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2018 Tennessee Williams And Italy: A Transcultural Perspective S. E. Gontarski

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Alessandro Clericuzio. Tennessee Williams & Italy: A Transcultural Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016. Pp. 225, illustrated. $99.99.

S. E. Gontarski

Abstract

Alessandro Clericuzio’s Tennessee Williams & Italy: A Transcultural Perspective traces the work of a young American playwright’s growing international reputation against the currents of cultural history in a conflicted Italy struggling to emerge from post-War, Fascist rule.

Key Words

Tennessee Williams, Luchino Visconti, Giorgio Strehler, Eliseo Theatre, Piccolo Teatro

Alessandro Clericuzio’s Tennessee Williams & Italy: A Transcultural Perspective is as much a cultural history of a conflicted Italy struggling to emerge from Fascist rule as it is a study of a young American playwright’s growing international reputation. It addresses particularly a “gap in Williams scholarship regarding his relation to a geographical and cultural area that had an enormous yet mostly uncharted on his work” (1). Like most compelling narratives this one has something of a hero, or a series of artist-heros, the Italian director Luchino Visconti chief among them but those around Rome’s Eliseo Theatre who supported him as well: his assistants, collaborators and particularly the translator Gerardo Guerrieri. Williams was introduced to Italy, Clericuzio tells us when Luchino Visconti decided to direct Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in Rome in 1946, and “Italian theaters were slowly recovering – culturally and economically – from the ravages of World War II. Intellectuals were disappointed by the poorness of what Italian playwrights produced [. . .]” and so they looked elsewhere, abroad.

Visconti’s closest collaborator was Gerardo Guerrieri, who worked as assistant director, translator, and in many other capacities. In an unpublished letter, dated 1945, held at the Visconti archives in Rome, Guerrieri wrote to the director that he was “making arrangements with Silvio d’Amico and a Murray lady to have plays from America and from England.” When Williams died, in 1983, Guerrieri read a eulogy on the radio and started his memories of the American playwright from the times in which The Glass Menagerie was produced in Rome. “Zoo di vetro,” he remembered, “was one of the first things that reached us from the United States after the war, together with Camel cigarettes and canned pea soup. The script was brought to us to the Eliseo Theatre by a young man still wearing his uniform, a soldier who was a theater agent” (1993 [i.e., ”I demoni” 15], [Clericuzio 57]).

Chapter 3 reprints Clericuzio a vrsion of the essay, “Tennessee Williams and Luchino Visconti: Various Stages of Outrage – and Censorship” from RSA Journal 25 (2014) which is why the chapter tends to sound as if the book is beginning again: “Luchino Visconti was the cultural ambassador who introduced Tennessee Williams’ theater to Italians. He directed Lo zoo di vetro in December 1946 at the Eliseo Theatre in Rome, where he also put on Un tram che si chiama desiderio in January 1949. In 1951, with some changes in the cast, his Streetcar opened in Milan at the Teatro Nuovo [two years after Giorgio Strehler staged Estate e Fumo (Summer and Smoke) at his Piccolo Teatro in Milan (24)]. Newspaper critics thronged to see and judge Italy’s most provocative director staging a new American playwright” (Clericuzio 55).

