex starvation44 that was respon-
sible for her bruises. She had left her husband drinking on Bourbon Street
the night before to go back to the hotel, and when he tells her that he
found a condom in the toilet of their room, she claims it must be his and
that she suspects he forgot to take it off after having sex with a Bourbon
Street stripper. Their conversation shifts seamlessly between his aggressive,
tormented insistence on an explanation for his wifes bruised body and
his aggressive, tormented experiences in Waakow, where he complied
with orders to shoot down screamin wimmen an children;45 domestic
intimacy and war are fused. The Girl, who sees his duty as doing whatever
he was ordered to, a soldier got to do what hes ordered particularly
since those jungle people are animals Lessn human46 dismisses
the anguish he expresses over his actions and calls his patriotism and
revert to glamorized marginalization rather than fight for social change. Hoopers book explores
the interface between desire and the broader politics it often succeeds in stifling and argues that
while the pursuit of desire creates its own power structures, it also diverts, even dismantles, larger
political frameworks, so that Williamss social conscience is lost in stories and plays that probe the
personal rather than the ideological, that reference contemporaneous events but are not fundamen-
tally political(9).
41 Tennessee Williams, Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing, in The Traveling Companion
and Other Plays, ed. Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008),152.
42 John S. Bak, A Streetcar Named Dies Irae: Tennessee Williams and the Semiotics of Rape,
Tennessee Williams Annual Review 10 (2009),59.
43 The soldier who is about to get sent to Vietnam in Gerome Ragni and James Rados hit play Hair,
which ran on Broadway from April 1968 to July 1972, is also named Claude. It is unlikely that this
was a coincidence, given the timeline of Green Eyes, which was sent to Williams publisher, New
Directions, by Audrey Wood at International Creative Management on September 17,1971.
44 Williams, Green Eyes, 151,152. 45 Ibid.,155. 46 Ibid.
masculinity into question, warning him not to lose her respeck.47 Their
argument over whether she could have carried out such orders herself slides
into the present argument over ordering breakfast, as the word ordered
becomes layered with double meaning, sliding from his past traumatic
experiences to their present mundane argument:
BOY: Could you have doneit?
GI RL: If ordered.
BOY: Then you go back to Waakow in five days, you take my place there!
SayI
GI RL: I would if ordered.
BOY: You know you wont be ordered. Git back inbed.
GI RL: Not with breakfas ordered, waitll tnight.
BOY: Come away from that window with your back to me like you hated t
seeme.48
Not only are war orders and breakfast orders conflated but Claude now
gives his wife orders to get back into bed with him. Even as he sus-
pects her of infidelity the night before and demands an explanation, he
tries to make love to [her] advances she rejects as rough and awk-
ward: Feelin me like a melon t see if Im ripe is not makin love tme,
Claude.49
After he informs her, however, that he will be sending his army paycheck
to his mother, not to her, she offers to tell him the truth about las night,
claiming that she done it five times with a man who caught hold of [her]
wrist, drug [her] between two buildings, and befo [she] could holler put
his hands on her, which she enjoyed it was too late to holler after that
and they had sex in the alley.50 They both wanted more, and she goes on to
describe a night of passionate, animalistic sex in her honeymoon bed with
this sailor who had enawmus green eyes,51 an obvious reference to his sex-
ual potency. Claudes reaction is that people with green eyes have nigguh
blood in em and are therefore racially ambiguous, as he dismisses this
man as a nigguh riddled with disease, but the Girl calls him clean as
the sea.52 Language is blatantly overdetermined, as blackness becomes a
signifier of both burning desire and racial otherness, and Claude marks his
wife as infected with blackness. Her claim that her lover had burned the
room runnin in like it caught fire. I tell you its a wonder Im not burned
black! is followed by Claudes attack that a whore fucked by a nigger is
47 Ibid.,158. 48 Ibid., 155156.

49 Ibid.,156. 50 Ibid.,162. 51 Ibid.,163.
52 Ibid., 162. For more on racial ambiguity, see Chapter5, where I discuss Kingdom of Earth.
burned black!53 Hooper writes that Claude defends the Vietnamese he
has killed against his wifes ignorant claims that they are animals but
when threatened sexually, his nemesis is (as he sees him) African American
and riddled with venereal disease.54 Even though Claude repeatedly calls
his wife a whore and threatens to knock [her] teeth in, she is determined
to finish this life story of hers,55 taunting him with his inferiority, provid-
ing details of her ecstatic infidelity, and even going so far as to say she had
begged this green-eyed man to let her run away with him but he had to
return to sea alone. In essence, Claude, the soldier sent to halt the advance
of Communism in an unstable foreign country returns to find his own
wife possessed and colonized.56 The play ends with a build-up of violence
and sexual intensity; Claude tears open her flimsy wrapper as she is in a
heated passion over this man whose green eyes blazed at an blinded her,
set her on fire, a fire that her husband will never put out! His anger
turns to frenzied desire as he demands to be infected by that passion:
Burn me in it, yeah, youre blazin hot, burn me!57 He needs to rape his
wife and be burned black himself now, in a series of curious equations of
sexual desire, but she fights off his advances, still insisting that nothing will
ever match last nights ecstasy.
Green Eyes premiered at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival
in 2008, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin and starring Jaimi Page and Matt
Rasmussen. Hall-Flavins riveting production which was first presented
at the Art House Theatre in 2008, then again in 2011 in an actual hotel
room (with Matt Rein taking over as Claude) powerfully brought out
the relationship between sexual tension and the tensions of battle.58 In
2010, Travis Chamberlain directed Green Eyes for Target Margin Theaters
Unknown Williams Lab with performance artist Erin Markey59 and Adam
Couperthwaite, and in 2011 this production was presented in a hotel
suite in New York Citys Hudson Hotel as part of PS 122s COIL Festival.
53 Ibid.,163. 54 Hooper, Warring Desires,37.

