MISTER PARADISE and OTHER ONE-ACT PLAYS Tennessee Williams Was Born in 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, Where His Grandfather Was the Episcopal Clerygman
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Tennessee Williams MI S T ER PARADI S E AND O T HER O NE-ACT P LAYS Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel Foreword by Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson Contents FOREWORD INTRODUCTION These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch Mister Paradise The Palooka Escape Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? Summer at the Lake The Big Game The Pink Bedroom The Fat Man’s Wife Thank You, Kind Spirit The Municipal Abattoir Adam and Eve on a Ferry And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens … NOTES ON THE TEXT ABBREVIATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS MISTER PARADISE AND OTHER ONE-ACT PLAYS Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the episcopal clerygman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with the family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1961), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963; revised 1964) and Small Craft Warnings (1972). Tennessee Williams died in 1983. Peter Shaffer has written of Tennessee Williams: ‘He was a born dramatist as few are ever born. Whatever he put on paper, superb or superfluous, glorious or gaudy, could not fail to be eletrifyingly actable. He could not write a dull scene …Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself.’ Cameron Folmar and Myk Watford in the original production of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens … at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C. Photo by Richard Termine; used by permission. Foreword: A Two-Hander ANNE: Maureen Stapleton, one of Tennessee Williams’s favorite actresses, was asked by an interviewer why she chose to perform in his plays that dealt with homosexuality, incest and cannibalism. She answered: “Well, to quote Tennessee, ‘They’re just folks!’” ELI: But, we do not agree with the question posed by the interviewer who was sensationalizing and trivializing Williams’s characters. Because Tennessee’s “just folks” were those down on their luck, lost souls trying to make their way in a cruel world. As actors we were fortunate enough to take on the problems of those characters and bring them alive on stage. Tennessee gave them humor as well as pain, and breathed into them a nobility of spirit. ANNE: We first met when we were cast in Tennessee’s one-act play This Property is Condemned for Equity Library Theater. It was a two-hander. I thought Eli was too old for the part … ELI: … because at the reading I appeared in my Captain’s uniform—having just been discharged from the army—and on final leave as a Medical Administrative Officer. ANNE: I took the director, Terry Hayden, aside and whispered “Don’t you think he’s too old to play the fifteen-year-old boy?” She answered, “I saw him act and we’ll be lucky if he agrees to do it.” ELI: Obviously I agreed because I came to the first rehearsal dressed in knickers and a cut-up fedora covered with baseball buttons … ANNE: … I never questioned Eli’s ability to play any age or character again. I first met Tennessee when I auditioned for and was cast in his play, Summer and Smoke. The director came down to the footlights and said, “I’d like you to meet your author.” I imagined a tall Eugene O’Neill poetic type with sunken cheeks and soulful eyes. Instead a chubby little man, beautifully groomed in a white panama suit, carrying a gold cigarette holder, came giggling down the aisle and said, “I’m happy to have you as Nelly Ewell in my new play.” ELI: My first encounter with Williams occurred when he came to the Actors Studio to watch a scene from his phantasmagoric one-act fantasy, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. The director, Elia Kazan, had invited Tennessee to see a scene from the play in which I played Kilroy, an ex-boxer just discharged from the Navy. Williams almost jumped out of his seat at the end of the scene—“I’ll enlarge this one-acter into a full play, and it will be done on Broadway! Can I count on you to direct it?” he asked Kazan. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kazan answered—three years later I played Kilroy in the full-length Camino Real on Broadway, directed by Kazan. As he left the room after seeing the scene at the Studio, Tennessee stopped at the door, stroked his chin, and said to me, “I think you’d be just right for the role of the truck driver, Mangiacavallo, in my new play, The Rose Tattoo. Cheryl Crawford is producing it—give her a call.” And he giggled and went out the door. ANNE: While The Rose Tattoo was being prepared we continued to work on Williams’s one-act plays. Karl Malden directed me in Mooney’s Kid Don’t Cry, with Kevin McCarthy at the Actors Studio. ELI: I was asked by Joshua Logan at the Actors Studio to direct Hello From Bertha, a play about an over-the-hill prostitute who was being evicted from her apartment. I was struck by Tennessee’s empathy and sensitivity for the plight of the women—as American officers in North Africa we were ordered to raid the whorehouses to protect the health of our soldiers … ANNE: After Camino Real, Eli was fortunate to be cast in Williams’s first original film and to be directed in it by Elia Kazan. Williams had stitched together two of his one-act plays, The Unsatisfactory Supper and Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton, to create the screenplay for the film he called Baby Doll, which also starred Karl Malden and Carol Baker. ELI: Anne and I continued our friendship with Williams for decades and in the late 1980s we put together an evening of scenes from his plays called Tennessee Williams Remembered. Woven between the scenes we perform are anecdotes and memories from many pleasant evenings spent with Tennessee. ANNE: So, you’ve come on a little trip through the past and our relationship with Tennessee. And now 50-some years after that trip began, a cache of Williams’s earliest one-act plays has been unearthed by diligent scholars Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel. Mister Paradise is the title play of this collection. It is ironic and just, at the same time, that the theme of the play deals with the voice of a poet who is forgotten and defeated. A young woman, a poet herself, seeks him out. She’s found a copy of his book of poetry being used to balance the shortened leg of an old table in an antique shop in “the Quarter.” She visits Mr. Paradise with the hope of bringing his work to the attention of the public once again. ELI: Mister Paradise is like an x-ray look into Williams’s soul—it is acidic, sad, and most moving. Yes. Tennessee was a poet, and it is the poetry in his plays that gives them their unmistakable signature. His early plays are rich with exploration of different theatrical styles. Just as young painters make their stabs at impressionism and cubism, in these one-acts Williams tried his hand with political satire, expressionism, social realism, and even drawing-room comedy, influenced by playwrights such as Phillip Barry and S.N. Behrman—the wife in The Fat Man’s Wife is described by Williams as the “Lynne Fontainne type.” But the delightful sophistication of Tennessee’s wit and humor always comes refreshingly through in his own distinctive voice .… ANNE: This book is a treasure trove that actors will come to again and again—professional, college actors, and even some high school students…. These thirteen “new” one-acts, along with the dozens of other one-acts Williams wrote, served as inspiration and the training ground for his well-known full-length plays. ELI: In each of these one-acts there are elements of Williams’s courage, his sensitivity to the outsiders of life, his wicked sense of humor, and most of all his compassion. It is a wonder to be reminded of Tennessee’s gifts. ANNE: The character of Anthony Paradise puts it this way: “The motion of life is upwards, the motion of death is down. Only the blindest of all blind fools can fail to see which is going to be finally—highest up! Not death, but life, my dear. Life—life! I defy them to stop it forever! Not with all their guns, not with all their destruction! We will keep on singing. Someday the air all over the earth will be full of our singing.” ELI: We wish you a happy read.