(1911-1983)
I. Biographical Sketch
1911 Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi
1915 Williams suffers an attack of
diphtheria and loses the use of his legs for two years
1918 Family (mother, Edwina, father,
Cornelius, and sister, Rose) moves to St. Louis
1923 Begins writing as a retreat to an imaginary world away from his
alcoholic father and
1929 Graduates from high school; works intermittently for International Shoe
Company
1938 Graduates from University of Iowa with B.A. in English
1939 Uses pen name, "Tennessee," consistently
1943 Employed as MGM screenwriter 1947 Meets Frank Merlo, who becomes
Williams' longtime companion 1963 Frank Merlo dies
II. Major Plays
Battle of Angels (1940); The Glass
Menagerie (1945); A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947); The Rose Tattoo (1951);
Summer and Smoke (1948); Camino Real
(1953); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955);
Orpheus Descending (1957); The Night of
the Iguana (1961); Garden District (1960);
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); The Milk Train
Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963); The
Two-Character Play (1967); In the Bar of
Tokyo (1969); Out Cry (1971); Small Craft
Warnings (1972); The Red Devil Battery
(1975); The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
Summer for Creve Coeur (1979); Clothes for
a Summer Hotel (1980); Something Cloudy,
Something Clear (1981); A Night Not Meant
to Stand (1982)
III. Awards
Williams' first major awards included a
prize of $100 from the Group Theatre for a collection of plays, American Blues, and a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant. In later years, he received the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar
Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
He also received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the above
and The Night of the Iguana. Williams was elected to lifetime membership in the
National Institute of Arts and Letters and was given a lifetime fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
IV. Artistic Development A. Williams the Poet
During the 1930s, Williams initially found expression for his poetic imagination by
writing verse. During this time he published more than forty poems mainly in small,
two poems in Poetry. However, Williams grew dissatisfied with both his own verse and the bleak possibility of earning a living by writing poetry. Thus, he made a
transformation from poet to dramatist. Critic Harold Bloom argues that Williams never completely transformed and instead adopted a divided artistic personality of a "dramatic lyricist." Likewise, critic Frank Durham calls Williams a "Theatre Poet in Prose." The lyrical and dramatic qualities of
Williams' work has led to a split in the
Eudora Welty, in an interview on Williams, commented on the lyrical qualities of
Williams' drama: "I think he was essentially a dramatist; he had the imagination and the directness. Yes, it is almost as if he were writing his plays for films. There is so much poetry in them" (qtd. in Grierson 584).
B. Influences on Williams
value Crane a little above Eliot or anyone else because of his organic purity and sheer breathtaking power. I feel that he stands with Keats and Shakespeare and Whitman" (qtd. in Debrusscher 114). Traces of Crane's influence are evident in Williams' use of
Crane's work in titles, mottoes, and
allusions. Williams may have also adopted some biographical information from Crane's life in his creation of such characters as
Amanda from Menagerie. D.H. Lawrence's influence is recognized in Williams' focus on the relationships between men and
Touched Me is a dramatization of a
Lawrence story. From Chekov, Williams learned the power of understated plot and action in drama.
C. Shorter Works
Williams experimented with shorter forms that served as sketches of longer works. These early one-act plays are "one
movement studies of people caught in the ambiguous world of the twentieth century" (Jackson 85). In these plays Williams
"looks at the inner lives of a group of
feelings and to record this through poetic exploration" (Jackson 92). Lucretia Collins
in Portrait of a Madonna served as an early
character sketch of Blanche DuBois in
Streetcar and Alma in The Eccentricities of
a Nightingale. Camino Real is based on the
short play, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real.
Williams also experimented with fiction.
Menagerie is based on his short story,
"Portrait of the Girl in Glass." Similarly, Williams' short story, "The Poker Night," helped to shape the poker scene in Streetcar.