55 Williams, Green Eyes, 162,163.
56 Hooper, Warring Desires, 37. For further discussion of Green Eyes, see Hooper, Sexual Politics.
57 Williams, Green Eyes,164.
58 Hall-Flavins production was presented once again at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary
Festival in 2014, with Jaimi Page and Matt Rein reprising their roles. It was part of an evening
of Williams one-acts titled the Hotel Plays, which included The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, Mr.
Paradise, and The Traveling Companion and took place in a balcony room in the Hermann-Grima
House in the French Quarter, as the audience moved from room to room to view each play.
Presenting Green Eyes in this location authentically mirrored the plays setting and illuminated the
production in ways that would not otherwise be possible.
59 Erin Markey also appeared in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws in 2011, directed by Jonathan
Warman. See Chapter2.
Performed for audiences of twenty at a time in what Chamberlain called a
hyper-intimate production, this interpretation dealt even more aggres-
sively with the plays taunting sexuality, even adding a striptease by the
Girl for the plays opening frame. Highlighting the sadomasochistic desire
underlying the play, this centennial production overtly brought out the
ambiguous connections between desire, sexual violence, andwar.
By the 1980s, with Vietnam behind the United States and the Cold War
reaching its climax, Williams was becoming obsessed with the possibility
of nuclear holocaust, as was the nation. The Terminator (1984) was a box-
office hit, and on November 20, 1983, Americans were glued to their tel-
evisions for the premiere of the television movie The Day After, written by
Edward Hume and directed by Nicholas Meyer, which depicted the after-
math of a nuclear war between the United States/NATO and the Soviet
Union/Warsaw Pact, focusing on the residents of Kansas City, Missouri,
and Lawrence, Kansas, who were living in a barren, devastated world. The
threat of destruction and a focus on self-preservation are evident through-
out Williams plays of this period, not only The Chalky White Substance
and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde but also A House
Not Meant to Stand, where the collapsing house serves as a metaphor for
a disintegrating society, which Cornelius describes as sinister, with both
East and West armed to the teeth. Nukes and neutrons. Invested so
much in every type of munitions, yes, even in germs, caint [sic] afford not
to use them, fight it out to the death of every human inhabitant of the
earth if not the planets destruction opposed by no one.60
In keeping with his darker vision, Williams The Chalky White
Substance is set in a post-apocalyptic world where there is little human
tenderness and the earth is covered with a mysterious chalky white pow-
der that continually blows through the sky, choking the atmosphere,
enveloping everything and everyone. Philip C. Kolin has described the
play as an anti-gospel, a Williams anti-parable.61 Although the names
of the two characters, Luke and Mark, evoke the Apostles, they live in a
postapocalyptic wasteland where cruelty and survival of the fittest domin-
ate. Lukes protector, Mark, threatens to turn him in to the authorities in
order to claim the reward for cooperating with a totalitarian regime. Mark
claims that he is certainly capable of such action to save himself, since self-
preservation has become the way of life in a world that cant support its
Williams, House,48.
60
61 Philip C. Kolin, The Existential Nightmare in Tennessee Williamss The Chalky White Substance,
Notes on Contemporary Literature 23 (January 1993),9.
shrinking population a man will use a woman a while and then, when
shes no longer desirable to him, not as she was before, hes likely to des-
troy her.62 The play ends with Mark finally dragging Luke, futilely strug-
gling, across the stage to turn him in to be locked up confined til long
out-used, to the end of [his] time. Even Lukes pleas to have mercy and
just kill [him] are rejected, since Mark will not sacrifice the reward.63
It is with The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, however
the play Williams called his Guignol that Williams succeeded in
affront[ing] the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage,64
thereby revealing a more primitive, bestial side of human nature. It is rele-
vant that this is Williams only published play to be set in England,65 as
Rooming-Houses mock-Englishness takes advantage of a culture that (at
least through American eyes) values socially proper, civilized behavior
that is often expressed in a careful, self-diminishing manner. The play
smashes this polite faade and uncovers an extreme self-regard marked
by the human quest for power, embracing a sense of cruelty, manipula-
tion, control, and the fight for sexual domination beneath social repres-
sion. The power games in Rooming-House play with the notion of what it
means to be human when all taboos and boundaries have been removed.
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, like in-yer-face thea-
tre, draws on Artauds philosophical concept of a theatre free from social
taboo to access the truth of what lies beyond the civilized surface of human
interaction.
As I discussed in Chapter 2, Artaud likens the theatre to an urban
plague, an extreme situation that breaks through civilized repression to
reveal a more honest and primal human reaction. Once the plague is
established in a city, Artaud writes, the regular forms collapse66 and the
dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed,
62 Tennessee Williams, The Chalky White Substance, in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, ed.
Annette J. Saddik (New York: New Directions, 2008).
63 Ibid., 1112. The Chalky White Substance was revived in 2007, directed by David Kaplan at the
New Orleans/Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. It starred Ben Greissmeyer (now known as Ben
Berry) and Jeremy Lawrence, and was presented with another Williams two-hander, The Traveling
Companion, using the same actors, a pairing that highlighted the familiar Williams theme of
opportunism and greed revealing themselves as part of the power dynamics of intimate relation-
ships. This production was also presented later that year at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival, with Zachary Clause replacing Ben Greissmeyer.
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,4.
64
65 The Pronoun I focuses on Mad Queen May and also apparently takes place in England, but the
play is so absurdist, and Queen May so obviously a fiction, that the setting is inconsequential.
enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no pur-
pose or profit.67 For Artaud, this irrational explosion of human will is
emblematic of the theatre, in the sense that theatre is an immediate gra-
tuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.68 Yet, rather than attack-
ing bodies, the theatre attacks social customs. Excess and exaggeration are
needed in order to free us from the old forms, as there must be absolute
freedom in revolt: In the true theater a play disturbs the senses repose,
frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which
moreover can have its full effect only if it remains virtual) and imposes on
the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic.69
Like the human spectacle that occurs in reaction to the plague, the theatre
releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these
possibilities are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but
of life. Rather than seeing this darkness as negative, Artaud insists that
it is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes
the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, the baseness, and hypoc-
risy of our world.70 For Artaud, incest, rape, physical violence, emotional
cruelty, and the quest for power are all part of the primal reality that is
revealed when the mask fallsaway.
Along these lines, Rooming-House exhibits a desperate self-concern and
a cruelty, evident in physical and emotional violence as well as in the with-
holding of comfort and sustenance. The deliberate cruelty that Blanche
DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire insisted was unforgivable71 is taken
to an extreme in Rooming-House. The rooming houses landlady, Mme.
Le Monde who is described as a large and rather globular woman with
a fiery red mop of hair that suggests a nuclear explosion, as does her voice72
distributes meager rations for Mints consumption, and eventually these
too disappear as their visitor, Hall, greedily devours the tea and biscuits
without regard for Mints suffering, even as Mint begs him to have pity
on a broken and desperate soul, subsisting on diminishing bits of char-
ities.73 Mint is used for violent sexual gratification throughout the play:
raped, neglected, mocked, and starved. Denying Mints request for the
lubricant that would make an assault endurable, even pleasurable, his
assailant Mme. Le Mondes son instead announces that he will be
using astringent, causing Mint to cr[y] out in terror.74 Yet, as in Green
67 Ibid.,24. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 29,28.

72 Williams, Rooming-House, 103. 73 Ibid.,98. Ibid.,102.
74
Eyes, there is also an element of pleasure in Mints response to the rape, an
ambivalent ecstacy in submission to violence. Kolin sees Mintas
stak[ing] his ancestry in freakdom to a long line of mutilated/disfigured
souls in Williams the Strega in Rose Tattoo, Anthony Burns in Desire
and the Black Masseur, Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer,
Trinket Dugan in The Mutilated, the Frulein in Gndiges Frulein, and the
assorted denizens of kinky desire who inhabit Williamss last novel, Moise
and the World of Reason.75
Yet, despite the overt cruelties he endures, Mint remains polite and self-
deprecating in what amounts to a parody of English social propriety and
is careful to not appear to be complaining.76 His protestations to Hall as
he greedily devours the tea and biscuits with no regard for Mints desper-
ate hunger are weak and apologetic: You are drinking the tea so fast that,
pardon me for this concern which may seem to be selfish, I I fear that
the pot will be empty before I am able to join you.77 Later, his requests are
a bit more insistent: I meant could you reduce somewhat the speed with
which you are I mean not quite so rapid, the consumption of biscuits
and tea, since, but Halls response is simply Not a chance, old boy.78
Moreover, Halls repeated insults to Mint, calling him a bit of a fag, to
put it politely and a bed-wetter,79 for example, are ignored. He follows
an offensive remark to Mint with the automatic no offense, and Mints
response is characteristically reassuring: Oh, none taken none what-
soever, dear Hall.80 Mint does finally cry out, begging for nourishment:
For the sake of our blessed Saviour, save me one biscuit! but his pleas are
dismissed by Hall, who tells Mint that he must simply have hope that
more will arrive.81
Hall continues to employ this same sort of mock-politeness in his rec-
ollection of lewd public sex acts with a woman in ataxi:
She said, Dont come in the oral preliminary, I want you to fuck me.
Not wishing to contract the clap or syph from her, I politely declined. She
became somewhat annoyed. Then remove your cock from my mouth
please. I did not comply with this bad-tempered request. On the contrary,
I shot my load immediately down her esophagus.82
The measured, polite language conflicts with the violence, vulgarity,
and selfishness of the encounter, making a comment on the uselessness
75 Philip C. Kolin, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde: Tennessee Williamss Little
Shop of Comic Horrors, Tennessee Williams Annual Review 4 (2001),41.
76 Williams, Rooming-House,95. 77 Ibid.,96. 78 Ibid.,97.
79 Ibid., 99,95. 80 Ibid.,93. 81 Ibid.,101. 82 Ibid.,99.
and dishonesty of politeness and propriety in general. Moreover, this
juxtaposition of cruel violence and polite expression engages the sick
humor, humor too diseased to allow for easy reconciliation that marks
the grotesque.83 Halls shift from offensive, cruel remarks presented
in a matter-of-fact manner to casual observations about the weather
made through broken spectacles to requests to borrow money from
the present object of his cruelty is performed without transition or
differentiation:
[He munches a biscuit.] At Scrotum-on-Swansea you were a notorious fag
and bed-wetter but reasonably mobile. Now you can get about only by
swinging from hook to hook, like that historical ape-man swinging from
branch to branch in the jungle. [He puts on broken spectacles to look about.]
Twilight descending with intemperate weather. [He picks a crumb or two
off the floor and pops them into his mouth.] Havent had time to stop by my
bank today. Can you spare me a couple of quid?84
His shocking lack of awareness is both disturbing and funny in a sick
sort of way, creating a dizzying disorientation, a response that leaves spec-
tators in an ambivalent emotional space.
The theme of fundamental human selfishness and the predatory aspect
of human nature that appeared in Williams plays such as Suddenly Last
Summer, The Gndiges Frulein, and Kingdom of Earth, for example, is
intrinsic to Rooming-House. Natural law dominates and the characters are
reduced to their bestial origins, as Mint can now get about only by swing-
ing from hook to hook, like that historical ape-man swinging from branch
to branch in the jungle. At one point, Hall insists that Mint had groped
his genitals without realizing it, perhaps by allowing his unconscious
impulse to over[come] propriety for a second.85 At the end of the play,
Mme. Le Monde murders Mint, Hall, and even her son, claiming that
he is expendable and replaceable: I am constantly reproducing drones
such as that one.86 Human life has no value, and individuality no longer
matters. The taboos of incest, homosexuality, rape, pedophilia, murder,
and the parentchild bond are all carelessly done away with in this play.
Halls story of a child murdering his parents with tools that ranged from
hacksaw to meat grinder is relayed with a matter-of-factness that assumes
cruelty and accepts the cycle of life: Well, what of it? Obviously suffered
child abuse in his youth: finally evened it out.87
83 Remshardt, Staging the Savage God, 8182. See Introduction.

