Tennessee Williams and Europe : Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges [1 ed.] 9789401211277, 9789042038738

Citation preview

Tennessee Williams and Europe

54 DQR

STUDIES IN LITERATURE

Series Editors C.C. Barfoot - A.J. Hoenselaars W.M. Verhoeven

Tennessee Williams and Europe Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges

Edited by

John S. Bak

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover image: A Kabuki-like Blanche (Anne Kessler) and Stanley (Éric Ruf ) in Lee Breuer’s 2011 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the ComédieFrançaise in Paris. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3873-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1127-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands

For Marie-Hélène Vigné-Petit (27 March 1981 - 20 June 2012)

CONTENTS

Illustrations

xi

Ackowledgments

xiii

Thomas Keith Foreword

xvii

John S. Bak Introduction

1

Part One: Tennessee Williams and Europe Felicia Hardison Londré En avant! Tennessee Williams between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean

27

James M. DelPrince “Violets & Carnations Sold on every Corner”: Tennessee Williams, Europe and Flowers

45

Henry I. Schvey “Lightning in a Cloud”: Tennessee Williams’ Theatrical Expressionism

65

Richard Hayes Sergei Eisenstein, Hollywood and Tennessee Williams’ “Plastic Theatre”

89

R. Barton Palmer The View from Here and Abroad: Tennessee Williams and 1950s Hollywood Cinema

111

Part Two: Tennessee Williams and Europe’s Intercultural Encounters Dirk Gindt Williams and Bergman, Lust and Death: Culturally Translating A Streetcar Named Desire in Post-war Sweden

135

Alessandro Clericuzio Tennessee Williams’ Ladies Speak Italian: Cinematic Voices on Stage and in Dubbing

169

Laura Torres-Zúñiga Sea, Sun and “Quien Sabe!”: Tennessee Williams and Spain

189

Ramón Espejo Romero Tennessee Williams in Spain: The Early Years (1945-1957)

213

Kornelia Slavova Tennessee Williams on the Bulgarian Stage: Cold War Politics and Politics of Reception

235

Part Three: Tennessee Williams and Europe’s Transatlantic Exchanges David Savran The Kindness of Strangers?: Tennessee Williams in France and Germany

259

Michael Paller Their Date with Each Other from the Beginning: Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter

281

Johan Callens Tennessee Williams and Ivo van Hove at Home Abroad

301

Xavier Lemoine Un Tramway: Warlikowski’s Desire to Reignite American Theatre in Europe

323

Michael S. D. Hooper Pedro Almodóvar’s “Homage” to Tennessee Williams

347

Notes on Contributors

369

Index

377

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: “Papa” Joffe à la Marne Figure 2: Shrine to the Virgin Mary, The Rose Tattoo Figure 3: Karen Stone, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone Figure 4: After Frank Merlo and the “Stoned Age” Figure 5: Taormina Figure 6: The Jewel Box Figure 7: The Two-Character Play Figure 8: Blanche Figure 9: Williams’ 1948 postcard to Jessica Tandy Figure 10: Flora’s Japanesque Fantasie Figure 11: Anna Magnani, Black Coffee and Cigarettes Figure 12: Violets in the Mountains Figure 13: Carl-Johan Ström’s French Quarter setting Figure 14: Stella (Annika Tretow), Blanche (Karin Kavli) and Stanley (Anders Ek) in the Kowalski apartment Figure 15: Bergman and Ström’s elaborate revolving stage Figure 16: A shy and fragile Blanche (Kavli) Figure 17: Stella (Tretow) refusing to feel guilty Figure 18: Hubert Lärn’s “Lustgården gjorde succé” Figure 19: Lee Breuer’s Un tramway nommé Désir at the Comédie-Française Figure 20: A Kabuki-like Blanche (Anne Kessler) and Stanley (Éric Ruf) in the Breuer production Figure 21: Stanley (Chyra) and Blanche (Huppert) during the rape scene in Warlikowski’s Un Tramway Figure 22: Blanche (Huppert) in the opening scene Figure 23: Visual signs of Blanche’s madness Figure 24: Eunice (Renate Jett) performs “Common People” Figure 25: Blanche awaits the kindness of her stranger

33 49 50 51 52 53 55 56 57 58 59 60 139 143 144 145 148 155 269 275 330 335 337 339 342

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this collection came to me back in 2009, while attending the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans. I had figured back then that there would be various conferences throughout the world dedicated to the centennial celebration of Williams’ birth, and I wanted to make sure – very selfishly, I now admit – that the mass of international theatre and Williams scholars would commit to my conference in the lesser-known French city of Nancy, located in the eastern part of the country. Luckily for me, they did, and this book is the product of our collective efforts. The fifteen articles that appear here were all presented at the “Tennessee Williams in Europe: A Centenary Celebration, 19112011” conference held at the Université Nancy 2 (today, the Université de Lorraine). I am grateful not only to these fifteen scholars, who kindly agreed to let me publish their work, but also to the heroic efforts of the conference co-organizers – Jean-Marie Lecomte, Matthew Smith and the late Marie-Hélène Petit, whose tragic death during childbirth almost a year later prompted this book’s dedication – without whose help the conference would never have been the success that it was. For their generosity in granting me permission to reproduce all of the illustrations that appear in this book or on its cover, I would like to thank: Pascal Victor and ArtComArt; Anita and Viveca Lärn; Lee Breuer; and Katharina Wänseth and Göteborgs Stadsmuseum. At Rodopi, I would like to thank Masja Horn, Esther Roth and especially Cedric Barfoot, who proved indispensible as a copy editor. He always found the right word or the italicized comma in preparing the manuscript for publication. I would also like to thank Thomas Keith, who agreed to write the Foreword to this collection, as well as Kate Johnson, Georges Bordshadt, Inc., the Tennessee Williams Estate and the University of

the South at Sewanee for allowing certain unpublished poems and passages from Williams’ work to be cited. Additional thanks also go out to my research center, I.D.E.A. – Interdisciplinarité dans le monde anglophone – which provided necessary funds for the 2011 conference and for this publication. I would also like to acknowledge the help of my research assistant, Jordan Olry, in helping me put together this book’s index. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Nathalie and our two children, Margaux and James, whose continued love and support make my life with Tennessee Williams all the more enjoyable.

On a tous quelque chose en nous de Tennessee Cette volonté de prolonger la nuit Ce désir fou de vivre une autre vie Ce rêve en nous avec ses mots à lui Quelque chose de Tennessee. “Quelque Chose de Tennessee”, song performed by Johnny Hallyday, lyrics written by Michel Berger, 1985

FOREWORD THOMAS KEITH Le théâtre de Williams continue d’habiter nos mémoires parce qu’il est sensuel, parce qu’il est raffiné au dehors comme au dedans, parce qu’il est ambitieux dans sa vision libertaire.1

At the time of his death in 1983, Tennessee Williams formed part of a triumvirate considered to be the best American dramatists – Arthur Miller and Williams, side by side, held up Eugene O’Neill securely in his place of the highest rank. Twenty-eight years later, during the centennial year of Williams’ birth in 2011, the same three names were still evoked most often when the matter of who might be America’s greatest playwright was considered (with Edward Albee and August Wilson sometimes thrown into contention). However, the question of who is the writer of greatest distinction has become more fluid, less certain, more subject to disagreement and, more often than not, it is now Tennessee Williams we find at the top of the lists and on the tips of the tongues of critics. Most prolific among his peers, Williams wrote at least thirty-four full-length plays and over seventy one-Acts (approximately half his dramatic output was published during his lifetime). He also wrote two novels, four collections of short stories, two poetry collections, a collection of essays, a screenplay and a memoir. During his career, Williams saw seventeen of his plays premiere on Broadway, another                                                            

1

Liliane Kerjan, “La valse et le revolver”, in Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la ComédieFrançaise, 8: Tennessee Williams, Paris: L’Avant-Scène, 2011, 104: “Williams’ theatre still lives in our memories because it is sensual, because it is refined inside and outside, and because it is ambitious in its libertarian vision” (translation by Jean Serge).

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ten premiere Off-Broadway and in regional theatres, and dozens of one-Act plays in venues large and small. As early as 1962, Time declared Williams to be the world’s greatest living playwright, “barring the aged Sean O’Casey”. Yet, within a decade he was persona non grata among the critics and the public. Williams followed a pattern set by the likes of Poe, Melville and Fitzgerald, among others, writers who are now permanent fixtures in our literary heavens but whose reputations were in the gutter at the times of their deaths. Due to much publicized problems in his personal life, as well as brutal and unhappy reviews of almost all of his work after 1963, Williams’ life was viewed as a tragedy of greatness reduced to humiliation and failure, both before and after he died. Then a funny thing happened. Time passed. Not only did Williams’ plays continue to be produced in the years after his death, the number of productions increased. At this moment, and on nearly any day of the year, The Glass Menagerie is being performed somewhere in the United States – whether at a high school, a university, a community theatre, a small professional company or a regional theatre, and most often there are several at once. Right behind The Glass Menagerie are A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana, performed annually at colleges, universities and professional theatres around the country. Culturally speaking, what Lucille Ball is to syndicated television, Tennessee Williams is to American theatre – his plays are always being presented somewhere. Since 1983, there have been over sixteen major Broadway revivals of Williams’ work and one Broadway premiere – Not about Nightingales in 1999. There have been premieres of thirty-two of his one-Act plays, respected Williams festivals have sprouted up in Louisiana, Mississippi and Massachusetts, there have been over a dozen biographies, and two scholarly journals are dedicated to the study of his work. Writing that remained unpublished at the time of Williams’ death but is now available in print includes twelve fulllength plays, three collections of one-Acts, his notebooks, three volumes of selected letters, a collection of screenplays and his collected essays and poems. The passage of time also opened up space for consideration of Williams’ earlier and later work that had been overshadowed, condemned or neglected during his lifetime. Instead of revivals of the

Foreword

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big three – The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on Hot Tin Roof – an overview of centennial-year offerings in 2011 reveals plays that most audiences are not as familiar with. In New York, there was a revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore starring Olympia Dukakis, the Wooster Group’s production of Vieux Carré, a site-specific production of Green Eyes directed by Travis Chamberlain, the New York premiere of Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club starring Mink Stole and Everett Quinton, Small Craft Warnings directed by Austin Pendleton, and the premiere of Moises Kaufman’s stage adaptation of One Arm (based on the Williams short story and screenplay). The rest of America was invited to attend equally untypical Williams fare that year: the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival produced Something Cloudy, Something Clear, directed by Cosmin Chivu; two early one-Acts, The Magic Tower and In Our Profession, and a one-Act version of The Glass Menagerie called The Pretty Trap had their premieres at the Southern Rep Theatre in New Orleans; Confessional was staged at the PushPush Theatre in Atlanta; Period of Adjustment played at the San Francisco Playhouse; and in Los Angeles, there were productions of Camino Real and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a stage adaptation of Baby Doll, and the Fountain Theatre produced the West Coast premiere of A House Not Meant to Stand. Other centennial tributes in the United States included an evening of readings in tribute to Williams by luminaries such as Jessica Lange, Marian Seldes, Olympia Dukakis and Alec Baldwin at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York; New Directions published a group of previously uncollected and unpublished short plays in The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays as well as a Centennial Edition of The Glass Menagerie with an introduction by Tony Kushner; Hansen Publishing released a collection of essays edited by David Kaplan entitled Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams; an exquisite, previously unknown poem, “Your Blinded Hand”, was published in The New Yorker; American Theater Magazine dedicated the September issue to Williams; and The Southern Quarterly brought out a special Williams Centennial Edition edited by Philip C. Kolin. In addition to the annual American festivals – the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, the Delta Tennessee

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Williams Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival – celebrations and academic conferences were held around the country: “The CenTENNial Festival” was offered at Georgetown University in Washington, DC; the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Albuquerque Theatre Guild hosted “A Tennessee Williams Festival”; the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, hosted a week of events; the University of Illinois at Urbana held a conference on the early plays of Williams with, as the centerpiece, a full production of Battle of Angels directed by Tom Mitchell; “Tennessee Williams: The Art of Endurance” was held at the University of Missouri at Columbia with special guests Edward Albee and Elizabeth Ashley; Columbia University in New York City hosted “This Is: Tennessee Williams & Friends”; “The Tennessee Williams Tribute and Tour of Victorian Homes” was held in Columbus, Mississippi; Washington University in St Louis hosted “Tennessee Williams at 100”; and there were also exhibits of rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from the collections of Columbia University, Harvard University, the City of Key West, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. And what about the rest of the world? Well, 2011 was probably, internationally speaking, what could now be considered a typical year for Williams in many ways: Spring Storm premiered in Athens, an adaption of The Glass Menagerie was a hit in Moscow, A Streetcar Named Desire was revived in Caracas, and The Case of the Crushed Petunias was translated into Indonesian. More newsworthy, however, is that 2011 also yielded the first film version of a play by Williams in Persian. Filmed in Tehran with an Iranian cast and crew, director Bahram Tavakoli’s interpretation of The Glass Menagerie is titled Inja bedoone man, which translates into English as Here Without Me. Frank Rich wrote in his 1988 review of Peter Hall’s London revival of Orpheus Descending: In death, Tennessee Williams is more often regarded by the American theatre as a tragic icon than as a playwright worthy of further artistic investigation. The reverse is true in London when the Williams canon,

Foreword

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neglected by the major companies during the writer's lifetime, is suddenly being rediscovered.2

Williams has become a staple of the theatre season in London over the last two decades, where companies are as likely to take on The Rose Tattoo, Period of Adjustment, Something Cloudy, Something Clear or Spring Storm, as they are A Streetcar Named Desire. In 2011, London audiences were offered revivals of The Two-Character Play and Kingdom of Earth, as well as the premieres of the late one-Act plays A Cavalier for Milady and I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays. Parisians flocked to a highly successful production of Kingdom of Earth (Le paradis sur terre) starring the inimitable French rock singer Johnny Hallyday. The international theatre event of the Williams centennial year also took place in Paris, where the Comédie-Française staged the first non-European play in their over 300-year history, Un tramway nommé Désir. Staged by American director Lee Breuer of the Mabou Mines Theatre Company, the 2011 Tramway garnered almost as much controversy as it did praise for Breuer’s approach – not only did he entirely abandon Elia Kazan’s iconic interpretation of the play, without changing the dialogue Breuer brought his own aesthetic, telling the story with visual theatrical techniques and a global cultural vocabulary. International academic conferences in 2011 included “Cent’anni di desiderio: Convegno Internazionale su Tennessee Williams” held at the University of Perugia; “International Tennessee Williams Centennial Conference: Embracing the Island of His Self” at the University of Extremadura, Cáceres; “Page to Stage: Tennessee Williams Centennial Celebrations” hosted by the Department of English at Independent University, Bangladesh; “Tennessee Williams – International Colloquium” hosted by the Technical University of Construction in Bucharest; and “Celebrating 100 Years of Tennessee Williams (1911-2011)” at the School of American Studies, University of East Anglia. Organized by John S. Bak at Nancy-Université in France, “Tennessee Williams in Europe: A Centenary Celebration, 1911                                                            2

Frank Rich, “In London, Taking Williams Seriously”, The New York Times, 15 December 1988: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/15/theater/review-theater-in-lon don-taking-williams-seriously.html (accessed 14 April 2014).

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2011” was the largest and most comprehensive international academic conference held during the centennial. There were two keynote speakers, beginning with the esteemed American poet William Jay Smith, who offered a moving look into his personal friendship with Williams when they attended St Louis’ Washington University in the 1930s. Then, distinguished professor, scholar and theatre critic David Savran set the tone for the conference by articulating the impact Williams has had in Europe as an inadvertent cultural ambassador for the United States through his plays and the Hollywood film versions they inspired. On the third day in Nancy, people attending were treated to a one-man show about Williams, Everybody Expects Me to Write Another Streetcar, written and performed by Jeremy Lawrence. The scholars who presented papers and participated on panels represented fifteen different countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States. This published selection of articles based on papers they presented at Nancy is a testament to Williams’ stature as an international playwright and the importance of Williams’ influence on contemporary European theatre and scholarship. Is Tennessee Williams the greatest playwright America has yet engendered? That Williams is an international playwright and a permanent fixture in world theatre is now established. Few modern American playwrights have such incandescent vitality around the globe in their busy afterlives.

INTRODUCTION JOHN S. BAK

Williams and Europe were tempestuous lovers, and their story is one straight out of the theatre: boy falls in love, love turns to desire, passion burns brightly then wanes, lovers part ways, mutual understanding comes to define their relationship over time. It was a formula Williams often exploited in his own plays, though he always replaced the “mutual understanding” part with a denouement a bit less optimistic: boy rapes girl, boy is eaten by strangers, boy gets castrated. Still, his relationship with Europe had a happy ending. Williams first encountered Europe on 12 July 1928, while accompanying his grandfather on a tour for parishioners of the pastor’s Episcopal church in Clarksdale. He returned there after a nineteen-year hiatus to find that the continent was different. Had it changed so much, or had he? “Europe?” he wrote in his notebook for January 1948 while retracing his and his grandfather’s earlier steps from Paris to Rome after World War II, “I have not yet organized my impressions”.1 Williams would soon forge those impressions into the many stories, plays and one-Acts he wrote while living in Italy or traveling throughout Spain, Germany or France, and his renewed interests in post-war Europe forever altered the course of his life and his literary aesthetics. Europe, too, would contemplate its first intercultural encounters with Williams through its many productions of his plays, including Lo zoo di vetro, Spårvagn till Lustgården, La gata sobre el tejado de zinc, Orfei sliza v ada and Le paradis sur terre. This book is about those first intercultural encounters, the impressions they left on both parties over the years, and the interatlantic exchanges that resulted.

                                                           

1

Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 469.

2

John S. Bak

In 1928, Williams documented his first impressions of Europe in a travelogue, what he referred to in a letter to his grandfather penned in late September as his “little diarys”: I found the little diarys I had written. At first I thought that they had been lost. I am going to re-write them on the typewriter sometime soon.2

Published in installments the following academic year in his high school newspaper, U. City Pep, the travelogue reveals the young man’s fascination and eventual infatuation with the continent’s various people, cultures and histories. During those few weeks, Europe left an indelible impression on the young writer. While the sights, sounds and smells of a reconstructed Europe fill most of the pages of his travelogue, Williams also paid close attention to the people he met, and frequently those he describes are European types encountered later in his plays. The combative Germans in Amsterdam were later incarnated as Herr and Frau Fahrenkopf in The Night of the Iguana, who “tuned in to the crackle and guttural voices of a German broadcast reporting the Battle of Britain”.3 The “small [Gypsy] boys [who] pursued our bus, holding out their hands for coins” in his essay “A Trip To Monte Carlo” resemble the Spanish “flock of black plucked little birds” who pursue Sebastian Venable “halfway up the white hill” before devouring parts of him in Suddenly Last Summer. Even the very “stout woman, dressed with gaudy splendor of a circus queen” who steps out of the “sumptuous lavender, Hispano-Suiza limousine” could be any number of Williams’ faded starlets, from Alexandra Del Lago to Flora “Sissy” Goforth.4 Many of Williams’ European figures had already found life here in these juvenile travel pieces. Ultimately, though, Europe was to Williams synonymous with freedom. Writing his family aboard the S.S. Homeric, on 13 July, he explains knowingly how the ship’s saloon “never [has] a lack of                                                             2

Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 19201945, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2000, 22. 3 Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1972, IV, 261. 4 Tennessee Williams, “A Trip To Monte Carlo”, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 229.

Introduction

3

customers” and how his grandfather also kept “his tongue pretty slick” with alcoholic beverages.5 The young man, too, “tried” his grandfather’s cocktails – no doubt under the indulgent eye of the Reverend – but added, perhaps reassuringly to his mother, that “he prefer[red] none to plain ginger-ale and Coca Cola”.6 Admitting to his mother a few days later that French champagne was “the only drink” that he liked also suggests that Williams continued trying several drinks, perhaps even an illicit absinthe at the café Napolitain, which he visited with his grandfather while in Paris.7 He confessed not only to having unashamedly “imbibed” in “french champagne” but also having seen scantily dressed showgirls in the “notorious Parisian shows – The Folies Bergére [sic] and the Moulin Rouge”.8 If Versailles was for Williams “a perfect wonder-land”,9 as he wrote to Hazel Kramer a couple of days later, Paris was “simply sublime”, even with its “charmingly wicked show” at Les Folies Bergères, whose juicy details he refused to describe further on paper but promised to recount in detail to a girlfriend whom he had already trompé of sorts with the “gay city” of Light.10 When you are in Paris, he boldly told his mother, “you might as well leave all dispensable conventions behind”11 – and he did. Williams left his lover two months later. He had to. After all, he was only seventeen, and Europe was already involved in another relationship, one that would soon end again in a dispute more volatile than the one Williams had seen traces of in Belleau Wood, permanent home now to the remains of 2,289 fallen American soldiers. Straightjacketed for years by the conservative mores of St Louis and the puritanical ratchetings of his mother, the young Williams had discovered in Europe a level of social tolerance of the kind he would not know in America for another two decades. When Williams returned to Europe on 6 January 1948, again to “gay” Paris (the city’s famed moniker had taken on a whole new meaning for him), he was planning on renewing the romance with the Europe he had quitté like so many returning GIs. He was all grown up                                                             5

Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, I, 14. Ibid., 15. 7 Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, 233. 8 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, I, 16-17. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid., 15, 16. 11 Ibid., 17. 6

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now and fleeing his own volatile relationship with Amado “Pancho” Rodriguez y Gonzales. Europe was just what he needed to mend his battered heart. But, upon arrival, he found that Europe had changed, and dramatically so. No doubt he expected as much, knowing full well that the Europe he would find was not going to be the one he had left back in September 1928. After all, Europe was still recovering from the war’s tragic second Act. By now, he had escaped St Louis and his mother’s extensive reach, and, following the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, he could travel anywhere in the world he wanted. Strangely, he did not run back to Europe right away but would wait several more years. He mentioned to his publisher, James Laughlin, in a letter of June 1946 that he and Pancho had plans on visiting Spain the following year.12 When he finally did return to the Old World, alone, his fears about Europe were justified. In a letter to Paul Bigelow, dated 7 January 1948, Williams pines at how Paris had “changed since [he] was here at sixteen [sic]”: “I remember it as being so light and lively at night. Now the streets are rather dim and murky.”13 Lost and disheveled, Europe was the Blanche DuBois of an ad hoc realpolitik, eager to welcome its former lover – and his fat wallet: “living in Europe”, he admitted to Oliver Evans in a letter of 31 January, “is inexpensive when you have learned the ropes”.14 And if Williams learned little at university that he found useful, he had learned one thing: how to enjoy life on the cheap. Postwar Europe was just like Columbia and Iowa City, save the topless can-can dancers; and it certainly resembled the French Quarter he had discovered back in 1938, only cheaper, in all senses of the word. Williams could find sexual partners in any major European city with an ease that he had only encountered in certain pockets of known “decadent” American cities like New Orleans or Provincetown. Big Daddy’s impression of post-war Europe, as Laura Torres-Zúñiga rightly points out in her article in this collection, is that it was nothing but a “fire-sale”, and Sebastian, like Big Mama, was there for the taking: “If Big Daddy impersonates the most ambivalent face of                                                            

12 Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 19451957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 57. 13 Ibid., 142. 14 Ibid., 155 (Williams’ emphasis).

Introduction

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American capitalism, which cooperates with but also profits from other countries’ disfavored economic situation, Sebastian transposes such commodification of countries and people in Europe’s ‘big firesale’ … into sexual and political (ab)use fuelled by an incessant consumerist drive.”15 Spending two weeks in Paris, Williams, too, took advantage of the economic disparities. Having recently lived his own “catastrophe of success” with The Glass Menagerie and all of its trimmings (including a chocolate-cum-gravy sauce for his thick sirloin steak16), he could barely stomach what poverty-stricken Europe offered him, including the “noxious stuff they call coffee” or the “white granules” of “powdered milk”.17 Writing to his agent, “Taudrey” Wood, just after arriving in Paris, Williams admitted that his “impressions of Paris” were “mixed notices”: “The people seem terribly greedy, in fact avaricious, and while they like Americans, I think they like them in the way that a bird like worms.”18 Having lived a rather pampered life during the American Depression, Williams, for all of his Socialist leanings, could not see how his lover had sacrificed all for mere survival. Fake furs and rhinestone tiaras were all that Europe had left to seduce him with. Leaving Nice on a train at the end of the month, Williams jotted down in his notebook: I look forward to Rome as to some mystery with good portents. I had two lovely affairs in Paris, one a piece of living sculpture and the other a charming little chick.19

Rome’s “portents” a few days later would include a young “Neopolotan” [sic] boxer named “Jeeno” (Gino?), whom Williams describes in a letter of 31 January to his friend Oliver Evans: Thick glossy black hair and a small but imperial torso! The nightingales busted their larynx! And Miss Keats swooned in her

                                                            15

See her article in this volume. Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, 33. 17 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 147 (Williams’ emphasis). 18 Ibid., 144-45. 19 Williams, Notebooks, 469. 16

6

John S. Bak grave! …. I wish I could tell you more about this boxer, details, positions, amiabilities – but this pale blue paper would blush!20

As in his letter to Hazel nearly two decades earlier, Williams would save the juicy bits of his encounter for verbal discourse alone. He wrote to Audrey again later that April, admitting to her that These Italians break my heart, or what’s left of it. They are such loveable and pitiful people, and up against such a blank wall, politically, economically, almost every conceivable way. I hate to make friends among them – easy as that is! – because I shall feel so badly when I leave them here with the sort of future that seems to be inevitable.21

But leave them he did, heading north that month with American writer Frederic Prokosch because they, like Sebastian Venable, “were getting an appetite for blondes as the Roman gentry are all sort of dusky type”.22 Once Williams’ lover, Europe was now simply his trade, and what a “bull market” it turned out to be.23 It did not take long, however, for Williams to fall in love again, and each summer for nearly a decade he would return faithfully to Europe. In a letter of 8 February 1948 to Carson McCullers, Williams admitted: I feel that this is the place for us both, especially here in Italy, this place of soft weather and golden light and of great bunches of violets and carnations sold on every corner and the Greek ideal surviving so tangibly in the grace and beauty of the people and the antique sculpture as well. I cannot write very coherently about Rome as I love it so much!24

Though he traveled extensively throughout the continent, his favorite European cities would be limited to two, Rome and Barcelona. When life in one became too torpid – either from the oppressive summer heat or from Frank Merlo’s cold-shoulder to his many infidelities –                                                            

20

Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 155. Ibid., 183. 22 Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965, ed. Donald Windham, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, 215. 23 Williams, Notebooks, 477. 24 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 160. 21

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Williams quickly moved on to the other. In both cities, he could readily enjoy his days, and his nights. With its progressivist (or, at least less virulent) attitudes toward sensuality and homosexuality, Europe, particularly Italy and Spain, had decriminalized consensual homosexual acts in the previous century under the pan-European Napoleonic Code (Franco’s dictatorial regime would change that during the Spanish Civil War), and it provided Williams free license to cruise, which inevitably loosened his own attitudes toward representing homosexuality in literature that was once confined to the pages of his short fiction. To a certain extent, Europe helped Williams out of the theatre’s closet, with plays like Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer bearing traces of his European experiences in their more earnest treatment of homosexuality than did his plays of the previous decade. Paradoxically, for all of its liberalism toward sexual transgression in private life, European nations were not that tolerant of the representation of sexuality, gay or straight alike, in its theatres. After all, Europe was largely a Catholic enclave, where social conservatism still trumped political progressivism, and not just in the representation of sexuality in art. As there were places made explicitly for such private activities, there was no need to confront it publically in the national theatres that performed regularly the classics of Molière and Corneille or of Goldoni and Pirandello. In his letter to “Taudrey” Wood, Williams confessed that he felt Europe’s theatres were “20 years behind Broadway”: This is a somewhat premature judgement as I haven’t seen much. But the hamming, mugging, and the prevailing chi-chi quality of the material, the corruption of the critics, the arrogance of the stars is really shameful.25

If indeed Europe’s theatres were twenty years behind America’s, as Williams jingoistically suggests, it was because its theatre had been the war with a Fascist exposition and a Capitalist/Communist denouement. Theatre needs democracy and social accord to thrive, lest doxa slip into dogma or propaganda. Europe’s inter-war playwrights were hardly lagging behind their American counterparts, and, if anything, their absurdist philosophies were largely ahead of                                                            

25

Ibid., 145.

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Broadway’s seasonal fare, as Michael Paller argues in his article in this collection. Europe’s various state theatres, as opposed to its more art theatres like Spain’s teatros de cámara that Ramón Espejo Romero describes, frequently choked on Williams’ phallocentric plays, and Williams became the American bad-boy to Europe’s sculpted gentility, the Capitalist playboy to its fomenting Socialist agenda, and the sensationalist prurient to its cerebral playwrights. David Savran, Ramón Espejo Romero, Dirk Gindt, Kornelia Slavova and R. Barton Palmer all point out in their articles here how Williams’ plays were perceived as being decadent, vulgar, even pornographic. This did not, of course, stop Europe from importing his plays to its many stages and promoting them, as do the king and the duke in Twain’s Huck Finn for their theatrical productions, by prohibiting certain people from entering the theatre or by denouncing the play’s licentiousness, both of which increased box-office receipts. As the duke says of the “biggest line” on the promotional bill that they have posted throughout the village, “LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED”, “… if that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw”.26 Europe, with its own royal nonesuch, was not to be trusted, not in Twain’s day or in Williams’. All the time that Europe was openly exposing Williams’ plays as examples of American or Western decadence, it was privately coveting them as an affront to its own staid and effete values. If Williams was great theatre, and that was still very much an “if” throughout Europe, it was a greatness that Europe had not yet fully recognized but would come to appreciate, or hate, just as it had done with most American exports, from McDonalds to blue jeans to jazz music. At any rate, Williams was not to be ignored since he was undeniably bankable. The critics may not have liked him, and many repeatedly said so, but the public kept coming back, if only to be titillated by a glimpse of Blanche’s pink brassière, just as Williams had been teased back in 1928 by the sight of gyrating pasties and rotating tassels at the Moulin Rouge. Both, it seems, had helped each other through the rough waters of sexual initiation, one socially and the other culturally. Like any pair of lovers, though, Williams and Europe soon grew bored with one another. For almost a decade, Williams had been                                                            

26

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), New York: Washington Square Press, 1968, 197.

