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The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies

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The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Barnett, David. "The 1930s’ Plays (1936–1940)." The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014. 9–34. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472515452.0007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 04:57 UTC. Copyright © Brenda Murphy 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER 1 THE 1930s ’ PLAYS (1936 – 1940) Williams in the Thirties Much of Williams ’ s early playwriting was shaped by the social, economic, and artistic environment of the 1930s. His most important theatrical relationship at the time was with director Willard Holland and Th e Mummers of St Louis, a group dedicated to the drama of social action that was vital to American theatrical culture in the 1930s. Candles to the Sun (1937), based on a coal mining strike, and Fugitive Kind (1937), about the denizens of a seedy urban hotel, were both produced by Th e Mummers, and Not About Nightingales (1938), about brutal abuses in the American prison system, was intended for them, although they disbanded before the play was produced. Th e other major infl uence on Williams ’ s early development as a playwright was the playwriting program at the University of Iowa, which he attended in 1937 – 38. Its director, E. C. Mabie, had worked for the Federal Th eatre Project (FTP), the only federally subsidized theatre in American history, which existed briefl y from 1935 until 1939, when its funding was cut by a Congress that objected to its leftist leanings. In the FTP, Mabie had worked with agit prop and other social action techniques in the Living Newspaper, a theatrical form that he brought to Iowa. As part of a Living Newspaper, Williams wrote a one-act dramatization of a prison hunger strike, called Quit Eating! , which became the basis for Not About Nightingales . Williams ’ s other instructor in playwriting at Iowa was E. P. Conkle, who had had a successful Broadway production of his play about Abraham Lincoln, Prologue to Glory , just the year before Williams came to Iowa. 9 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 9 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:330:28:33 AAMM The Theatre of Tennessee Williams With this background, it is not surprising that Williams worked hard during the 1930s to produce drama of political and social signifi cance. At the same time, the perennial themes and tropes that make a Tennessee Williams play recognizable were beginning to be established during these early years. Th e misfi t, the marginalized, and the “ fugitive kind ” who need to escape from the trap of confi nement by middle-class mores are evident from the beginning, as well as the artist, who often is also the misfi t, and the bohemian lifestyle that he seeks as escape. Williams ’ s interest in the representation of sexuality, particularly the divergence from, or the transgression of, the heteronormative, is there as well. And permeating all his work is his lifelong obsession with his mother, his father, his grandparents, and especially his sister Rose, which would fuel much of his art. Th ese themes are particularly evident in Spring Storm , written in 1937 – 38, and Stairs to the Roof , written in 1940, neither of which was produced during his lifetime. Both dramatize concerns that were immediate to Williams at the time: sexual confl ict and confusion, the situation of the artist, and the necessity of escaping the trap of a mechanical, dehumanizing job and a joyless, drearily conventional middle-class life. A Literary Bohemia: The Magic Tower Th e Magic Tower was Williams ’ s fi rst produced play, staged on 13 October 1936 by an amateur theatre company in Webster Groves, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St Louis. In a playwriting contest sponsored by the Webster Groves Th eatre Guild, the play won fi rst prize, which included production of the play. Perhaps because it was not a play written for Th e Mummers or for the seminars at Iowa, there is no striving for social signifi cance in this one-act play about a bohemian artist, Jim, and his wife, Linda, a former vaudevillian. Williams ’ s depiction of the bohemian lifestyle is straight out of the traditional literature of bohemia deriving from Henri Murger ’ s La vie boh è me (1849) and Giacomo Puccini ’ s opera La boh è me (1896), a bohemia that was popularized in the United States by the writers 10 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 1100 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:330:28:33 AAMM The 1930s’ Plays (1936–1940) and artists of the Greenwich Village Little Renaissance that fl ourished before World War I. Williams ’ s play could easily be one of the one- act plays of the Provincetown Players, which often indulged in the self-depiction of the bohemian community of Greenwich Village. Williams was to alter his view of the bohemian lifestyle as he gained in experience and broadened his views, embracing particularly the gay element in the bohemian subcultures of New Orleans, New York, Key West, Southern California, and Puerto Vallarta. But at this stage in his life, Williams clearly took his view of bohemia from literature. Th e Magic Tower has many of the tropes of traditional bohemian literature. Th e penniless artist and his wife are living a life of poverty devoted to art and love in an attic apartment they call their “ enchanted tower ” while they dodge the landlady and wonder where their next meal will come from. But like many of the Provincetown plays, it engages in an ironic self-criticism by dashing the cold water of reality on the bohemian fantasy. Jim, a very young artist, pins his future hopes on a meeting with an art dealer who is looking for fresh new talent to invest in, while his wife Linda is tempted back to her show business career by two former colleagues who try to convince her that she is just a drag on her husband ’ s artistic ambitions. Th ey nearly succeed until Jim returns, revealing he has failed to impress the art dealer, and Linda feels the need to stay and take care of him. In a fi nal twist, though, Jim reveals that he is not as dedicated to the “ enchanted tower fantasy ” as Linda is, exploding with “ magic tower, boloney! It ’ s Mrs. O ’ Fallon ’ s attic that we ’ re up in, Linda! Mrs. O ’ Fallon ’ s lousy, leaking attic! And we ’ re fi ve weeks behind on the rent! Do you know what ’ s going to happen to us, Linda? We ’ re going to get kicked out on our ears, that ’ s what! ” (Williams 2011: 36). When he responds to her statement that in “ this state of enchantment – in which we lived – nothing ever happened – nothing ever mattered except our having each other ” (36 – 7) with the fl at “ those were pretty words ” (37), Linda decides to leave him after all, assuring him that it will be “ much healthier to live in a dry, bright attic – than a magic tower with a leaking roof! ” (38). For Williams, who was living in his parents ’ attic in 1936, this notion of combining the artist ’ s garret with the regular meals, clean laundry and other comforts of middle-class life was an 11 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 1111 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:330:28:33 AAMM The Theatre of Tennessee Williams attractive compromise. It would be 2 years until he fi nally broke out of the parental nest and made his fi rst foray into the authentic bohemian lifestyle of the New Orleans French Quarter. “ Group consciousness” : Candles to the Sun Candles to the Sun was the fi rst full-length play by Williams to see production. It was actually his development of a one-act play, Th e Lamp , by Joseph Phelan Hollifi eld, a writer who was a friend of his grandparents in Memphis. Th e two had worked together on the play in 1935 when Williams was in Memphis, and Hollifi eld eventually turned it over to Williams to do what he could with it (N: 52, n. 81). As Dan Isaac notes in his Introduction to the play, Williams wrote a note on a draft of the play that he submitted to Holland, explaining that Hollifi eld had written the original one-act play, and he was “ doing the writing on the present manuscript ” while Hollifi eld was contributing material about the Red Hills section of Alabama where the play is set (Williams 2004: xxv). Th e play, which dramatizes the brutal living conditions in a mining camp and the eff orts to improve them with a labor strike, culminates in the miner ’ s widow Fern ’ s choice to spend her savings to sustain the strikers rather than to save it for the college tuition that will free her son from the mine. Th e play was tailor-made for the Mummers, and Williams worked with Willard Holland in a close collaboration that was the fi rst of several such partnerships between playwright and director during his career. William Jay Smith, one of Williams ’ s close friends in St Louis, says in the play ’ s Foreword that Holland “ had almost single- handedly helped to shape the fi nal version of the play from the more than 400 unnumbered typewritten pages of various drafts that now repose at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas ” (ix). As shaped by Williams and Holland for Th e Mummers ’ 1937 production, Candles to the Sun certainly fulfi lls the group ’ s mission of social engagement.
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