84 Williams, Rooming-House,95. 85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.,104. 87 Ibid.,100.
What remains in Mme. Le Mondes final speech is a world dominated
by survival of the fittest: The world is accident prone, no use attempting
correction. After all, the loss of one fool makes room for another. A super-
abundance of them must be somehow avoided if at all possible now.88
The only hint of regeneration or rebirth in this world the only world
that exists, since she is Le Monde is the announcement of her exces-
sive fertility: Mr. Hall, my fecundity is equal to the queen bees. I am
constantly reproducing drones such as that one.89 It is, however, a bleak
and repulsive regeneration, grotesque in its careless economy of reproduc-
tion and destruction.
In one sense, this play is very specific to the economic and political cli-
mate of the 1980s, with its elevation of greed and competition. Mme. Le
Monde could even be seen as a character modeled on Margaret Thatcher
(who similarly had a mop of hair that resembled a mushroom cloud),
with Hall as a model for Reagan. On another level, of all Williams late
plays, this one could have been written in the current economic climate,
with its references to the hypocritical ruthlessness of financial dealings and
the undermining and destruction of economic rivals.90 Mme. Le Monde
negotiate[s] a deal the likes of which the queen herself would scarcely
equal if the whole British empire at the height of its grandeur fell back
into her lap and acquires a controlling interest in Amalgamated, Inc
from Hall.91 At the end of the play, however, she betrays Hall, and, in a
scene that seems like it could have come out of Sweeny Todd, pulls a lever
by the door, which is followed by sounds mechanical and human as the stairs
flatten out, becoming a long deep slide to the pits. Silence. Then the mechan-
ical piano picks up again its sentimental and nostalgic refrain.92 Propriety
is dismissed, greed and selfishness win out, and the dark Artaudian uni-
verse of primal reality takes over, while a sentimental tune plays in the
background.
Kolin writes that Throughout Rooming-House Williams emotionalizes
a physical set, as he had done throughout his career The set in Rooming-
House is personified, the metonymy of the suffering body.93 Dianne M.
Zandstra, who analyzes the grotesque in the work of Argentinian writer
Griselda Gambaro, argues that Gambaro presents the concrete suffer-
ing of the human body, broken and distorted. She sees Gambaros work
88 Ibid.,105. 89 Ibid.,104.
90 I want to thank my doctoral students in our Spring 2013The Grotesque in Theatre course at the
CUNY Graduate Center Program in Theatre for these insights.
91 Williams, Rooming-House,103. 92 Ibid.,105.
93 Kolin, Little Shop of Comic Horrors,42.
as rooted in the theatrical tradition of grotesco criollo of the late 1920s
and early 1930s, and argues that this traditions tragicomic presentation
degraded the pretentiousness of the foundational myths of the social
system by depicting the degradation of the individual.94 Gambaro, she
writes, carries over techniques and patterns from this tradition into her
novels as well as into her plays. Some of them are the failure of the gro-
tesque protagonist, the inability to control ones own body, the breakdown
of language as communicative device, and the use of animal imagery to
describe human beings.95 Zandstra cites Francine Masiellos discussion
of Argentine narrative works that opposed the dictatorship during the
Military Process of National Reorganization of 19761983, pointing out
that, in these texts, the body takes center stage to speak the truth regard-
ing its own oppression.96 Similarly, the broken body of Mint that his-
torical ape-man and morphodite gimp97 who is dependent on Hall to
place him back on his hooks in order to have even the most rudimentary
mobility is starved, carried off repeatedly to be raped, and finally thrown
onto his cot which flattens to floor, where he evidences no sign of sur-
vival.98 While Mint must perversely depend on the kindness of stran-
gers who instead torture him, his body becomes a metaphorical site on
which the chaos of political, social, and interpersonal situations that are
outside our control operate. This lack of control over ones body culmi-
nates in the sexual incontinence that permeates the play incest abounds
in Mme. Le Mondes relations with her son; Mint was never blessed with
a particularly strong nature to resist the lustful advances;99 Hall refuses
control and ejaculates when and where he pleases; and Mme. Le Mondes
son the Boy is equated with an out-of-control phallus, at the mercy of
his own rapacious desires.
Even though the playwrights who launched what came to be called
in-yer-face theatre most likely had Williams classics of the 1940s and
1950s in mind as influences, plays such as Rooming-House and Green Eyes
as well as several of his other plays of the 1970s and 1980s went far beyond
what he was able to depict on the stage thirty years before. They there-
fore have the most in common with these British plays of the 1990s. Sierz
writes that the early sixties saw the first steps in the emergence of a truly
94 Dianne M. Zandstra, Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque (Cranbury, NJ:
Bucknell University Press, 2007), 1516.
95 Ibid.,16. 96 Ibid.,15.
Williams, Rooming-House, 95,103.
97
98 Ibid.,104. 99 Ibid.,101.
confrontational theatre in Britain,100 and in 1968 censorship laws were
repealed in both the United States and Britain, providing opportunities
for playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic to write, as Williams put
it, more honestly about life.101 One difference between Rooming-House
and in-yer-face theatre, however, is that the perverse sexual act[s] in
Williams play occur behind the semi-transparent curtains, provided as
a retreat for certain occasions that require privacy.102 In-yer-face theatre
rejects the very concept of privacy, exposing most of the graphic violence
and perverse sexual acts onstage in front of the audience, taking Artauds
notion of excess in the theatre that which is too much to a new level,
as the violence that was only referred to or partially hidden in Rooming-
House is, in most cases, actually depicted in front of us on the stage.
While this chapter would not accommodate an in-depth analysis of the
major works of in-yer-face theatre at this point, one illustrative play does
merit some consideration in relation to Williams late works. When the
enfant terrible of in-yer-face theatre, Sarah Kane, had her first play, Blasted,
produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995, she endured extra-
ordinary public controversy.103 The play was first performed in the United
States at Harvards Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in
April 2008, and the New York premiere opened in October of that year
at the Soho Rep Theatre, directed by Sarah Benson and staring Marin
Ireland, Reed Birney, and Louis Cancelmi. Masturbation, rape, defeca-
tion, fellatio, racism, sexism, homophobia, and foul language are only the
beginning of the list of what makes this play shocking and uncomfortable,
both on the page and, even more so, in performance. In the course of the
one hour and fifty minutes of action (no intermission), a baby is eaten,
eyes are gouged out, a woman is raped in a blackout scene, and a man is
sodomized onstage. Sex is a power game, one of violence and domination.
Written as a comment on the war in Bosnia, Kanes play draws parallels
between personal aggression and the more widespread aggressions ofwar.
The plot is absurd and extreme, in keeping with Kanes sense that the
form and content attempt to be one. The form is the meaning. She sees
the play as experiential rather than speculative,104 putting the audience
in the second half of the play through the experience it had previously
only witnessed in the first half. Blasted opens in a very expensive hotel