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faithfully returning to Europe each summer, but each summer ended up being worse than the previous one in terms of his writing: 19 July 1950 – “this Roman period has all the defects of the one before and very little of the occasional charm.” 23 July 1950 – “How infinitely wrong this Roman period has turned out!”. 16 September 1951 – “Rome again … and things are not changed much …. But the real jolt was when I read through my long story [“Three Players of a Summer Game”] this A.M. (yesterday). Had thought that might be the one accomplishment of the season. But it was dull, dull! And I hit the bottom! The old familiar rock bottom –”. 29 June 1953 – “I’ve just about run through this Roman period already. Everything is just a little too familiar.”27

By 1956, Williams confessed to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy that he felt that he had “had Europe”28 and was ready to turn East toward exotic Asia. Europe had seemingly grown a bit tired of Williams’ brand of theatre, too, though it indulged greedily, like some peep-show habitué, in his films, as R. Barton Palmer notes in his article in this book. To a certain extent, the Williams that the average European came to know by mid-century was the “Hollywood” Williams, the watered-down and neutered version of the Broadway playwright. Williams lamented as much during a 1976 interview with Danièle Gilbert for the French television program Midi Première. He was in Cannes, serving as Président for that year’s Film Festival, and Gilbert asked him if he was a little “triste”, or sad, that his plays were know in France essentially through their cinematic adaptations: Je crois que c’est un dommage que le monde connaît seulement les films ... presque tout le monde connaît seulement les films, mais les films de vingt ans, d’il y a vingt ans étaient très, censurés? Comment dit-on [censured] .... Et je suis un personne qui aime l’honnêteté, plus du tout dans les films, et maintenant il y a beaucoup d’honnêteté,

                                                            27 28

Williams, Notebooks, 513, 515, 537 and 569 (Williams’ emphases). Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 613.

10

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Some Europeans only had access to Williams’ plays through the big screen. Writing to J. Brooks Atkinson on 25 June 1953, Williams describes how “Censors have forbidden the showing of ‘Tattoo’ on the Italian stage ...”.30 By the time European audiences discovered the “Broadway” Williams, most of the scandals that had earlier maligned his play no longer shocked them. If anything, Europe was able to look anew at Williams’ theatre and find there, once the veneer of sexuality had been stripped away, plays that bore a serious social message or that captured a universal human dilemma. Williams, too, could not stray far and long from his former lover, and, after a brief fling with Japanese Noh theatre, William returned to Europe and its “new wave” playwrights, including Samuel Becket and Harold Pinter. In an unpublished essay draft of three-pages that begins “That Greek Island” (c. 1960), Williams pays tribute to this experimentalist theatre with which he felt a certain kinship: Although nearly all my own work belongs to a different school, or generation, I can feel not only a sympathetic understanding of what they are not only trying to do but often doing, but sometimes I can

                                                            29

“I think it’s a shame that the world only knows the films ... almost everyone knows the films alone, but the films of twenty years ago were heavily censured. How do we say that [word in French, censurés]? …. And I am a person who loves honesty [which cannot be found] at all in the films; and if there is a lot of honesty today, in my tomb ... or temps [time] Yeah? Did I say tomb or temps? [Laughs] .... Yes, there was a lot of censorship in my day.” For the full, albeit slightly inaccurate, transcript and video of the interview that took place on 15 May 1976, see http://www.ina.fr/fresques /festival -de-cannes-en/fiche-media/Cannes00168/charlotte-rampling-and-tennessee-williamsmembers-of-the-jury-at-the-1976-festival?video=Cannes00168 (accessed 22 November 2012). Nota bene: Throughout this book, I have opted to reproduce all quotes in their original language, providing an English translation in a footnote. I am cognizant of the fact that most readers of this book will not be able to understand its many citations in French, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, Swedish and Dutch. My reasons for this unorthodox editorial decision are twofold: Williams, the constant traveler, would himself attempt to converse in the language of his interlocutor whenever possible, and he repeatedly had the foreign characters in his plays speak in their native tongues. Williams appreciated a foreign language’s musical rhythms and understood that meaning frequently gets lost in translation. In the spirit of Williams’s sojourns throughout Europe, I have tried to remain faithful here to both of these tenets. 30 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 486.

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also feel an identification with it, at least with its principles and aims.31

Just as he had done with his bedeviled father after his death, or with the frustrated Pancho after their rupture, Williams would begin to understand Europe, and Europe him, over time. Though they would never again become the lovers they once were, over the next thirty years Williams and Europe solidified their friendship. Williams would repeatedly seek solace on the European continent, whether to find inspiration when the creative wells of New Orleans or Key West ran dry or preach to catholic audiences, such as those at Italy’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, when Broadway and its theatre critics repeatedly failed to appreciate the experimental nature of his later works. As he admitted to Maria St Just in a letter of April 1973, not long after the third failed run of his blighted play Out Cry: Darling, I have no fixed date of return to the States. I feel that I am totally washed up there and must start a fresh career in some Englishspeaking place like Australia or England.32

America largely rejected Williams’ plays during the 1960s and 1970s, and he looked to Europe’s theatres, like Vienna’s English-speaking and London’s fringe theatres, to premiere his new work. Though their actual reception in either was anything but sensational, at least the plays were not greeted in the next day’s press notices printed with venomous ink, and for Williams that alone meant victory.33 From 1948 till his death in 1983, Williams continued to travel extensively throughout Europe. Though he was repeatedly drawn to the sultry climes of Italy and Spain, Williams visited other countries like France, England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Greece,                                                            

31

Tennessee Williams, “That Greek Island in times so ancient ...”, fragment of an essay [c. post-April 1961], Tennessee Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, n.d., [1]. Copyright © 2014 The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the University of the South, Estate of Tennessee Williams. All rights reserved. 32 Tennessee William, Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, ed. Maria St Just, New York: Penguin, 1991, 286. 33 Following its disastrous tryout in Boston in June 1975, Williams turned to over-sea productions, and The Red Devil Battery Sign was again performed in the winter of 1975-1976 at Vienna’s English-speaking theatre to strong reviews, and another production followed at the Phoenix Theatre in London from 7-23 July 1977.

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Turkey and Sweden. Rarely staying long in any one place (save Rome), Williams nonetheless left his mark on each country he visited, just as each country indelibly left its mark on him. Spain’s Santayana and France’s Sartre, Holland’s van Gogh and Spain’s Picasso, Italy’s Visconti, Sweden’s Bergman and Russia’s Eisenstein, England’s Leigh and Italy’s Magnani, France’s Cocteau and England’s Pinter – be it a philosopher, painter, auteur, actress, or playwright, Europe’s intelligentsia nourished Williams’ creativity for over four decades in ways that his traditional southern roots never could. Thus, while the American South (and St Louis, by opposition) helped shape Williams’ literary thesis, Europe often served as the muse through which that southern thesis was given a voice. Today, though, it is Europe which has turned to Tennessee Williams for inspiration and material. Williams has, in fact, become something of an intercultural icon or literary muse to a new generation of European artists, playwrights, filmmakers and dramaturgs bent on breaking the cultural molds and nationalist agendas that for years have repressed transgression or stymied development in their countries’ national arts. If Europe had at one time helped open Williams’ mind to new ideas and art forms, it is now Williams who is enlightening Europe on certain multicultural perspectives and social interactions that its theatre has historically neglected. A chance, or predestined, encounter between Williams and Europe in 1928, and renewed in 1948, has by today become a rich transatlantic exchange. Though no longer lovers, Tennessee Williams and Europe have remained the best of friends, and their mutual understanding has sustained nearly seventy years of theatre between them, and Europe shows no signs of letting him go. *

*

*

For the first time in a single volume, Williams scholars from around the world have been assembled to document the bi-directional exchange of ideas and images between Williams and post-war Europe that had altered the artistic landscapes of both continents for half a century or more. The fifteen articles gathered here examine this artistic symbiosis and explore avenues of research mostly uncharted in Williams scholarship to date. Authors from the United States and seven different European countries contribute here to our

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understanding of the early Williams and the uses he made of various European sources in his theatre; the late Williams and the promise European theatre afforded him with his experimental plays; and the posthumous Williams and his influence on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century European theatre and cinema artists. With the recent celebrations of the Williams centennial that Thomas Keith describes in his Foreword to this collection, the playwright has increased in popularity in artistic and academic circles on both continents. To some extent both a product of and a muse for Europe over the last half century, Tennessee Williams is well positioned to become America’s most famous playwright on the international stage. This book hopes to mark the beginnings of Williams’ rich critical tradition within that global context. Part One of this collection, entitled “Tennessee Williams and Europe”, deals with those general impressions Williams had of Europe and of Europeans. In the first article, Felicia Hardison Londré explores how Williams often expressed his orientation toward the South in both the United States and Europe, but after examining geographical and literary references in his letters and notebooks, as well as in his plays and poetry, Londré shows that northern influences should not be dismissed. Many clues point to the centrality of France, between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean, in his vocabulary, artistic formation and literary sensibilities. Londré even traces possible sources for Williams’ well-known motto “En avant!”, though she admits that this exhortation to the self cannot be seen as geographically directional. The plays that most vividly emblematize the dichotomy between northern cold and southern warmth are Out Cry and The Two-Character Play. As suggested in these two versions of the same play and in examples from Williams’ poetry, the disappointments of Williams’ last years seem to have turned his perspective, albeit unwillingly, toward the silver or white cold – the northerly images – that he associated with incompletion and death. If Londré steers us north toward the Arctic, James M. DelPrince returns us to the South, American and European alike. In a rather unorthodox approach to studying Williams’ experiences in Europe, DelPrince explores how the writer was greatly affected by European plants and flowers, both in the visible landscape and that of the soul. In his early years, Williams learned about floriculture in the garden and in the domestic environment of the South, their arrangement a

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vestige of the Victorian cults of domesticity and tranquility. As such, Williams’ plays hold numerous references to the flowers he would have encountered in Columbus, as well as in London, Rome and Taormina, where flowers were, and still are, abundantly grown and marketed openly on street corners. Williams’ drew from these southern and European traditions in creating his own florigraphy, but these horticultural cues are often overlooked in his stage productions and in the analysis of his work. Instead of providing traditional literary analysis of plays like Out Cry or Small Craft Warnings, DelPrince reproduces floral analysis by means of flower arrangements that offer a visual interpretation of the play or of Williams’ relation to it. The importance of the visual in Williams’ plastic theatre has long been noted in Williams scholarship, and while DelPrince’s analysis of Williams’ visual theatre is achieved through flowers, Henry I. Schvey’s is accomplished through paintings. European art movements, Schvey contends in the third article, are directly responsible for Williams’ virtuosity at three-dimensional realistic characterization and portraiture, making Williams an Expressionist in his approach to playwriting. Like van Gogh and the later German Expressionist painters, Williams saw the world in visionary terms, and his theatrical œuvre was at least as concerned with the delicate interplay of color and light usually associated with paintings as it was with literary texts. Ignoring or underestimating this extra-literary component to his work, critics have long disregarded the totality of his theatrical achievement. In demonstrating Williams’ theatrical work in visual (and aural) terms, Schvey examines closely the relationship between Realism and Expressionism in his greatest work, A Streetcar Named Desire. The visual art in Williams’ plays were not always limited to the stage. Richard Hayes explores the connections between Williams’ plastic theatre and Sergei Eisenstein’s film techniques. In his famous “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, Williams describes a new form of theatre that was unconventional but that leads to “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are”. Hayes proclaims that the Russian film director was an important figure to Williams’ “sculptural drama”, declaring him another European force behind Williams’ plastic dramaturgy. Williams first encountered Eisenstein through his film Alexander Nevsky, and Hayes considers the use of music in A Streetcar Named Desire as an example of

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Eisenstein’s direct influence on him. Williams’ interest in Eisenstein must be set against his absorption of the practice of the classical Hollywood film. In the end, Hayes maintains, Williams seems ambivalent towards the “unconventional” aesthetic proposed by Eisenstein and, indeed, ambivalent towards Modernist European aesthetics in general. That ambivalence can be read as indicative of Williams’ efforts to translate that Modernist, European aesthetic into a homemade Modernism adapted to American circumstances. R. Barton Palmer concludes Part One with a historical explication of how the films made from Williams’ plays and fiction in the first decade and a half of the post-war era were as sensational in the United States as his plays had first been in Europe. Williams’ films challenged the applicability and relevance of Hollywood’s Production Code, weakening it fatally and profoundly affecting the national cinema. From a European perspective, these films did not exert a strong influence on either its cinema or on its culture more generally, for the kind of Modernism that Williams’ properties brought to American filmmaking was making its way into European, especially French film, from other directions. If the goal of Part One is to study Tennessee Williams and Europe as separate entities – that is, looking at the European elements of Williams’ life and work – Part Two, entitled “Tennessee Williams and Europe’s Intercultural Encounters”, explores in detail the artistic confrontations that resulted from their initial meetings. The further Williams explored European culture, as the articles in this second part reveal, the more European he became in his artistic vision; but the more Europeans saw Williams’ work produced, the more American he seemed to them, an America that they had loved to hate. It was this paradoxical perception of a man and a country that Europe had to reckon with as it struggled to hold itself together after World War II. Europe could not deny that America and Americans were vulgar, a little on the primitive side, but perhaps, just as Stella had located her own salvation in the arms of the Polish-American Stanley Kowalski, Europe needed to see how much its delusions about its grandeur of two devastating wars aligned it more with Blanche than with her little sister. Article six begins in Northern Europe, where Dirk Gindt offers a detailed analysis of Ingmar Bergman’s 1949 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, filling a lacuna in the extensive scholarly corpus on the

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Swedish director. Based on archival material, Gindt’s article identifies the production’s aesthetic characteristics and discusses the critical reception of the play within a cultural context in Sweden that was deeply racist and misogynistic. The two major themes Gindt studies here are the pathologization of Blanche and the racialization of Stanley. While critics were fascinated by actor Anders Ek’s daring representation of Stanley’s masculinity, their interpretation of Karin Kavli’s Blanche was filtered through the Social Darwinist agenda of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and the prevailing racist and misogynist ideology of the Social Democratic welfare state. Alessandro Clericuzio brings the reader back south in article seven to Williams’ encounter with a Fascist Italy that has yet to fully extirpate its jingoist views towards foreigners and their artistic properties. Analyzing the effects of transcultural practices involved in the adaptation of dialogue in plays and film, from the perspective of voice, and taking into account different Italian versions of Williams’ works, namely Lo zoo di vetro, Un tram che si chiama desiderio and Improvvisamente l’estate scorsa, Clericuzio assesses if and how Williams’ female characters gain or lose meaning in the adaptations, and how voice works in the overall process of the translations of these plays on the stage and screen. If film dubbing “ignores, or tends to delete, all other linguistic and extra-linguistic references to the original culture”, a staged performance of a foreign play necessarily recreates “the linguistic and extra-linguistic codes of the host country and of the cultural landscape of its viewing public”. It is here that performance should exploit all the potential signifiers that could aid in character construction. With respect to Williams’ plays, Clericuzio concludes, the success or failure in reproducing the foreign codes inherent in the southern voices of his many heroines is inextricably linked to that given play’s favorable reception in Italy, then and now. Laura Torres-Zúñiga looks at Williams’ encounter with another southern enclave in the eighth article – Francoist Spain. “Spain stinks” was Williams’ assessment of the country in his notebook entry for 16 August 1954. Yet it was but a fleeting dislike, because throughout the 1950s he would always find time for a short trip to Spain while spending his summers in Italy. These trips to Spain, Torres-Zúñiga points out, were Williams’ strategy to take a break from the tedious familiarity that had begun to imbue his customary Roman respites. They also provided an escape from his increasingly strained

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relationship with Frank Merlo, who would stay in Rome while Williams travelled to Madrid or Barcelona, be it alone or in the company of friends, such as Maria St Just (née Britneva) or Paul Bowles. In Barcelona, Williams often enjoyed pleasant days on the beach and met new friends, but he also experienced certain encounters that would leave an indelible trace on his later work. Torres-Zúñiga argues in her article that these vestiges from Williams’ visits to Barcelona mark a turning point in his relationship with Spain, as witnessed in such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer, and that Williams’ presence in Spain also effected a change in the perception of his persona and his plays in the country. In article nine, Ramón Espejo Romero’s research on Williams’ reception in Francoist Spain complements Torres-Zúñiga’s more historical overview by exploring how the gradual incorporation of Williams into the repertory of foreign playwrights regularly performed in Spain took longer than would have been desirable. Williams’ Spanish debut took place in 1947 with El zoo de cristal, but by 1957, he was still largely unknown in the country. For a long time, his nearly total disappearance from the Spanish stage was countered by a number of semi-amateur stagings of his plays in the teatros de cámara, or chamber theatres, which Espejo Romero examines in detail. But their lack of professionalism, together with the restrictions imposed by the Spanish dictator, could not do justice to the complexities and intricacies of Williams’ plays. Espejo Romero concludes that it was largely thanks to specialized journals and widely-circulated print media that Spanish audiences ever learned of Williams’ plays at all, let alone desired to see more of them performed on their national stages. Part Two closes with a look at Tennessee Williams from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Kornelia Slavova moves east in article ten, across the geopolitical divide between blocs, and takes a historicalproduction approach to the reception of Williams on the Bulgarian stage in the context of the Cold War. Drawing upon theatre reviews, program notes and media discourses, she discusses three major turns in the critical interpretations and assessments of Williams’ drama in Bulgaria for the past fifty years. In the 1960s, she argues, his plays were appropriated for the didactic and moralizing purposes of Communist propaganda, emphasizing social problems and the crisis of American Capitalism. The aesthetic turn in the late 1970s and 1980s

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signaled a new interest in the artistic quality beyond the ideological clichés and political protocols, whereas the post-Communist period reveals more heterogeneous appropriations for the purpose of aesthetic renewal, cultural prestige, experimentation and escapism. Slavova reveals the significant impact of ideology on the theatre’s intercultural exchange conducted along the East/West axis during and after the Cold War. Yet, she posits, the Iron Curtain, drawn over Williams’ performances as a “safety curtain” to contain the spreading of “Western fire” into the Soviet world, never managed to “contain” the imaginative power of his translucent “gauze curtains”. While Part Two explores the confrontations, personal and artistic alike, that resulted from Williams’ and Europe’s exposure to each other’s wants and desires, fears and fetishes, Part Three of this collection, entitled “Tennessee Williams and Europe’s Transatlantic Exchanges”, examines the confluence of their encounter: how Europe inspired Williams’ later work (its theatre and its audiences) and how Williams influenced European theatre and film. In article eleven, David Savran compares the early and the later reception of Williams in France, Germany and, to a lesser extent, in Spain. While France, always a bit reticent about accepting anything American tel quel, has historically denounced Williams’ plays as middle-brow “kitsch”, its recent interest in Williams’ plays, even to the point of making A Streetcar Named Desire the first American play to enter into the repertoire of the prestigious theatre of the ComédieFrançaise, tends to belie the country’s vocal disregard of Williams’ properties. In Germany, however, the reception of Williams indicates “the critical response was more generous and cultural politics more complex”. Endstation Sehnsucht “‘created a sensation’ in the Federal Republic” and despite “an inaccurate and clumsy translation for its 1950 premiere in Pforzheim (in the US occupation zone), it “‘opened completely new avenues of experience’”. Both countries’ divergent responses to Williams’ plays, Savran argues, were indicative of the two nation’s emerging roles in a post-Cold War Europe. Thus the “pathologization of both Williams and his plays” were seen “as the emblems of an alien and fearsome culture in the ascendant”, one that France refused to acknowledge at first, and Western Germany greeted as an antidote to Stalinist Russia. What the recent revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire in both France and Germany have revealed, Savran concludes, is that, even if the political prejudices have

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remained intact over the last half century, the artistic ones have evolved, and Williams is now enjoying the stature of being “a citizen of the world”. Michael Paller examines in article twelve the question of just how much Williams has influenced European theatre. Paller looks specifically at the case of Williams and Harold Pinter and asks whether either playwright influenced the work of the other? The world of their plays reveals a similarity. Both are worlds of violence and danger, a world quite palpable in Williams’ later plays, but one that was also present in his pre-1960 plays, in which the violence is tempered by humor and lyrical language. There is an affinity here between the playwrights, Paller finds, but not an influence. The ambiguity that is a hallmark of Pinter’s work, which Williams much admired, is also present in Williams’ late plays, but in a less central, controlling way. Pinter used language in order to chart the battle for status and power between characters; Williams used it in multiple ways to suit the needs of any given play. In the end, one can say that while there are many affinities between their work, Pinter’s writing had no direct influence on Williams’. If Paller can put to rest some debate concerning the affinities between Williams and the European “new wave” playwrights of the absurdist or post-absurdist period, the last three articles make a convincing case for the influence Williams had upon three recent European artists working in various media. Johan Callens studies in article thirteen Ivo van Hove’s Dutch productions of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, the first premiering on 20 January 1995 with an all-Dutch cast. Four years later, van Hove revived this production at the New York Theatre Workshop, but this time with an American cast. These two versions provide a suitable test case, Callens argues, for the vicissitudes of Williams’ classic in the hands of one of Europe’s high-profile theatre directors. Apart from providing a brief survey of van Hove’s career and the production history of Williams’ play in the Low Countries, Callens shows how the disruptiveness of violent performative actions and the frame-breaking effect of several historical citations problematize the characters’ plight through a temporal dynamic that holds their fate in suspense. On the one hand, the eruption of the real within the seemingly preordained narrative and the overt metatheatrical display of performative styles offer the prospect of choice

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and change. On the other hand, the repetitiveness of the stage violence and the historical belatedness of the theatricalized present threaten to clinch the characters’ entrapment in a past whose idyllic and traumatizating moments they seem doomed to re-enact. Van Hove does not just interpret Williams’ play, Callens intimates, but deconstructs it altogether and constructs from the shards a new play that is neither entirely Williams’ nor his own. Reconstructing a new play from pieces of the former one perhaps best characterizes the trend in performing Williams in Europe today. Article fourteen is dedicated to Krzysztof Warlikowski and Wajdi Mouawad’s adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire for the OdéonThéâtre de l’Europe, Un Tramway, which was the sensation of Paris during the 2010 season. As Xavier Lemoine points out, the sold-out production received scathing reviews that deemed the play flawed, accusing French film star Isabelle Huppert (Blanche) of stealing the show and Warlikowski of being pretentious with his erudite interpolations. Williams’ original script was deemed defaced, its emotions smothered by an aesthetic coldness. As a result, Un Tramway raises a number of questions about the meaning of Williams’ work today in Europe and about contemporary European theatre. Does Warlikowski derail this version of A Streetcar Named Desire by rejecting the Actors Studio realism which arguably made it famous? Or does his highly stylized stage of multimedia bricolage breathe new life into an old play? To address these questions, Lemoine looks at the series of misunderstandings surrounding the play’s reception in Paris, especially those involving the use of European film stars in canonical plays. Then, by closely examining various stage and script choices that Warlikowski makes, Lemoine argues that hybridization, ghosting and expansion all provide ways to negotiate the play’s limitations on the contemporary stage, and concludes that Williams’ work still remains a productive site of creation. Nowhere is that productive site more visible than in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film Todo sobre mi madre and Samuel Adamson’s 2007 stage version of the film, both of which weave Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire into complex tapestries of nearly identical stories. Michael Hooper concludes Part Three with article fifteen of the collection by examining the extent to which Almodóvar’s use of Williams can be considered an homage. For all the film’s inter-

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textuality, A Streetcar Named Desire (especially Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version) is the major influence, both as thematic source and as narrative framework. Yet, initially drawn to the transgressive nature of the Williams films, Almodóvar ironically focuses on Stella Kowalski’s fate, altered from the original play following the intervention of the ultra conservative Production Code in Hollywood. Hooper argues that Almodóvar finds radical possibilities in new family paradigms more appropriate to the end of the twentieth century, and that these are fundamentally different to the family life eclipsed by heterosexual desire in Williams’ play. Viewing or reading A Streetcar Named Desire after Todo sobre mi madre only serves to underline Williams’ un-conventional approach to the family values advocated in post-war America and his marginal treatment of motherhood. Samuel Adamson’s stage version of All About My Mother in 2007, more faithful to the original text of A Streetcar Named Desire, further highlights Almodóvar’s departure from Williams but also indicates the brazen integration of elements of A Streetcar Named Desire and its performance into the Spanish filmmaker’s plot. Consequently, the texts of A Streetcar Named Desire have a life in modern European culture outside of theatrical revivals. The passing of the Tennessee Williams centennial has offered scholars of American theatre and drama the opportunity to reflect on the playwright’s legacy both in America and abroad. This is not to say Williams scholarship has never concerned itself with Europe’s influence on Williams. Clearly it has, and the extensive list of books, PH.D. dissertations and articles written over the years that touch upon the European influences and sources of Williams’ plays and stories attest to the importance Europe had in shaping Williams’ aesthetic and the scholarship devoted to it. Most of this research, however, has only examined what Europe gave to Williams, and rarely if ever broached the influence Williams had on Europe, its theatre and its artists alike. No book to date has attempted to deal exclusively and extensively with the bi-directional path of Tennessee Williams’ influence from and on Europe. By tracing this mutual exchange of values and aesthetics, Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges hopes to open the debate on how Williams altered the face of American theatre abroad and changed the way European

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art is fashioned and consumed today. Read in isolation, each article in this collection increases our knowledge and appreciation of the intercultural encounters and the transatlantic exchanges between Europe and Williams. Read collectively, the fifteen articles reveal a systematic pattern of artistic idolatry that shaped a playwright who later helped shape the political and artistic landscapes of not one but two continents.

   

PART ONE: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND EUROPE

 

We are now approaching the British coast and of course we are anticipating that first glimpse of Europe with a great deal of pleasure. I begin to understand how Columbus felt when he came into sight of the West Indies. Tennessee Williams, letter to his family, 13 July 1928

   

EN AVANT! TENNESSEE WILLIAMS BETWEEN HYPERBOREA AND THE MEDITERRANEAN FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

“En avant!” Tennessee Williams’ famous motto might literally be translated “Forward!” Like the image of the streetcar, that motto in French or English translation implies movement. But “forward” contains no built-in direction. To move forward is to move in whatever direction one is facing. And that is what Williams did when he sought a quick escape from an intolerable situation. He seemed to choose his destinations capriciously, and in Europe he faced north almost as often as he faced south. In 1955, for example, anticipating problems with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it went into rehearsal, Williams began “making plans for a far away flight (perhaps as far as Ceylon) the night the play opens in New York!”.1 He ended up sailing for Rome and two weeks later flying to Athens, where he immediately contemplated going: North, I guess, almost anywhere north. Maybe all the way up to Hamburg. Then maybe Berlin. Who knows? Anyhow I guess I’d better keep going if I can, as long as I can .… En avant.2

After only two days in Athens, Williams flew to Istanbul.3 Six days later he was back in Rome, and four days after that, Barcelona,4 followed by Rome again, then Stockholm, Hamburg, London, and                                                            

1

Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 665. 2 Ibid., 671-73. 3 Ibid., 675. 4 Ibid., 677-79.

 

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Paris.5 That 1955 summer itinerary, like many other phases in his life and work, shows Tennessee Williams was pulled almost randomly between northern and southern climes, between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean. It is generally assumed that Italy was the major European font of inspiration for Williams. In Memoirs, he claimed that he had “long dreamed of buying” a little farm “among those lovely people” in Italy.6 He recalled sailing for Europe in December 1947, when he was “no longer able to cope with the unremitting publicity in New York”,7 and, after becoming ill in France, he found his “health and life” “magically restored” as soon as he crossed the border into Italy: “There was the sun and there were the smiling Italians”.8 Three days in Rome led him to declare it “the capitol [sic] of my heart!”.9 Thenceforth, as attested in the Notebooks and Letters, visits to Italy were almost always restorative to Williams. But the effect of Italy on Williams was largely that of people like Anna Magnani and the Sicilian Frank Merlo or of movies like those directed by Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. Those Mediterranean influences were important, but they were not literary. In literary terms, a more important Mediterranean influence derived from a brief, early-career interest in Federico García Lorca, which shows up primarily in Williams’ one-Act play, The Purification, and perhaps in Camino Real. The earliest and longest-lasting European literary influence on Tennessee Williams was Hyperborean. Williams often acknowledged the great Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s influence on his own writing. For example, in 1965, Williams wrote, “I believe that the chief influence on me, as a playwright, was Chekhov”.10 In 1972, he confirmed his assessment:                                                            

5

Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 19451957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 593; Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, ed. Maria St Just, New York: Penguin, 1991, 126-28. 6 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1975), New York: New Directions, 2006, 128. 7 Ibid., 139. 8 Ibid., 141. 9 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 155. 10 Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986, 114.

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Chekhov, of course, was a tremendous influence on me. I began to read Chekhov in depth when I was twenty-four and living in Memphis. I got his short stories from the library, and I had never before come in contact with anything so penetrating, so beautiful. Later I read his plays.11

And in 1981, he added: What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!12

For a 1937 literature course at Washington University, Williams wrote a twenty-two-page seminar paper analyzing Chekhov’s influence on modern drama. And over forty years later, in 1981, Williams completed The Notebook of Trigorin, fulfilling his long-held dream of adapting The Sea Gull, which he regarded as “the first and greatest modern play”.13 Other Hyperborean writers who gained a solid foothold in Williams’ consciousness include the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg14 and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.15 Having acknowledged both northern and southern European literary models for Williams as a writer, I will proceed to two less obvious aspects of this polarity. First, I want to suggest that his European orientation was basically towards le beau idéal, that is, French culture. Second, I want to look at how his personal orientation between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean manifested itself in some interesting ways. Williams’ adoption of the motto En avant! signals that the French language was reasonably within his comfort zone. However, “En avant!” does not seem to have meant exactly “Forward!” to Williams. When we look at his use of the motto in his letters and notebooks, it almost always connotes something more like “Keep going!” or “Bon courage!” or perhaps even something not too different from Sarah                                                             11

Ibid., 221. Ibid., 331. 13 Allean Hale, “Introduction: Two Masters, One Play”, in Tennessee Williams, The Notebook of Trigorin, New York: New Directions, 1997, ix. 14 Williams, Notebooks, 647 and 239. 15 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 154. 12

  

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Bernhardt’s motto “Quand même!” – “Never mind!”, “So what!”, “No matter!”, “In spite of everything!”. Indeed, in his plays and fiction as well as in his letters and notebooks, Williams seems to have associated the phrase “En avant!” with the concept of endurance. The earliest En avant! in the published Notebooks occurs in an entry dated 19 October 1937. Williams’ lifelong habit of sprinkling French phrases into his writing apparently began during his time at Washington University when he studied French under Professor Harcourt Brown, and was introduced to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud by his friend Clark Mills McBurney. Williams’ notebooks for the fall months of 1936 contain just three snippets of French: he closes an entry with “Au Revoir” (23 September 1936); six weeks later there is “Bon Soir!” (8 November 1936); and two weeks after that, the more ambitious “Sur l’autre côté de la lune!” (21 November 1936). In February 1937 Williams was cast in the role of old Géronte in Molière’s Les fourberies de Scapin, which he acted in French on 7 April 1937. After that, French phrases proliferate in the notebooks: “Ça Va sans dire” (4 March 1937), “je ne sais pas!” (4 April 1937), “Au revoir” (27 May 1937), “Je ne sais pas!” (13 June 1937), “Eh bien! Nous verrons!” (4 July 1937), “enfant terrible” (6 July 1937), “Courage! – Au Revoir!” (9 July 1937), “Au Revoir” (15 September 1937), “ça va sans dire” (22 September 1937), “Je ne sais rien!” (13 October 1937) and finally, on 19 October 1937: “En Avant!!” Over the next five years, he used “En avant!” only intermittently,16 more often closing his journal entries with “So long” or “Goodnight”. Williams may have consciously adopted En avant! as his motto in March or April 1942. His journal entry written at 1:00 a.m. on 26 April begins “Yes – En Avant, and always En Avant ...”, and he closes the following day’s entry: “Well – En Avant”.17 As I attempted to trace the rise of this phrase in Williams’ consciousness, I began with the assumption that he might have learned it from Harcourt Brown, who was born in 1900 and would have been seventeen when the United States entered the Great War in April 1917. In May 1917, a prominent French delegation led by Marshal Joseph Joffre and former premier René Viviani toured several American cities to rally public support for the French component of the Allied cause, and their itinerary included both Chicago and St                                                             16 17

Williams, Notebooks, 131, 167, 173, 175, 201, 227, 245, 247, 249 and 261. Ibid., 285 and 287.

