Theater Review: Five by Tenn - Five Landmark Plays by Tennessee Williams, New York - Page 2

In the year 2000 - the start of the new millennium - eleven plays by Tennessee Williams were discovered in an archive at the University of Texas at Austin. Although the finished manuscripts had been typed and emended in the author’s own hand, they had never been published or performed.

Though the reasons why these eleven works had never seen the light of day may remain a mystery, it is hardly surprising that so many producers, directors, actors, and dramaturges have eagerly chosen to breathe life into these newly discovered works. Typically, with each new production, a few of these old yet new plays have been debuted, usually as part of other lesser-known Williams one-acts.

Following in this new tradition, director John W. Cooper presents to the New York stage two virtually unknown Williams plays along with three others — all but one written before Williams’s first major work, The Glass Menagerie, galvanized 20th century theater when it opened in Chicago in 1944, and then again in New York in 1946.

With Five by Tenn, Cooper has chosen to premiere Thank You, Kind Spirit (1941) and Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? (1935) for their first New York City run, along with three other rarely performed early one-acts: Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let me Listen (1945), Hello From Bertha (1939), and The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1941). Taken together, this brilliant staging presents a portrait of a young Williams and introduces the enduring themes from which he would later fashion all his major plays. More delightful still, Five by Tenn audiences will encounter the earliest examples of some of the major prototypes which continued to dominate the playwright's later works.

In 1941, the then-30-year-old Williams composed Kind Spirit and Larkspur, envisioning them as part of an evening of one-acts to be set in New Orleans. The set was to be entitled Vieux Carre, after the French Quarter where the young playwright first came to live in 1939. Like narrator/protagonist Tom in The Glass Menagerie, Williams fled St. Louis to escape the “coffin”-like atmosphere he had endured while living there with his mother and sister. Having completed his degree at the University of Iowa, he left behind his schizophrenic sister Rose in the charge of their manipulative, controlling mother and went to seek his fortune in the Vieux Carre, then a haven for fellow writers, painters, and other bohemians seeking refuge during an economically depressed, socially repressed era in American culture.

Like The Glass Menagerie — written a year after Williams’ parents agreed to subject Rose to a prefrontal lobotomy that left her incapacitated and institutionalized for the rest of her life — Vieux Carre was a “memory play.” The protagonist was the Author, and just as with The Glass Menagerie’s Tom (named after the playwright, whose given name was Thomas Lanier Williams III), the Author clearly presented himself as both writer/narrator and character. Thus, the on-stage Author was the young, twenty-something writer newly arrived in 1939 New Orleans. The offstage author is the older and perhaps wiser — or at least, more wizened — Williams who composed Vieux Carre in his mid-sixties. Although it hardly garnered rave reviews at its New York premiere in 1977, Michael Ramach, managing director of Milwaukee's Theater X, which staged a revival of the play in 1997 and who knew the playwright for decades, noted that Williams considered Vieux Carre to be his masterpiece.

Article Author: Elvira Black

Elvira Black is a “retired” New York writer blogging for her own amusement here on BC. Her passions are politics, the arts, the weird things we do, and New York City.

Visit Elvira Black's author page — Elvira Black's Blog