101 Williams, New Selected Essays,109. 102 Williams, Rooming-House,91.
103 David Greig, Introduction, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, by Sarah Kane (London: Methuen,
2001),ix.
104 In Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre,98.
room in Leeds105 an elegant and civilized setting for the explosive and
uncivilized violence we witness throughout the course of the play with
Ian, a middle-aged journalist who is apparently dying of lung cancer, and
a naive, caring, stuttering (and perhaps mentally slow) young woman,
Cate, who had once been Ians lover before he rejected her. Ians first line
gives an indication of what audiences can expect from the play: Ive shat
in better places than this.106 This is perhaps a more vulgar version of Bette
Davis famous line, What a dump, also referenced in yet another play
that explodes with emotional violence, Edward Albees Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962). Ian carries a gun and suggests he is involved in
more dangerous pursuits than journalism, possibly as a hired killer. Cate
has agreed to see him out of guilt, and he attempts to seduce her through-
out scene one. She repeatedly resists his advances, and he rapes her in a
blackout at the end of the scene, reminiscent of the suggested rape at the
end of scene x in Streetcar.107
Both scene i and scene ii end with the explosive sound of rain falling,
but the absurd passage of time is suggested by the fact that the rain at
the end of scene ii is summer rain while in scene i it had been spring
rain.108 At the end of scene ii, a nameless soldier bursts in and invades the
space, marking his territory as he stands urinating over the pillows, and
there is a blinding light, then a huge explosion, followed by a blackout
and more rain.109 Rain and water in general figure strongly in this play, a
cleansing ritual that ironically implies hope and redemption. Blasted opens
with Ian asking Cate if she wants a bath, then going into the bathroom
to take one himself.110 The morning after he rapes Cate, he dismisses her
anger and goes off to take a shower.111 Later Cate is taking a bath when the
soldier bursts into the living room, which allows her to escape through the
bathroom window before he realizes she is there. His urinating over the
pillows a mockery of rain is countered by the bathing that saves Cate
from his potential assault. A powerful image in Kanes work, cleansing
becomes an ironic metaphor in her 1998 play, aptly titled Cleansed. This
play was conceived as the second part of a trilogy of plays, the first being
Blasted and the third intended to be concerned with nuclear devastation,
105 Sarah Kane, Blasted, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001),3.
106 Ibid.,3.
107 The violence of Cates rape is not depicted onstage. See Kim Solga, Blasteds Hysteria: Rape,
Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible, Modern Drama 50:3 (2007) for an insightful discus-
sion of Cates unstaged rape through a feministlens.
108 Kane, Blasted, 39,24. 109 Ibid.,39.
110 Ibid.,45. 111 Ibid.,25.
before she abandoned the idea of a trilogy.112 The symbolic function of
water in Blasted can be contrasted with its role in the devastated landscape
of The Chalky White Substance, where water is severely restricted by the
authorities and Luke bathes in an illegal, subterranean stream in order
to keep his skin clean and soft for Marks pleasure. It is this information
that Mark uses to betray Luke and turn him in to the authorities for a
reward, as water becomes the catalyst for punishment rather than redemp-
tion. Similarly, in Rooming-House the rumble of thunder and sounds of
gusty rain sweeping the attic roof at the beginning113 serve as a sinister,
almost Gothic, commentary. The rain bridges the two instances of Mints
suffering that open the play, as it comes right after the Boy rapes Mint and
is followed by the entrance of Hall, Mints new tormentor. And Kingdom
of Earth, of course, is driven by the destruction of the coming flood.
During scene iii of Blasted, the violence that had previously been sug-
gested on a smaller scale finally explodes onstage. The hotel has been blasted
by a mortar bomb and there is a large hole in one of the walls, and everything
is covered in dust which is still falling.114 As in The Chalky White Substance,
suffocating dust has replaced refreshing water. The violence escalates as the
soldier rapes Ian onstage, sucks out his eyes, eats them, and then shoots
himself dead, ending scene iii. In scene iv, Cate returns, carrying a baby and
announcing that Soldiers have taken over and Everyone in town is cry-
ing.115 By scene v, the baby has died, and Cate leaves to go trade sex with
the soldiers for food in her focus on survival. During this final episode, the
plays excesses are evident in both the language and the action. Ian mastur-
bates, defecates, and eats the dead baby, as he performs his climactic solio-
quy: cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.116
Like Mark and Luke in Chalky White, the characters in Blasted strug-
gle to survive amid the debris of a postapocalyptic landscape. Images of
apocalyptic explosion mark Rooming-House as well. Mme. Le Monde, as I
pointed out earlier, is described as a large and rather globular woman with
a fiery red mop of hair that suggests a nuclear explosion, as does her voice,117
and Kolin argues that she is the larger world, intimately betrothed to
the flesh and the devil in Williamss (sometimes comic) apocalyptic cos-
mography.118 While Blasted is a 1990s response to the war in Bosnia, the
sexual violence in Green Eyes is tied to the violence of the Vietnam War,
112 Greig, Introduction,xiii. 113 Williams, Rooming-House,92.

114 Kane, Blasted,39. 115 Ibid.,51.
116 Ibid.,59. 117 Williams, Rooming-House,103.
118 Kolin, Little Shop of Comic Horrors,43.
and Williams plays of the 1980s reflect a world where the threat of nuclear
devastation was still looming and often focus on the national paranoia
fused with his own personal paranoia which, in both cases, was not
necessarily misplaced.
Unlike Green Eyes, Chalky White, or Rooming-House, however, Kanes
wildly violent play ends with bizarrely misplaced gestures of kindness,
gratitude, and redemption. Despite all the plays horror and violence,
Cate returns to feed Ian with the remaining food and pour gin into
his mouth.119 She still believes in conventional morality, telling Ian in the
final scene that Its wrong to kill yourself God wouldnt like it.120 Even
though Ian flatly rejects any idea of God, he still asks her to pray for him
when hes dead.121 Hope emerges in a strange and minimal way, as Cate
insists that theres Got to be something.122 Toward the end of the scene,
a stage direction indicates that Ian dies with relief, but he is immediately
resurrected when it starts to rain on his head, and he awakens with an echo
of the plays first line: Shit.123 The final tableau is of Cate sitting next to
Ian, whose bloody and eyeless head is sticking out of a hole in the floor
of a devastated landscape, as she drinks gin and sucks her thumb. There is
an attempt at cleansing, connection, and forgiveness, as rain pours down
on them and Ian utters the plays last line in the ultimate attempt at polite
normalcy: Thank you.124
In both Blasted and the late Williams plays discussed in this chapter,
particularly Rooming-House, the violent excesses serve as a vehicle for the
exploration of our humanity. Ultimately, Blasted offers the youthful out-
look of some possibility of hope, albeit through a twisted and perverse lens.
Sierz maintains that the play reminds us that war is both unendurable and
must be endured, and argues that life is also both unendurable and must
be endured.125 Kane insisted that Once you have perceived that life is very
cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and
119 Kane, Blasted,61.
120 Ibid.,55. 121 Ibid.,58.
122 Ibid., 55. Interestingly, a similar exchange takes place between the characters One and Two in
Williams 1966 play I Cant Imagine Tomorrow (in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New
York: New Directions, 1981)), although the something is much more vague, and not necessarily
spiritual. Both, however, illustrate an existential need for that something that will provide mean-
ing and stability.
ONE: What next? Something or Nothing?

T WO: Theres always
ONE: What?
T WO: Got to be something, as longas
ONE: Yes, as long as welive. (135)
123 Kane, Blasted,60. 124 Ibid.,61.
freedom as you can.126 Sadly, however, the weight of the world apparently
proved to be too much for Kane, who suffered from depression and com-
mitted suicide on February 20, 1999, at the age of twenty-eight.
While the violence and brutality of Williams earlier plays were often
countered with some symbolic gesture of hope, resurrection, or redemp-
tion at the end as in Camino Real or Orpheus Descending for Williams
in the 1980s the possibility of resurrection, both globally and personally,
was often bleak, and hope was a dubious investment, sensibilities that he
transferred to Chalky White and Rooming-House. Camino Real ends with
Kilroys resurrection and the dried-up fountain beginning to flow again,127
and in Orpheus Descending wild things like Val leave behind clean skins
and teeth and white bones after they are destroyed, as tokens passed
from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their
kind.128 Yet Gods bones in Chalky White have turned to dust, suffocating
all humanity. God is long gone, having left behind such enormous white
bones when He died Endlessly long ago, the bones of Him now turned
to powder that blows and blows.129 In Rooming-House, even the hope that
more tea and biscuits will arrive remains futile. Yet, despite the darkness of
much of Williams late work, he still championed the impulse of survival,
even in a cruel and ruthless universe. In the late plays, he faced the tragic
element in life with a mocking sense of irony, responding to lifes atroci-
ties with his famous battle cry, En Avant!
Williams last produced play, A House Not Meant to Stand, does end
with a hint of peace and renewal, and even the violent desire that explodes
at the end of Green Eyes may be seen as a rejuvenating kind of passion.
Although Kirche, Kche, Kinder is fraught with violence, it is an absurd
comic violence, and there is some redemption in the Mans interactions
with the church organist, Miss Rose a character, as with all characters
who bear the name or symbol of Williams beloved sister, who stands for
purity and gentleness. While the play ends with Williams mocking com-
mentary on the status of the American artist as prostitute the Man has
to go out and hustle for survival, to contend once more for the great
Hotlicker Award130 he is triumphant in the fact that he has endured
and survived,131 and the Wife asks us to consider that the plays ending
might be a happy one.132
126 In ibid.,107. 127 Williams, Camino Real, 150,159.