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Louis. The Chicago public’s reception of Viviani’s speech was notably enthusiastic, especially when Viviani gestured toward the beloved general known as “Papa” Joffre and called out the famous order given by Joffre in September 1914 as the troops advanced to fight the battle of the Marne: “En avant!”18 However, my assumption that Brown could have personally recalled that galvanizing moment so vividly that he might have relayed the phrase “En avant!” to his students did not pan out. The Canadian-born Brown had studied and taught only in Ontario and New York state before teaching just two years at Washington University in St Louis, 1935-1937; thus Brown presumably did not hear Viviani’s speeches in Chicago or St Louis. It must be noted also that Tennessee Williams did not begin using “En avant!” in his notebooks until after he had left Washington University to study at the University of Iowa. Still, the fact that the military slogan “En avant!” was so closely tied in popular consciousness to General Joffre could be significant. Joffre’s words are reported in several books published in English during the years immediately following the Great War. One in particular caught my attention, Famous Generals of the Great War: Who Led the United States and Her Allies to a Glorious Victory by Charles H.L. Johnston, published in 1919, when Tennessee Williams was eight-years old. Johnston had written a series of books for boys: Famous Scouts, Famous Indian Chiefs, Famous Cavalry Leaders and many more. Johnston’s Preface to Famous Generals of the Great War is addressed to “My dear Boys”. The book was so popular that it continued to be reprinted as late as 1970 – the market is flooded with ex-library copies of it. We know that as a child Williams was a voracious reader. It is possible that he read the book in the 1920s and that the phrase remained dormant in his consciousness until he                                                            

18 This part of Viviani’s Chicago speech, reported in Robert B. Bruce’s A Fraternity of Arms: America and France in the Great War, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003, 55, appears in various translations in different sources. A fairly close rendering to that described by Bruce seems to be the one in Balfour, Viviani, and Joffre: Their Speeches and Other Public Utterances in America, and Those of the Italian, Belgian, and Russian Commissioners during the Great War, ed. Francis W. Halsey, New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1917, 115. See also René Viviani, Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre and Emile Hovelaque, Addresses in the United States by M. René Viviani … and Marshal Joffre, French Mission to the United States, April-May MCMXVII, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1917.

  

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claimed it for his motto. Here are the pertinent lines from Johnston’s chapter on “Papa” Joffre: … when the clarion notes of the bugle called out “En Avant”, and when the stirring words of General Joffre were read to them, the faces of all the Poilus from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. The men were worn out with fatigue and with constant fighting, their faces were black with powder-smoke and their eyes blinded with the chalk-dust of Champagne, – yet they roused themselves for a mighty stand and their hearts were filled with faith and hope. La Belle France should and must triumph. En avant! En avant!19

Perhaps Tom Williams read that book in conjunction with his visit in July 1928 to the battle area of the Marne with his grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin. The church group’s battlefield tour occurred not quite fourteen years after that First Battle of the Marne, France’s first crucial victory of the Great War. Admittedly, according to a travel essay titled “A Tour of the Battle-fields of France”, written by Tom Williams and published in his high school newspaper, U. City Pep (19 February 1929), the group focused more on the area of American engagement at Belleau Wood in the Second Battle of the Marne that had been fought in 1918, only ten years earlier.20 In any case, the 1920s had brought a huge war memorial industry in France, much of it in response to the American veterans revisiting the battle sites with their families. Postcards, medals and plaques were sold as bitter souvenirs. Thus it is at least possible that Williams saw at that time a brass plaque, about eight inches wide and six inches high, bearing a portrait of General Joffre and the words: “Joffre à la Marne: 21 ET MAINTENANT EN AVANT!” Again, this proves nothing about Williams’ adoption of the motto, other than to show that there were many ways he must have been exposed to it before it surfaced in his notebooks in 1937. Throughout Williams’ writing there are phrases in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The Memoirs contain a spate of Italian                                                             19

Charles H.L. Johnston, Famous Generals of the 32 Who Led the United States and Her Allies to a Glorious Victory, Boston: Page, 1919, 15. 20 Tennessee Williams, “A Tour of the Battle-fields of France”, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 231-32. 21 Plaque laiton, available at http://lagrandeguerre.cultureforum.net/t33533-plaquelaiton-joffre-a-la-marne (accessed 10 May 2012).

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in passages that recollect enjoyment of his time in Italy. But statistically, over the decades, French terms pop up far more often than those of any other language. True, Williams often made mistakes in French, especially errors of gender. For example, from the Notebooks we find “‘le fin d’été’” and “Bon nuit”,22 and from the Collected Poems he wrote “La Coeur A Ses Raisons”.23

Figure 1: “Papa” Joffe à la Marne.

An amusing touch of fractured French is “Quelle sottises! – Comment je suis bête! Parbleu!!!”.24 But Williams undoubtedly read and understood some French. He read the poems of Rimbaud apparently in French as well as in English translation. Gavin Lambert’s Foreword to Tennessee Williams in Tangier notes that                                                             22

Williams, Notebooks, 121 and 283 (Williams’ emphases; my italics). Tennessee Williams, The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, eds David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis, New York: New Directions, 2002, 183 (my italics). 24 Williams, Notebooks, 133. 23

  

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Williams’ Spanish and French were “minimal to fragmentary”.25 The author of that book, Mohamed Choukri, recounts how he listened to a conversation between Williams and a friend named Mrabet during which Williams spoke English and Mrabet spoke French.26 Williams bought and read Le Monde, telling Choukri that it contained as much as “all the other French papers combined”.27 Quite apart from considerations of language, an important indicator of cultural affinities is one’s choice of reading and one’s use of literary allusions. To test my claim for the primacy of French culture in Tennessee Williams’ European sensibility, I listed names of artists and titles of art works from the indexes of four volumes of his letters, as well as from the Notebooks and Memoirs. Quite consistently there are about twice as many French names and titles as there are either Italian or Russian. Far fewer names, titles and allusions come from England, Germany, Spain and other countries. Naturally one cannot make too much of a purely statistical observation like this, as it does not account for contextual connotation. For example, it is impressive to see the name of the great French actor-director Louis Jouvet in the indexes of two volumes, but two letters from Williams disparage Jouvet’s performance in Molière’s Dom Juan, which Williams had attended on 16 January 1948. The letter to Donald Windham is notably catty about it, and Williams extends those remarks to the Paris theatre in general.28 Sympathique or not, French culture wormed its way into Williams’ literary sensibility, especially evidenced by his frequent allusions to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. After Rimbaud, it is Jean Cocteau who gets Williams’ attention, often with some aesthetic reservation. Williams’ New York Times review of Cocteau’s book The Diary of a Film encompasses observations on Cocteau the man, French attitudes toward art, the film La Belle et la Bête and its designer Christian Bérard, as well as allusions to Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Shostakovich and Sergei Eisenstein. That list of name-dropping                                                            

25

Gavin Lambert, Foreword to Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams in Tangier, trans. Paul Bowles, Santa Barbara: Cadmus Editions, 1979, 9. 26 Ibid., 60. 27 Ibid., 63. 28 Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965, ed. Donald Windham, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, 206. See also Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 145.

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instances in Williams’ review maintains the pattern: four are French, two Russian. Although Williams did not refer to Cocteau in his Notebooks until 1943,29 a hitherto unremarked influence can be detected as early as 1941 in Williams’ poem “Blood on the Snow”. The movement of Williams’ four stanzas evokes the sequence early in Cocteau’s 1932 film Blood of a Poet when the schoolboy-artist sheds his blood on the snow to the shallow amusement of a politely-applauding coterie in a dress box at the theatre. Like Cocteau’s film, the 1941 poem by Williams signals the artist’s sacrifice of self: “the crippled singer’s / blood on the snow at the blood-red close of day?”, while “the killer” (presumably the unappreciative public) “stands in the branches, burning the ice in the branches, / thawing the crimson edge of the icecovered stream”.30 That image of “burning the ice” is surely à propos to my theme of Hyperborea and the Mediterranean. France’s geographical location in the center of western Europe, truly between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean, may serve as a metaphor for its centrality in the European formation of Tennessee Williams. His first exposure to France came during that church group trip to Europe in July and August 1928 that his grandfather took him on. It was during the group’s five days in Paris (15-20 July) that seventeen-year-old Tom Williams experienced a psychological trauma akin to that of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy during his famous “night at Arzamas” in 1869. The “Arzamas horror” occurred in the middle of the night at an inn. Tolstoy described it in a letter to his wife: unexpectedly, he “was seized by a despair, a fear, a terror such as I have never known before”. Elsewhere he wrote of it: “I felt that some misfortune had befallen me; I might forget it for a moment, but it was always there, at the back of my mind, and it had me in its power.”31 As well-read as the young Tom Williams was, it is unlikely that he knew of that episode in Tolstoy’s life. Yet their crises and the aftermaths sound remarkably similar. The cerebral panic ambushed Williams in broad daylight as he walked alone on a Paris street. He recalled in his Memoirs that “the most dreadful, the most nearly                                                            

29

Williams, Notebooks, 345. Ibid., 256. 31 Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, 320. 30

  

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psychotic” crisis of his early life had lasting “significance in my psychological make-up. Abruptly, it occurred to me that the process of thought was a terrifyingly complex mystery of human life”. Thinking about thinking seemed to generate a vortex in the mind that possessed the body and caused sweating, trembling and fear of madness, the very same physical symptoms experienced by Tolstoy.32 Both Williams and Tolstoy were subsequently able to hide their conditions from others even as something internal was “growing in strength, and getting out of control”.33 The horror that initially gripped Williams during that visit to Paris, although eventually assuaged on a corporeal plane, remained a constant underlying awareness in his writing, both personal and artistic. For both Williams and Tolstoy, much of their residual fear stemmed from the drive to create, while relentlessly gnawed by the thought that their creative expression could be cut off and left incomplete at any point. Tolstoy later recorded his experience in Notes of a Madman: “My whole being ached with the need to live, the right to live, and, at the same moment, I felt death at work.”34 We can find hundreds of similar comments throughout Williams’ writing. “The old enemy – Fear”, he wrote in his notebook in September 1936.35 “But, yes, there was work, and if I ran before death to perform it, this saying of truth as I felt it, then – whatever it comes to when completed – ”, he mused incoherently at a low point in 1979.36 The mental turmoil that took possession of the young Williams in Paris in 1928 must have colored his feelings about the city long afterward. Indeed, we might see a parallel between that psychological spiraling inward and a geographical spiral with Hyperborea and the Mediterranean on the outer circle and Paris at the epicenter. According to his Memoirs, Williams remained gripped by his phobia until the day he visited the Gothic cathedral in Cologne (around 10 August 1928) and suddenly “the phobia was lifted away as lightly as a snowflake though it had weighed on my head like a skull-breaking block of iron”.37 The terror returned briefly in Amsterdam, but this time he                                                             32

Williams, Memoirs, 20-21. See also Troyat, Tolstoy, 17-19. Kathleen Parthé, “Tolstoy and the Geometry of Fear”, Modern Language Studies, XV (Autumn 1985), 83. 34 Troyat, Tolstoy, 319. 35 Williams, Notebooks, 57. 36 Ibid., 751. 37 Williams, Memoirs, 21. 33

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recovered his mental balance by composing a poem in which an awareness of his own smallness within a vast thronging humanity “soothes my fears”. The last two lines of that poem are: “then all at once my hot woe / cools like a cinder dropped on snow.” That “moment of recognition that my existence and my fate could dissolve as lightly as the cinder dropped in a great fall of snow”38 prefigures the idea of “burning the ice” in his 1941 poem “Blood on the Snow”. Either the artist’s passion sears the ice of society’s indifference or the artist loses his passion by melting into the cool world. The juxtapositions of ice and flame, silvery cold and golden heat, fear of incompletion and passion of creativity recur throughout Williams’ canon. They are both poetic images and objective correlatives in variants of the play titled Out Cry (1973) or The TwoCharacter Play (1975). The latter contains a poem that begins: Fear is a monster vast as night – And shadow casting as the sun. It is quicksilver, quick as light – It slides beneath the down-pressed thumb.39

The play-within-the-play, an artist-created realm, is a room flooded with golden afternoon light in a Southern home in summer, whereas the surrounding stage area – an apparently abandoned theatre in a foreign country, a dimly-lit concrete reality external to the imagined world of the inner play – is a “nightmarish … true world with all its dismaying shapes and shadows …”.40 The two characters, Felice and Clare, a brother and sister, actor and actress, slip in and out of the play-within-the-play. To escape the bitter cold of the outer void with the stairs that go nowhere – an objective correlative for incompletion,41 they consciously switch into the warmth of the play. The metaphor is clear: heat of creativity as a refuge from dreading the cold stasis of death, which dooms the artist’s work to incompletion. However, Felice realizes in Act 2 that “the house has turned into a                                                             38

Ibid., 22. Williams, Collected Poems, 131-32. See also Tennessee Williams, The TwoCharacter Play, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1976, V, 311. 40 Williams, The Two-Character Play, V, 308 (Williams’ italics). 41 Ibid., 14 and 56. 39

  

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prison”,42 just as Williams himself eventually felt constricted by critical expectations. Out Cry reinforces the point with a mise en abîme when Clare recalls their having been invited to tea by an old painter on the Viale. When they arrived, the concierge said, “Oh, him, huh, five flights up, not worth it!”. But Clare and Felice made the effort; they climbed up to meet the artist. And Clare recalls, “the old, old painter was seated in rigor mortis before a totally blank canvas, teakettle boiled dry on the – burner – under a skylight – that sort of light through a dirty winter skylight is – unalterable – circumstance”.43 The poignancy of that story hits harder now that we can see that the old artist with the blank canvas was Tennessee Williams’ image of himself late in life. The burner, like the artist’s heat of passion, had boiled dry the tea that was to be offered to the visitors. This could happen only because philistines like the concierge had not found him worth the effort. And winter light through a skylight illuminates the remaining shell of the artist. Most of the images I have mentioned here also occur elsewhere, scattered throughout Williams’ plays, poems, and private writings.44 One example that comes readily to mind is Nonno’s poem in The Night of the Iguana: “the ripe fruit on the branch”, that is, the golden fruit of life in its prime, “observes the sky begin to blanch”, and the sky’s change to (wintery) whiteness signals “the plummeting to earth”.45 Such examples can be found throughout Williams’ plays and poetry, including his unpublished poem “Arctic Light”. In a way, that poem evokes a Master Builder (to posit an analogy with the Hyperborean playwright Henrik Ibsen), crying out to unleash his continuing creativity but exhausted by the forces of critical negativity. Finally the artist draws from within himself the resources to accept the white-out or blank canvas or blanched sky before descending into eternal grayness. There is a reference to “Arctic Light” in the Introduction to William Prosser’s The Late Plays of Tennessee                                                            

42

Tennessee Williams, Out Cry, New York: New Directions, 1973, 55. Ibid., 11 (Williams’ italics). 44 It is worth noting the direct influence of poems by Hart Crane, whose “Garden Abstract” (70) bears some similarities to Nonno’s poem by Williams. Crane’s “North Labrador” (78) is especially interesting in relation to the subject of this present article. See Hart Crane, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Waldo Frank, New York: Liveright, 1933. 45 Williams, Collected Poems, 171. 43

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Williams. Prosser recalled that one of the last times he saw Williams was at a dinner party at his house, when … he was very depressed and at one point said, “Let us talk about death shall we?” He said he wasn’t afraid of death but only of dying, its possible pain. He also read a poem titled “Arctic Light,” which he had recently written. It was about death as a going toward light.46

The title “Arctic Light” signaled to me its possible relevance for my consideration of Williams “between Hyperborea and the Mediterranean”, but the poem is not easily accessible. Among the Tennessee Williams Papers at Harvard University’s Houghton Library is a three-page typescript titled “Arctic Light” and described as an undated, incomplete draft. On it one can make out a very faint, apparently erased or tentative, date: 1978. In the course of his research in the Harvard Theatre Collection in October 2011, John S. Bak found some additional “Arctic Light” manuscripts that had been misfiled. One of those is virtually identical to a recording of Tennessee Williams reading the poem in the course of his forty-two-minute poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on 22 November 1982. In his comments before reading “Arctic Light”, Williams referred to the poem as one that he was still working on. If we put any stock into that faint “1978” on one of the typescripts, Williams could have been working on this poem for six years. Considering the poem’s congruity with other writing from the 1970s, like the images in Out Cry, I am inclined to believe that he had been working on it at least that long. The version discovered by Bak was a 1988 acquisition by the Houghton Library from the Williams Estate, and thus it may well be the actual paper from which Tennessee Williams was reading at the 92nd Street Y just four months before his death. The spoken poem of 1982 had evolved considerably from the earlier typescript draft. It builds upon the cry of the artist, despite “degradation”, to go on with his creative work before being consumed in the great whiteness of Arctic light. Laurels (the Nobel Prize?) may elude the artist, yet the artist struggles to continue “under a skylight of                                                             46

William Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams, Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2009, xviii.

  

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lost search”. Ultimately “the glitter of Arctic light” gives way to a slow fade and descent into grayness. Let us take this unfinished piece – a sadly ironic example of the incompletion feared by the artist – as one deeply meaningful reiteration of ideas that preoccupied Tennessee Williams during his final years. We might well conclude from it that, as Williams approached the end of his life, the direction of En avant! was north: “Arctic Light” It is a violation of law, whether premeditated or not, For an artist to arrive at the end of his being while he remains an artist, still practicing his vocation. It is only legally san[c]tioned when his art is out worn. This point may now be reached or it may be reached somewhat later but certainly it will be reached. Exhaustion will force surrender, and the great whiteness of dawn, its arctic light, will be singularly unresponsive to the cry of “Let me continue!” It is too ancient a law to be revoked, it is indelibly scored on time’s tablet and it demands of him, whether it be his own anarchic law or theirs, statutory, to reach at this point with all possible expedition, an end of being. Those who ignore this edict, lingering still within the burnt-out shell of mere physical being[,] attempt this felony because the unknown is a thing which they sense to be endless. The arctic light, its great whiteness, warns of an opposite color descending through gray, and those who struggle to stay, professing not fear in a season of fading laurels, of plaudits always less decorously withdrawn till there is mockery in them[.] For these the ultimate state is one of degradation … Isolate in the silence of lost art or of madness, imagined bells ring, ghostly footsteps approach. Still they may remain under a skylight of lost search for that aerial god or godliness which they once fleetly and with passion pursued, footprints of silver, this way, that way, such a bewildering silver, the restless quest of their youth or time still relevant to it. It may be now or it may be somewhat later, but it is, it is, they are, they are, the laws, the orders, obdurate as rock unworn by time now entered, immutable to resistance and to appeal. Oh, yes, we did once play the desperate guess-game with God, but finally won what?

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The glitter of Arctic light is blindingly precedent to the still more blinding descent of gray into still deeper gray, deeper gray: a long descent, without stay .... 47

                                                            47

Tennessee Williams, “Arctic Light”, MS Thr 397 (864), Houghton Library, Harvard University, n.d. It was the work-in-progress transcript of his reading on 22 November 1982 at the 92nd Street Y (sound recording copyright, 1982, The 92nd Street Y). Another earlier version of the poem, titled “Arcturus”, was also misfiled under MS Thr 397 (864). Copyright © 2014 The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the University of the South, Estate of Tennessee Williams. All rights reserved.

  

   

I believe the most poignant memory a traveler can bring with him from Europe is that of standing upon this tall cliff, gazing across the wide expanse of the bay and seeing the huge black cone of Mount Vesuvius with its waving plume of red-tinged smoke, outlined sharply against the deep, starset blue of the night sky. Tennessee Williams, “The Amalfi Drive and Sorrento”, 1928

 

   

“VIOLETS & CARNATIONS SOLD ON EVERY CORNER”: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, EUROPE AND FLOWERS JAMES M. DELPRINCE

The rectory of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Tennessee Williams’ first home in Columbus, Mississippi, is on the South Side of town, a neighborhood of Antebellum, Victorian and Craftsmen homes. Nearly each of these has a garden, a window box or at least a collection of mixed annual and perennial potted plants dotting their lots. Plants and flowers affected Williams, their natural beauty a part of his upbringing, both in the visible landscape and in his soul. This was yet another trait that Cornelius would not have liked in his son, but “Tommy” was encouraged by Ozzie, the family’s nursemaid, his mother Edwina, Grand, the Reverend Dakin and his sister Rose. Flowers in the garden and in the domestic environment remain a necessity in the southern home. The arrangement of fresh flowers indoors and the care of flower gardens remains a vestige of the cults of domesticity and tranquility.1 Flowers represent nature at its most pristine and its most promiscuous: they are the sexual organs of the plant kingdom. Commercial flowers, those selectively grown by producers and improved upon by breeders and hybridizers, are usually the least costly to grow and make the showiest floral designs. They are the Vegas showgirls or the French Can-Can dancers of the flower bucket theatre. Tennessee Williams loved flowers and knew the emotions they could arouse. He saw his characters as flowers, flaunting their attractions with wavy, rhythmic petals and delicious colors promising sweet nectar and scent, luring pollinators to aid in genetic                                                             1

 

W.J. Reader, Life in Victorian England, New York: Capricorn Press, 1967, 164.

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perpetuation, sexual reproduction. He would have also seen the irony of a voluptuous orchid corsage on Edwina’s shoulder as part of her Mother’s Day church ensemble. When Williams traveled to Europe, he undoubtedly enjoyed seeing flowers and plants displayed in every fashion, from massive floral arrangements in hotels to those sold on street corners, service-oriented floral shops and possibly nurseries. There was much science behind that transient beauty. The post-World War II unification of Western Europe was cemented in the Counsel of Europe’s 1948 Hague Conference. Through these strengthened international alliances, commerce was able to grow, meeting market demand for agricultural products, including cut flowers and potted plants. Applied research data helped improve agricultural practices, and French, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian and Italian flower growers prospered. As an example, the Italian Riviera’s San Remo flower growing region helped Italy experience a rise of over fifteen-hundred per cent in floriculture production from 1950 to 1978.2 An illustration of the rise in European floriculture consumption can be made by using one of Williams’ favorite flowers, the daffodil (Narcissus sp.), known in the American South as the jonquil. It is recommended that their bulbs be planted six inches (fifteen centimeters) apart in commercial production.3 It would take just under a million daffodil bulbs to plant a hectare, and, with about three blooms per healthy bulb, nearly three million flowers would be produced on that amount of land. In 1950, when Williams tried to convince Anna Magnani to star in the stage production of The Rose Tattoo, he could have seen 435,000,000 daffodils. This takes the liberty of turning all Italian floriculture away from the production of roses, gladiolus, carnations and other mid-century European favorites. By the time A Lovely Sunday in Creve Coeur premiered in early 1979, 7,305,000,000 daffodils would have been produced. That’s a lot of gentlemen callers. Professional floral designers preparing sets for movies or television, or those designing for museums, research appropriate flowers for period settings. For instance, what flowers are appropriate                                                             2

Cecil N. Smith, “Marketing Practices of European Flower Growers”, Proceedings of the Florida State Horticulture Society, XCV (1982), 186-89. 3 Allan M. Armitage and Judy M. Laushman, Specialty Cut Flowers, 3rd edn, Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2003, 424.

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for a 1840s’ parlor or a 1950s’ cocktail party? The answer is deceptively simple: modern consumers enjoy the same genera as those purchased decades ago. The differences are twofold: newly bred varieties and availability. Twentieth-century research showed how to bring flowers into bloom, out of season, while jet transportation offers fresh flowers delivered from all over the globe. Floral designers should use restraint, however, when creating historically accurate designs. Uncompromised floral decorations for the Columbus Episcopal Rectory should be seasonal, from local gardens and prairies, when depicting the Dakin residency. Naturally, fashions change; flowers gain, and subsequently lose, favor. A good example of this is the revival of Oscar Wilde’s late nineteenth-century favorites, sunflowers and lilies, both extremely popular today. Just as the Princess Kosmonopolis found additional work in Hollywood, maybe the gladiolus will enjoy her second chance. In the 1950s, the public was ready for new art, new design, and mid-century artists produced it as fast as money could pay for it. This was true for commercial floral design and floristry gained a foothold as a profession, particularly one where women were encouraged to start a business. Floral arrangements were no longer Victorian set pieces in the shapes of horseshoes, anchors and hearts.4 Flowers were arranged with stems showing, long and languid, like the subject of a Beaton photograph. They were recognized as a commercial product, yet could be sculptural; they were both mass-produced and sitespecific, high art and pop art alike. Floral designers, like playwrights, saw that the times were changing, so they experimented, and some of what they created influenced designers that followed. British garden designer Gertrude Jekyll’s approach to clustered, painterly ribbons of flowers influenced floral artists long after her, especially Constance Spry, a British florist, teacher and author. Spry has been dubbed by many as the Martha Stewart of mid-twentiethcentury Britain. Her style promoted the use of everyday household objects for floral design – a departure from nineteenth-century specifications – and plant materials collected from the local landscape for society events. Deliberate mixing of what was considered formal with the informal inverted the preconceived notions of what a floral                                                             4

B.E. Cokely, and J.T. Cokely, Wire Frames (for Floral Ebellishments), Scranton, PA: n. pub., c.1930.

  

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arrangement should be. Spry’s documented work set the standard for elegant society floral design for over half a century.5 In the US, Ethyl “Tommy” Bright began a school of floristry in Chicago to teach florists the correct techniques of construction and design. Her graduates’ work ensured that bridal bouquets would not disintegrate while marching up the aisle, and congratulatory floral baskets delivered to theatres on opening night could stand the test of city traffic. While never truly comfortable on planes, she took to traveling the country by train and, during stops, had a knack for getting porters to help her collect wild “roadsidiana” for the next demonstration.6 Bodies of work from these florists and their students created new floral design theory. Viewing floral design as design and not as arrangement has been known to cause some discussion and disagreement. In 2006, James Dyson (of vacuum cleaner fame) resigned his post from the Board of Trustees of London’s Design Museum because it exhibited the work of Constance Spry.7 The battle of style versus substance continues to be waged, but when its soldiers die, what shall we put on their graves? While professional florists tailored floral designs to appeal to the marketplace, the mid-twentieth century garden club movement took off in a different direction. In a rejection to naturalism, flowers were positioned in unconventional ways, from various angles or even upside-down. Twisted, dried vines were painted and used along with scrap metal, wire and other mechanistic cast-offs. Bent and trimmed plant materials created a new design principle: tension.8 The invention of phenolic floral foam, a petroleum byproduct, enabled floral designers to create angular geometric forms, introducing negative space, this in tandem with Japanese Ikebana influence. The garden club movement and media coverage propelled                                                             5

Mary Rose Blacker, Flora Domestica: A History of British Flower Arranging, New York: Abrams Press, 2000, 231-32. 6 Society of American Florists, “Tommy Bright History”, available at http://www. safnow.org/tommy-bright-history (accessed 4 April 2012). 7 Robert Uhlig, “Dyson quits Design Museum in Disgust over ‘Empty Styling’”, The Telegraph, 27 September 2004, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1472703/Dyson-quits-Design-Museum-in-disgust-over-empty-styling.html (accessed 4 April 2012). 8 AIFD Education Committee, “The Elements and Principles of Design”, The AIFD Guide to Floral Design, 3rd edn, Flourtown, PA: Intelvid Group, 2008, 117-19.

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the public’s realization that it is not just the flowers but what you do with them that brings art-to-science. A visible, ephemeral, communion with nature is evidenced. Many American florists and flower enthusiasts have lamented that sales and the general use of flowers pale in comparison to European consumption. In Europe, it is customary to present a bouquet of flowers or a plant when visiting friends and family. This is a welcome, but not de riguer, custom in the US. Flowers were, and still are, more abundantly retailed in Europe than in the US, and prices are significantly lower. There are flower vendors in most every railway station and on many street corners, as Williams noticed during first visit back to Europe in early 1948.9 Art begets art, be it a floral design or a play, and much of what is produced is a cross-pollination of genus and genius. Williams loved European flowers as much as he did European theatre, and both influenced his art throughout his life. The following floral designs were developed through inspiration derived from Williams’ writing. Each one of them has a different purpose, be it symbolic, educational

Figure 2: Shrine to the Virgin Mary, The Rose Tattoo.10

                                                            9

See his letters of February 1948 to Carson McCullers and Margo Jones in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 157 and 160. 10 All floral designs, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.

  

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or interpretive, but the overall effect is to capture in floral representation the theatrical space of Williams’ life and work. Small shrines used to be a focal point in homes of religious Catholics on the Gulf Coast, a tradition imported from Europe. The abstraction is representative of Serafina’s conflicted life. She loves Mangiacavallo and realizes the compromise of loving her dishonest, unfaithful Rosario. Her life is lived under the eyes of the church, but she eventually lives the life of God’s gifts, giving and receiving Mangiacavallo’s love.

Figure 3: Karen Stone, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

This floral arrangement is characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century due to its scalene pyramidal form. It contains larkspur, Dutch iris, Fuji chrysanthemums, Oriental lilies and willow oak foliage. Karen Stone received many floral bouquets during her New York tenure. In the 1961 motion picture version of the novella, Vivien Leigh often passes a floral shop near her Rome apartment, in her

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pursuit of, to borrow Tom’s line from The Glass Menagerie: “… find[ing] in motion what was lost in space.”11 Another scene was true to form; Karen stops her dashing about to purchase a bunch of lily of the valley, the perfect bridal flower in the British nineteenth-century language of flowers tradition, meaning a “return of happiness”.12 The designs Vivien Leigh saw on the set were mostly plastic, longlasting permanent designs making filming just a bit easier. Angular line-mass floral designs were the perfect marriage of Japanese Ikebana and European mass designs, which were considered high-fashion throughout Europe at that time. Such arrangements were the product of Styrofoam and phenolic foam invention. An Ikebana floral arrangement, the focal area of this design is made from fine-textured elements, turquoise stones reminiscent of Mediterranean water and wool yarn.