Much of the strength of Clericuzio’s natrrative is the depth of his archival research listed in a prefatory section called “Sources” (ix).. In his analysis of early productions of Un Tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire), he comments on “the prudery of Italians in the late 1940s.” His examples feature the way the Italian Press handled the homosexuality of Blanche’s late husband, Allan Grey, “some were outraged, defining Allen’s homosexuality as his ‘beastly vice,” calling him “depraved” (77). And even as the promotional posters of the wildly popular film version of 1951 featured depictions of passion and images of Marlon Brando en déshabillé, the film was sanitized by Hollywood of all reference to homosexuality and what many consider Kowalski’s rape of his sister-in-law while his wife, Stella, was in labor. Sanitized as the film was, the violent closing scene redrafted and references to sexuality, particularly homosexuality removed, the Hollywood posters adapted for the Italian market and for which the Italian dubbing of dialogue had “been transformed [. . .] where the literal translations are most injudicious,” still carried notices of restriction of customers 16 years or younger, “Vietato al minori di 16 anni.” That was the small print; the poster’s imagery, on the other hand, announced that the film would be selling sex. Clericuzio details the back-story of that warning, and it is with such research, digging into Italian archives and reviewing contemporary assessments, that Clericuzio excels. As he notes, “[Elia] Kazan’s film was given its world premiere in Italy, at the 12th Venice Film Festival in September 1951,” but, he continues, “Six years after the birth of the Republic [i.e., 1945], Italian entertainment was still controlled by two former Fascists who were profoundly linked to the Church and to [Giulio] Andreotti, ‘who had in mind to crush Italian cinema.’ [. . .] Politics and the church, together with compliant bureaucrats, kept Italian culture (mainly popular culture) under very strict control” (87-8). Such re-sanitizing of a film already sanitized by Hollywood’s Hayes Code gives credence to Clericuzio’s subtitle, “A Transcultural Perspective,” although his perspective may more accurately be dubbed bi-cultural or cross-cultural. Clericuzio’s reception history might have been more Transcultural, however, since the Italian reception of Williams was not unique and resistance to his work was echoed in any number of other European countries as well, the UK during the time when the Lord Chamberlain’s reach extended to approval of public performances in particular (see, for instance, my “In scena,” / “On Stage” in the bilingual edition Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire. Canone teatrale europeo / Canon of European Drama. A cura di / edited by S. E. Gontarski. No. 7. Pisa, Italia: Editioni ETS, 2012, pp. 201-223, 225-244, which, oddly, Clericuzio neither cites nor lists in his bibliography). What Clericizio excels at is the detailing of Williams’s reception in Italy, particularly the resistance from the Catholic Church and those who project and protect its values: “[. . .] the late 1950s and early 1960s were years of quite harsh opposition to any artistic expression that seemed to deviate from the norm of Catholic and middle-class ethics. Italian censorship worked in many ways, not all of them explicit, towards ‘scandalous’ artist [. . . .] Politicians, as well as some intellectuals, were trying to keep at bay forces of change that were about to explode from 1968 on” (184). Clericuzio’s account details many of the reasons why this very American and even regional playwright had such broad appeal abroad. And despite the resistance of the Catholic Church, European artists, intellectuals and general audiences may have accepted him more fully than American audiences and his continued if not continuous performance in Europe suggests a richer vitality than the playwright seems to enjoy in his native land, even from the earliest productions of Streetcar which were embraced and produced by well-known, well-established European and Central American theatrical artists: Seki Sano, often called “the father of Mexican theater,” Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Cocteau and Laurence Olivier. Furthermore, reviewing a series of transatlantic productions for the New York Times on 15 December 1988, Frank Rich, for one, makes an insightful comment about America’s most internationally influential if not locally accepted theater artist not long after the playwright’s freakish, accidental death in 1983: “In death Tennessee Williams is more often regarded by the American theater as a tragic icon than as a playwright worthy of further artistic investigation. The reverse is true in London, where the Williams canon, neglected by the major companies during the writer’s lifetime, is suddenly being rediscovered.” Rich’s observation could extend to most of Europe, where the most interesting and sensitive Williams revivals continue to occur and where Williams is “a playwright worthy of further artistic investigation.” This is a position that Clericuzio shares and augments, although he does not deal with Rich, per se, nor with Williams’s reception in a broader Europe. His subject is not only Williams the playwright but the ethos of post-War Italy, and that he does extremely if not uniquely well. Moreover, if English is Clericuzio’s second language one would be hard pressed to find evidence of such in this well-written text. For scholarly reference, however, the volume does have a shortcoming and that is its perfunctory Index which lists proper names but neither themes nor works of art, not even those of its principal subject.