128 Williams, Orpheus Descending, 341. We encounter the image of a great white bone of a giant beast
that had caught on fire in the sky! in Suddenly Last Summer (421) aswell.
129 Williams, Chalky White,12.
Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,147.
130
131 Ibid.,146. 132 Ibid.,148.

Conclusion
The only thing to do is laugh
I made my agent laugh, a few weeks ago, when I told her that the
career of a writer was shorter and more hazardous than that of a trap-
eze performer who works without the net beneath him, and at the
top of the tent. I laughed, too. We both laughed. There are some very
serious matters at which the only thing to do is laugh.
Tennessee Williams, excerpt from the Columbia University
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, c.19601
Everyone expects me to write another Streetcar. I dont want to, even
if I could.
Tennessee Williams,19812
I need somebody to laugh with.
Although Tennessee Williams later work demonstrates an ambivalence

regarding the possibility of resurrection or renewal, he remained commit-
ted to a more direct, presentational style of theatre, shorter pieces that cen-
tered on the impact of excess in its many forms as a vehicle through which
to challenge the hypocrisy of social norms, and consistently remained
engaged with the sociopolitical landscape throughout his career. Looking
at Williams late plays theoretically through the excessive sensibilities of
the carnivalesque and the grotesque illuminates them in key ways, and
the new international collaborations between scholars, publishers, artists,
producers, and theatre festivals have allowed for greater understanding of
the work of Williams late period, resulting in more well-informed pro-
ductions. As we are now seeing from both the critical reevaluations of his
later work and the insightful recent productions of these plays, Williams
later experiments, often misunderstood when they were originally staged,
1 I am in debt to Jeremy Lawrence and John S. Bak for bringing this quotation to my attention and
locating its source at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Bak dates the
quotation circa 1960 (in an email to the author, May 3, 2014).
2 In Rader, Cry of the Heart,257. 3 Williams, Memoirs,304.
161
succeed when their subversive politics of excess, ambiguity, and laughter
is embraced and celebrated. Despite a continuity in his development as an
artist, the experience of Williams late plays is very different from that of
the early ones, not only in terms of their anti-realistic emphasis but also
in one other important respect: While Williams early plays come across
well when read, many of the late plays can only be fully appreciated when
given informed and imaginative productions that fully realize their the-
atrical potential and capture the subtleties that operate beyond language.
In Streetcar, for example, the power lies primarily in the language, charac-
ters, and plot. In the late works, as Ive argued, this is often not the case,
and the spectacle has to be managed carefully in order to negotiate the
plays excesses. The late plays therefore need to be approached differently
in order to reveal what can be determined only on the stage.4 Dotson
Rader recounted that, in Williams later years, he told Rader: I used to
write symphonies. Now I write chamber music, smaller plays. Everyone
expects me to write another Streetcar. I dont want to, even if I could.5
Williams was, however, trapped in his own ambivalence. On the one
hand, he was not afraid to confront life and go to extremes in his art,
experimenting with new forms and breaking socially constructed taboos
in favor of accessing a truth beyond convention that provided an hon-
est glimpse at what it really means to be human and to live in the world,
in all its ambiguity, uncertainty, horror, and joy. On the other hand, he
was deeply affected by how his work was received, and took to heart the
attacks on him and his work in the press, needing approval, or at least
understanding. We know that he wrote and rewrote his plays multiple
times, even after they had been performed and published, as he strove
for clarity and completion in what Jessica Knight sees as a madness for
control.6 And, thinking he could control his reputation and the recep-
tion of his work, he wrote letters responding to his critics throughout his
career, pointing out their lack of comprehension and even defending his
honor when accused of not being truthful in his art. As John Bak writes
in A Broken Romance: Tennessee Williams and Americas Mid-century
Theatre Culture: If you were looking to pick a fight with Williams, all
you had to do was call him a liar.7 Never one to back down from a fight,8
4 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,46. 5 In Rader, Cry of the Heart,257.
Knight, Too Difficult to Bear,81.
6
John S. Bak, A Broken Romance: Tennessee Williams and Americas Mid-century Theatre Culture,
7
in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (London: Methuen, 2014), 222. See this illuminating essay for
Williams responses to his critics.
See Rader, Cry of the Heart, where Rader recalls Williams standing up to assailants in Key West and
8
declaring, My name is Tennessee Williams! and I am not in the habit of retreat! (193194).
Conclusion: the only thing to do is laugh 163
Williams responses to his critics demonstrate how [he] was not going to
sit idly by and watch his reputation getting destroyed.9
But, whether or not he was always successful in communicating his
vision, there is no doubt that Williams was engaged with his work and
its relationship to the world around him. He was not the played out,
self-obsessed, Southern relic that the press tried to suggest he was from
the 1960s to the end of his life. Nor could he be dismissed as a drunk
and sick old queen, a sad victim of his own personal excesses, who was
employing gratuitous shock value and violence in his later plays because
his talent had failed him, as some of his most hostile reviewers claimed.
His work was rooted in a theoretical and theatrical tradition of excess,
and he remained in touch with current styles of theatre and the work
of young playwrights, taking risks to experiment with tone and style in
his work and paying the price for these risks when his vision was misun-
derstood, dismissed, and attacked. As Bak aptly points out, If Williams
made one great mistake late in his career, it was not in altering his theatres
direction; it was in assuming that American audiences and theatre critics
would grant him the right to evolve.10 Not content to rest on his laurels,
Williams fought for the right to change, to experiment, and to develop
as an artist. He was aware, he was current, he was brave. And, despite his
ambivalent views of humanity and growing anxieties about the state of
the world in which he lived, as well as his own personal struggles, he was
a survivor. Never abandoning his lifelong habit of waking up at five every
morning to write, he was in-yer-face and not going away. When he died
at the age of seventy-one, Tennessee Williams was young.
Bak, A Broken Romance,209.

9
Ibid.,230.
10
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Index
Page numbers in italics are figures; those with n are notes.
abject, the18 Barasch, Frances K. 7, 11, 97,136137