Figure 4: After Frank Merlo and the “Stoned Age”.

                                                           

11 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 237. 12 Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, New York: Avenel Press, 1979, 27.

  

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In 1962, Frank Merlo, Williams’ lover of fourteen years, became ill with what would later be diagnosed as lung cancer. He died in September 1963. After his funeral, Williams and companion Frederick Nicklaus flew to Mexico where The Night of the Iguana was being filmed. After these events, depression and heavy drug and alcohol use fueled Williams’ “stoned age”. A black-painted Dracaena plant and Phalaenopsis orchid inflorescence in decline is sheltered by a tropical Alocasia leaf which provides relief from distress and disarray. Such lush plant materials flourish in Southern Europe’s tropical climate.

Figure 5: Taormina. Floral Design by Lynette McDougald, Instructor and Business Manager, The University Florist, Mississippi State University.

Evocative of a high-end resort in Sicily where Williams may have enjoyed a Negroni cocktail with Anna Magnani, this design features a contrast of elements, from earthy pottery and willow framework to sprays of Cymbidium orchids and white Agapanthus.

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Being “one of his favorite spots on earth”,13 Taormina, Sicily, is drenched in the Mediterranean sun. Williams found enjoyment in this place, interacting with other writers and artists.

Figure 6: The Jewel Box. An open terrarium of carpet-like Lycopodium, a star-shaped Tillandsia and moss creates its own ecosphere.

  Exotic plants prized for fancy leaves and adaptable to dim interiors were introduced to European collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While collection of newly-classified plants held                                                             13

Richard Freeman Leavitt and Kenneth Holditch, The World of Tennessee Williams, East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen, 2011, 68.

  

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many perils, their protection from the salty sea air required the use of Ward cases, glass boxes designed to allow the penetration of light into a humid atmosphere.14 These miniature greenhouses were adapted to the interior and made more decorative to suit the parlor, themselves a menagerie of glass and floral-themed decorative objects. Some styles resembled the great conservatories of Amsterdam and London. In the summer of 1930, Tom and Rose Williams enrolled in Rubicam’s Business School for a ten-week course, both selling stock they owned to finance their education. Soon, Rose stopped going to the school, losing any interest she may have once had, but she did not tell her mother, Edwina. She did indeed spend her time wandering, often in the park.15 At that time, a section her favorite park’s production greenhouses was devoted to public horticultural displays, and Rose may have very well spent time in this space, which was the precursor to The Jewel Box. The Jewel Box, officially called the St Louis Floral Conservatory, was a fifty-foot tall art deco greenhouse conservatory built in 1936. Approximately half of the $117,000 it took to build the conservatory came from WPA funds. Gaining much acclaim with its state of the art design and spectacular flower shows, The Jewel Box withstood a massive hail storm in 1938, miraculously with no broken panes of glass, and in 1939, 416,000 visitors toured the conservatory, 26,000 more than the Art Museum that year.16 The following floral design is absurdist, like the play, a table centerpiece where diners cannot see their guests, but only hear their voices. The focal area of the arrangement reflects The Two-Character Play’s Clare, Aunt Rose Comfort or Rose Williams: “A garden enclosed is my sister ….”17 Anyone who has grown sunflowers knows the height the old-fashioned varieties can attain, so it makes sense to make use of them as they grow, towering above the heads of guests. Not unlike an Italian garden in appearance, this garden is invasive rather than quaint. Flowers arranged in parallel lines seemingly char                                                            14

Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, A Paradise out of a Common Field, New York: Harper and Row, 1990, 20. 15 Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, New York: Norton, 1995, 116. 16 City of St Louis, “Jewel Box”, available at http://stlouis-mo.gov/government/ departments/parks/parks/Jewel-Box.cfm (accessed 11 April 2012). 17 Tennessee Williams, The Two-Character Play, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1976, V, 303 (Williams’ italics).

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acterize a garden, the form popularized by avant-garde Dutch floral designers around the third-quarter of the twentieth century.

Figure 7: The Two-Character Play.

Felice and Clare live in New Bethesda, a city in the south. In the Bible, it is the new place, a lake, a river (water) of healing. The brother and sister want to go out into the town of healing but cannot. Around their house grow sunflowers as tall as the eaves: … it’s so gold, so brilliant that … it seems to be shouting sensational things about us .… Tourists will be attracted, botanists – you know, botanists – will come to – marvel at this marvel, photograph it for the – the National Geographic, this marvel of nature, this two-headed

  

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sunflower taller than a two-story house which is still inhabited by a recluse brother and sister.18

Figure 8: Blanche. There is subtle beauty in decay, a fading magnolia.

About a month after A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, Tennessee departed for a European trip, roughly following the itinerary he and his grandfather took back in 1929. The following is from a postcard he mailed to Jessica Tandy from Rome. The front of the card shows an old-fashioned bouquet of violets. The message reads: This looks like something of Blanche’s! How she would have loved Rome if she hadn’t gone to the dogs in Louisiana! It is warm & sunny, violets & carnations sold on every corner. I have already been to Sicily and am now in Naples and considering a trip to Capri which is

                                                            18

Ibid., 330.

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in view from my balcony here. Half the hotel in ruins, the other half very elegant. (like Blanche) Greetings to Hume. & Love. (to you!) Tennessee19

Figure 9: Williams’ 1948 postcard to Jessica Tandy, front and back. Reproduced with the permission of Tandy Cronyn.

Blanche DuBois was an elegant ruin, a tan-colored gardenia, a second-day magnolia blossom. In Laurel, she lost the plantation, and the “beautiful dream” it represented; now in New Orleans, she has lost herself. She is in complete reliance on her sister when she once was                                                             19

Unpublished postcard from Williams addressed to Jessica Tandy at the Barrymore Theatre, W. 47th Street, New York, NY, c. February 1948 (reproduced with the permission of Tandy Cronyn). See also Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 157 and 160.

  

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the belle. We are constantly reminded of her grief, even when the Spanish woman walks down the French Quarter streets peddling painted tin flowers, “Flores para los muertos”.20 In her youth, Blanche was surrounded by the weathered antiquities that her ancestors brought back from their Grand Tours through Europe. French Aubusson rugs, German cased glass and English iron campana urns made their way across the Atlantic through the ports of Mobile and New Orleans to plantations like Blanche’s Belle Reve.

Figure 10: Flora’s Japanesque Fantasie. Dutch iris, chrysanthemums and aspidistra leaves. Floral design by Molly Mauney, Mississippi State University.

The saying “the milk train doesn’t stop here anymore” connotes that business, and therefore the town, is in decline. Such is the state of                                                            

20

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 388.

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Flora Goforth. Cascades of bougainvillea characterize her villa, a temple-tomb on the coastal mountainside near Positano. Williams wrote that the stage setting can be defined by folding screens, moved by two Kabuki theatre stages assistants, both dressed in black. The screens are in “the mountain-sea-sky [colors] of Italy’s Divina Costiera [The Tyrhanian Sea] in summer”. Flora dons a “black Kabuki wig” studded with “fantastic ornaments”.21 Like the moving waters below her villa, Flora is a meraviglia, a wonder.

Figure 11: Anna Magnani, Black Coffee and Cigarettes. Floral design by Beth Cranford, Mississippi State University.

Williams’ partner Frank Merlo introduced him to lively, ItalianAmerican family culture. In pursuit of Anna Magnani for the role of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo, Williams’ fascination for the celebrity developed from his respect for her character roles as the face of war                                                           

21

Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1976, I V, 4, 40 and 44 (Williams’ italics).

  

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torn, peasant stock Italians. She represented Italy, love and life through her streetwise, passionate roles.

Figure 12: Violets in the Mountains. Floral design with African Violets and other tender plants and cut flowers. Ceramic container by art Professor Robert Long, Mississippi State University.

The closing lines of Camino Real include the sentence, “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!”.22 This line is inscribed on Williams’ tombstone located in Calvary Cemetery, St Louis. Throughout his works, Williams articulated fleeting emotions. Flowers, as transient as the emotions they convey, are glimpses into the soul of nature, a mirror of humanity. Happy anniversaries, nosegays for Delta debutantes, birthday wishes – all are comforted by the patterns, fragrances and color of nature. Flowers have the ability to soothe an aching heart and provide a sense of hope for reunion in a better afterworld. Williams’ epitaph references the most fragile,                                                            

22 Tennessee Williams, Camino Real, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, II, 591 (Williams’ italics).

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threadlike, spring flower to fracture the strongest barrier known. His references to flowers and floral designs form a uniquely crafted language of flowers.

  

   

Tonight Germany seized Denmark and war was declared by Norway – but infinitely more important is the fact that my play will be discussed and perhaps a decision rendered by the Theatre Guild. Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, Monday or Tuesday A.M. 8 or 9 April 1940

 

   

“LIGHTNING IN A CLOUD”: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ THEATRICAL EXPRESSIONISM HENRY I. SCHVEY “… the quick inter-play of live beings suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, those things are the play ….”1

There is a short story entitled “The Poet” (1948), originally published in the collection One Arm and Other Stories, which reveals something extraordinary about Tennessee Williams’ approach to the creative process. Far more intimate than the flamboyantly sensational (and sexualized) Memoirs (1975) written largely to generate publicity and financial reward, “The Poet” is its antithesis – a quiet, introspective tale that depicts the poet as solitary and passive, a “ruminant beast”2 who scavenges his way through life, surviving in a driftwood shack. His poems are not written down, only spoken, and his audience is made up of adolescents “poised between the coming of wisdom and its early rejection”. Whatever early rage the poet once possessed is now gone, “purified out of his nature”. And when he dies, we are told “the sun and the sand and the water washed [his body] continually and swept away all but the bones and the stiff white garments”.3 While the self-portrait in “The Poet” is obviously stylized and perhaps even mythologized, what is particularly striking is Williams’ description of the creative process itself:                                                             1

Tennessee Williams, letter to theatre critic J. Brooks Atkinson, April 1953 in in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 474. 2 Tennessee Williams, “The Poet”, in Collected Stories, New York: New Directions, 1994, 246. 3 Ibid., 247, 247 and 250.

 

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Henry I. Schvey The poet distilled his own liquor and had become so accomplished in this art that he could produce a fermented drink from almost any kind of organic matter. He carried it in a flask strapped around his waist, and whenever fatigue overtook him he would stop at some lonely point and raise the flask to his lips. Then the world would change color as a soap bubble penetrated by a ray of light and a great vitality would surge and break as a limitless ocean through him.

In this story, the poet’s process is not guided by rational or external events but by a kind of internal, spiritual vision. He quaffs his fermented liquor, and “the world [changes] color as a soap bubble penetrated by a ray of light”.4 In short, the story reveals Williams not as part of a realist tradition, but as a prototypical Expressionist poet whose creative impulse is visionary and comes from within. Discussion of this potentially prophetic power of the artist goes back to Plato, who mistrusted it and banned the poets from his ideal Republic. It is also firmly lodged within the tradition of Bardic wisdom associated with Romanticism, as in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past, & Future sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy Word, That walk’d among the ancient trees.5

In the twentieth century, this vatic perspective towards art is most closely identified with Expressionism: “Die Welt ist da. Es wäre sinnlos, sie zu wiederholen.”6 With this pithy comment, German critic Kasimir Edschmid articulated perhaps most concisely the definition of the European movement in literature, music and the visual arts known as Expressionism. Swiss painter Paul Klee put it equally succinctly in his “Creative Confession”: “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder,                                                             4

Ibid., 246. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, plate 30. 6 Ulrich Weisstein, Introduction, in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, ed. Ulrich Weisstein, Paris and Budapest: Didier and Akademiai Kiado, 1973, 23: “The world is already here. It would be senseless to repeat it.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 5

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sondern macht sichtbar.”7 In less epigrammatic terms, scholars have written that Expressionism seeks to render “extreme moods, such as numinous fear or ecstatic joy, externalized by means of projection and outwardly manifesting themselves as distortions of color, shape, syntax, vocabulary or tonal relationships (=dissonance)”.8 It is the contention of this article that Tennessee Williams’ work may be seen as navigating between the anarchic fluidity of European Expressionism on the one hand and grounded, character-driven psychological portraiture on the other. As Williams once observed about his own work: My characters make my play. I always start with them, they take spirit and body in my mind. Nothing they say or do is arbitrary or invented. They build the play about them like spiders weaving their webs, sea creatures making their shells …. I know them far better than I know myself, since I created them and not myself.9

Yet, there is a contrapuntal mode in nearly all of Williams’ writing which can be traced back to his earliest inspiration in The Mummers, the semi-professional theatre group in St Louis in the mid-1930s, whose director, Willard Holland, championed Williams from the start. While all art for Williams was “a kind of anarchy”, The Mummers were “run by a kind of beautiful witchcraft!”: It was like a definition of what I think theater is. Something wild, something exciting, something that you are not used to. Offbeat is the word.10

Anarchic vision is present in some of his most controversial works, notably Camino Real, where Williams caustically observed: At each performance a number of people have stamped out of the auditorium, with little regard for those whom they have had to crawl

                                                            7

Quoted in Weisstein, Introduction, 23: “Art does not seek to reproduce the visible, it makes visible the invisible.” 8 Weisstein, Introduction, 23. 9 Tennessee Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 72. 10 Ibid., 43 and 45.

  

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over, almost as if the building had caught on fire, and there have been sibilant noises on the way out and demands for money back if the cashier was foolish enough to remain in his box.

Despite his self-deprecating humor about box office and critical failure, Williams vigorously defended Camino Real in his Foreword to the published edition, arguing that “this sort of freedom is not chaos or anarchy. On the contrary, it is the result of painstaking design, and [I paid] more conscious attention to form and construction than I have in any work before.” Having grown used to the solid, three-dimensional characters and lyricism of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and other early works, audiences emphatically rejected Williams’ desire to provide “my own sense of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water in the mountains, or clouds changing shape in a gale, of the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream”.11 Perhaps only recently has the scholarly community become willing to understand that Williams’ voice is not in a single key, but polyphonic; that the trajectory of his career is not a simple falling away from the great early plays into decline, but a continuously shifting dialogue between Realism and an Expressionism that links his earliest successes with his later, admittedly less accessible work. Hostile reviews indicate that audiences have, until quite recently, been unwilling to join the playwright on a journey heavily influenced by August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, employing archetypal rather than three-dimensional characters, and an episodic structure connected loosely by symbols instead of a linear plot. The critical and popular failure of a work like Camino Real illustrates a profound divide in audiences’ reception of Williams’ work when he strayed from the detailed and psychologically complex characterization for which he was (and is) rightly acclaimed, in favor of a fluid, abstract dramaturgy whose aims are quite similar to the experiments in poetry, drama and the visual arts associated with late Strindberg and the German Expressionists. Although its chief impact was in the German-speaking countries during the “Expressionist decade” of 1910-1925, Expressionism had a significant impact on American drama of the 1920s and 1930s, and its influence is to be found in the major work of such figures as Eugene O’Neill (The Great God Brown, The Hairy                                                             11

Ibid., 69.

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Ape and The Emperor Jones), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal), Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine) and Thornton Wilder (Our Town). What was it that drove these and other American dramatists towards Expressionism? According to O’Neill, it was the notion that theatre ought not reflect petty or mundane activity, but rather should provide “refuge from the facts of life which … have nothing to do with the truth”, bringing us “deep into the unknown within and behind ourselves”.12 As noted earlier, Williams’ greatest strength as a playwright was his indelible creation of character – especially the lonely, vulnerable outcasts who people his dramas: Amanda and Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, etc. However, there is another tendency in his work: the temptation to challenge audiences with unconventional, non-realistic staging. The “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie underscore this ambition to create a new kind of “Plastic Theatre”: Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other art forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

What Williams argues for in his “Production Notes” is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the theatre which goes beyond conventional realism to pursue inner truth. Williams went further to                                                            

12

Quoted in Mardi Valgemae, “Expressionism in the American Theater”, in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, 196.

  

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argue that his assertions not only applied to The Glass Menagerie, the play which provided the occasion for the “Production Notes”; rather, his vision aspired towards “a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to assume vitality as a part of our culture”.13 In order to illustrate how this new theatre might operate in practice, Williams proposed a number of specific design elements for The Glass Menagerie, including a musical leitmotif, a single recurring theme for Tom Wingfield’s sister Laura which is “like circus music” and “weaves in and out of your pre-occupied consciousness”. He also advocated nonrealistic lighting in which “shafts of light are focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center”, proposing that the light upon Laura Wingfield be distinct from the other characters, “having a pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas”.14 Finally, Williams encouraged the use of a screen device intended to project “magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles”, which would “give accent to certain values in each scene”. Unfortunately, the playwright’s argument in favor of this screen device (somewhat clumsily borrowed from Bertolt Brecht) was undercut by the fact that even in the original Broadway production it was omitted, although Williams justified its omission by arguing that “the extraordinary power of Miss [Laurette] Taylor’s performance made it suitable to have the utmost simplicity in the physical production”.15 Not surprisingly, in contemporary productions of The Glass Menagerie, the screen device is frequently omitted. Despite the playwright’s passionate exhortations for Expressionist techniques to replace “the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions”, this early play is often wrongly staged as realist drama bookended by the monologues of its narrator, Tom Wingfield, rather than as the true Expressionist drama it was conceived as. However, a purely realist production weakens the playwright’s dramaturgical aims, allowing an audience to forget that “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic”.16                                                            

13

Tennessee Williams, “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 131. 14 Ibid., 133-34. 15 Ibid., 132. 16 Ibid., 145.

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While in some of Williams’ plays, the marriage between character and symbol, Realism and Expressionism, may seem uneasy or artificial, in one play in particular this union is absolutely seamless: A Streetcar Named Desire. In A Streetcar Named Desire as in no other American play (with the possible exception of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman), realistic characterization and Expressionistic stagecraft are held in perfect equipoise, creating a tragedy completely satisfying as an aesthetic whole. Color, lighting, sound and stage images consistently operate on two levels simultaneously, enhancing both the realistic journey of Blanche’s arrival and eventual removal from the Kowalski home in the French Quarter, and highlighting her internalized descent into madness. As a playwright, Williams was acutely aware of both the power and limitations of the word. We know that he often tested out theatrical ideas in purely literary forms, such as poetry or short stories, including “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, which contains the germ of The Glass Menagerie, or “Three Players of a Summer Game”, which describes the arc of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But he was also cognizant that theatre is above all a visual art form, always more than mere literature. As he wrote to critic J. Brooks Atkinson in June 1953, just after the Broadway premiere of Camino Real: A book is only the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it …. The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed. The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper ….17

For Williams, then, theatre is more a visual art form than it is a verbal one. In Memoirs, he makes the trenchant observation about the power of painting to express emotion through non-verbal means: The work of a fine painter, committed only to vision, abstract and allusive as he pleases, is better able to create for you his moments of intensely perceptive being. Jackson Pollock could paint ecstasy as it

                                                            17

Quoted in Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 95.

  

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Henry I. Schvey could not be written. Van Gogh could capture for you moments of beauty, indescribable as descent into madness.18

In this context, it is significant that one of the preliminary titles for A Streetcar Named Desire was “The Poker Night”, and that, even after the title of the work as a whole was ultimately changed, he bestowed “The Poker Night” title to the play’s third scene, the only scene in the play bearing its own title. “The Poker Night” refers to a specific painting by van Gogh, Night Café (1888), whose importance is indicated by the playwright’s intricately detailed description of the scene: There is a picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlor at night. The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum. Over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen table hangs an electric bulb with a vivid green glass shade. The poker players – Stanley, Steve, Mitch and Pablo – wear colored shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green, and they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colors. There are vivid slices of watermelon on the table, whiskey bottles and glasses. For a moment, there is absorbed silence as a hand is dealt.19

It is clear from this description that the playwright has taken considerable pains to “paint” this scene, down to the most precise details of color and shape. The “absorbed silence” in the stage directions is a particular clue that Williams wanted his audience to register the image visually for a beat as a tableau vivant, even before a word was spoken. However, Williams’ choice to quote the van Gogh painting would be little more than an interesting curiosity were it not that, like van Gogh, the dramatist is concerned not merely with external but also with the internal depiction of emotion. Night Café, which has been termed van Gogh’s “most expressionist painting”,20 is dominated by sharp color contrasts – deep red walls and yellow floor contrasting with the dark green of the coffin-shaped billiard table                                                             18

Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1975), New York: New Directions, 2009, 250. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 286. 20 Lara Vinca Masina, Van Gogh: The Life and Work of the Artist, trans. Caroline Beamish, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, 29. 19

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which, set diagonally in the middle of the room, casts an ominous shadow. This eerie scene is further conveyed by the figure of a landlord in white coat who faces the viewer from behind the table, and especially by four lamps suspended from the ceiling which are surrounded by circles of vibrating yellow light. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh describes the scene thus: In my picture of the Night Café, I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit a crime. In short, I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis XV-green and Veronese green with yellowgreens and harsh blue-greens, all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern. And yet under an outward show of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.21

Just as van Gogh attempted to create dynamic tension between the nature of this infernal world and the trappings of a simple café, so Williams uses color and shape (“the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum”) to mask the harshness of a world “as coarse and direct as the primary colors”.22 Significantly, the scene begins with the line “Anything wild this deal?” and climaxes with Stanley Kowalski’s violently hurling a radio out the window, striking his wife Stella and being forcibly restrained by the other poker players, who grapple with him and toss him into a cold shower to recover his senses. The scene concludes with a virtuoso stroke – the iconic reconciliation between Stanley and his wife Stella in which he “throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife’s name” before the couple “come together with low animal moans”.23 In this scene, Williams has transformed the raffish French Quarter into a world of primordial, jungle-like violence, just as the protoExpressionist van Gogh had done. It is a world in which Blanche DuBois is at first lost, trapped and then finally destroyed. As she says to Stella the next morning, dazed and confused by the violence, and her sister’s submission to her husband’s bestial sexuality:                                                             21

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, London: Penguin, 1997, 399. 22 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 286. 23 Ibid., 307 (Williams’ italics).

  

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Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is – Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! …. Night falls and other apes gather! There in front of the cave, all grunting like him, swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! – you call – this party of apes!24

Creating a savage, barbaric world underlying the ordinary domestic activity of a game of cards, the playwright employs harsh colors and violent distortion precisely as van Gogh and later Expressionists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had done to suggest a subtle relationship between the surface veneer of the everyday, and the howling dance of archetypal violence lurking underneath. Were Williams simply alluding to Expressionistic use of color in a single scene, avowedly based on van Gogh’s painting, it might not be terribly significant. However, the violent antagonism between Blanche and Stanley throughout the entire play is best understood through powerful contrasts in color, just as it is in Expressionist painting. From the very beginning of the play, Williams makes it apparent that Blanche is to be identified with a moth: Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.25

By contrast, Stanley, her antagonist and, ultimately, her executioner, is associated with those primary colors to which she may be drawn like a moth to a flame, but which will ultimately consume her. When we first see Stanley, he carries a “red-stained package from a butcher’s”,26 which he tosses up to his wife, suggestive of both his primitive, animal nature and his sexuality, recalling the playwright’s stage directions in which we are informed that “He sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them”: STANLEY. Catch! STELLA. What?

                                                            24

Ibid., 323. Ibid., 245 (Williams’ italics). 26 Ibid., 244 (Williams’ italics). 25

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STANLEY. Meat!27

Throughout the play, Stanley is associated with primary colors in contrast to Blanche’s moth-like delicacy. His “gaudy pajamas” lie across the threshold of the bathroom in scene four; in scene five, he wears a green bowling shirt (worn again at the beginning of the rape scene), and he waves a brilliantly colored pajama top as a flag just before his assault on Blanche. Even when not directly associated with the primary colors through his costume, Stanley’s speech reinforces the visual connection between his person and these bright, vivid colors. He refers to sexual intercourse as “get[ting] the colored lights going”, and the evening of the rape he terms “a red-letter night” for him and Blanche. Moreover, in his stage directions, Williams refers to Stanley as a “richly feathered male bird” and “gaudy seed-bearer”.28 Blanche, as her name suggests, is obviously most often associated with the color white, stressing her essential purity, even innocence, as she enters the jungle of the French Quarter seeking refuge. Of her name, she tells Mitch: It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring! You can remember it by that.29

The first words spoken to Blanche by Eunice are “What’s the matter, honey? Are you lost?”, suggesting her singular appearance in the Quarter in a “white suit with fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat”.30 In view of the associations made between Blanche and whiteness, it is interesting to note that in the “Poker Night” scene, Williams specifically identifies the object Stanley throws out the window in his rage as a “small white radio” – thus prefiguring Blanche’s destruction by means of color symbolism. However, Blanche’s association with whiteness only tells a part of the story of her complex, contradictory nature. And it is a tribute to the playwright’s symbolism in A Streetcar Named Desire that she is                                                             27

Ibid., 265 and 244 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 373, 395 and 265 (Williams’ italics). 29 Ibid., 299. 30 Ibid., 246 and 245 (Williams’ italics). 28

  

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not simply depicted as “white” against the backdrop of Stanley’s “black-dyed villain”.31 In the “Poker Night” scene, for example, she dons the colors of desire in a “dark red satin wrapper” to make herself sexually desirable to Mitch, just as she deliberately stands in the light wearing only a “pink brassiere and white skirt”32 to attract the men’s glances when it suits her purposes. Blanche’s association with “whiteness”, then, like her innocence, only tells part of her story: her innocence is simultaneously both real and a pose which she uses as both defense and refuge in a dangerous world. In addition to his use of color in the play, Williams consistently employs the symbolic use of lighting in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley, as noted earlier, associates the sexual act with “getting the colored lights going”. In contrast with Blanche, who is repulsed, at least consciously, by Stanley’s brutishness, her sister is sexually excited by it. Significantly, his predilection towards sexual violence is conveyed through the image of smashing light bulbs, ironically the very objects which Blanche must cloak with paper lanterns to conceal herself: STELLA. Stanley’s always smashed things. Why, on our wedding night – soon as we came in here – he snatched off one of my slippers and rushed about the place smashing light bulbs with it. BLANCHE. He did – what? STELLA. He smashed all the light bulbs with the heel of my slipper! [She laughs.] BLANCHE. And you – you let him? Didn’t run, didn’t scream? STELLA. I was – sort of – thrilled by it.33

To hide her age and remain physically alluring to men, Blanche has covered the bare bulbs in Stanley and Stella’s apartment, and, when alone with Mitch, she asserts that she is unable “to stand a naked light                                                            

31

Williams used this phrase in a letter of 1947 to director Elia Kazan to emphasize the fact that neither of the play’s antagonists should be perceived as being entirely good or evil, and that the tragedy depends upon the fact that “nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos”. The ideal response to the play, Williams suggests, would be, “If only they all had known about each other” (Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 95; see also Elia Kazan, A Life, New York: Knopf, 1988, 329-30). 32 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 279 and 293 (Williams’ italics). 33 Ibid., 312-13 (Williams’ italics).

