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~~tlon2 Sundayi, '.February 18, 1969 .+
ARTS AND LEISURE
Named Desire-or Death? I
By DAN ISAAC
"All poets look for god, all good po·ets do ••• " -TERNESSEE WILL4\MS, "Sud-ly Last Summer." N THE night of December 3, 1947 -more than 20 )'ears ago now"A Streetcar Named Desire" opened in New York, and the next morning it was clear that Tenn•see Williams had established himself as a major American dramatist. Had he written nothing more than "The Glass Men4arie" (1945) and "Streetcar," his reput;4tion would have been secure; for these two plays have already achieved the stature of American classics. In the years 11bat followed, Williams succeeded in ha'flng ten more fulllength plays produced in New York, plays which have pres~rved~'s prominence as the greatest living pl right in America today, Only Arthur Iller and Edward Albee can be conside~ rivals for such eminence and esteem. Twenty years is a loag time, and it may make all of us a little bit sad and sentimental to think back to who we were and what we were doing •hen we first discovered Tennessee Widlams for ourselves. But it's been a long time for Mr. Williams, too, and there is no one who feels the flow of time more il1ll1)edia11fly, more painfully, than he:
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"It goes tick-tick, jlt's quieter than your heartbeat, a l'adual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to burntout pieces. • • • Ti~whci could beat it, who could defeat it ~ver? Maybe some
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saints and heroes, but not Chance Woyne." So spoke the playwright through his central character in "Sweet Bird of Youth," giving memorable expression to the way in which the measured intervals of our regulated lives-who among us does not wear a watch?-lead only to a private little apocalypse of extinction. But maybe the artist, the playwright who takes our unspoken anxieties and hidden fears, shaping them into images that move and mean-maybe such a man ranks with the saints and heroes, for it is he who conquers death by creating the timeless world of a play. Ironically, it is just now when ·Williams has successfully won the dusty respect of academe that his reputation among theater critics and practitioners of the avant-garde is in great disrepair. Looking a little antique· in the midst of so much that strives to be modern, the Williams play seems to belong to what we have already begun to think of as the past. After all, two movements in the last ten years, the Theater of the Absurd and the Theater of Cruelty, have occupied the center of the stage. And not since December, 1961, when "The Night of the Iguana" opened, has Williams had a successful new play on Broadway. 'l'he general assumption about Williams -indeed, a public myth that has such a fast grip on our fantasies that we are unwilling to admit it might not be true-is that he is repetitious to a fault and has written himself out Even were this indict-
ment true, Williams is nevertheless one of the few American dramatists whose work displays any evolution of thought toward the solving of a set of philosophic and religious problems. That critics have failed to deal productively with this fact only emphasizes that Williams's image as the play\Vright of sex and violence was too valuable a commercial and critical prop· erty to be readily forsaken. The ideological shift in Williams's plays was signaled by a significant change in dramatic strategy. His earliest plays were concerned with the representation of a developi,ng action, an action that required a certain duration of dramatic time and a number of scenes to unfold; in distinct contrast, the later plays tend to collapse the range of dramatic time into a limited period that seldom exceeds 24 hours. Starting with "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," almost every Williams play is more interested in exploring a situation rather than narrating a complex action. And in the last plays, "The Night of the Iguana" and "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore," character and thought take com· plete precedence over plot. At the same time that this emphasis on thought occurred, Williams's manipulation of symbols-important to the life of even his earliest work-became more pronounced. In the later plays, the intricate and ambiguous complexity of thought is made to compensate for the excitement lost through diminished dramatic action. As Williams continued to develop this new dramatic (Continued on Page 7)
Twenty years ago "A 9lrcctcar Named Desire" with Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, le~, established Tennessee Williams as a major American dramatist. Today he prepares his latest play for Broadway, '~Kingdom of Earth." Below right, at a rehearsal, he watches as Estelle Parsons, portr.ing a Southern girl, accepts the caras of her new husband, Brian Bedford, although she has her eye on his brother, Harry Gu•rdino. This "comic talc of crude se.x" is set against the' background of an approaching Mississippi flood.