Abrahamse, Fred, 9598,124 Barks, CathyW.67
AbrahamseMeyer productions Barkus, Arnold49n. 28
Kingdom of Earth 122124 Barnes, Clive16
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Bartkoff, Regina 17n. 52, 60, 60f. 2
95102 Beckett, Samuel34
Adamson, Eve36,65n. 5 Beggar, The (Sorge)22
age/aging 2930, 64,89 benevolent anarchy 42,45
seealsoMilk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, Benson, Sarah156
The; This Is the Peaceable Kingdom Berlinsky, Harris39
alcohol/drug abuse 3, 12, 14, 70,78 birds
allegory95 Bird-Girl 32,107
All Very [Not!] Pirandello! Radical Theatrics in Gndiges Frulein, The 3234, 47, 4849,
the Evolution of Vieux Carr (Dorff)4 52,53
ambiguities117 Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,A35
Cavalier for Milady, A 125129 Mutilated, The32
House Not Meant to Stand, A 129137 Suddenly Last Summer 49,122
Kingdom of Earth 117125 Birney, Reed156
androgyny7578 blasphemy39
Clothes for a Summer Hotel 69, 70,8384 Blasted (Kane) 156160
and the New Woman7475 Block, Simon 20,141
Night of the Iguana, The26 Bogdanovich, Peter 2n. 4
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens Borney, Geoffrey 44n.11
(Williams)5 Boom! (film)98
animal imagery108 Bosch, Hieronymus 25, 26,28
Anthology of German Expressionist Drama Botha, Saartjie95
(Sokel)23 Bray, Robert4,98n. 108
Arcade, Penny 110, 111, 111f. 4 Brecht, Bertolt 46,5354
Artaud, Antonin 5, 19, 4247, 5051, 5354, Breuer, Lee1718
6263, 138, 150151 Broken Romance, A (Bak) 162163
Ashby, Romy 17n. 52 Bromilow-Downing, Pat, 101f. 3, 123f. 5
Atkinson, Brooks 37n.77 Bruhm, Steven3
Brustein, Robert15
Baddeley, Hermione95 Bryer, JacksonR.67
Bak, John S. vin. 2, 2, 69, 112n. 187, 162,163 Burton, Richard98
Bakhtin, Mikhail 5, 10, 18, 22, 2728, 29, Butler, Judith71
3032,40
Balcony, The (Genet) 46,47 Camino Real (Williams) 37,160
Bankhead, Tallulah 95 camp38
173
174 Index
camp (cont.) Coward, Nol98
Kirche, Kche, Kinder3738 Crandell, George3
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws59 creativity and productivity 6869, 7071, 78,81
Pronoun I, The115 cruelty seeRemarkable Rooming-House of Mme.
Cancelmi, Louis156 Le Monde, The; theatre of cruelty
Candles to the Sun (Williams)144 culture vs. nature 45, 5051,6263
cannibalism 9, 104n.133 Kingdom of Earth118
Capote, Truman 76n.47 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws59
letter to56
carnivalesque 5, 10, 17, 18, 28,161 Dallas, Nicholas 95, 9899, 101111f.3, 124,
Rose Tattoo, The 37n.77 123f. 5
Cassidy, Claudia 72, 130131 Day After, The (TV movie) (Hume and
castration, Sweet Bird of Youth910 Meyer)149
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 4546n.15 Day on Which a Man Dies, The (play)
and homosexuality9 (Williams)3
Cavalier for Milady, A (Williams) 9, 64, 117, death
125129,137 and desire 100, 131132
Miss Josie 126127, 128129 seealsoMutilated, The, Jack inBlack
Mother 125128 decay 2930, 64, 100,132
Mrs. Aid 126128 House Not Meant to Stand,A132
Nance 125128,137 Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The 92,
premier 125n. 45 94, 96,100
Vaslav Nijinsky 117, 125126, 127128 social 40,149
Cenci, The (Artaud) 46,56 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom2930
censorship9 de Jongh, Nicholas3
Chalky White Substance, The (Williams) 1617, Derrida, Jacques45
149150,158 Desire and the Black Masseur (Williams)
and Grand Guignol143 104n. 133,152
and in-yer-face theatre 1920,139 Devlin, AlbertJ.3
Luke 149150,158 Diamond, Elin 51,54
Mark 149150,158 Dorff, Linda 1n. 4, 2, 3, 4, 10, 32, 37, 49,5556
redemption160 drug abuse seealcohol/drugabuse
Chamberlain, Travis 148149 Dukakis, Olympia98
chaos19 du Maurier, George1
Chivu, Cosmin 65n. 5, 110,111 Dunnock, Mildred 95,98
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (Williams) 19, 23,
64,6585 Endgame (Beckett)34
Cassidy review72 England150
Dr. Zeller8182 exaggeration 19,44
opening7172 excess 161163
Scott Fitzgerald 19, 64,8085 personal 12,40
Zelda Fitzgerald 19,8085 theatre of56
Clum, John3 seealsogrotesque
Clurman, Harold3233 Existential Nightmare in Tennessee Williamss
cocaloony birds 3234, 47, 4849, 52,53 The Chalky White Substance (Kolin)3
Coen, Larry9f.1 expressionism 22,23
Cohn, Ruby34 German 5, 22, 23, 3839,40
Collins, Angus P. 68,73
color schemes 34, 39, 100,133 fantasy
Communists, Cowboys, and Queers (Savran)2 and Night of the Iguana, The2232
Confronting the Late Plays of Tennessee Williams on 37n.77
Williams (Hale)4 Female Grotesque, The (Russo)28
Connor, Steven52 femininity
Conversations with Tennessee Williams3 Clothes for a Summer Hotel 19, 6869,7071
Couperthwaite, Adam148 and homosexuality7475
Index 175
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The19 and Germans as sinister 18,3234
Mutilated, The 19,110 Guareon10
Pronoun I, The19 Indian Joe5152
Tender Is the Night7374 Molly 34, 4749, 5051, 53,5455
Ferguson, James (Tigger!)115 Nadel review16
Fitzgerald, Scott 6585 Polly 34, 4749, 5053,54
seealsounder Clothes for a SummerHotel seealsoSlapstick Tragedy
Fitzgerald, Zelda 6585 Goldhurst, William7475
seealsounder Clothes for a SummerHotel Gordon, Mel142
Ford, Ruth95,98 Gothic, term 130131
Foucault, Michel69 Gottfried, Martin15
Freeman, Lucy20 Grand Guignol 1617, 142143
Freud, Sigmund 64, 6869, 74,128 Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing
friendship 105106 (Williams) 19, 139, 140n. 12, 145149
Frosted Glass Coffin, The (Williams)1,54 Girl and Boy/Claude Dunphy 146148
Mr. Kelsey54 premier 148149
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homosexuality and redemption160
the Genesis of Tender is the Night Gross, Robert4
(Collins)73 grotesco criollo155
Fugitive Kind (Williams)47 grotesque 5, 712, 17,161
fugitive women 103, 109110 and feminine identity19
and German Romanticism 18, 2832
Gambaro, Griselda 154155 seealsoCavalier for Milady, A; Germans;
Garden of Earthly Delights, The (painting) House Not Meant to Stand, A; Mutilated,
(Bosch)25 The; Remarkable Rooming-House of
Garden of Eden, The (Hemingway)7577 Mme. Le Monde, The; Suddenly Last
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais)27 Summer
Genet, Jean 43,4647 Grotesque as a Comic Genre, The
Germans41 (Barasch)136137
in Gndiges Frulein, The 18,3234 Guare, John 10,2021
in Kirche, Kche, Kinder 18,3640 Guernica (Picasso)54
in Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A 18,3536
in Night of the Iguana, The 18, 2428,30 Haigh, Kenneth72
Gert, Valeska 3334n.65 Hair (Ragni and Rado) 146n. 43
gesture Hale, Allean 2, 3, 4,144
and language 45, 5255, 61,62 Hall-Flavin, Jef148
ghost plays seeCavalier for Milady, A; Clothes Hand, Richard J. 142143
for a Summer Hotel; House Not Harpham, Geoffrey1011
Meant to Stand, A; Something Cloudy, Harrison, Jordan9f.1
Something Clear; Steps Must Be Gentle; Hays, Peter L. 76n.47
Vieux Carr; Will Mr. Merriwether Hemingway, Ernest 6667, 6871, 7273,
Return from Memphis?; Youthfully 7578,8385
Departed,The Hemingways Gender Trouble
Gibson, Walter25 (Kennedy)7677
Gideons Point (Williams) 12n.4 Hewes, Henry15
Gilman, Richard14 Hibbert, Edward98
Glaspell, Susan55 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 31,128
Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play Hollywoods Tennessee98n. 108
(Breuer and Mitchell)1718 Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises
Glass Menagerie, The (Williams) 7, 18, 22,144 (Kauffmann)13
Amanda 107,132 homosexuality
Gndiges Frulein, The (Williams) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof9
and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43, Cavalier for Milady,A126
4445,4756 Clothes for a Summer Hotel 6869, 73,8385
Frulein 3235, 4849, 5152, 53, 5455,152 and femininity7475
176 Index
homosexuality (cont.) Kauffmann, Stanley1314
House Not Meant to Stand,A132 Kayser, Wolfgang 11,45
Tender Is the Night7374 Kazan, Elia91
Williams 1215, 21, 64,7880 Keith, Don Lee66
Hooper, Michael 145,148 Keith, Thomas 4,1920n. 54, 65n. 6, 130, 131,
Hourihan, Margery74 134,135
House Not Meant to Stand, A (Williams) 12n. 4, Kennedy, J. Gerald7677
5, 23, 65, 129137,149 Kiernan, Kip 65n.5
Bella McCorkle 132134,135 Kindness of Strangers (Spoto)6768
Charlie McCorkle 132, 133,137 Kingdom of Earth, The (story) (Williams)
Chips McCorkle 132,133 124125
Emerson Sykes 133, 134135 Kingdom of Earth (Williams) 117125,137
Jessie Sykes 131132, 133, 135 AbrahmseMeyer production of 122124, 123f. 5
Joanie McCorkle 132, 133,134 Chicken 118122, 124125,137
Mr. Black131 Lot 118121, 124125,137
redemption160 Myrtle 118121, 124125,137
reviews 130131 short story 124125
Spud131 Kirche, Kche, Kinder (Williams) 9,139
Stacey McCorkle 132, 133, 135136,137 compared to Artaud46
Hugo, Victor28 Frulein Haussmitzenschlogger
Hume, Edward149 (Hotsy)3940
Hunter, Tab95 and the Germans 18,3640
Hynds, Reed144 Minister39
premiere 140n. 12
I Cant Imagine Tomorrow (Williams) 159n. 122 redemption160
identity Son40
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Man 3940,160
The9394 Wife39
Mutilated, The105 Knight, Jessica 130,162
Pronoun I, The 113,115 Knight, Richard73
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (Williams) Kolin, Philip C. 2, 3, 4, 149, 152, 154,158
Barnes review16 Kretchik, Grant, 65n. 5
Hewes review15 Kristeva, Julia 5, 1819, 2829, 7071,74
Kalem review15
language57 Lahr, John2
in-yer-face theatre 138142, 155160 Lambert, Gavin1n. 4
and Chalky White Substance, The1920 language 6, 4344,162
and Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth and gesture 45,5255
Seeing19 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom 61,62
and Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Gndiges Frulein, The 4849, 51,5255
Monde, The19 Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing
In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today 147148
(Sierz)138 In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel57
Ireland, Marin156 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws57
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (Williams)122 and paradox11
I Think the Strange, the Crazed, the Queer Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le
(poem) (Williams)21, 104105 Monde, The 152153
Larcan, Gary60
Jeffreys, Joe E.2n. 4 Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (film)120
Jennings, C. Robert78 Late Tennessee Williams (Cohn)4
Jentsch, Ernst128 laughter5,19
appropriate/inappropriate 710,136
Kalem, T.E.15 and Grand Guignol142
Kane, Sarah 139, 156160 Rabelaisian 25, 2728,3032
Kaplan, David 3334n. 65, 87,9798 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom61
Index 177