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bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action”.34 After Mitch has been informed by Stanley about Blanche’s promiscuous past, she attempts to parry his blunt comments on the subject of her fear of being seen in bold, unadorned lighting: MITCH. I’ve asked you to go out with me sometimes on Sundays but you always make an excuse. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much. BLANCHE. There is some obscure meaning in this but I fail to catch it.35

Later, insisting on seeing her in bright light, Mitch tears the paper lantern off the bare bulb to be better able to see her, and she lets out a frightened gasp. To Mitch’s insistence that he only wants to be “realistic”, Blanche responds: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In contrast to the other characters in the play, including her sister who has accommodated herself to the grossness of the world as it is by marrying Stanley, Blanche chooses to hide from its glare in a world of make-believe: “Say, it’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea – But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!” In describing her past to Mitch, she suggests that her devotion to the world of shadows was caused by accidentally revealing her young husband’s homosexuality. Having exposed him in direct light (“I saw! I know!”), Blanche claims that “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this – kitchen – candle …”.36 For roughly the first half of its eleven scenes, these elements – color, sound and lighting – are used to develop character or underscore the overall dramatic effect, just as they might be typically employed in a realistic play. For example, in scenes one to six, the ubiquitous “blue piano”, screeching cats or shouts of “Red Hots!” are employed chiefly to help enhance the charged and sensuous atmosphere of the Quarter, rather than as part of a non-realistic dramaturgy. This half of the play concludes at the end of scene six                                                             34

Ibid., 300. Ibid., 384. 36 Ibid., 385, 360 and 355. 35

  

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when it appears that Blanche and Mitch might discover happiness together: MITCH [drawing her slowly into his arms]. You need somebody. And I need somebody too. Could it be – you and me, Blanche? BLANCHE. Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!37

However, beginning with scene seven, the chronology of the play jumps from early May to mid-September, giving Stanley sufficient time to unearth Blanche’s promiscuous past in Laurel and convey it to Mitch. It is only at this point that the play transitions from realist into Expressionist mode, as Blanche herself begins to lose her tenuous grasp on reality. As she emerges from one of her frequent hot baths in the seventh scene, Blanche becomes aware that something is desperately wrong: “Something has happened! – What is it?” At this moment, the “blue piano”, which is a constant feature of life in the Quarter, “goes into a hectic breakdown”,38 indicating through soundscape the beginning of Blanche’s own mental collapse. As the play heads towards climax, both the use of sound and light grow increasingly non-realistic. Such sounds are present earlier in the play, when the sound of the Varsouviana melody is heard playing inside Blanche’s head as memory, capturing the moment in the past when she confronted her young husband about his homosexuality: [Polka music sounds, in a minor key faint with distance.] BLANCHE. We danced the Varsouviana! Suddenly in the middle of the dance the boy I had married broke away from me and ran out of the casino. A few moments later – a shot! [The Polka stops abruptly.]39

Once the gunshot sounds, the polka music fades out, and she is able to return to reality. However, as Blanche loses her grasp over the real, the music returns but the gunshot is withheld, delaying her (and the audience’s) sense of resolution: The “Varsouviana”! The polka tune they were playing when Allan – Wait! [A distant revolver shot is heard. Blanche seems relieved.]40

                                                            37

Ibid., 356 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 368 (Williams’ italics). 39 Ibid., 355 (Williams’ italics). 38

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In the final scene, however, the Varsouviana music is heard without the return to everyday reality provided by the gunshot. Like the alcoholic “click” in his head which Brick requires for calm in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Blanche seeks a kind of respite from the haunting memory of her past through the gunshot. But as she moves towards the abyss, there is only dissonance without its accompanying resolution. By scene nine, once clear-cut divisions between reality and hallucination have now eroded. For example, the Mexican Woman’s cry, “Flores para los muertos, flores – flores …” may be interpreted as either actually occurring on the street or as a manifestation of Blanche’s increasingly disordered consciousness. As Brenda Murphy notes, in the play’s early drafts, Blanche hears the woman’s cries near the beginning of the play. In rehearsals, however, director Elia Kazan shifted her appearance to scene nine, where she actually comes to the door and seems to speak directly to Blanche’s innermost thoughts, provoking the scream, “No, no! Not now! Not now!”.41 The Expressionist use of lighting and sound are similarly developed as the play moves towards Blanche’s mental breakdown. Scene ten opens a few hours after she has chased Mitch from the house with cries of “Fire!”. Her mask of purity having failed her, Blanche can now only elicit Mitch’s desire for sex: “You’re not pure enough to bring in the house with my mother”. Alone, and bereft of any means of escape, she dons a costume befitting the mask of innocence and her bruised self-conception: “a somewhat soiled and crumpled white satin evening gown, and a pair of scuffed silver slippers with brilliants set in their heels”. While for Blanche, the dress suggests an attempt to recapture a fading ideal, for Stanley it is merely a “worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some ragpicker!”.42 Left alone with her antagonist, she retreats into her makeshift bedroom. As Stanley intrudes on her space, Williams metamorphoses Blanche’s world to into something altogether distorted and grotesque,                                                                                                                                

40

Ibid., 381 (Williams’ italics). For further discussion of how director Kazan was instrumental in “repositioning the significant figure of the flower vendor”, see Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, 33. 42 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 390, 391 and 398 (Williams’ italics). 41

  

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manifesting her inner journey, precisely as in an Expressionist painting. As she attempts to flee her pursuer, she is cut off and unable to contact even her imaginary suitor by telephone: “Operator, operator! Give me long-distance, please …. I want to get in touch with Mr. Shep Huntleigh of Dallas.” When the operator presumably enquires after his address, she responds, “He’s so well-known he doesn’t require any address”.43 Abandoning the telephone as a means of escape, she crosses back into the kitchen in a frantic search for safety. Williams remarkably creates the disturbed topography of Blanche’s consciousness through sound and image: “The night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in the jungle …. shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces”.44 As she plunges into madness, Williams raises the visual stakes even higher, so that the division between interior and exterior space deliberately becomes indistinct: Through the back wall of the rooms, which have become transparent, can be seen the sidewalk. A prostitute has rolled a drunkard. He pursues her along the walk, overtakes her and there is a struggle. A policeman’s whistle breaks it up. The figures disappear.45

At this point, it is impossible for an audience in the theatre to distinguish precisely what is objectively happening from what is playing out in Blanche’s mind. As Stanley declares that “maybe you wouldn’t be bad to – interfere with …”, not only do “inhuman jungle voices rise up”, but Stanley himself becomes a part of this primordial, savage eruption within her mind: “He takes a step toward her, biting his tongue which protrudes between his lips”.46 The final scene, which occurs several weeks after her rape, appears at first glance to return us to the relative calm, domestic realism of the first half of the play. Stella is packing Blanche’s things, and the sound of water can be heard from the bathroom where Blanche is bathing, as she did earlier in the play. However, through visual cues, Williams maintains a bifurcated stage picture, suggesting the world of savagery is not altogether absent; there is a poker game going on in the kitchen,                                                            

43

Ibid., 399. Ibid. (Williams’ italics). 45 Ibid. (Williams’ italics). 46 Ibid., 401 (Williams’ italics). 44

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and the atmosphere is “the same raw, lurid one of the disastrous poker night”.47 Despite the presence of the world of the “Poker Night”, Blanche is now described as “sleeping like a little angel”, and much of the imagery associated with her in this final scene is suggestive of divine innocence and purity aligning her with the Virgin Mary. Her jacket, she insists, is “Della Robbia blue. The blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures”,48 and she carries a silver-backed mirror in her hand, an image traditionally associated with Mary in renaissance iconography. Moments later, the cathedral bell chime – “the only clean thing in the Quarter”, according to Blanche. Even the grapes she is given to eat seem to allude to images of defiled innocence and selfwilled martyrdom. She claims that “I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean …. And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard – ast noon – in the blaze of summer – and into an ocean as blue as [chimes again] my first lover’s eyes!”.49 This image evokes both the poet’s death described in the opening pages of this article, and the suicide of Williams’ favorite poet, Hart Crane. The play’s conclusion is anything but simple or uncomplicated. Blanche’s departure from the flat must take her through the kitchen (“Must we go through that room?”50), and past her tormentor, Stanley Kowalski. When she realizes that the Doctor who has come for her is “not the gentleman I was expecting”, she attempts to rush back into her bedroom, but Stanley blocks her retreat. Once again, the playwright employs the language of visual and aural Expressionism to suggest a primal threat: She rushes past him into the bedroom. Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd sinuous shapes. The “Varsouviana” is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle. Blanche seizes the back of a chair to defend herself.51

                                                            47

Ibid., 403 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 409. 49 Ibid., 410 (Williams’ italics). 50 Ibid., 413. 51 Ibid., 414 (Williams’ italics). 48

  

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The unity of Expressionistic distortion and psychologically realistic characterization are perhaps most beautifully counterpointed as Blanche is about to retreat back into her bedroom. First the Matron, “a peculiarly sinister figure in her severe dress” advances on her, and her greeting “Hello, Blanche”, is “echoed and re-echoed by other mysterious voices behind the walls, as if reverberated through a canyon of rock”.52 Then Stanley asks her if she has forgotten anything, adding: “You left nothing here but spilt talcum and old empty perfume bottles – unless it’s the paper lantern you want to take with you. You want the lantern?” As he rips the lantern off the naked light bulb, Williams indicates that “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.”53 Connecting this delicate paper lantern which Blanche has bought as protection from the outside world with her own horror at being violated, the playwright creates a seamless unity between literary symbol and stage metaphor. The play’s final moments are among the most memorable in the canon of the American theatre. After her renewed hysteria, Blanche has assumed a kind of calm dignity as the Doctor utters her name, “Miss DuBois”, and, supporting her with his arm, escorts her out the door. Interestingly, she allows herself to be led from the flat “as if she were blind”,54 a stage direction which may allude to the final moments of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, where a doomed aristocratic woman (also drawn towards her virile, low-born executioner), makes her final exit. And just as Julie’s final choice in Strindberg’s play re-establishes Julie’s dignity at the expense of Jean, the adversary who quivered at the sound of the Count’s bell and the sight of his boots, so Blanche’s last moments may be seen as both triumphant as well as the culmination of her inevitable descent. As she exits, Stella accepts her newborn baby wrapped in a pale blue blanket – an obvious symbol of renewal as Blanche, the obstacle, has been removed from the Kowalski household. But, as we might expect, the final image of the play is more ironic, textured and complex than that. The final moments of the play belong to neither of the play’s larger-than-life antagonists, but to Stella, the object of their mutual desire and mortal

                                                           

52

Ibid., 415 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 416 (Williams’ italics). 54 Ibid., 418 (Williams’ italics). 53

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struggle. That Stanley has won the battle “for Stella’s heart and mind” is clear, but the cost of his victory is less so.55 As Blanche is removed at the end of Kazan’s 1951 celebrated film (under pressure from the Legion of Decency and its producer, Warner Brothers), Stella races upstairs with her newborn baby to provide the wholesome impression that she will not return to Stanley. However, in the play, the imagery of rebirth is powerfully undercut by having Stanley grope for an opening in his wife’s blouse, murmuring “(voluptuously, soothingly) Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love”.56 The implications of this ending are highly suggestive: by choosing to accept Stanley’s “love” and the life in the Quarter, Stella has sacrificed her own integrity as well as her sister. The play ends with Stella’s sobbing “with inhuman abandon”, suggesting that at some level she has realized the magnitude of the choice she has made. At the beginning of scene eleven, she confided to her neighbor, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley”, to which Eunice replies, “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going”.57 But what if the necessity of going on means living a lie? The play (as opposed to the film) then concludes not with an image of renewal, but with the choice between Stella’s acceptance of motherhood or embracing her sister’s destruction. “Death-in-life” will be the price of remaining with Stanley and embracing the “colored lights” at all costs. It is in this context that the play’s final line, “The game is seven-card stud”,58 is a brutally appropriate response to the question which opened the “Poker Night” scene: “Anything wild this deal?” Unlike the compromised, safe answer provided to general audiences at the end of the film, Williams’ play ends with terrifying, open-ended ambiguity. Naturally, there are as many productions of A Streetcar Named Desire as there are directors. No single analysis of the script, no one production can be declared definitive, even its celebrated premiere. Some productions will make more or less use of Williams’ incisive,                                                             55

See Felicia Hardison Londré, “A Streetcar Running Fifty Years”, in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 56. 56 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 419 (Williams’ italics). 57 Ibid., 406. 58 Ibid., 419.

  

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poetic stage directions, or his remarkably detailed suggestions with regard to costume, lighting and sound design. Some productions will undoubtedly emphasize the play’s Expressionistic, abstract possibilities more than others. At its heart, however, any director or student of the play must come to terms with the fact that A Streetcar Named Desire is a uniquely balanced concordance of two distinct impulses already present in Williams’ dramaturgical arsenal at the beginning of his career: psychological realism and Expressionism. In this one play, he was uniquely able to marry these two, potentially conflicting tendencies in a way that is very close to perfection. Perhaps most importantly, Williams takes us on a journey which begins in Realism and ends in Expressionism. In a letter to the play’s first director, Elia Kazan, dated 19 April 1947, the playwright eloquently points out how the play’s best quality is its “authenticity or its fidelity to life”. This aspect is found in the principal antagonists’ blindness to one another: Nobody sees anybody truly, but through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.

Thus, Stanley sees Blanche as a “calculating bitch”, not the desperate, driven creature she is. Blanche, in turn, is similarly blinded to Stanley nature and Stella’s needs. In traditional drama, however, Williams argues that people are never depicted as they really are: We see from outside what could not be seen within …. It is not that one person was bad or good, one right or wrong but that all judged falsely concerning each other ….

Adding that he has written this out in case Kazan is unclear “over my intention” in the play, Williams points out the necessity of finding “a director … who can bring this play to life exactly as if it were happening in life …”.59 The qualities Williams sought, however, are paradoxically not found in conventional realism. Near the end of the letter, he admits to Kazan that “sometimes a living quality is caught better by                                                             59

Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 95-96 (Williams’ emphases).

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expressionism than what is supposed to be realistic treatment”.60 Kazan noted in his autobiography A Life that Williams’ letter to him “became the key to the production to me”.61 It might be argued that Williams’ letter should be essential reading for any future director or student of the play.62

                                                            60

Ibid., 96. Kazan, A Life, 330. 62 This article was originally delivered as a paper for the Centenary Conference “Tennessee Williams in Europe: A Centenary Celebration, 1911-2011”, held in Nancy, France, from 23-25 June 2011. Portions were adapted from my essay, “‘Getting the Colored Lights Going’: Expressionism in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire”, in Critical Insights: Tennessee Williams, ed. Brenda Murphy, Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010, 58-79. 61

  

   

Holocaust in Europe – it really does sicken me, I am glad to say. Of course my reactions are primarily selfish. I fear that it may kill the theatre. Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, Thursday, 30 May 1940

 

   

SERGEI EISENSTEIN, HOLLYWOOD AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ “PLASTIC THEATRE” RICHARD HAYES

In Tennessee Williams’ early unpublished play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay (1935), an Unknown Author plans to leave America for Paris where, the suggestion is, he will find kindred spirits. “It’s real”, the Unknown Author says of Paris and its culture: “There’s nothing artificial about it.” Another character, Noted Author, warns him off: “Well”, he says, “if it’s realism you want, why cross the pond? They’ve got the same ducks on each shore.”1 Williams captures in this snippet of dialogue something of American attitudes toward European Modernism. To most Americans of the first half of the twentieth century, argues Malcolm Bradbury, “Modernism was foreign; but since it was modern they wanted it, but made in a homemade way”. He goes on: Poets like William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and many American novelists, musicians, and painters obliged, becoming Modernist without even going to Europe, exploring the new preoccupations [of Modernism] as an aspect of the problems of the American language, the needs of American perception and American consciousness, American plenitude and American emptiness.2

                                                           

1

Tennessee Williams, “Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay”, Tennessee Williams Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Austin, Texas, box 4, folder 12. Copyright © 2014 The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the University of the South, Estate of Tennessee Williams. All rights reserved. 2 Malcolm Bradbury, “The Nonhomemade World: European and American Modernism”, American Quarterly, XXXIX/1 (Spring 1987), 27.

 

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In the lines from Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, Williams’ Unknown Author is directed back to America as somewhere as “modern” as Paris or London and (it is implied) the “homemade modernism” that reflection on such an experience by artists might produce is as authentic as that created by any European in any European city. Werner Sollors refers to this “homemade” quality as “ethnic modernism” and argues that, while early in the twentieth century “modern art seemed like a strange European invention, modern music and jazz had subcultural or popular but not national or artistic significance, and the best modernist literature had not yet found many sympathetic readers”, “by mid-century ... agencies of the US government proudly adopted abstract art, modern jazz, and the 1950 Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner ... as true expressions of the American spirit that could be officially endorsed for export around the globe”.3 The history of modern American theatre follows something of the path sketched out by Sollors. While Eugene O’Neill in the period after World War I found inspiration in August Strindberg and the theatre experiments recorded in Kenneth MacGowan’s Continental Stagecraft (the “continent” in the title naturally being Europe4), the work of Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman and others in the 1930s and after was marked by a deliberate turning away from “foreign”, that is, European models and influences. When Odets’ Waiting for Lefty was described by Harold Clurman’s as “the birth cry of the Thirties”, he was referring to the play as attempting to form a theatre that was distinctively American as much as to its contribution to a kind of social movement.5 “Our aim”, Clurman suggested to his colleagues in 1934, “was not and never had been to become a political theatre, but to be a creative and truly representative American theatre”.6 Hence, at the end of Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, Agate announces, “HELLO 7 AMERICA!”.                                                            

3

Werner Sollors, “Ethnic Modernism, 1910-1950”, American Literary History, XV/1 (Spring 2003), 73. 4 See Kenneth MacGowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft, London: Benn Brothers, 1923. 5 Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties (1945), New York: DeCapo, 1983, 148. 6 Clurman, The Fervent Years, 136 (my italics). 7 Clifford Odets, “Waiting for Lefty” and Other Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1979, 31.

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Miriam Hansen has argued that film was “part and symptom of the crisis and upheaval by which modernity was experienced and perceived” and provided “the single most inclusive, cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated”.8 In the same vein, Sam Girgus suggests that film was “an expression, engine, and source of modernism”.9 Films certainly were one of the means by which the American intelligentsia encountered European Modernism, none more so than Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) in 1919. Eugene O’Neill mentions the film in a letter written in 1944 to Theresa Helburn: “I thought long ago when I saw Caligari that there could be a genuine, original art form developed along that line.”10 O’Neill’s enthusiasm for Caligari and the kinds of possibilities for film art was shared by many – Theatre Arts, Sheldon Cheney’s influential magazine, reproduced many stills from the film, for instance. Russian films, too, by Sergei Eisenstein began to circulate in American in the late 1920s.11 Many of Eisenstein’s key writings were reproduced in the influential journal Close-Up in the early 1930s. Eisenstein made a widely reported visit to the United States in 1930 – as Bordwell notes, when Eisenstein and his entourage arrived in Hollywood, they were “lionized, visiting Disney, Dreiser, and other notables and becoming fast friends with Chaplin”.12And The Film Sense, Eisenstein’s seminal theoretical work, was published in translation in the United States in September 1942 and was reviewed in The New York Times. Films like Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) were seen by many as offering an antidote to what O’Neill called in his letter to Helburn “the commercial mob amusement                                                            

8

Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, in Reinventing Film Studies, eds Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, London: Arnold, 2000, 341-42. 9 Sam B. Girgus, America on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 1. 10 Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, eds Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1988, 557. 11 See Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (1939), New York: Teachers College Press, 1968, 312-24. 12 David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 17.

  

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racket” – that is, Hollywood.13 At the same time, the kind of promise that artists like O’Neill saw in the movies – as exemplified by films by directors like Eisenstein – was also for some available in Hollywood. For instance Clifford Odets, in a significant article, “‘Democratic Vistas’ in Drama”, identifies Hollywood cinema as the “folk theatre” of America.14 If Modernist ideas and aesthetic practices found their way to America through imported European films, Hollywood also offered a means to make this Modernism “homemade”. Ironically, Hollywood itself was a creation of Europeans, mostly Jewish emigrants who, in Gabler’s compelling analysis, created in Hollywood an “empire of their own”: “by creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction.”15 The story of the American theatre between the end of World War I and the 1960s is in part at least a story of its interactions with Hollywood which, though the product of Europeans managed, through their genius, to be identified as formative of “Americanism” in general, and, at the same time, the kinds of aesthetic challenge presented by Eisenstein and others. There was a fragility about the home-madeness of American Modernism – it referenced, tentatively, European forms and models and, at the same time (with less nervousness), divest itself of Europe and turn toward home. Tennessee Williams might be seen to embrace the spirit of Clurman and Odets and the Group Theatre who sought a theatre that was, in some way, “truly representative”. Williams’ account of Camino Real might just as easily describe Awake and Sing!, Waiting for Lefty or any other Odets play: Camino Real should have, Williams said in a letter to Audrey Wood, “an atmosphere of the American comic-strip transposed into a sort of rough, colloquial poetry”.16 In the figure of Stanley Kowalski, Williams explored a new, post-war America, divorced from the past in the shape of Belle Reve and the Old South. Blanche’s description of Stanley as a figure from “anthropological studies” is to position Stanley as a new-born, modern                                                             13

O’Neill, Selected Letters, 557-59. Clifford Odets, “‘Democratic Vistas’ in Drama”, The New York Times, 21 November 1937, X1. 15 Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, New York: Crown Publishers, 1988, 7. 16 Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 19451957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 45. 14

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American, “homemade” in some crude, brutish way.17 At the same time, while there is clearly this “homemade” impulse in Williams, his work also displays an interest in foreign Modernism. For GronbeckTedesco, The Rose Tattoo displaces a major convention in earlier American theatre, which was to use home-grown comic characters to stand as paragons of virtue against the Europeans “who revel in artificiality and pretentious social norms”. Rather, “in The Rose Tattoo, it is the European characters who are the figures of passionate life against the ground of deadly rigidification brought to the play by the American characters who have lost any vivifying connection with their European origins”.18 Gronbeck-Tedesco describes Williams as an expatriate writer who, in the context of time spent with partner Frank Merlo in Rome in the mid-1950s, challenged the New Normalcy of 1950s America, particularly its sexual Puritanism: his was, one might propose, essentially a European sensibility and, as such, represented a challenge to any idea of an “homemade” America. Williams’ ambivalent relationship with American modernity is refracted through his relationship with the cinema, particularly the Hollywood version. “My original impression of the place”, he says of Hollywood in a letter to his mother in the late 1930s, is that it is “about the last place on earth I would want to live”: “It is full of sham and corruption and the atmosphere of the place is generally putrid.”19 At the same time, “who can deny”, he wrote in draft letter to Robert Lewis (26 August 1942), then working in Hollywood, “that the best pictures lately have been considerably better than ‘the best plays’”.20 Williams’ relationship with Hollywood has been subject of several book-length studies: Maurice Yacowar’s Tennessee Williams and Film, Gene Phillips’ The Films of Tennessee Williams, and R. Barton Palmer and Robert Bray’s Hollywood’s Tennessee.21                                                             17

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 323. 18 John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco, “On The Rose Tattoo”, in Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, ed. Robert F. Gross, New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 68. 19 Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 19201945, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2000, 168. 20 Williams, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, box 3, folder 11. 21 See Gene D. Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams, Philadelphia, London and Toronto: Art Alliance Press/Associated University Presses, 1980; Maurice Yacowar,

  

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Though these works in the main consider adaptations of Williams’ plays for the screen (by himself and others), and do not systematically examine film’s influence on Williams’ style, their very great merit is to signal Williams as, in some way, “movie-made” (to borrow Robert Sklar’s phrase).22 The remarks below offer some further lines of inquiry that might extend our sense of Williams’ relationship with the film industry. In particular, this article claims that Williams’ sense of theatrical style and form was in some part influenced by his familiarity with Hollywood cinema and his encounter with avantgarde, European cinema in the form of the work of Sergei Eisenstein. The article draws on two important studies of the influence of film form on aspects of Williams’ work: George Brandt’s “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams” and George W. Crandell’s “The Cinematic Eye in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie”.23 This article aims to supplement these two useful studies and to illuminate further aspects of Williams’ complex aesthetic. Cinematic montage and the plastic theatre Leverich notes that, while in New York in 1942, Tennessee Williams avoided the Broadway theatre “both from financial necessity and lack of interest”.24 In one of his notebooks for that year, Williams distinguished himself from those writing for Broadway: he refers to himself as an “experimental dramatist” and writes of the problem for a writer like him, namely that of finding “a method of presenting his passion and the world’s in an articulate manner”. The method he was to adopt was “non-realistic” and the form he was to use he “labelled as ‘the sculptural drama’”.25                                                                                                                                 Tennessee Williams and Film, New York: Ungar, 1977; and R. Barton Palmer and Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 22 Robert Sklar, Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, London: Chappell, 1978. 23 Georges Brandt, “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams”, in American Theatre: Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 10, eds John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, London: Arnold, 1967, 163-87; George W. Crandell, “The Cinematic Eye in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams Annual Review I (1998), 1-11. 24 Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995, 446. 25 Quoted in ibid., 446.

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The famous “Production Notes” Williams offered as a preface to The Glass Menagerie revisit the theoretical ground of the 1942 notebook. Williams introduces in the notes the term “plastic theatre”, a term that is synonymous with “sculptural drama”.26 Both imply a rejection of realistic conventions. Williams goes on to describe some of the ways in which convention may by overturned in a production of Menagerie: he mentions a screen device, on which might be projected “slides bearing images or titles”; he mentions music being used “to give emotional emphasis to suitable passages”, music that continues “almost interminably” through the play; he notes that “The lighting in the play is not realistic” and that “A free, imaginative use of light can be of enormous value in giving a mobile, plastic quality to plays of a more or less static nature”.27 This “freedom of convention” has one goal: “a closer approach to truth”, to offer “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are”, for “truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance”. Williams’ drama, he claims, is a “new, plastic theatre” that will, through the freedom of its forms, “take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions”.28 An important play in any consideration of the “plastic theatre” is “The Spinning Song”, written in 1942-1943. The play predates The Glass Menagerie and contains elements both of that play and of A Streetcar Named Desire. It is interesting particularly for the prefatory material Williams attaches to it. In the first place, an undated note attached to one version of the play is clearly a prototype for the “Production Notes”: The form of the play is chosen by the nature of memory. Memory is non-realistic, certainly. It is lyrical, it is broken, it is sensuous and dreamy, it is a mingling of actual speech and what was left unspoken: meditation, images of fancy – all of these together. Sections are

                                                           

26 For more on Williams’ notion of the “sculptural drama”, see Richard Kramer, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre”, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review V (2002), 1-10, and John S. Bak, Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 92-95. 27 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, I, 132. 28 Ibid., 131.

  

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Richard Hayes clearly chiselled: others, darkling. Morning, night, and noon run in together. Time is escaped: their meaning makes separate events appear co-eval. Colors through the the [sic] coloration of nostalgia are fused in a delicate harmony. Interiors fuse with landscapes. The play is memory – sorrow – the looking back at life.29

In another draft, Williams has a long dedication in which he identifies not only the visual nature of the “plastic theatre” but also the indebtedness for the conception of that theatre to a cinematic source. In it, Williams writes: The conception of this play began on my return one evening from seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevsky. Its pictorial drama and poetry of atmosphere, a curiously powerful blend of passion and restraint, an almost sculptural quality, had excited me very deeply and made me wonder if it were not possible to achieve something analogous to this in a poetic drama for the stage .... The passionate restraint, the sculptural effect noted in the film, became the artistic tone of this play as I began to conceive it .... [Designed in this way, the play] would have to be independent of nearly all dramatic conventions .... it seemed to me that after sitting on my ass for six months in Hollywood, the noblest and most cavalier act that I could perform by way of atonement was to put all popular ambitions aside and devote whatever I had in the way of energy and emotion to this extremely challenging idea, a synthesis for the stage of those artistic terms that informed the film of Eisenstein – a classic theme with broad and familiar outlines, a tragedy purified by poetry and music of modern feeling, a vividly pictorial presentation that would offer the utmost visual excitement and be informed by the rich and disturbing beauty of surrealist painting.30

Alexander Nevsky was released in the 96 in March 1939, though it is likely Williams saw the film a number of years later. The dedication to “The Spinning Song” is signed “September 1943”.31 Williams does not suggest he acted immediately on seeing the film, though the tone of his note suggests a certain currency to his experience. His notebook                                                            

29

Williams, “The Spinning Song”, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, box 34, folder 6. 30 Ibid. 31 Williams spent May-October 1943 in Hollywood as a contracted writer with MGM.

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records him finishing the first draft of the play on 25 February 1942.32 The film was showing at the Thalia Theatre in New York toward the end of January 1942, around the same time that Williams was living there. It is most likely Williams saw Alexander Nevsky then. In one scene in “The Spinning Song” at least, the effort at “pictorial presentation”, as Williams calls it, takes place through a series of brief sub-scenes that resemble cinematic “shots” – Eisenstein’s montage-based style, David Bordwell says, broke a scene down “into many shots, building up a dramatic action out of many short, close-up pieces”.33 In this case, a mother, Blanche, is worried about her daughter and goes to see a doctor. The dialogue of the scene takes place against the backdrop of a series of stage directions that resemble cinematic shots: DOCTOR IN BLACK. MOTHER IN PALE BLUE DRESS. THE DOCTOR TOUCHES HER HAND AND MOVES TO THE STAIRS. BRING 34 LIGHT UP ON ARIADNE BY OVAL MIRROR.

The Doctor enters, calls her name and Ariadne smiles: “FADE SPOT A narrator then speaks:

OUT ON MIRROR.”

The sky that day was white, the day was white. My mother’s dress was white. So was Ariadne’s. All the world appeared to contain was whiteness.35

“BRING UP LIGHT ON SKY WITH BIRDS”, the play continues. Then, the narration returns: SHE SAT IN THE SWING AND THE DOCTOR WENT OUT TO HER. HE LAUGHED AND TALKED AND ACTED LIKE A LOVER. WE WATCHED FROM THE HOUSE.

                                                            32

Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 81. 33 Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 46. 34 Williams, “The Spinning Song”, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, box 34, folder 6. 35 Ibid.

  

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Richard Hayes MY MOTHER, TO HIDE HER NERVOUSNESS, PLAYED THE PIANO. (Spinning song.) BRING LIGHT UP ON PIANO.36

For Eisenstein, cinematic montage involves the juxtaposition of images, the meaning arising less from the images than the collision of those images together. Moreover, Eisenstein, Andrew writes, “could never accept the notion of a shot as a bit of reality which the filmmaker gathers” but insisted that “the shot was a locus of formal elements such as lighting, line, movement, and volume”.37 The juxtaposition of the final two “shots”, of sky and a woman at a piano, in “Spinning Song” is striking – in itself it succeeds in “foregrounding style”, one of the effects of montage, according to Bordwell.38 In the “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, Williams draws attention to the role of music as “another extra-literary accent” in the “plastic” theatre.39 Williams’ note on Alexander Nevsky celebrated the film’s use of music as much as the experimental visuals: The film of Eisenstein was immeasurably enhanced by a complete musical score by Prokofiev, which combined with picture and action so perfectly that the effects were of blood-chilling intensity. The influence of modern music and surreal art, both present in this film masterpiece, could be used as powerfully in a poetic stage play.40

In the note, with Eisenstein’s film in mind, Williams goes on to project a play “Written in verse, with a surrealist influence and a background of modern music”, a play that would be a tragedy “purified by poetry and music of modern feeling”.41 In a letter to Eric Bentley from 1948, Williams identified music as an important element in the plastic theatre, defending from those who dismissed them as “cheap tricks” “the use of transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects, which are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue”.42                                                             36

Ibid. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 51. 38 Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 50. 39 Williams, The Glass Menagerie, I, 133. 40 Williams, “The Spinning Song”, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, box 34, folder 6. 41 Ibid. (my italics). 42 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 203 (my italics). 37

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The idea that the “cheap tricks” Williams deploys in his drama are for him as meaningful as the dialogue is important, for such a position also recalls Eisenstein. Of the Kabuki theatre (which influenced him greatly), Eisenstein wrote: “The meaning of a kabuki play ... could never be understood merely by a recounting of the plot or gestures. It is the form of the ensemble which contains the meaning.”43 Bordwell writes that what Eisenstein “discovered” in the Kabuki play was what he called “monistic ensemble”, where “stage setting or music is not subordinated to action or dialogue. Instead, Kabuki grants various sensory channels an equal status in triggering spectatorial response.”44 In The Film Sense, his essay “The Synchronization of Senses” deals with the relationship between sound and image, with Eisenstein writing of what he calls “polyphonic montage”: “where shot is linked to shot not merely through one indication – movement, or light values, or stage in the exposition of the plot, or the like – but through a simultaneous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence.”45 Eisenstein identifies here the equality of significance of all the component parts in a shot (and he includes music and sound): plot, as in Kabuki theatre, is just one strand within a shot sequence. In the novel Moise and the World of Reason, Williams has the painter, Moise, explain to the narrator that empty space in her canvases is “as much a part of the living canvas as the bits of color”.46 The painter articulates here an aesthetics of non-dominance where space and paint are as important as each other in the effect of the picture. This aesthetics informs Williams’ thinking. Initially Eisenstein saw the sound film as a retrograde step in the development of film art: in the essay “The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR”, he suggested that the coming of sound to the cinema

                                                           

43

Quoted in Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 47. Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 125. 45 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda, London: Faber and Faber, 1968, 65. 46 Tennessee Williams, Moise and the World of Reason, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975, 136. 44

  

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“threatens to ruin its present actual achievements”.47 The most productive use of sound, the “Statement” suggests, was if it were treated as another element in a film’s montage – treating sound in this way “will inevitably introduce a new and enormously effective means for expressing and solving the complex problems with which we have been troubled, owing to the impossibility of solving them by the aid of cinematography operating with visual images alone”. With this in mind, he suggested that “the first experiments with sound must be directed toward its pronounced non-coincidence with the visual images”.48 Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein’s first sound film, following on from the pronouncements in “The Sound Film”, treats the music not as an element in the film that supports the dominant action but as an integral and equal component within the montage. Thus, as he describes in The Film Sense, some sequences of the film were scored following the construction of the visuals, while other sequences were first scored and then the visuals were constructed around the music.49 Throughout, Eisenstein sought “a tighter unity of image and sound than orthodox film scoring allows”,50 a unity Eisenstein referred to as “vertical montage”.51 While not avoiding the synchronization of sound and image, Eisenstein sought more flexibility in the use of sound and music than was conventional for filmmakers. The climactic “Battle on the Ice” sequence in Alexander Nevsky sees the music of Prokofiev “play both with and against the content of Eisenstein’s images of battle and the rhythms and shapes that control the cutting of the images”.52 Eisenstein analyses part of that sequence – the “dawn of anxious battle” sequence, as he calls it – and, by plotting graphically both the visual composition of the various shots that make up the sequence and the variations in musical note, he concludes that there is

                                                            47

Sergei Eisenstein, W.I. Pudovkin and G.V. Alexandrov, “The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR”, in Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, eds James Donald, Anna Friedberg and Laura Marcus, London: Cassell, 1998, 83. 48 Ibid., 84. 49 Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 124. 50 Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 220. 51 See Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 175-216 and pull-out diagram. 52 Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 165.