A. Form
Like playwrights such as Strinberg, O'Neill, and Miller, Williams used dramatic
expressionism. Expressionism "occurs
when a playwright objectifies the subjective, when he deems an accurate reflection of the world of sense impressions less important than a direct expression of the thoughts and actions of a character or himself" (Corrigan 375). In the Preface to The Glass
Menagerie, Williams describes his theatre in
expressionistic terms:
Being a "memory play," The Glass
Menagerie can be presented with
unusual freedom of convention.
and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part.
Expressionism and all other
unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its
genuine frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of photographic likeness.
represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through
changing into other forms than those which were merely present in
appearance.
These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.
(qtd. in Jackson 91)
Williams' idea of a "plastic theatre" is a call for the cinematic stage, a more visual
experience. Music, lighting, gauze scrims, costume, and staging all contribute to
Williams' "plastic theatre": sets dissolve, walls fade away, lights bring one part of the stage into the foreground, while the rest
recedes in darkness. Not only does he
experiment with traditional stage setting, he also uses music for dramatic effect. For
example, music often expresses the
consciousness of characters. Blanche, in
Streetcar, hears in her mind a "blue piano" in remembrance of her husband's death.
designers, and performers; directors like Elia Kazan and designers like Jo Mielziner
helped to create many of Williams' productions in the 1940s-50s.
B. Themes
1.The sensitive creature who has no home in an alien world: evictions, banishments, or the loss of a beloved refuge are a
theatrical metaphor of alienation. The lost home, like Belle Reve in Streetcar, is a symbol of an enchanted time of youth, love, beauty, and gentility.
occasions, such as birthdays, often occur as a metaphor of the attempt to recapture in the present what was lost in the past. 3.Time seen in its elegaic aspect of decay:
setting often illustrates this; for example,
in Menagerie, Laura's old records and
glass figurines contrast with the outside world of alleys and fire escapes.
4.The transience of life and time as a
destroyer: life succumbs to death, youth to age, gentility to brutality, goodness to
corruption
reverie, fantasy, dream, alcohol, drugs, and insanity
6.Southern myth of the plantation, the
genteel code, and how the past affects the present
C. Character
Williams created many memorable
characters including Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie, Big Daddy and Maggie the cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and Hannah in The Night of the Iguana. Many critics have noted Williams'
The faded Southern gentlewoman is a
frequent character in his work. This woman is raised in the South of good or aristocratic breeding, has a refinement of taste, and a puritanical attitude toward sex. She is
generally disappointed in love at an early age and either ends as a recluse or abandons herself to promiscuity, becomes deranged, and is taken to an institution.
The language of his characters is
was wonderfully capable in Streetcar, for example, of distinguishing the language of Blanche from the language of Stanley,
dramatizing the contrast of classes and male and female sensibility" ("Orpheus").
VI. Critical Response
Williams had a major influence on the
American theatre. He has been deemed the most honored living playwright in his day. Williams was prolific; for years he averaged one play on Broadway every two years. His plays received enormous exposure and
also been a controversial playwright. His commercial success and dramatic intent
earned him the title of "popular dramatist." The numerous film adaptations of his films contributed to his popular appeal. Williams is also described as a popular playwright because of his interest in recovering the
"natural function of the drama as the mirror of popular imagination" (Jackson 76). His drama is not in the literary tradition
established by playwrights such as Pirandello, Brecht, Eliot, or Wilder.
Battle of Angels (which later became
Orpheus Descending). Menagerie and
Streetcar continue to be his most highly
acclaimed works. Cat was praised by many critics and also attacked for the vulgar
language and ambiguity of Brick's
homosexuality. His more experimental plays, like Camino Real, challenged
theatrical conventions and often set him at odds with the expectations of his audience. Williams' shocking subjects were frequently given negative commentary. For example,
Suddenly Last Summer features lobotomy,
pederasty, and cannibalism; Sweet Bird of
disease. His later work (1963-82) is criticized as too self-reflexive, often
seeming more like works-in-progress than finished plays. Whatever the criticism,
Menagerie and Streetcar have forever