Lawrence, D. H. seeI Rise in Flame, Cried the stage assistants 18, 88, 9596, 98, 99,102
Phoenix Witch of Capri 90, 95,9899
Lehmann, Hans-Thies54 Mitchell, Maude1718
Leighton, Margaret110 Moise and the World of Reason (Williams)
Leverich, Lyle3 6n. 16, 152
Life (magazine)15 monsters 8688
Lifeboat Drill (Williams)2930 seealsoMilk Train Doesnt Stop Here
Losey, Joseph98 Anymore, The; Mutilated, The;
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A (Williams) Pronoun I,The
Bodey3536 Monteiro, George83
Dorothea Gallaway3536 Monument for Ercole, A (Williams)17
and Germans as sinister 18,3536 Mosher, Gregory131
Helena35 Mother Courage (Brecht)5354
Mr. Butts35 Mountford, Fiona 125n. 45
Sophie Gluck35 mouths, open 30, 5455,62
ludicrous-horror 7, 11,97 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway)7577
Ludlam, Charles 3738,110 Murphy, Brenda4
Mutilated, The (Williams) 5, 60n. 69,86
Mabou Mines17 Bernie106
Machiz, Herbert95 Celeste 86, 105110
madness19 and femininity19
Cavalier for Milady,A129 and grotesque figures3233
House Not Meant to Stand, A 133, 134135 Guareon10
Streetcar Named Desire,A100 Jack in Black 102, 104, 109,112
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Maxie107
Memphis?130 and the monstrous woman 102112
and Zelda Fitzgerald 19, 71, 8182,85 Our Lady109
Magical Muse (Voss)4 premier110
Maids, The (Genet)46 reviews111
Markey, Erin 60f. 2,148 Trinket 105110,152
Martin, Robert3 seealsoSlapstick Tragedy
masculinity 7071,74 Muz, Julie Atlas115
seealsofemininity
Masiello, Francine155 Nadel, Norman16
McClain, John16 nature seeculture vs. nature
Memoirs (Williams) 1, 2, 14, 42, 117,161 Nazis27
on laughter78 Neilson, Anthony138
on promiscuity79 New Woman7475
work at bistro bar 3334n.65 Night of the Iguana, The (Williams) 5, 12,
on his writing41 2223,32
Merlo, Frank14 and the fantastic2232
metadrama56 Frau Fahrenkopf2627
Meyer, Marcel 9598, 124, 123f. 5 and Germans as sinister 18,2428
Meyer, Nicholas149 Hannah Jelkes 22,2627
Milford, Nancy 71n. 29, 72n. 32,82 Maxine Falk 2425,2627
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, The Nonno29
(Williams) 86, 8795, 101111f.3 Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon 22, 2425, 2627,
AbrahamseMeyer production of 95102 30,32
Blackie 86, 8889, 91, 94,99 Night Waking: Strange Room (Williams)17
Chris Flanders 89, 9096, 98, 99102 Not About Nightingales (Williams) 144,146
and femininity19 Notebooks (Williams)2
film version98 Notes on Camp (Sontag)38
Gilman review14 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (Williams)64
Mrs. Goforth 86, 8897, 98,99 and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43,
premiere95 44,5660
178 Index
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws Rabelaisian laughter 25, 2728,3032
(Williams) (cont.) Rader, Dotson 73, 78, 145,162
Bea57 Rado, James 146n. 43
First/Second Young Man 58,59 Ragni, Gerome 146n. 43
Madge5758 rape151
The Manager 5758,59 seealsoBlasted; Green Eyes, or No Sight Would
Mr. Black131 Be Worth Seeing; Remarkable Rooming-
premier5960 House of Mme. Le Monde, The; Streetcar
The Waitress 57,5859 Named Desire,A
nuclear holocaust 149,159 realism 4, 13, 16, 44, 4546, 115116,137
Nutcracker and the Mouse King, The (Hoffmann) and Hoffmann31
31,128 hyper-135
Night of the Iguana, The24
One Arm (Williams) 104n.133 redemption160
Orpheus Descending (Williams) 55,160 Redgrave, Lynn120
dismemberment9 Reid, Kate110
Val Xavier 55,160 Rein, Matt148
Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,
Pacheco, Jon115 The (Williams) 910, 9f. 1, 17, 139, 140n.
Page, Geraldine72 12, 151154,158
Page, Jaimi148 Boy 6, 155,158
Page, Michael 49n. 28 and Grand Guignol143
Palmer, Barton98n. 108 and the grotesque6,7
Parade, The (Williams) 65n.5 Hall 151, 152154, 155,158
paradox11 and in-yer-face theatre19
Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, A (Williams)1 Mint 6, 151152, 153, 155,158
Period of Adjustment (Williams)145 Mme. Le Monde 6, 151, 153154, 155,158
Perkins, Maxwell66 production (2009)8
Pettie, Darren98 and redemption160
Pettit, Alexander120n. 22 Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde,
Picasso, Pablo54 The: Tennessee Williamss Little Shop of
plastic theatre 7, 22,4344 Comic Horrors (Kolin)4
Play about Terrible Birds, A: Tennessee Williamss Remshardt, Ralf 1,7,8
The Gndiges Fraulein [sic] and Alfred Ridiculous Theatrical Company 3738,5960
Hitchcocks The Birds (Kolin)4 Ridley, Philip 20,141
Politics of Reputation, The (Saddik) 2,4,95 riots6162
polysexuality83 Robinson, Davis 8,9f.1
postdramatic theatre54 Roebling, Paul95
Postmodernist Culture (Connor)52 Romanticism11
Powell Holm, Eric65n. 5 German 18,40
Pronoun I, The (Williams)4647 Rose Tattoo, The (Williams) 37n. 77,152
Dominique 112113, 114115 Roudan, Matthew C.3,4
and femininity19 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul25
and the monstrous woman 112115 Russo, Mary28
premiere115
Queen May 112115 Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats)89
Young Revolutionary 113114 sailors108
Prosser, William 2n. 5,130 Sandman, The (Hoffmann) 31,128
psychoanalytic theory5 Save Me the Waltz (Fitzgerald)8082
Psychology of the Uncanny, The (Jentsch)128 Savran, David2,3
Pumpernickel, Madame 3334n.65 Schiavi, Michael R.120
Schick, Charlie17n. 52
Quinton, Everett 59, 60, 60f. 2 Schweizer, David2n. 4
Sea Change (Hemingway)84
Rabelais, Franois 25,2728 seal, trained 48,50
Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 22,2728 Secret Script of Tennessee Williams (Hale)3
Index 179
Selengut, Jesse112 Steine, Gertrude 75,83
Seven Descents of Myrtle, The seeKingdom Steiner, George54
ofEarth, The Steps Must Be Gentle (Williams) 23,65
sexuality 3, 1215,47 Steyn, Jennifer 9597, 101111f.3
in Blasted (Kane) 156159 Stole, Mink (Nancy Paine Stole) 60, 60f. 2, 110,
Cavalier for Milady, A 125128 111, 111f. 4
Clothes for a Summer Hotel8283 Stoller, Robert74
Gndiges Frulein, The5152 Storm, Roelof 95, 98, 99, 101111f.3
Green Eyes, or No Sight Would Be Worth Seeing Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams) 7, 91,
145148 92,137
House Not Meant to Stand, A 133136 Blanche DuBois 7, 86, 8788, 100, 132,151
interview with Dotson Rader78 rape 9,100
and in-yer-face theatre156 Stanley 91,92
The Kingdom of Earth 120121 wedding night133
Kingdom of Earth (short story) 124125 Suddenly Last Summer (Williams) 89,92
Kirche, Kche, Kinder3940 birds in 49, 121122
Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, cannibalism9
The9192 Catherine92
Mutilated, The 103104, 105106, 108109 film 78n.24
Night of the Iguana, The2627 Mrs. Venable89
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws5758 Sebastian Venable 62, 92, 121122,152
polysexuality83 Violet122
Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway)7475
Monde, The 151152 Sunburst (Williams) 17, 87n.7
seealsohomosexuality survival44
Shepard, Sam133 Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams) 30, 86,87
Showalter, Elaine82 Alexandra Del Lago (Princess
Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Kosmonopolis)8687
Performance, The (Diamond)51 castration910
Sierz, Aleks 20, 138140, 141142, 155156,159 Chance Wayne 30,86
Simple Enquiry, A (Hemingway)84
Slapstick Tragedy (Williams) 10,47 Taboo of Virginity (Freud) 64,74
Gottfried review15 Taubman, Howard 1213,14
McClain review16 Taylor, Elizabeth 7n. 24,98
Nadel review16 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald)7374
Smith review15 Tennessee Laughs1
Smith, Michael15 Tennessee Williams: A Casebook (Gross)4
Smith, William Jay144 Tennessee Williams Annual Review4
Sokel, Walter 23,3839 Tennessee Williams Guignol 16,142
Some Problems for the Moose Lodge Tennessee Williams Literary Journal,The3
(Williams)12 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary
Something Cloudy, Something Clear Festival3,4
(Williams)65 Tennessee Williams Newsletter3
Something Cloudy, Something Clear: Tennesse Tennessee Williams Review,The3
Williamss Postmodern Memory Play Tennessee Williamss Three Plays for the Lyric
(Kolin)3 Theatre (Hale)4
Something Wild (Williams)42 Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Sontag, Susan38 (Saddik)46
Sorge, Reinhard22 Theater and Its Double, The (Artaud) 4243,138
speech seelanguage theatre of cruelty 4344,4547
Spendids (Genet) 47n.18 Gndiges Frulein, The 19,4756
Spoto, Donald6768 Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws 19,5660
Stacy, Jerry115 This Is the Peaceable Kingdom 19,6063
Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Theatricalist Cartoons: Tennessee Williamss
Performance (Remshardt)1,7 Late, Outrageous Plays (Dorff)4,10
Stanton, Stephen23 THIS IS (Williams)46
180 Index
This Is the Peaceable Kingdom, or Good Luck God Williams, Edwina (mother) 20,79
(Williams)2930 Williams, Rose (sister) 6768, 69, 70,160
and Artauds theatre of cruelty 19, 43, 44, Williams, Tennessee
57, 58,6063 alcohol/drug abuse 3, 12, 14, 70,78
Bernice62 ambiguity117
Lucretia62 androgyny78
Mrs. Shapiro62 The Bird64
Ralston62 Christian upbringing79
Saul62 on Clothes for a Summer Hotel73
Thompson, Anthea 123124, 123f. 5 death of 16,163
Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre6465 death of partner14
Tom (Leverich)3 on D. H. Lawrence122
Tracey, Megan115 German expressionism22
tragicomedy11 health70
transformation1213 on homosexuality 69,73
Traveling Companion, The (Williams) 16,36 homosexuality 1215, 21, 64,7880
Trilby (du Maurier)1 on House Not Meant to Stand,A129
Two-Character Play, The (Williams) interviews73
17n. 51,1718 laughter161
letters 37n. 77,91
Uecker, John2n. 4,16 and politics 143145
uncanny, the128 productivity/creativity 21,78
Uncanny, The (Freud)128 psychiatric confinement 14,41
Undiscovered Country (Kolin)4 his reputation 162163
sexuality78
vampire imagery 86, 89, 96,100 on shock138
Vengeance of Nitocris, The (Williams) 7n.21 on Streetcar Named Desire,A161
Verge, The (Glaspell)55 and the Vietnam War 144145
Vidal, Gore 2n. 4, 64 on Zelda Fitzgerald81
Vietnam War 144145 seealsoMemoirs
Vieux Carr (Williams)65 Williamss The Frosted Glass Coffin (Kolin)4
Vorlicky, Robert3 Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
Voss, Ralph4 (Williams) 23, 64, 129130
Louise130
wabi-sabi96 Wilson, Michael (author) 142143
war20 Wilson, Michael (director) 98
War against the Kitchen Sink, The (Guare)10 Woolf, Virginia69
Warman, Jonathan5960
Warring Desires (Hooper)145 Yeats, William Butler89
Weigel, Helene5354 Youthfully Departed, The (Williams)64
Wilde, Oscar86
Williams, Cornelius (father) 130n. 92 Zandstra, Dianne M. 154155