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a “complete correspondence between the movement of the music and the movement of the eye over the lines of the plastic composition”.53 What is impressive about Eisenstein, and what one senses struck Williams, was the deliberateness with which he treats music and the seriousness with which he deploys sound. The difference between Williams’ treatment of music in plays before and after his experience of seeing Alexander Nevsky perhaps indicates the change effected by Eisenstein’s influence. Candles to the Sun hardly uses music at all: music is suggested for one scene only, scene eight, which ends with Red telling Luke, “Go with your mother, boy” followed by “MusicCurtain”.54 The lack of specificity about the music here contrasts with Williams’ directions in The Glass Menagerie, where a specific theme, “The Glass Menagerie”, the nature of which Williams establishes in his “Production Notes”, is played on and off through the play. In scene one alone, music is indicated mid-way through Tom’s first speech, after he introduces the “social background” of the play and before he says “The play is memory”. The theme is again heard when Amanda is first considered: “Tom motions for music and a spot of light on Amanda.” The theme is played “Faintly” and “lightly” toward the end of the scene as Laura looks out the window, and the scene ends with the music dying out as the light dims.55 The specificity about the use of music here – the identification of a particular theme, the deliberateness of the placing of the theme and the indications of the manner in which the theme should be played – differs remarkably from the lack of specificity in Candles to the Sun. It is worth dwelling on the use of music in A Streetcar Named Desire for a further example of what might seem to be Eisenstein’s influence. The play is sonically rich and possesses a highly textured “soundtrack” made up of music but also voices, “inhuman cries”, jungle noises, ringing telephones and locomotive engines. Two aspects to the soundtrack to “The Poker Night” (scene three) deserve particular attention. First of all, there is a gradual increase in the volume of the voices across the scene. From the “absorbed silence” of the poker game in the scene’s opening moments, the game is next                                                             53

Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 139. Tennessee Williams, Candles to the Sun, ed. Dan Isaac, New York: New Directions, 2004, 96. 55 Williams, The Glass Menagerie, I, 145, 149 and 150 (Williams’ italics). 54

  

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heard “in undertones”.56 Moments later, Stanley bellows for Mitch. He shouts again as he throws the radio from the window, and Stella “cries out” and Blanche “screams”.57 Though Stanley’s friends “speak quietly and lovingly to him”, the voices around the apartment sound “shrill”, “high, unnatural”. When Stanley emerges into the street to seek Stella, he bellows “with heaven-splitting violence”58 the name of his wife, a further volume change. The increase in volume corresponds to the movement of the action of the scene from the poker table to the bedroom, the shower and onto the street. In other words, the character movement across the scene is matched with a change in the nature of the sound effects, in this case a change in volume. It is as if the characters emerge from the quietness of the domestic space to the noise of the outside world. In this respect, the transitional moment between the inner and outer worlds is important and significantly that transitional moment is signalled not just by lighting but also by sound: “Dissonant brass and piano sounds as the rooms dim out to darkness and the outer walls appear in the night light.”59 The movement of the characters in the scene from the inner, domestic world – signalled by the kitchen table – to the street parallels an increase in desire across the scene. This movement begins with the “loud whack” of Stanley’s hand on Stella’s thigh during the game and concludes with Stanley’s bellow of “STELL-LAHHHHH!”, the gradually increasing volume signalling a gradual increase in feeling. This connection between noise and desire is confirmed elsewhere in the scene when Stella jokes with Blanche about the noises of love-making in the room upstairs cracking the plaster.60 Secondly, there are four pieces of music specified in the scene: the playing of rhumba music on the radio; the playing of a waltz, also on the radio; the playing of “Paper Doll” by a local band; and the low moan of a clarinet. The music slows down across the course of the scene as the rhumba (usually in 4/4 time) gives way to the waltz (in 3/4 time) which gives way to “Paper Doll”, which is played “slow and blue”, a tune that in turn is replaced by the “low-tone clarinet moans”,                                                             56

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 293 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 294, 301 and 303 (Williams’ italics). 58 Ibid., 303 and 307 (Williams’ italics). 59 Ibid., 305-306 (Williams’ italics). 60 Ibid., 290, 307 and 294 (Williams’ italics). 57

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where there is no indication of tempo at all.61 The slowing down of the music seems at odds with the action of the scene that begins with a silent poker game and proceeds to a fight and to Stanley shouting in the street. However, the music works to distract from the action, the changes of pace, which are not synchronous with the action, indicating that some other force is at work beneath what is immediately perceptible. In part, the slowing of the music signals the increase in desire; the music maps a trajectory for the audience’s attention away from the noise of the street (the rhumba is identified as by a popular band leader, Xavier Cugat, and is to this extent the music of the people; further, it is played not long after Blanche and Stella return to the apartment from the outside) to the inner feelings of the characters (the clarinet’s moans are echoed by the coming together of Stanley and Stella “with low, animal moans”).62 It is also the music that attracts Mitch to the bedroom to talk to Blanche: he has just returned from the bathroom to the poker game when he hears the music and rises once more. Later, when the waltz plays, Mitch dances with Blanche.63 Stanley is anxious to police this seemingly growing desire; early in the scene he shouts to Stella and Blanche to “cut out that conversation in there”, and it is Stanley who throws the radio out the window. The movements of the two characters form a kind of dance to the four pieces of music. When the rhumba plays, “Mitch rises at the table” only for Stanley to jump up to turn the radio off.64 Mitch dances “like a dancing bear” to the waltz; “Stanley stalks fiercely through the portieres into the bedroom” and flings the radio out the window. As Mitch collects his winnings and flees from the enraged Stanley, “Paper Doll” begins to play – Stanley then emerges from the shower dripping wet.65 Finally, the clarinet that accompanies the reconciliation of Stella and Stanley fades out as Mitch approaches Blanche at the end of the scene. Stanley’s control of the scene’s music may be read as an attempt to control Mitch. He

                                                           

61

Ibid., 305 and 307 (Williams’ italics). Ibid., 307 (Williams’ italics). 63 Ibid., 293 and 302. 64 Ibid., 294, 295 and 295 (Williams’ italics). 65 Ibid., 302, 302 and 305 (Williams’ italics). 62

  

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succeeds, and Mitch in the end speaks to Blanche quietly and without desire (she does not flirt with him, merely seeks kindness).66 The plastic theatre and Hollywood conventionalism Christopher Bigsby suggests that World War II “deepened a sense of insecurity” amongst Americans, and that Williams, along with Arthur Miller, in their stylistic experiments “were concerned to develop a theatrical style which reflected their desire to dissolve a confident realism and to trace the social and psychological origins of cultural anxiety”.67 Bigsby’s historicization of Williams’ experiments is useful in thinking about the attraction of Eisenstein for Williams. As well as making films that commented directly on contemporary political and social concerns – Alexander Nevsky was a clear allegory of the relationship between Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Germany – Eisenstein’s formal method was itself designed to prompt intervention on the part of his audience in history: Eisenstein was of a piece with other Soviet artists in his commitment to prompting his audience to engage with political and social forces through their engagement with his art. In October, for instance, as Bordwell and Thompson explain, Eisenstein “makes vigorous use of temporal discontinuities”, in one sequence cross-cutting between a battlefield, the seat of government, a factory and a bread-queue in a street. These cuts do not indicate simultaneous action, as they might in a Hollywood film, for the factory is filmed during the day and the bread-queue at night. Eisenstein “sacrificed the delineation of 1-2-3 order so that he can control the shots as emotional and conceptual units”. Using such strategies, “October seeks to go beyond a simple presentation of story events by making the audience actively interpret those events”.68 Eisenstein’s was an art that sought both to reflect on history and to change it, and his style was the formal method by which he proceeded to encourage such critical engagement. But Williams, despite the seeming influence as set out above, did not. An early version of Sweet Bird of Youth was called “The Enemy: Time”, and with it Williams                                                            

66

Ibid., 308-309. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, 2: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 7. 68 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979, 181-82. 67

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sought, to some extent, a theatre that stood outside time – a dehistoricized theatre in other words. His Foreword to The Rose Tattoo is called, striking in this context, “The Timeless World of a Play”. “In a play”, he says, … time is arrested in the sense of being confined .... The audience can sit back in the comforting dusk to watch a world which is flooded with light and in which emotion and action have a dimension and dignity that they would likewise have in real existence, if only the shattering intrusion of time could be locked out.69

Williams’ spectators – in this conception of them at least – are not the engaged spectators Eisenstein imagined for his own works. Williams writes in the Afterword to Camino Real, “I have read the works of ‘thinking playwrights’ as distinguished from us who are permitted only to feel”, and he goes on to write of the live theatre as “a theatre meant for seeing and feeling”.70 This seems at variance with where Eisenstein positions his spectator: “The strength of montage resides in this”, Eisenstein writes, “that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator”.71 Williams’ “plastic theatre”, despite appearances, in the end does not entirely break free of convention. His effort in his seemingly most “sculptural” play, Camino Real, was, as he writes in the Foreword: “the achievement of a continual flow. Speech after speech and bit after bit that were nice in themselves have been remorselessly blasted out of the script and its staging wherever they seemed to obstruct or divert this flow.”72 “Continual flow” is a very good description of the style of the Hollywood cinema: it is positively the opposite of Eisenstein’s mode of operation. The Hollywood cinema is a cinema of illusions – “a clear pane of glass”; that is, the classical Hollywood film prided itself on its “concealed artistry” and sought to involve its audience in clear, linear and continuous realist narrative served by that concealed

                                                           

69

Tennessee Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 60-61. 70 Ibid., 71. 71 Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 34 (my italics). 72 Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, 69.

  

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artistry.73 It is a cinema that “depends upon the spectator’s absorption into the filmic world”, and such absorption was dependent on the “signs of cinematic production” being rendered as invisible as possible.74 To an extent, despite Williams’ protestations to the contrary, it was Hollywood’s style, rather than Eisenstein’s, that came to have a more profound influence on him, and it is telling in this respect that The Glass Menagerie emerged from Williams’ brief sojourn working in a Hollywood studio where the play was originally drafted as a screenplay.75 A full examination of Williams’ use of Hollywood conventions is beyond the scope of this article, but one example may serve to illustrate. According to Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, “From the start, musical accompaniment has provided the cinema’s most overt continuity factor”.76 Williams comments on this is in a letter to Cheryl Crawford in 1951 (about The Rose Tattoo): “Music helps the audience follow emotionally. It softens the rough edges of which there are many, alas.”77 Hollywood films assist audiences and build continuity deploying musical leitmotifs. Williams identifies “The Glass Menagerie” as a leitmotif in his “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie: “A single recurring tune, ‘The Glass Menagerie’”, he says, “is used to give emotional emphasis to suitable passages”. He suggests that the tune seems “to continue almost interminably and it weaves in and out of your preoccupied consciousness”. It is, however, “primarily Laura’s music and therefore comes out more clearly when the play focuses upon her and the lovely fragility of glass which is her image”.78 The tune is mentioned explicitly a number of times in the play, each time in connection with Laura and each time as Laura is engaged with one other character in the play: the first time the tune is heard Laura is in conversation with her mother; the second time sees her with her brother; the final time the tune is heard is when Laura is alone with Jim, the gentleman caller. Each time the tune is heard                                                            

73

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 36, 24. 74 Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, 78-79. 75 See Williams, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, box 17, folder 4. 76 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 33. 77 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 388. 78 Williams, The Glass Menagerie, I, 133.

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marks a different stage in Laura’s psychological development, and the theme encourages a sense of character as well as narrative continuity, the tune effectively mapping out Laura’s relationships with all the other characters in the play in turn. This deployment is entirely in keeping with the way leitmotifs work in Hollywood films.79 Conclusion In the end, as future scholarship may confirm, it was Hollywood cinema that had a more lasting influence on Williams’ aesthetic than Eisenstein. It is tempting to read this as a surrender on Williams’ part akin to the “sin” Clifford Odets committed when, in the 1930s, he went to work in Hollywood, a “sin” that ruined him – in the eyes of many – as a playwright.80 However, it might be suggested that, in turning to Hollywood, Williams may be seen to be a frontier figure in Postmodernism, where, according to Singal, “the democratic urge within Modernism to break down all division between the elite and the popular has at last overcome the long standing practice of Modernist thinkers to dismiss mass culture on the grounds of inauthenticity”.81 Thought of in this way, Williams’ interest in Hollywood style is consistent with his Modernism, and also consistent with Miriam Hansen’s proposal that Hollywood cinema represented a kind of “vernacular modernism”.82 In turning to Hollywood, in not fully embracing Eisenstein’s aesthetic, Williams may be making visible a recognition that America did not need European Modernism. He may not have entirely broken free of convention in his work but, in swapping what seems European-inspired Modernist conventions for conventions developed by an American medium – the popular, Hollywood cinema – Williams perhaps demonstrates a desire to forge a “homemade” aesthetic better suited to American circumstances.

                                                           

79

For more on the notion of the leitmotif in The Glass Menagerie, see John S. Bak, “‘Celebrate her with strings’: Leitmotifs and the Multifaceted ‘Strings’ in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie”; Notes on Mississippi Writers, XXIV/2 (July 1992), 81-85. 80 See Clurman, The Fervent Years, 170. 81 Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism”, American Quarterly, XXXIX/1 (Spring 1987), 22. 82 Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses”, 333 ff.

  

   

 

   

If I can make it – I think Europe is the place for me now. Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, 1 December 1946

 

   

THE VIEW FROM HERE AND ABROAD: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND 1950S HOLLYWOOD CINEMA R. BARTON PALMER

In a classic essay on the connection between the theatre and the cinema, French critic André Bazin observes that “The more the cinema intends to be faithful to the text and to its theatrical requirements, the more of necessity it must delve deeper into its own language”. Such “dialectical progress” means for Bazin that “the cinema will give back to the theater unstintingly what it took from her …”.1 And so there “are no plays that cannot be brought to the screen”, for some of the greatest contemporary playwrights, “Cinema is only a complementary form of theater …”.2 Bazin only mentions the leading lights of French theatre, but among these playwrights was certainly Tennessee Williams, arguably the most cinematically significant of all twentieth-century American writers. A prophet in spite of himself The enfant terrible of post-war Broadway, Tennessee Williams made even more of a mark on the commercial film industry of the 1950s through several critically acclaimed and startlingly controversial screen adaptations of his stage successes. In ways that had rarely if ever been seen before on either stage or screen, Williams dramatized the discontents of modern living. And so, at a time when private experience and the values that should guide its conduct were much in flux, it is not surprising that American cultural life was affected deeply by the release and exhibition of A Streetcar Named Desire                                                            

1 André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema”, in Theater and Film, ed. Robert Knopf, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 126. 2 Ibid., 131.

 

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(1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), Baby Doll (1956) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). These films became public events in ways that only very few Hollywood releases ever do. To be sure, they were far from revolutionary, either artistically or in their intense focus on family relations. In fact, Hollywood producers found the Williams properties attractive precisely because they treated time-honored subjects upon whose appeal the film industry had long depended. These included the ravaging effects of time on human destiny; the irregular passages of romantic life, marked by betrayal, loss and compromise; the moral and psychological discontents of sexual desire as lived out in a society with a long history of repressive attitude, the unavoidable tensions of intimate relationships; and – in a more specifically national vein – the exotic, fascinatingly perverse nature of southern culture. Yet it can hardly be denied that in their treatment of this subject matter the Williams films brought to Hollywood’s audiences a distinct vision of lived experience whose substantial departures from traditional values and styles now seemed to demand representation. As the decade neared its end, the screen versions of Williams’ plays found increasing resonance with the directions in which American life itself was relentlessly moving – and, ironically enough, with an everincreasing speed such that by the 1960s the playwright became rather démodé. By that time, screen versions of properties that Williams had first conceived ten or fifteen years earlier, notably The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone or Summer and Smoke (both 1961), seemed very much old hat and met with little favor from audiences and critics alike (notable exceptions were Sweet Bird of Youth [1962] and The Night of the Iguana [1964]). It was imports from Europe, such as Blow-Up (1966), and provocative material from current Broadway, notably Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film version 1966), that led the final push towards a liberalization of Hollywood that, for a brief radical moment in 1972, witnessed the mainstream exhibition of hardcore (if undoubtedly classy) pornographic films like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. America was a different place two decades before when the release of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire was a controversial sensation. Williams provided ideal source materials for early post-war filmgoers who were eager for the new, yet reluctant to surrender entirely their attachment to the tried and true entertainment Hollywood had been providing since the 1920s. As yet unaffected by

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the radical revisionisms of the sexual revolution and the decline in public endorsement of what we are now accustomed to term “family values”, cinemagoers of the 1950s, marked by the dislocating changes of the recently concluded World War, were nonetheless increasingly uneasy with inherited pieties that purported to explain life’s texture and meanings. Transformed to fit the industry’s peculiar requirements, Williams’ works found on celluloid a second (and now seemingly inextinguishable) life. Provided with national and international distribution, they reached a much larger and more diverse audience than the playwright had enjoyed on Broadway. In the battle that has been waged on many fronts in American society since the latter half of the nineteenth century between modernizing, secularizing moyens de vivre and more established national traditions based on a thoroughgoing religious conservatism, the Williams films took on no little significance. They affirmed even as they critiqued a culture then rapidly evolving; they pointed, if always uncertainly and obliquely, towards emerging understandings of identity and social relations in an America quickly becoming obsessed with the psychologism of therapeutic culture and a fevered devotion to self-actualization. Williams limned the outlines of a politics of self that anticipated the social upheavals of the next two decades. Unlike others who played a conscious, even deliberate role in this series of revolutionary developments (singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, for example), the playwright did not see himself as either a prophet for or advocate of some new order. His fate instead was to be an involuntary agent of change connected to a certain cultural moment. For a time, the screen versions of his films insured that he was lionized. By the end of the 1950s, Williams was arguably America’s best-known author, rivaled only by Ernest Hemingway, who had blazed his own path to notoriety through the calculated construction of a public self. By 1970, however, Williams would be a figure no longer well known beyond literary circles, especially to a younger generation of Americans. Events had bypassed the sensationalism his Broadway and then Hollywood successes had aroused. And the controversies in which he had been centrally involved began to seem curiously empty of any larger significance as a fast-moving culture passed them by. But in the 1950s, Williams provided “adult” material for a Hollywood desperate to win back its customers in a time of   

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precipitous decline by presenting them with the kind of drama they could not see gratis on their living room televisions. Hollywood was then desperate to find and screen material that would appeal to an audience whose tastes and interests were becoming less uniform, or even, from year to year, as safely predictable as they once had been, a critical state of affairs for the industry that Robert Bray and I have recently chronicled at length.3 The crisis that bedeviled the plans and interests of industry producers in the 1950s was no more evident than in the industry’s institutionalized attempts at self-regulation, which were becoming increasingly difficult to manage effectively. Responding, in the early sound period, to complaints from more conservative elements within American society that objected to films that treated in increasingly direct ways the discontents of modern life like divorce, adultery and the dissatisfaction of women with the patriarchal sexual order, Hollywood had embarked, not entirely unwillingly, on a course of self-monitoring. The continuing stream of releases was to be regulated by a detailed Production Code, written in 1930 by a Catholic intellectual, Father Daniel Lord, that effectively proscribed or restricted such themes. These detailed admonitions were widely disregarded, however, and it was only with the establishment of the industry-financed Production Code Administration (PCA) office in 1934 that the Code was more regularly enforced by its director, the formidable Joseph Breen.4 Breen was charged to issue films that were found to conform to the Code with certificates of approval. Without that certificate, producers would find it difficult, if not impossible, to find distribution and screen time. To be sure, Breen was no inflexible moralist, but an industry employee whose ultimate task was to help producers avoid unprofitable controversy yet still make films that conformed to the evolving taste of a huge and diverse audience. For this reason, some controversial material found its way into the films that received certificates, as Breen and his associates became experts in altering the outrageous into the barely permissible. The PCA worked (though informally) in conjunction with a Catholic lay organization, the Legion of Decency, which had been                                                            

3

See R. Barton Palmer and Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 4 See Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940-1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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formed at the end of the 1920s to create and maintain what its officials hoped would become a wholesome screen, an aim shared widely among conservative groups of all kinds.5 The Legion’s purpose was not to ensure that Hollywood films were morally acceptable as such. Breen and the PCA had the responsibility of making possible a continuing flow of unobjectionable releases to the nation’s theatres. The Legion carried no such corporate brief. Instead, its sole aim was to safeguard the spiritual welfare of the Catholic laity. Despite their different purposes, these two institutions, one outside and the other inside the film industry, managed to work together despite occasional conflict and disagreement. The nearly revolutionary impact of the early Williams films on Hollywood and on American culture more broadly was measured by the difficulties that the filmmakers in each case encountered during production with PCA officials and, after exhibition, with Legion critics, who had the power to enjoin Catholics not to attend a film that they considered “an occasion of sin”. A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Baby Doll and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof all posed significant challenges to both the Code and also the institutional protocols followed by Legion reviewers. It is a testimony to the power and significance of Williams’ understandings of modern life that these challenges proved surprisingly successful. Even if they diverged from the playscripts, the films all proved notorious to one degree or another and were generally applauded as artistically accomplished by the domestic critical establishment. Hollywood would never be the same after the release of A Streetcar Named Desire, or so was the view of many. Here was a film that challenged the moral strictures of the Code (particularly its usually non-negotiable list of forbidden themes) and, more important, had defeated the attempts of the industry’s appointed guardians to melodramatize its portrayal of the sexual life and reduce the struggles of Stanley, Stella, Blanche and Mitch with desire and accepted codes of behavior to the then regnant Hollywood master narrative, with a happy ending offering the moral clarity of poetic justice and the comforting re-establishment of conventional social forms and roles. Against all odds, Williams’ drama emerged with its central and bestknown features more or less intact, including rather unsubtle                                                             5

See Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

  

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references to Blanche’s promiscuous past, her yen for good-looking and too-young men (the film includes the scene from the play in which this desire is poignantly and disturbingly dramatized) and the rape she endures at the hands of her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, who with this attack at least in part punishes Blanche for her faux respectability and the air of moral and cultural superiority with which she had derisively treated him. Like the Broadway stage, the nation’s screens had never before presented a sexual encounter of this kind. In a series of increasingly bitter and finally epic confrontations with Breen and his assistants, the playwright and his director, Elia Kazan, steadfastly refused by all means available (including evasions bordering on mendacity) to effect substantial changes in a drama that had proven more than a little scandalous even for playgoers more culturally liberal than the general audiences served by Hollywood. It is not so well known that Williams and Kazan also successfully resisted the attempt of producer Charles K. Feldman to turn A Streetcar Named Desire into a more conventional narrative. Feldman had been eager to purchase the play’s movie rights when others had been frightened off by what appeared to be a story that would never be certificated. And yet, as scriptwriting proceeded (handled by Williams and Oscar Saul), Feldman, who had invested a great deal of money in the project, began to lose enthusiasm for the play’s sensationalism, arguing with playwright and director that, in effect, Blanche was actually a weak-minded fantasist (that is, a typical manless woman, according to the gender stereotypes of the era), who, interfering in her sister’s domestic arrangement (hardly tranquil, but mutually satisfying erotically), in some sense gets what she deserves. In the problematic reconciliation between husband and wife with which the play closes, Feldman saw an endorsement of traditional values, pre-eminently the importance of family, a theme that, as he suggested to an unresponsive playwright and scornful director, should be emphasized. Had Feldman’s vision of A Streetcar Named Desire prevailed, nearly everything that had made the play a scandalous success, including the shocking rape, would have been eliminated. The producer argued that this violent culmination of the sexually charged rivalry between Blanche and Stanley was unnecessary once Stanley “destroys” her by telling Mitch what he learned about her seamy personal life, as the brother-in-law improbably becomes the spokesman for a moral standard that Blanche has proved unable to

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uphold.6 Kazan and Williams dismissed with contempt this overly moralistic vision of the play’s characters and the meaning of the many sided agon in which they become so thoroughly enmeshed. A Streetcar Named Desire made it to the screen unchanged in its essentials, thanks to the efforts of Kazan and Williams, not to mention the silent connivance of Breen himself, who was not eager to reject a film based on what was then universally acknowledged as one of the finest dramas ever produced on Broadway. Feldman himself could hardly have been displeased with the outcome as the play furnished the filmmakers with a challenging newness that nonetheless enthralled viewers and critics alike, as A Streetcar Named Desire, voted Best Picture in 1951, received the industry’s ultimate endorsement. Feldman saw his investment in Williams rewarded with a healthy return, and the lesson was not lost on other producers who had initially proved reluctant to bid on A Streetcar Named Desire despite its critical success, sealed by a Pulitzer Prize. As the American cinema moved in the post-war era to the screening of contemporary fiction and drama that challenged Code protocols, the industry’s producers, as well as the PCA that represented their collective interests, found itself in a difficult spot. Public taste was obviously liberalizing. For Hollywood, this development was unmistakably evident in the emerging source material upon which the continuing flow of film projects depended: the novels and plays that each year achieved popular acclaim and which, with their pre-sold quality, demanded screening. And yet the Catholic Church, at least in its conservative wing represented so effectively by the Legion and by many bishops, had become a powerful advocate for traditional morality in American life, promoting a quite different understanding of Hollywood’s mission than directors like Kazan had in mind (in short, films were to provide entertainment characterized by moral uplift, essentially a nineteenthcentury artistic value). With its business model predicated on bringing the new and the sensational to the nation’s screens, the film industry could hardly afford to appear old-fashioned and inappropriately moralistic in a period of rapid evolution, and yet there was still real danger for producers and exhibitors in challenging too strongly values                                                             6

Palmer and Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee, 78-82.

  

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that continued to be held robustly by a sizable and politically engaged segment of the viewing public. It was still possible to push the envelope too far. And this is what happened when Williams and Kazan, who was now acting as producer, director and co-screenwriter, miscalculated what the public as a whole would tolerate in the advertising campaign the duo engineered for Baby Doll, whose engagement with sexual themes is almost entirely innuendo and double entendre. An outsized Times Square billboard advertising the film and featuring an image of the title character, in provocative dishabille, lying in a crib sucking her thumb and meeting the gaze of onlookers with a sexy leer, proved too much for Francis Cardinal Spellman, who helped organize a campaign of resistance to what he determined was unspeakably obscene even though he never viewed a single frame of what playwright and his collaborator had produced. As Williams and Kazan discovered, there could be repercussions to such outrage with exhibitors, who were rightly worried about the picketing and boycotts that, in some cities, greeted the appearance of Baby Doll. The film did much less business than expected as it was proved true that Catholic viewers, and other social conservatives could still be persuaded to reject films that were condemned from the pulpit even after they passed muster with the PCA.7 It is a measure of the cultural distance that America has traveled since the release of Baby Doll in 1956 that the film shows regularly on cable and broadcast TV without restriction or comment. A Streetcar Named Desire, a Pulitzer-Prize winning drama and a notoriously provocative property, brought these different issues to a head. Breen’s assistant Geoffrey Shurlock said of this film that … for the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment …. Streetcar broke the barrier …. Tennessee Williams was something new to movies …. The stage got a shock from Tennessee Williams. We got twice the shock. Now we know that a good deal of what we decide in censoring movies is not morality but taste. It began with Streetcar.8

                                                           

7

Ibid., 123-49. Quoted in Murray Schumach, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: The Story of Movie and Television Censorship, New York: William Morrow, 1964, 72.

8

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Shurlock reports being surprised that this film’s engagement with the stuff of existence needed to be considered not as simply a matter of morality (in which the key question was whether what was represented was obscene, or, in the legal formulation of the era, issuing an appeal to prurient or excessively lustful interests). Breen’s censor was more than a little naïve, perhaps, for Modernist trends in the arts at the time had for more than two decades been a matter for often acrimonious public debate and, because of the nation’s commitment to First Amendment protection, legal challenges to not infrequent obscenity prosecution. A number of these cases became cause célèbres, most notably perhaps Judge Woolsey’s 1933 New York district court determination that James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was not obscene, as it had been found to be by a lower court, because, as the judge so memorably put it, the author nowhere exhibited the “leer of the sensualist”. Joyce should have been condemned, so Woolsey concluded, if he had ruined his masterpiece by failing to record the thoughts of characters which, however much they might offend some, were true to life.9 Shurlock’s reaction to A Streetcar Named Desire was arguably more symptomatic than idiosyncratic. Like many educated Americans, the executives as the PCA were still experiencing the shock of the ongoing aesthetic shift from a Victorian insistence on moral instruction to a Modernist advocacy for truth-telling that expanded the limits of what could be acknowledged and represented, especially, as Judge Woolsey notes, about the personal life, whose inner secrets could be made known in the service of authenticity. Interestingly, Shurlock defines A Streetcar Named Desire not by what it is, but rather by what it is not: “family entertainment.” He seems unwilling to acknowledge that this film might be art. The PCA director would likely have not been reticent to so describe the critically acclaimed play on which the film was closely based, but movies exhibited in America were not then ordinarily described as art regardless of their (largely unnoticed by most) aesthetic merits. Shurlock’s reticence ignores the effect on American film culture on the then rapidly expanding popularity in the exhibition sector of what we now routinely refer to as art houses that showed movies made                                                             9

For the full text of Woolsey’s decision, see “Woolsey”: http://scholar.google.com/ scholar_case?case=5544515174778878625&q= (accessed 29 September 2012).

  

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abroad, mostly in Europe. These foreign films were, as appropriate, often acknowledged as art by the cognoscenti, including East coast metropolitan reviewers like Bosley Crowther at The New York Times, but not many within the industry on the other side of the country would have postulated a division of filmed fiction into two divergent if occasionally overlapping sectors, art and entertainment. Nonetheless, in admitting that A Streetcar Named Desire demanded to be judged by “taste” rather than “morality”, Shurlock sounds very much like Judge Woolsey. Both bracket off the question of offensiveness on which the determination of obscenity had traditionally been thought to turn. The clear implication is that the film Williams and Kazan have produced cannot be judged simply on moral terms because of its artistic quality, and this decision interestingly anticipates how American culture was then moving towards a redemptive theory of art that isolates it from legal censure and actionability. In his own way, then, Shurlock is reflecting the trend of legal decisions in the era that would culminate in Miller v. California (1973) in which “serious artistic value” redeems from condemnation what might otherwise be considered obscene.10 A Streetcar Named Desire, as Shurlock admits, was the first production to raise that question in post-war Hollywood, an eloquent characterization of the role that because of their peculiar combination of artistic worthiness and cultural provocation the Williams films would play in the transformation of the industry’s preoccupation with obscenity and the representation of moral questions more generally (the Code would be abandoned and the Classification and Ratings Administration instituted in 1968). America’s continuing lean towards cultural liberalism would soon consign the Legion to irrelevance, as even the Catholic Church, under the forward-thinking leadership of Pope John XXIII would more enthusiastically embrace modernizing change. In 1966, the Legion passed from the scene, with its ratings functions assumed by a newly formed National Catholic Office on Motion Pictures. That development appropriately indexes the waning of the crusading zeal that had powered the organization’s founding some four decades earlier.

                                                           

10 For full details, see “Miller”: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl? court=us&vol=413&invol=15 (accessed 29 September 2012).

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Like Christian Bérard to Pablo Picasso Hollywood in the 1950s was a substantially globalized enterprise, with the profitability of the industry dependent, as had been the case since the end of World War I, on the overseas distribution of films produced domestically and, as the decade wore on, of international coproductions of different kinds. In contrast, though of great significance to Hollywood and post-war America more generally, the cultural and cinematic politics in which Tennessee Williams came to play such a significant role were strictly national. These struggles over the use and value of his texts spoke to the continuing problematic way in which American society engaged with the post-Christian secularism that was then already dominant in most European countries and no longer contending there with more traditional values and practices. The one exception was Great Britain, where the industry was overseen by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a long-established, government-supported body that carefully policed film content. After the liberal-minded John Trevelyan, who was friendly to the international art cinema, took charge of the BBFC in 1958, however, there were few struggles over the representational freedom accorded to filmmakers, especially those interested in screening contemporary fiction and drama in an adult manner. In contrast, the American industry in the post-war era remained preoccupied until the Miller case in 1973, which forced the industry to pull back from purveying pornography, with adjusting to a rapid change in taste. This was a difficult challenge at a time when Hollywood’s economic model was challenged by a new medium and the flight of urban audiences to the suburbs. And only in the United States was this cultural readjustment associated largely, if never exclusively, with the works of one author, in this case a dramatist who had effected a similar revolution in the national commercial theatre. No doubt, Williams was a Modernist in the obvious artistic sense, as his eventual departures from the dominant commercial tradition of theatrical realism in the later part of his career bear witness. But, equally important, he was a Modernist in the sense that his works broke representational taboos and helped re-define the two media in which he worked. Williams’ texts, in fact, did for the American film industry what D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover did for British publishing, when that novel, prosecuted for obscenity, was   

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found in 1960 by British courts, after a trial in which the artistic notables of the age were called to testify, to fall under the protection of the Obscene Publications Act, which had been passed by Parliament the year before in order to provide the kind of artistic freedom that Judge Woolsey had earlier ruled writers of the modern age should possess.11 For the most part, however, different cultural issues preoccupied intellectuals and artists in Europe, where filmic Modernism, adopting various guises, was defined by contrasting views of politics and artistic protocols rather than by the moral issues raised by censorship and the industrial problem of the proper relationship of permitted representation to popular taste. The 1950s were a period of great artistic accomplishment in a European cinema that witnessed a number of crucial developments:  the advent of Italian Neorealism and its somewhat quixotic advocacy of a cinema to be located outside studio walls and constructed with the raw materials of everyday life;  the growing prominence of youth culture in France and its challenge to the artistic values of an older, increasingly discredited generation that culminated in the development of a seriousminded, enthusiastic film culture that was dominated by critics turned directors who pioneered what came to be called the French New Wave;  the emergence in various countries (including India and Japan) of a generation of directors who were to take a multi-faceted approach to artistic seriousness and whose common denominator was a studied, creative dissatisfaction with the entertainment model of commercial cinema, as evident, to take some notable examples, in the idiosyncratic mixture of Social Realism, avantgardism and even historical symbolism in the much praised oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman as well as the deep existential psychologism and anti-realism stylizations in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini;  and the complex if informal alliance formed between documentarians, dramatists and novelists in a Britain then stirred by social change, which resulted in the bringing to the commercial screen what came to be called the British New Wave: a series of memorable, authentic filmic portraits of a regional working-class

                                                            11

For further details, see C.N. Rolph, The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

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life that had hitherto denied representation by an industry long dominated by a middlebrow worldview and a London cultural establishment.

Perhaps the most important result of these divergent developments was their convergence: the rise of an international art cinema in which these intriguingly conflicting but reinforcing strains of innovation and revisionism found a collective exhibition presence. Arising first in the American distribution market and then spreading around the world, the emergence of this powerful alternative to the model of filmmaking upon which Hollywood’s domination of the cinema had depended energized the medium, which would enjoy its most artistically productive period since the beginning of the studio era in the 1920s. Though the more educated and urbane were developing an enthusiasm for films made in defiance of Hollywood norms, the American industry remained largely outside the orbit of the startling developments. In America, the most insistent question about film content and style concerned the continuing viability of PCA. Would that contract between the industry and its paying customers, with its extensive repertoire of prescriptions and proscriptions, continue to hold? Or would modification, even abandonment eventually prove necessary? The American cinema would have to wait until the 1970s, and the demise of the original form of the studio system and the Code itself, for the revolutions in form and content pioneered by the international art cinema to have a transformative effect on what American directors, who now learned to style themselves deliberately in the European manner as auteurs, could bring to the screen. It is hardly surprising that in the 1950s European critics and filmmakers generally found little of interest in the growth in Hollywood of an adult cinema to which playwright Tennessee Williams made such important contributions, with A Streetcar Named Desire in effect inaugurating a tradition that would endure until the end of the studio system in the early 1970s. The Williams films helped usher in a form of American filmmaking that was unabashedly literary and unconcerned with glamour, glitz and action and no longer carried along by a simplistic and easily readable narrative; they were also striking in being less afraid of offending traditional pieties, even as they were not interested in the kind of obvious sexiness (oriented particularly around the arousing display of the female form) that   

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Hollywood had been selling for years. And yet this adultness was striking only from an American perspective because the Williams films were, stylistically speaking, hardly provocative or influential beyond national borders, even though made by an honor roll of postwar directors that included such luminaries (at least as far as American critics were concerned) as Elia Kazan, John Huston, Daniel Mann and Richard Brooks. Europeans, especially the French, were attracted by other aspects of American studio filmmaking. They found more interesting the emergence of a filmic authorship among those exceptional Hollywood professionals who imposed a personal style on divergent projects or colonized a genre, making it their own. Pioneered as a protocol of appreciation by Bazin, the politique des auteurs or, as it is known generally in this country, “the auteur theory”, was developed by the critics associated with the Cahiers du cinéma to identify the artistically worthy within an otherwise quite industrialized Hollywood cinema. Those directors identified as distinguished hardly constituted a school or a movement. It was instead their relentless individuality (which we might identify as the essence of the American approach to careerism) that made a John Ford or an Alfred Hitchcock or a Samuel Fuller notable. If the film noir, first identified and celebrated by the French, constituted a clearly distinctive area of Hollywood production in the era, this could be understood, at least initially, as nothing more than a trans-authorial visual style that emerged collectively but unconsciously in response to a number of literary, cinematic and cultural influences. What was most striking about the film noir, perhaps, is that its critical discovery speaks to the isolation of American film culture from international trends. Though now recognized as the most important large-scale artistic development within post-war Hollywood, film noir remained largely invisible within the country of its emergence until, much like the politique des auteurs, it was introduced to American film culture by a notable cinephile, screenwriter and director with a deep interest in the international art cinema: Paul Schrader. The French were fascinated by Hollywood’s dark cinema, which seemed to them connected to or at least reflective of Surrealism and artistic Modernism more generally. And they deeply admired as well those few directors who could be identified as authors, but they found little in the way of larger significance for the cinema in the Williams

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films or, more generally, in the development of the small, adult film that so characterized the decade. This was a dramatic form that, emerging from theatrical roots, constituted the centerpiece of an emerging tradition of quality with Hollywood, but first, and perhaps foremost, on broadcast TV, which was dominated by live serious drama before the turn at the end of the decade towards filmed programming. In that regard, it is significant, perhaps, that in 1947, during the earliest days of the new medium and its soon to develop fascination with live theatre, Kraft Television Theatre broadcast a live staging of Williams one-Acts, “Three Plays by Tennessee Williams” (This Property Is Condemned, The Last of My Solid Gold Watches and Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry). It is true enough, however, that Cahiers found Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire important enough to commission a longish review in 1952 by one of the central members of the journalist collective, Renaud de Laborderie. Only a few Hollywood films each year merited such attention, so this was an honor of sorts. Laborderie found himself impressed in general by the film’s artistry, but his notice is worth exploring in detail because he otherwise makes crystal clear the huge gulf between the European and domestic reactions to a release that the American Film Institute has enshrined as one of the American industry’s one hundred best Hollywood films list (both the original 1997 list and the substantially revised 2007 one). Acknowledged as one of the most notable Broadway directors of the era, Kazan draws praise for his expert handling of staging and production: “Sa mise en scène touche à la perfection, ses angles sont méticuleusement prémédités, et son utilisation d’une musique admirable en soi, est assez extraordinaire.”12 Blanche’s “attirance maladive qu’elle éprouve dès la première minute pour son beau-frère nous est magnifiquement, et à peu près uniquement, traduit par la musique seule. Mélodique d’abord, la musique devient psalmodique ….”13 Like the playwright, Laborderie maintains, the director shows                                                             12

Renaud de Laborderie, “A la recherche de l’hypertendu” (“In Search of the Hypertensive”), Cahiers du cinéma, XII (May 1952), 59: “His mise-en-scène approaches perfection, the angles he shoots from are carefully calculated, and the musical score, admirable in itself, is utilized in an extraordinary fashion.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 13 Ibid., 60: “sick attraction for her brother-in-law is communicated solely by the music, which, melodic at first, comes to resemble a psalmody ….”

  

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himself a “merveille obtenir le maximum d’une situation, utiliser le cresendo et l’achever par un paroxysme auquel le public ne peut pas résister”.14 And the acting, he admits, is superior. Marlon Brando emerges as a great talent, even if that talent consists largely in portraying Marlon Brando, and Laborderie finds even more to admire in Vivien Leigh’s mannered, complexly calculated performance as Blanche, with her self-deconstructing self-presentation as at turns nervous, feverish, or provocative, but, strangely enough, lacking any weakness. Blanche’s performing for the others and Leigh’s insinuating herself into Blanche is an act that is “augmente même par une accumulation de détails dont chacun est un chef-d’œuvre, et qu’elle couronne par le déchirement atroce du film, ses cris de bête à l’agonie font naître l’admiration”.15 The viewer is rewarded at this point with one of Williams’ most poetic lines, Blanche’s confession of her dependence on the “kindness of strangers”, a moment that in itself makes the film worth watching, or so Laborderie believes. Yet Kazan’s film proves in the end to be more literary than cinematic. Laborderie cannot, or at least chooses not, to identify A Streetcar Named Desire as anything more than a true “author’s film” the author in this case being none other than Tennessee Williams. The playwright’s omnipresence, in fact, oppresses the film to the point of strangulation, preventing the ordinary filmgoer from anything more than a puzzled admiration. Laborderie is worth quoting at length on this point: Je doute si le spectateur entré par hasard, ou sur la foi de l’affiche froidement érotique à laquelle les distributeurs, conscients de l’hermétique intelligence du titre, ont demandé quelque secours, comprendra goutte au déroulement de cette étrange histoire, contée parfois, convenons-en, avec beaucoup d’art.16

                                                            14

Ibid.: “a marvel in getting the maximum effect out of any given scene, building to a crescendo, and then finishing it off with a climax that no viewer can resist.” 15 Ibid.: “given depth by an accumulation of details, each one of which is simply masterful, and these are crowned by the cruel breakdown that tears apart this façade with her animal-like cries of anguish filling the spectator with admiration.” 16 Ibid., 59: “I doubt if a spectator, entering the theatre by chance, or trusting to the coldly erotic poster designed by the film’s distributors, who were nervous about the obscure intellectuality of the title and looking for some help in their marketing, would understand much at all of this strange story as it unravels, presented - to be sure - with a great deal of artistry.”

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Kazan and Williams’ film, Laborderie asserts, “représente un louable effort vers la qualité, et qu’il n’a nullement été conçu et réalisé pour complaire les goûts du spectateur moyen américain dont, selon les statisticiens, l’âge mental est environs douze ans”.17 This is because the property was originally intended for the exclusive public served by the Broadway theatre, a group that “se sentir quelque responsabilité culturelle, quelque intérêt pour les pamoisons [sic] nuancées d’intrigues dramatiques dites avant-garde”.18 The spectator must therefore expect something rather different: “le film sera intelligent, habile, subtil.”19 But, as Laborderie goes on, it will not be cinematic in the grand manner achieved by those who have recognized, practiced and advanced the art of the medium. Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire is to the films of Charlie Chaplin what the varied and thoroughly admirable œuvre of Christian Bérard (1902-1949, a French painter most noted for the decors he produced for Coco Chanel and the art design work done for Jean Cocteau’s Orphée [1949]) is to that of the revolutionary talent, Pablo Picasso. Not surprisingly, then: Il ne s’agit à aucun moment de génie mais de très haute couture intellectuelle, où tous les artifices, toutes les guirlandes, les fanfreluches et les paillettes de cette nouvelle école “décadente” Américaine – Carson McCullers, Truman Capote – qui célèbre en terme hyper-raffinés la névrose croulante de l’aristocratie du Sud des 20 U.S.A., seront mis en œuvre.

Tennessee Williams, whose film this is, has written a drama that is the product of someone who is “un peu plus intelligent, un peu plus roué, un peu plus brillant et beaucoup plus morbid qu’un habituel                                                            

17

Ibid.: “represents a praiseworthy fashion towards quality. The film has in no way been conceived and produced to please the tastes of the average American spectator, whose mental age, statisticians have informed us, is around twelve.” 18 Ibid.: “feels a certain cultural responsibility and evidences self-interest in the subtle intrigues of decline that are favored by the avant-garde.” 19 Ibid.: “The film will be nuanced, intelligent, and adroitly constructed.” 20 Ibid., 61: “there is no true moment of genius in the film, beyond its high fashion intellectuality, which is marked by the decorativeness, the garlands, the frills, and the glitter of that new American school of ‘decadence’ popularized by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, authors who celebrate in a hyper-refined style the doddering neurotics of Southern aristocracy.”

  

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auteur d’Hollywood”.21 Nothing revolutionary here, just a slight, hardly noteworthy, slight increase in quality and affect. Though he does not use the term, Laborderie appears to consider the film thoroughly middlebrow, an appeal to cinemagoers intelligent and educated enough to feel what he describes as a certain “responsabilité culturelle”,22 an entrant in that literary-based tradition of quality that Cahiers critics would find so artistically stultifying in their own national industry. The film avoids a happy ending (as proposed by Charles Feldman and others), and its grim, ambiguous finale does not obviously reassert consensus values. A Streetcar Named Desire, to its credit, preserves the morbidness, the deep despair that French reviewers were inclined to view as a central Williams quality. To be sure, Kazan’s film is by no means the ordinary kind of entertainment that the industry had been turning out for decades. And yet its achievement seems all flash and manner (in the decorative tradition of Christian Bérard), not a major entrant in a new cinema that, in the Chaplin manner, would be committed to the advancement of the medium. A well-connected insider journalist, Laborderie could hardly have been ignorant of what A Streetcar Named Desire meant to the American industry and to the larger national culture, how it successfully contested the Code that many intellectuals in the era were convinced had stifled the creativity of Hollywood filmmaking. We must conclude that he found uninteresting or irrelevant the intrigues in which Kazan and Williams became embroiled and in which they finally prevailed. Admiring of the professionalism with which Kazan, aided by Williams, completed a difficult project, Laborderie, nonetheless, could not help being mindful of what he sees as A Streetcar Named Desire’s only slight advance on the intellectual and artistic conventionalism that was then dominant in the American film industry. This was a film that effected no thoroughgoing revolution to compare with what Neorealism was then achieving for the Italian film industry. A Streetcar Named Desire’s contribution to revolution in taste was another matter entirely, one much discussed in the American press of the day and, naturally enough, exploited by studio marketing. Kazan would complain later that Warner Brothers had wanted                                                             21

Ibid.: “a bit more intelligent, somewhat more scandalous, a little more brilliant, and a great deal more morbid than the ordinary Hollywood author offers.” 22 Ibid., 59: “cultural responsibility.”

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“Streetcar dirty enough to pull people in”, even as studio heads were deeply afraid that the director and playwright might include material “that might keep anyone away”.23 These are matters of “shaping” that the French critic is reticent to discuss, perhaps because they have nothing to do with art or cinematic-ness. As is well known, and as Robert Bray and I have documented, the adaptation of the other Williams properties in the decade was decisively influenced by similar considerations as, to quote Kazan, the idea of “dirty enough” seemed to be very much on the minds of those concerned, with the notable exception of Williams himself, who, unsurprisingly, was preoccupied with maintaining the integrity of his texts and making sure that the film versions honored them. To be sure, Kazan read accurately the industry’s understanding of a reliable formula for box-office success in a time of cultural uncertainty and conflict; it was one that the director more deliberately sought to follow after his success with A Streetcar Named Desire in his confection of Baby Doll. Not based on a popular stage success, but drawing instead on Williams materials that Kazan hoped – correctly, as it turned out – would possess some of the same box-office magic, Baby Doll was intended to be just “dirty enough”. In fact, Baby Doll is precisely the kind of sequel favored by commercial filmmakers who are hoping to capitalize on a previous success; only the various delays involved in getting the project off the ground and then completed prevented this fact from being more widely understood. We might ask: was this a respectful use of what the playwright had produced or simply a cynical exploitation of his talent? As the Times Square billboard that Kazan designed for that film reminded the American public, Hollywood was driven more by show business than by a respect for art. Ironically, the European stylizations of Baby Doll that are the distinctive contributions of Kazan the artist went largely unnoticed in the US, and so he, too, was in a sense a victim of the desire to capitalize on the tensions of a peculiar historical moment. The film industry in the 1950s made Tennessee Williams more famous than any of his Broadway contemporaries; neither Arthur Miller nor William Inge became household names, and no dramatic playwright made more money from selling his properties to                                                            

23

Quoted in Palmer and Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee, 94.

  

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Hollywood until Neil Simon. The national notoriety that the playwright came to experience as a result of this celluloid sensationalizing came and went with considerable rapidity. The critical establishment is no longer burdened by that evanescent notoriety. And the films endure as a testament to the popularity he achieved in the immediate post-war era and to the unique artistic visions that, however modified, they continue to embody. But we must remember that they are also a record of a moment in film history that is narrowly national and defined by cultural forces that had no purchase beyond US borders. We must acknowledge as well that this moment proved to be of no importance within the wider scope of developments that radically and lastingly transformed the cinema during the period of what is otherwise arguably its most intense and thoroughly internationalized creativity.24

                                                           

24

Some of the material presented in this article appeared earlier in The Southern Quarterly, XLVIII/4 (Summer 2011), 108-25. I am grateful to the editors for allowing it to be reprinted here.

   

PART TWO: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND EUROPE’S INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

 

   

 

   

Europe? And I have not yet organized my impressions…. Later – we are now pulling out of Ventimiglia and there is a fair weather sunset in the Mediterranean. The country is full of flowers and the sea is turquoise. Snow-covered alps are visible way off. (I probably wrote the same things when I passed through here at 16! [sic]). Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, Tuesday, 27 January or Wednesday, 28 January 1948

 

   

 

   

WILLIAMS AND BERGMAN, LUST AND DEATH: CULTURALLY TRANSLATING A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE IN POST-WAR SWEDEN DIRK GINDT “I kväll är fröken Julie galen igen; komplett galen!”1 “Jag tror på köttets lust och själens obotliga ensamhet.”2

Between 1949 and 1956 Ingmar Bergman staged three of Tennessee Williams’ most famous works: A Streetcar Named Desire at Gothenburg City Theatre (1949), The Rose Tattoo at Norrköping City Theatre (1951) and finally Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Malmö City Theatre in 1956, the same year he directed a radio broadcast of the one-Act play Portrait of a Madonna. Despite the Swedish director’s international reputation and the undeniable artistic merit and significance of these productions, scholars have devoted little attention to them. Standard overview volumes or encyclopedias on Bergman’s oeuvre include entries on the Williams productions that range from a couple of paragraphs to a few pages and offer a summary of the reviews and the occasional photograph, but significantly lack critical analysis.3 Lise-Lone Marker and Frederick Marker’s important                                                             1

August Strindberg, Fröken Julie, in August Strindbergs samlade verk, nationalupplaga (1888), Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell 1984, XXVII, 119: “Tonight Miss Julie’s crazy again; absolutely crazy!” 2 Hjalmar Söderberg, Gertrud, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1906, 145: “I believe in the desires of the flesh and in the incurable loneliness of the soul.” 3 Henrik Sjögren, Ingmar Bergman på teatern (Ingmar Bergman in the Theatre), Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1968; Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005; The Ingmar Bergman Archives, eds Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius, Cologne: Taschen, 2008.

 

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study on Bergman’s work as a stage director devotes a short section to his relationship to American Realism, but the larger part of the book concentrates on his interpretations of Ibsen, Strindberg and Molière.4 Full-length articles that engage with Bergman and Williams are few. Philip C. Kolin’s “On a Trolley to the Cinema” represents a pioneering effort to describe Bergman’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. However, here too, given its limited access to source material and lack of cultural contextualization, the essay cannot offer an exhaustive and critical analysis.5 My own contributions to the field include an article on Bergman’s idiosyncratic interpretation of The Rose Tattoo as a Dionysian farce,6 while another focuses on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which fashion and costume emphasize and signify Stanley’s sexuality.7 This latter essay also attends to reviewers’ fascination with Stanley’s masculinity, an important aspect reprised further on in this article. By mining a considerably rich source material that encompasses reviews, interviews, visual documentation and an audio recording, this present study attends to the national context and its prevailing racist and misogynist climate. Paying close attention to the process of production and reception, I propose the concept of cultural translation for this particular case study of Williams’ transnational impact in order to understand how A Streetcar Named Desire, “America’s most quintessential dramatic export”,8 was made intelligible to a Swedish audience in 1949. My objective is to concentrate on Bergman’s A Streetcar Named Desire as a cultural document that exposes its importance in terms of Williams’ European                                                            

4

Lise-Lone Marker and Frederick J. Marker, Ingmar Bergman: A Life in the Theatre, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 48-53. 5 Philip C. Kolin, “On a Trolley to the Cinema: Ingmar Bergman and the First Swedish Production of A Streetcar Named Desire”, The South Carolina Review, XXVII/1-2 (1995), 277-86. 6 Dirk Gindt, “The Diva and the Demon: Ingmar Bergman Directs The Rose Tattoo”, New Theatre Quarterly, XXVIII/1 (February 2012), 56-66. 7 Dirk Gindt, “‘En gorilla-liknande högpotent hanne som stank av kön’: Anders Ek och gestaltningen av sexualitet i Spårvagn till Lustgården” (“A gorilla-like highlypotent he-male reeking of sex”: Anders Ek and the Portrayal of Sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire), in Mode - en introduktion: En tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse, eds Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg, Stockholm: Raster, 2009, 273-98, 358-61 and 378-79. 8 Kolin, “On a Trolley to the Cinema”, 285.

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reception in the theatre as much as the production’s position within Bergman’s overall oeuvre and his abilities as a cultural translator. According to cultural historian Peter Burke, cultural translation is “a double process of decontextualization and recontextualization, first reaching out to appropriate something alien and then domesticating it”.9 Intercultural translations in the theatre are unique, because they go beyond linguistics and the initial translation of a text from one language into another. They are dependent on corporeal presentation and interpretation to become intelligible for an audience in a specific regional and cultural context. This second element within the process of cultural translation is propelled by directors, actresses, actors and set designers.10 Reviewers finally play a significant part as professional evaluators and interpreters who explain and debate the content and merits of a play for their readers.11 They represent the third factor in cultural translation and recontextualization. Hot air, sweaty bodies and sensual rhythms “Det är så lätt att arbeta med en sådan här pjäs … som är direkt tänkt för teatern .… Tennessee Williams har ett intresse för död och lust, som jag delar”, stated an enthusiastic Bergman a week before the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire on 1 March.12 Sven Barthel’s faithful translation of Spårvagn till Lustgården, literally Streetcar to the Garden of Eden, was the young director’s last production at Gothenburg City Theatre, where he had had a contract between 1946

                                                            9

Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe”, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, eds Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 10. 10 For translations and performance, see for instance Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, eds Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 11 On the role of theatre criticism in the post-war period, see Karin Helander, Teaterns korsväg: Bengt Ekerot och 1950-talet (Theatre Crossroads: Bengt Ekerot and the 1950s), Stockholm: Carlssons, 2004, 178-87. 12 Quoted in “Spårvagn med många namn kör fram på Stadsteatern” (“A Streetcar of Many Names is Running at the City Theatre”), Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 24 February 1949: “It’s so easy to work with such a play … that is directly written for the stage .… Tennessee Williams has an interest in death and lust that I share.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own.

  

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and 1949.13 It was here he had met and learnt from the renowned Torsten Hammarén, then managing director, whose fierce anti-Nazi politics and repertoire in the 1930s and ’40s had established the City Theatre as one of the most respected stages in the region.14 In his biography The Magic Lantern, Bergman not only designated Hammarén as “the father-figure I had lacked since God had abandoned me”,15 but also summarized the many crucial lessons learnt from the master.16 The director’s script for A Streetcar Named Desire now lost, the archived prompt script contains little information in terms of notes or sketches.17 What remains is a partially preserved audio recording for a contemporary radio broadcast put together by playwright and influential critic Herbert Grevenius, another “father figure”.18 This recording offers a good impression of how Bergman did not hesitate to delete dialogue that he deemed unnecessary, not the least half of Blanche’s description of Stanley as a Neanderthal which significantly intensified the pace and rhythm of scene four.19                                                             13

Barthel’s acclaimed translations of American novels and plays remained faithful in tone and style to the original. He also wrote the occasional review and critical essay on Williams. See Sven Barthel, “Tillvarons främlingar” (“The Strangers of Existence”), Dagens Nyheter, 23 May 1949. 14 The City Theatre in Gothenburg displayed its solidarity with the occupied neighboring countries during the war, not least with an acclaimed production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in 1943 to express sympathy and support for Norway. For a history of the City Theatre, see Från Prosperos ö till Illyrien: Göteborgs stadsteater vid Götaplatsen 75 år (From Prospero’s Island to Illyria: Gothenburg City Theatre at Göta Square 75 Years), ed. Per Arne Tjäder, Gothenburg: Göteborgs stadsteater, 2009. 15 Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, trans. Joan Tate, London and New York: Penguin, 1988, 151. 16 Hammarén stressed the need to be well prepared for rehearsals in order to give concise instructions to the actors and encouraged Bergman to make sketches of the blocking to visualize how he wanted a scene to develop on stage. Paradoxically, this well executed homework allowed for greater freedom for the ensemble to improvise and put forward their own suggestions during rehearsals (see ibid., 152-53). 17 Tennessee Williams, Spårvagn till Lustgården, trans. Sven Barthel, script no. 1365, Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum. 18 According to biographer Peter Cowie, Grevenius was “a significant figure in Bergman’s early period. He had been the first theatre critic to acknowledge the promise of the younger man’s productions at Helsingborg” (Peter Cowie, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography [1982], New York: Limelight Editions, 1992, 73). 19 “En krönika av Herbert Grevenius” (“A Column by Herbert Grevenius”), Sveriges Radio, first broadcast 3 July 1949.

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Gothenburg City Theatre was renowned for cultivating a tight ensemble play, and, during his stay, Bergman frequently worked with the illustrious actors Karin Kavli and Anders Ek – key personalities in Swedish theatre history, who also played the leading parts in A Streetcar Named Desire – as well as set designer Carl-Johan Ström. By 1949, Ström had a perfect command of the elaborate stage machinery, which included a cyclorama and a large (eighteen meters in diameter) revolving stage. For A Streetcar Named Desire, he created a rich and detailed setting that represented a street in the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Figure 13: Designer Carl-Johan Ström created a detailed set that represented a street in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Particularly noteworthy is the introduction of an erotic movie theatre that materialized desire on the stage. Photograph: Georg Cassirer. Reproduced with permission of the Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum.