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Tennessee Williams and the

The plays of Tennessee Williams post-1961 period have often been

ANNET TE J. SADDIK is Professor of English and Theatre at the

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Tennessee Williams, Collected Poems1

Tennessee Williams, Something Wild,19482

BEAU: You are toomuch.

Tennessee Williams, The Traveling Companion,19813

List of figures pageviii

Introduction: sicker than necessary: Tennessee Williams

Select bibliography 164

1 Jordan Harrison and Larry Coen in The Remarkable Rooming-

The collaboration among scholars, artists, producers, festival directors, and

My work on this book was supported by PSC-CUNY research grants

On November 8, 1980, a triple bill of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams

1 George du Maurier, Trilby (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894),23.

Figure1 Jordan Harrison and Larry Coen in The Remarkable Rooming-House of

40 Richard Gilman, Mistuh Williams, He Dead, Commonweal (February 8, 1963).

56 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/dsva.

Drowned in Rabelaisian laughter

Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to

In Williams 1961 play The Night of the Iguana, generally considered to

1 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,66.

9 Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.

13 Ibid.,11. 14 Ibid.,99. 15 Ibid.,101.

18 Williams, Iguana,17. 19 Ibid.,11.

New York, 1981), 89, 90,115.

87 Ibid.,9. 88 Williams, Kirche, Kche, Kinder,112.

97 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,25. 98 Ibid., 2526.

Production notes in Williams, Menagerie,131.

In my opinion art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province

1 Williams, New Selected Essays,43.

5 Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature,37.

21 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,223.

24 Ibid., 250,219. 25 Ibid.,229.

32 Ibid., 229,247. 33 Ibid.,233.

41 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double,37.

45 Diamond, Shudder of Catharsis,162. 46 Inibid.

50 Williams, Gndiges Frulein,233.

Dorff, Theatricalist Cartoons,13.

71 Williams, Peaceable Kingdom,333. Ibid., 333,335.

80 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 8283.

Writing calls for discipline!

Man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected by her

As Williams approached the 1970s, he was becoming increasingly preoccu-

Company, 1963), 156157.

between Williams and Hemingway in Havana.

10 Williams, Conversations, 245246.

17 Williams, New Selected Essays, 166,167.

19 Freud, The Taboo of Virginity,271.

31 Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers,380.

34 Ibid., 347. 35 Collins, F. Scott Fitzgerald,168.

43 Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries,191.

73 Ibid.,29. 74 Ibid.,52. 75 Ibid.,55.

91 Ibid.,67. 92 Ibid.,67. 93 Ibid.,67.

to be natural is such a very difficult pose to keepup.

While Blanche DuBois may be Williams most (in)famous female char-

1 Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (London: Methuen and Company, 1899),15.

10 Williams, Milk Train,3. 11 Ibid.

25 Ibid.,4. 26 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer,391.

38 Ibid., 4142. 39 Ibid.,43. 40 Ibid.,41.

50 Ibid.,78. 51 Williams, Selected Letters, Vol. II,95.

74 Ibid., 112113. 75 Ibid., 33, 71,72.

90 Ibid.,104. 91 Ibid.,118. 92 Ibid.,120.