Stage right was dominated by a two-story home of which the porch, the entrance door, the French windows and the balconies were visible. A spiral staircase connected the two levels. Another two-story edifice at stage left represented an erotic movie theatre. In-between these two buildings was a narrow passage that led to a grocery store downstage. Distant skyscrapers were projected onto the cyclorama, informing the audience that the play was set in North America. Depending on which   

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time of the day the different scenes were set, elaborate lighting made the sky shift to different shades of blue. The changing seasons and Blanche’s decline into madness were mirrored in an “ominously symbolic”20 apple tree that stood center stage, blooming in the spring, bearing fruit in the summer and losing its leaves in the fall. Bergman opened A Streetcar Named Desire with a stunning, almost cinematographic scene. The show at the movie theatre had just ended when a guard in a red uniform opened the doors to release a crowd of people rushing out into the streets, laughing, chattering or holding hands. A young man took off on his bicycle, while a group of drunken soldiers on leave attempted to pick up a prostitute and drove away in a convertible. From the opening moments, the audience was plunged into a different world and foreign environment. The French Quarter became an exotic microcosm, distant enough for the spectators to feel safe in the auditorium, while at the same time so alluring and atmospheric to capture them with its dangerously appealing charms. In an introductory essay on Williams in the playbill, dramaturge and theatre critic Claes Hoogland explained: “Williams har återvänt till Södern, bosatt sig i New Orleans och det är dess heta klimat som slår emot oss ur pjäsen. Han för in dramat bland primitiva och okomplicerade människor ….”21 This exoticizing element was further underlined by the representation of various ethnic groups. To suggest the diverse population of New Orleans, the all-white cast used heavy make-up reminiscent of a minstrel show and performed exaggerated accents, for example actor Arne Nyberg’s take on the character Pablo Gonzales. Ny Tid provided a rich, if not problematic, description of the inhabitants of the French Quarter: “Deras liv präglas av den heta luften, de svettiga kropparna och bluesens sensuella rytmer som de har i blodet.”22 Grevenius wrote: “Det rinner en sprakande färgglad skara av svarta, vita, gula och melerade ur nonstopbion på hörnet.”23                                                            

20

Kolin, “On a Trolley to the Cinema”, 282. Claes Hoogland, “Tennessee Williams”, playbill Spårvagn till Lustgården (1949), 16: “Williams has returned to the South, settled in New Orleans, and we are met by its hot climate in the play. He leads the play amongst primitive and simple people ….” 22 Carl Cramér, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”, Ny Tid, 2 March 1949: “Their lives are characterized by the hot air, the sweaty bodies and the sensual blues rhythms, which are in their blood.” 23 Herbert Grevenius, “Göteborgs stadsteater: Spårvagn till Lustgården”, Stockholmstidningen, 2 March 1949: “A crowd of blazing colors consisting of blacks, 21

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Another reviewer favorably mentioned actress Berta Hall’s portrayal of the Hispanic flower saleswoman, as well as “Maria Sjöstrands ständigt skrattande och sjungande negerkvinna”, a side character introduced by Bergman.24 A particularly disturbing description was Göteborgs Morgonpost’s report from the dress rehearsal that praised “Maria Sjöstrand med dystert askgrå kinder och glättigt rullande niggerögon, sjungande egen composition”,25 a choice of words which was and remains equally racist in Swedish as in English. Between 1937 and 1949, the cultural conservative Göteborgs Morgonpost was edited by Sanfrid NeanderNilsson, who, during the war, had openly vented his right-wing extremist sympathies. Less than one year after leaving his post, the paper was shut down in 1950. One might assume that this choice of words was an extreme exception, but, as it will become clear throughout this article, this was simply the most explicit example that underscored the general reception and cultural interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire in post-war Sweden.26 The fictional envisioning of New Orleans was not only exoticized and racialized, it was also heavily sexualized. Desire was not just the name of a streetcar line, but literally manifested itself in the shape of the erotic movie theatre that visualized its promise of “Nights in Paradise” with a large billboard of a carnal embrace between a halfnaked muscular man and a delicate, barely visible woman. Kolin sees this introduction of a movie theatre as “the one change that most symbolized Bergman’s stamp on the play” and draws a parallel to the function of the movie theatre in The Glass Menagerie, which “offers both an escape into illusion and a source of danger”.27 The Markers                                                                                                                                 whites, yellows and mixed shades flow out of the non-stop movie theatre on the corner.” 24 Jesper Thorén, “Stor kväll på Stadsteatern” (“A Grand Evening at the City Theatre”), Göteborgs-Tidningen, 2 March 1949: “Maria Sjöstrand’s constantly laughing and singing Negro woman.” 25 Vera, “Akrobatik i spårvagn” (“Acrobatics in Streetcar”), Göteborgs Morgonpost, 1 March 1949: “Maria Sjöstrand with gloomily ash-grey cheeks and cheerfully rolling nigger eyes, singing her own composition.” 26 For a recent study of Sweden’s complex and problematic history in the 1930s and ’40s, see Klas Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan: Sveriges förhållande till nazismen, Nazityskland och förintelsen (Living Next Door to Evil: Sweden’s Relationship to Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust), Stockholm: Bonnier, 2011. 27 Kolin, “On a Trolley to the Cinema”, 281.

  

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state that the designer “transformed the tactile values that are suggested in Williams’ stage directions … into a three-dimensional environment. Desire, for Bergman and Ström, was first of all a place”.28 The movie theatre worked as an externalization of desire; it was the concrete materialization of one of the play’s core themes. The stage was the locus where lust and desire unfolded in an uninhibited way, in an ethnically diverse environment, whose exaggeration contrasted with the assumed hegemonic constitution, that is, whiteness, of a Swedish audience in 1949. The many, almost surreal, sounds that included sudden outbursts of laughter in the alley, exotic drums, dance music from the movie theatre, shrieking cats, rain and thunder, the morning whistles of the factories and the sounds of streetcars rattling through the streets, provided “en suggestiv bakgrund för Blanches öde”29 and contributed to the “djungelstämningen”, or “jungle atmosphere”, of the environment.30 When the revolving stage turned and pushed the exterior upstage, it presented the shabby interior of the Kowalski apartment downstage. Audiences were introduced to a simple kitchen with a round table, three chairs and details such as a kitchen sink and wooden shelves adorned with American corn flakes. The bedroom was located behind a curtain. This inventive way of staging allowed Bergman to present three different moments simultaneously at the very end of the play: in the bedroom, the doctor and the nurse trying to overpower Blanche; in the kitchen, Stanley’s poker buddies sitting around the table, while he himself prevented anyone from entering the bedroom; and on the veranda, Eunice comforting a crying Stella. While it is tempting and probably accurate to describe these various stage solutions as filmic devices, it also needs to be pointed out that Bergman was hardly the first nor the only director to make full use the revolving stage at the City Theatre. The relationship and mutual inspiration between his films and stage productions, both in terms of style and content, have been convincingly demonstrated by a number of scholars.31 What matters for our purposes is that Bergman                                                             28

Marker and Marker, Ingmar Bergman, 51. Elis Andersson, “Den fulländade succén” (“The Perfect Success”), GöteborgsPosten, 2 March 1949: “a suggestive background to Blanche’s fate.” 30 Vilgot Sjöman, “Blanche du Bois’ tragedi”, Vi, XI (12 March 1949), 22. 31 For intersectional studies on Bergman’s movies and stage productions, see Egil Törnqvist, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995; Ingmar Bergman: Film och teater i växelverkan 29

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Figure 14: Stella (Annika Tretow), Blanche (Karin Kavli) and Stanley (Anders Ek) in the shabby kitchen of the Kowalski’s apartment. Photograph: Georg Cassirer. Reproduced with permission of the Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum.

proved himself to be a skilled director who understood, embraced and enhanced the episodical structure and cinematographic characteristics of Williams’ play.32 Theatre scholar Karin Helander has identified the                                                                                                                                 (Ingmar Bergman: The Interaction between Film and Theatre), ed. Margareta Wirmark, Stockholm: Carlssons, 1996; Maaret Koskinen, Ingmar Bergman: “Allting föreställer, ingenting är” - Filmen och teatern, en tvärestetisk studie (Ingmar Bergman: “Everything represents, nothing is” - Film and Theatre, a Cross-aesthetic Study), Nora: Nya Doxa, 2001. 32 This also points to Swedish directors’ willingness to embrace American plays. French critics considered A Streetcar Named Desire and post-war American drama in general as too faithful to realistic conventions. They were also unconvinced by the influence of the film medium and cinematographic techniques on stage plays (for instance, the episodical structure of many Williams plays), a dramaturgical approach that was at odds with the rules and traditions of French theatre. See Lewis Falb, “‘Le Naturalisme de Papa’: American Drama in France”, The French Review, XLV/1 (1971), 56-71.

  

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tension between realism and psychological realism on the one hand and more theatrical modes of presentation on the other as a defining characteristic of post-war Swedish stage aesthetics.33 Bergman’s A Streetcar Named Desire unfolded in this tension. At first sight, it appeared as a product of realism, especially due to the set’s faithfulness to detail and the almost photographic reproduction of reality. However, this realism was undermined by the theatrical effect of having a real car on stage, the symbolism of the movie theatre and the apple tree, the surrealist sound effects and, as we will see, the physical expressionism of Ek’s portrayal of Stanley.

Figure 15: The elaborate revolving stage allowed Bergman and Ström to simultaneously present the dramatic events in three different locations during the final scene when Blanche is taken to a mental hospital. Photograph: Georg Cassirer. Reproduced with permission of the Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum.

Degeneration and sterilization The spectacular opening scene described served to reinforce the contrast between the lively crowd and the shy woman wearing a long coat, a beret and thick glasses, who made her entrance amidst this chaos. She held a piece of paper in her hand, trying to figure out the directions on it, while a shady male character sneaked up behind her, probably wondering if he might be able to steal her handbag.                                                             33

Helander, Teaterns korsväg, passim.

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Blanche DuBois was introduced as a shy wallflower, a perfectly innocent and naïve English teacher, who seemed lost and completely out of place in this turbulent environment. Thanks to her disciplined speech training, Kavli had a rich and clear enunciation, which helped to deliver all the nuances in Blanche’s lines. Southern speech does not translate into Swedish, but Kavli’s refined diction convincingly established Blanche as a teacher of language and literature. While it was obvious from her first entrance that the delicate lady was exhausted, Kavli did not give in to the temptation to reveal the character’s decline into madness too early. Driven by a less-is-more mentality, Kavli’s Blanche was a compelling demonstration of a fragile

Figure 16: Blanche (Kavli) was introduced as a shy and fragile English teacher, whose inner demons manifested themselves only gradually. Photograph: Georg Cassirer. Reproduced with permission of the Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum.

woman desperately trying to keep up appearances and hold on to her illusions, while her inner demons revealed themselves bit by bit. A case in point was scene nine in which Blanche is assaulted by Mitch and chases him out of the bedroom by screaming that the house is on fire. Instead of yelling, however, Kavli merely whispered the word   

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“fire” in such an intense way that Mitch (played by Harry Ahlin) fled the scene. In the end, however, Blanche was completely paralyzed, scared senseless and with panic in her eyes. Author and filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman offered a richly detailed analysis of Kavli’s approach, worth quoting in its entirety: Nervöst ångestpressad försöker hon till en början hålla sig uppe med fladdrande leenden – hennes tonfall blir ängsligt gälla och självförsvarande, men löses småningom opp i flickaktigt småfnitter under evig alkoholförtäring – tills det slutgiltiga sjukdomsutbrottet kommer, då spärrarna helt släpper, då hon ler med hela sitt upplösta ansikte och leker sin lek med tygtrasorna under andfått, lyckligt smågnolande …. Med hjälplöst irrande blick, ängslig som ett barn, försvann hon genom gatan, barnsligt förtroende sig åt sinnessjukläkaren, därför att hon alltid “litat på främlingars vänlighet” ….34

Dagens Nyheter’s respected critic Ebbe Linde praised Kavli’s performance as “en av de största konstnärliga segrar som denna framstående aktris någonsin vunnit”,35 and Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning spoke of a “ett nytt konstnärligt genombrott” or “a new artistic breakthrough”.36 Kavli often made it clear that her aim was not to achieve a complete identification with the character she was playing on stage. She was careful to retain a certain distance between herself and the role, something that she stressed until the end of her career.37 The collaboration with Bergman, however, seemed to have made her overcome her hesitation. The identification with Blanche on stage brought her rave reviews, but, like many actresses before and after                                                            

34

Sjöman, “Blanche du Bois’ tragedi”, 23: “Nervous and anxiety-ridden, at first she tries to keep herself together with flickering smiles – her intonations become uneasily shrill and self-defending, but gradually dissolve into girly giggles under the influence of perpetual drinking – until the final outbreak of the disease, when she loses all inhibitions, smiles with her whole dissolved face and plays with her rags humming softly in a breathless and happy way .… With a helplessly wandering gaze, anxious like a child, she disappeared into the street, with a childlike trust for the mental health doctor, because she always ‘relied on the kindness of strangers’ ….” 35 Ebbe Linde, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”, Dagens Nyheter, 2 March 1949: “one of the biggest artistic victories that this prominent actress has ever celebrated.” 36 Kjell Hjern, “Spårvagn till lustgården”, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 2 March 1949. 37 Elisabeth Frankl, “Jag är inte lik farmor” (“I am not like grandma”), Expressen, 10 February 1983.

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her, Kavli complained about the psychological strains of playing this demanding character.38 While Blanche was introduced as a stranger who did not belong in this environment, her sister Stella (played by Annika Tretow) felt perfectly comfortable in her home. She joyfully walked around barefoot in the apartment or sat relaxed in an armchair sewing or knitting, underlining her domestic nature. However, this “erotiskt glupska och erotiskt tillfredsställda lilla kvinna”39 also openly expressed her sexual attraction to Stanley. Tretow infused her character with warmth and sensuality, but also with the necessary pride to defend herself against Blanche’s various accusations. A press photo taken during a dress rehearsal captures the sisters’ conversation in scene one, when the recently arrived Blanche criticizes her younger sister for having abandoned the family mansion. Blanche’s penetrating gaze is directed at Stella, while she holds on to her already empty glass. Stella looks away, not wanting Blanche to see the hurt in her eyes, and stares instead into the photographer’s lens to meet the gaze of the viewer. Since Bergman’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire was a Scandinavian premiere, reviewers went beyond assessing the director’s and the actors’ performances and analyzed Williams’ latest offering, its content and characters.40 Several reviewers interpreted the play as depicting a class struggle between an aristocracy in decline and a rising working class and, perhaps unsurprisingly, drew parallels between Blanche and Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the aristocratic lady who is seduced, shamed and driven into suicide by her servant Jean on                                                            

38

“Kavli: Jag är som en hög sopor” (“Kavli: I feel like a heap of garbage”), Expressen, 11 March 1949. That same summer, Kavli’s own company took a production of A Streetcar Named Desire on tour through the Swedish People’s Parks and, in the fall, she replaced the main actress, Inga Tidblad, in the Stockholm production of the play. Kavli performed the role of Blanche almost a hundred-andfifty times in 1949 and must be considered the definitive Swedish Blanche. 39 A. Gunnar Bergman, “Teaterspårvagn i Göteborg och i Malmö”, Aftontidningen, 2 March 1949: “erotically greedy and erotically satisfied little woman.” 40 Technically, Gothenburg City Theatre shared the honor of a Scandinavian premiere with Malmö City Theatre, where director Stig Torsslow presented his production of A Streetcar Named Desire on the very same evening. Bergman and Hammarén therefore announced that they would raise the curtain at 7:30 PM, that is, fifteen minutes before Malmö. More than a symbolic victory, this also meant that all the major reviewers travelled to Gothenburg in order to report from the premiere.

  

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Midsummer’s Eve. Grevenius saw a “snudd på fröken Julie”, or a “touch of Miss Julie”, in Blanche,41 while Expressen’s critic repeatedly stressed that Blanche was “en amerikansk ‘fröken Julie’”, “an American Miss Julie”.42 For Sjöman, Blanche was also “en amer-

Figure 17: Stella (Tretow) looks away, refusing to feel guilty for having abandoned the family mansion. Photograph: Georg Cassirer. Reproduced with permission of the Theatre Collections at Gothenburg City Museum.

ikansk fröken Julie: den sista ättlingen av en degenererad sydstatssläkt”, contrasting her to “hennes sunt livshungriga syster Stella”.43 In an article published in Modern Drama in 1958, already available in Swedish in 1956, Richard Vowles debates the affinities and dissimilarities between A Streetcar Named Desire and Miss Julie. While the heroines in both plays are aristocratic ladies whose attraction to a working-class man ultimately destroys them, there are                                                            

41

Grevenius, “Göteborgs stadsteater”. Michael Katz, “Williams i Göteborg och Malmö”, Expressen, 2 March 1949. 43 Sjöman, “Blanche du Bois’ tragedi”, 9: “an American Miss Julie: the last descendant of a degenerate Southern family” and “her sister Stella, who has a healthy appetite for life”. 42

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significant differences between the two plays in terms of structure, atmosphere and the respective motivations of the male characters.44 During a press conference in Stockholm in 1955, Williams himself spoke out against any such similarities and claimed that, while Miss Julie was the one holding the whip, Blanche DuBois was on the receiving end of the thrashing and thus the play’s victim.45 While Strindberg’s play is deeply rooted in a Swedish culture and environment, the French Quarter in New Orleans, as we have seen, was removed enough to be described as exotic, sensual and primitive, titillating audiences and critics alike. Nevertheless, the reviewers’ comparisons to Strindberg are worth exploring, because they help explain the process of cultural translation of A Streetcar Named Desire in Sweden. The references to Miss Julie made the play culturally intelligible for a Swedish audience, which the reviewers assumed to be very familiar with one of Strindberg’s most popular and certainly most accessible plays.46 It was therefore both a pedagogical way of bringing the content of the play and the conflict between Blanche and Stanley closer to home as well as an expression of nationalist pride to enhance Strindberg’s influence and legacy as a founding figure of modern drama. The comparisons to Strindberg can also be seen as the first step in Williams’ canonization since he was the period’s most popular playwright on Swedish stages. Above all, the presumed parallels to Miss Julie pointed to the prevailing sexual ideology and gender order, allowing critics to present their own interpretation of the class and gender struggles in Williams’ play. Their understanding of A Streetcar Named Desire was filtered not least through the lingering impact of the influential Preface to Miss Julie, which served as a manifesto of naturalistic theatre and which found Strindberg reaching new heights of misogyny, while unapologetically articulating his Social Darwinist philosophy: “we shall feel as much unqualified pleasure and relief at                                                             44 Richard B. Vowles, “Tennessee Williams and Strindberg”, Modern Drama, I/3 (Fall 1958), 166-71. Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet, 11 April 1956. 45 Heidi, “Tennessee W skriver gärna en roll för Ingrid Bergman” (“Tennessee W[illiams] would love to write a role for Ingrid Bergman”), Morgon-Tidningen, 28 August 1955. 46 Miss Julie was a particularly popular play on Swedish stages in the 1940s, and between 1942 and 1948 Kavli herself played the title role in three different stage productions in addition to a radio broadcast.

  

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seeing the thinning out in our royal parks of rotten, superannuated trees, which have stood too long in the way of others with just as much right to their time in the sun, as it does to see an incurably ill man finally die.”47 Strindberg described Miss Julie as a “man-hating half-woman” who was “synonymous with degeneration”, whereas Jean was “the aristocrat because of his masculine strength”. He motivated Miss Julie’s downfall by offering a number of reasons, among them the influence of the environment, her upbringing, her monthly period and “her weak, degenerate brain”.48 It is striking to compare Strindberg’s words from 1888 to the language that Swedish reviewers used to evaluate A Streetcar Named Desire more than sixty years later. Echoing Strindberg’s Foreword to Miss Julie, Göteborgs-Posten, for example, wrote: “Den friska kraften likviderar den murkna grenen av familjen du Bois [sic], samtidigt som [Stanley] ympat in sitt röda blod på det stycke livsduglig stam, som heter Stella.”49 For Ny Tid, Blanche was “en missanpassad neurotika, som kommer som en infektionsbacill i det friska köttet och värks ut som en sprickande böld”,50 while Expressen considered her “en murken gren från ett degenererat sydstatsträd”.51 Finally, for Aftontidningen, she was simply “livsoduglig”, “unfit to live”.52 This Social Darwinist inspired reception was by no means unique to Sweden; as John S. Bak has demonstrated, it forms one of the play’s major lines of critical interpretation.53 What makes Blanche’s pathologization – that is, the continuous references to her alleged degeneration – and the cultural translation of A Streetcar Named Desire unique in a Swedish context is that Social Darwinism received a most palpable manifestation, first with the establishment of the State                                                             47

August Strindberg, Preface, Miss Julie and Other Plays (1988), trans. Michael Robinson, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 57. 48 Ibid., 60, 62 and 58. 49 Andersson, “Den fulländade succén”: “The fresh force liquidates the rotten branch of the du Bois [sic] family, while [Stanley] has inoculated his red blood into the one viable trunk called Stella.” 50 Cramér, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”: “a maladjusted neurotic, who like an infectious germ enters the healthy flesh and is expelled like a bursting boil.” 51 Katz, “Williams i Göteborg och Malmö”: “a rotten branch from a degenerated Southern tree.” 52 Bergman, “Teaterspårvagn i Göteborg och i Malmö”. 53 See John S. Bak, “Criticism on A Streetcar Named Desire: A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003”, Cercles, X (2004), 3-32, especially pages 4-12.

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Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala and, later, with the practice of enforced sterilization. The stately founded and sponsored Institute for Racial Biology, established in 1922 and still active at the time when A Streetcar Named Desire opened, took eugenics to an unprecedented level by studying the alleged relationship between race and mental illness, alcoholism and criminality, all in the name of social hygiene.54 Sterilization as a means to improve the population was already suggested in 1934 by Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, two key Social Democratic figures.55 Beginning in 1935, a large-scale program, which eventually gave the medical establishment the power to overrule the wishes and integrity of the individual patient, ensured that those deemed to be unfit to form part of the People’s Home (“folkhemmet”, a term used to summarize the Social Democratic welfare state’s responsibility to take care of its citizens with an emphasis on elderly care, public health insurance and social security) were prevented from reproducing. Women in particular were subjected to these medical encroachments if they were deemed to be bad mothers, alcoholics, immoral or sexually unrestrained.56 Had Blanche arrived in Sweden instead of New Orleans, she would not only have ended up in a mental hospital, but she probably would have been subjected to forced sterilization as well. Even though this medical practice was by no means a topic of a critical, public debate in the late 1940s, it helps us situate the cultural translation and the critical interpretation of the play in a particular cultural context that was deeply suspicious of women’s sexuality and anxious to preserve the imagined health and racial purity of the population.57                                                            

54

Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, Oönskade i folkhemmet: Rashygien och sterilisering i Sverige (Unwanted in the Welfare State: Eugenics and Sterilization in Sweden), Stockholm: Gidlund, 1991. 55 Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question), Stockholm: Bonnier, 1934. 56 Maja Runcis, Steriliseringar i folkhemmet (Sterilizations in the Welfare State), diss., Stockholm University, Stockholm: Ordfront, 1998. 57 For a study on how the ideology of hegemonic whiteness influenced the reception of Suddenly Last Summer in Sweden, see Dirk Gindt, “Anxious Nation and White Fashion: Suddenly Last Summer in the Swedish folkhem”, Nordic Theatre Studies, XXI (December 2009), 98-112.

  

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Sexualization and racialization Kavli and Ek were two of the most acclaimed actors and colorful personalities in twentieth-century Swedish theatre, unafraid to voice their anti-Nazi and left-wing opinions. The many anecdotes surrounding their various collaborations are a testimony to their impact on and ongoing legacy within Swedish theatre. When playing the part of Macbeth in 1948, Ek took realistic representation to the extreme and insisted on dipping his hands into a bucket placed backstage and filled with real ox blood to lend the necessary credibility to his entry after the regicide. In a 1947 production of Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, Kavli was so afraid when Ek attacked her with a theatre knife that she kicked him in the crotch so hard that he fainted on stage.58 These two anecdotes point to the different acting styles represented by the two performers. While Kavli preferred to keep her distance and approached a role in a more technical way, Ek was a proponent of Stanislavsky’s system, the Swedish translation of which started to make an impact on Swedish stages and acting schools after the war. What made Ek unique, however, was that he combined psychological identification with corporeal identification. Influenced by Meyerhold’s biomechanics and his wife Birgit Cullberg’s choreography, he strove to capture a character with every gesture, movement and tone of voice: “Stanislavskij intresserade sig mer för innehåll än för form, mer för psykoteknik än fysioteknik. Vad det fysiotekniska kunnandet betyder för förmågan till inlevelse blev aldrig fullt klart vid läsningen av hans böcker.”59 Helander considers Ek as one of his era’s most charismatic actors, who embodied a number of intriguing paradoxes. He worked in a very disciplined way to fully identify with the characters he portrayed. At the same time, he was unafraid to break aesthetic norms and constantly undermined the conventions of stage realism by turning to more theatrical and stylized modes of expressions. Because of his idiosyncrasies, coupled with a                                                            

58

Uno “Myggan” Ericson and Karin Kavli, Från Kassandra till Farmor (From Cassandra to Grandmother), Stockholm: Bonnier, 1984, 176-77. 59 Quoted in Somry, “Svensk teaters särling en sökare som Barabbas” (“Eccentric of Swedish Theatre and a Seeker like Barabbas”), Morgon-Tidningen, 15 February 1953: “Stanislavsky was more interested in content than in form, more in psychological technique than physical technique. What physiotechnical proficiency means for the ability to live a part became never quite clear when reading his books.” See also Helander, Teaterns korsväg, 56-57.

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strong personality, audiences were constantly reminded that they were experiencing Ek the actor who transcended the dramatic part he was playing – and with which he sought to identify so painstakingly.60 In A Streetcar Named Desire, Ek’s pronounced and familiar Gothenburg accent occasionally shined through. Given that Gothenburg is a bluecollar city, his dialect captured and signified Stanley’s working-class background and contrasted with Kavli’s refined diction in an effective way. Unlike some of the side characters, Ek, it should be stressed, did not apply any dark make up and played the part as a white workingclass lad from Gothenburg. Moreover, he made full use of his acrobatic abilities by dangling on the balcony rails in scene three, begging Stella to come back to him after the violent outbreaks of the poker night. An analysis of the reviews shows the success of Ek’s approach but also reveals the reviewers’ own fascination with the character of Stanley, “en gorillaliknande högpotent hanne som stank av kön, trög i tal och tanke, men kvick som en vessla när brunsten satte åt”.61 According to Expressen, this “polska tjur med en primitiv urkraft” left Stella “helt motståndslös mot denna vulkan av manlighet”.62 He was further described as a “[d]enne okomplicerade muskelman, renhårig ända till obehaglighet och animalt brutal”,63 who displayed his “virila vulgaritet”, or “virile vulgarity”.64 For the theatre journal Teatern, “Anders Eks Stanley var en he-man besatt av primitiva passioner. Hans fysiska förutsättningar voro lika utomordentliga som hans brist

                                                           

60

Karin Helander, “Att vara och inte vara rollen: Skådespelarens paradox” (“To be and not to be the part: the paradox of the actor”), Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien Årsbok 2011 (The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities Yearbook 2011), Stockholm: Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2011, 109-23, especially pages 116-21. 61 Bergman, “Teaterspårvagn i Göteborg och i Malmö”: “a gorilla-like highly-potent he-male reeking of sex, sluggish in speech and thought, but quick as a weasel when randy.” 62 Katz, “Williams i Göteborg och Malmö”: “Polish bull with a primitive drive” and “completely defenseless against this volcano of manliness”. 63 David Hallén, “Linje Lusta i Malmö och i Göteborg”, Aftonbladet, 2 March 1949: “This uncomplicated hunk, honest to the point of unpleasantness and bestially brutal.” 64 Urban Stenström, “‘Spårvagn till Lustgården’ i Göteborg”, Svenska Dagbladet, 2 March 1949.

  

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på intelligens.”65 Several reviewers expressed their admiration for Ek’s acrobatic skills that he displayed during the climax of the infamous poker night, when, in the words of Grevenius, he was “klättrande som en apa uppför huset och fyllande hela grannskapet med sina vrål under den himlastormande lördagsfyllan”.66 Linde was full of admiration and exclaimed: “Landet har väl ingen annan aktör som går uppför slät stång mitt i ett emotionellt utspel och avslutar monologen i krokig arm.”67 Sjöman finally offered a highly elated and rapturous description: [Ek] satsar sin nästan skulpturala intensitet på rollen av ungt handjur; en polack med snarast negroida ansiktsdrag, med brutalt hänsynslös panna under sitt strävt uppåtstubbade svarta hår. Han utvecklade en enastående fysisk teknik för att karakterisera figuren, som gjordes lojt hängiven sin egen smäckert trimmade kropp, ritualmässigt svängande och gungande som i en skog av lianer till ackompanjemang av dansande trummor: ett svart djur i glänsande röd pyjamas – det blev en nästan outhärdligt kuslig scen.68

An illustration by the editor and artist Hubert Lärn accompanying the review in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning offers further evidence for the general admiration of Ek’s physical constitution and represents a refinement of the intense sexuality with which he infused the character.69 Five out of six pencil drawings are devoted to Ek’s                                                             65

Gustaf Collijn, “Tennessee Williams och spårvagnen”, Teatern, XVI/3 (1949), 9: “Anders Ek’s Stanley was a he-man obsessed with primitive passions. His physical attributes were as remarkable as his lack of intelligence.” 66 Grevenius, “Göteborgs stadsteater”: “climbing like an ape up the house and filling the neighborhood with his roars during the intensely tumultuous Saturday night booze.” 67 Linde, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”: “This country has no other actor who can scale a slippery post in the middle of an emotional speech and end the monologue hanging by the crook of his arm.” 68 Sjöman, “Blanche du Bois’ tragedi”, 23: “[Ek] invests his veritably sculptural intensity in the role of a young male animal; a Pole with almost negroid features, with a brutally ruthless forehead beneath his coarse, black crew cut. He developed a remarkably physical technique to portray the character, making him indolently devoted to his own supple, trim body, ritualistically swinging and hanging as if in a forest of lianas to the accompaniment of dancing drums: a black animal in silky red pajamas - the scene was almost unbearably ghastly.” 69 Hubert Lärn, “Lustgården gjorde succé” (“The Garden of Eden was a success”), Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 2 March 1949.

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performance as Stanley; only one of them shows Blanche secretly pouring herself a drink. A close-up of Stanley’s face stresses the hard features and the sly look in his eyes. The next sketch shows him swinging on the balustrade trying to win back Stella who has sought refuge with the upstairs neighbor. This particular image of Ek is notable for its detailed attention to his muscles and sinews, reminiscent of an anatomical chart. Through exaggeration it heightens the focus on the body and, in the process, blurs the boundaries between man and animal. Stanley indeed appears like a monkey in the jungle. On the bottom row, we see Stanley drinking a beer and throwing either Stella or Blanche gorillalike over his shoulder, probably to take her to his bed. What initially appears to be the back of his head reveals itself as an exposed female behind. The illustrator comments rather drily: “Woman is being transported.” The tight trousers hugging Ek’s body enhance a wasplike waist and tight buttocks; at the same time, the broad shoulders, the strong chest and the body hair are visibly pronounced.

Figure 18: An illustration that accompanied a review in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 2 March 1949, offering a stylized representation of the hitherto unseen sexualized masculinity embodied by Stanley. Hubert Lärn: “Lustgården gjorde succé.” Reproduced with the permission of Viveca and Anita Lärn.

  

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While the picture conveys an aggressively heterosexual masculinity, the last sketch, in which Steve and Pablo take care of Stanley after the violent poker night, expresses a certain homoeroticism. This time, the comment reads “Ek tranporteras”, or “Ek is being transported”. It is interesting how, by revealing the crack of the buttocks in two of the pictures, the illustration draws attention to the fact that there is human flesh underneath the clothing, representing the male body as being potentially penetrable. Considering how much cultural anxiety revolves around the male anus, this illustration from 1949 is even more striking and quite daring.70 The all-male critical choir, however, contained its unabashed (and not-so-subtle homoerotic) desire through a blatant racialization. As evidenced by the above quotes, Swedish reviewers were fascinated by this sexualized male body, but also considered Stanley “gorillalike” and “bestially brutal”, a “black animal” with “primitive” instincts, and a “Polish bull” with “negroid features”. Desire was deflected onto the Other as a remedy to allow for and tolerate such an intense representation of masculinity and sexuality on Swedish stages. David Savran has critically analyzed the politics of race and desire in Williams’ work and argues: “Throughout Williams’s career, differences in ethnicity and race prove to be almost unfailingly the most potent, inflexible, and explosive sources of desire, the necessary spark to sexual liaisons ….”71 In A Streetcar Named Desire, the racialization of Stanley is a trope already present and pronounced in the dialogue, not least in Blanche’s many condescending comments about him. Despite identifying himself as being the offspring of Polish immigrants to America, Stanley is ultimately not allowed to define that cultural heritage and ethnic identity. As George Crandell argues, Of Polish descent rather than African American, Stanley is nevertheless defined as the Other by means of an Africanist presence implicit in the racialized discourse spoken by Blanche and Stella when comparing Stanley to a beast. This racialized discourse, familiar to readers of Williams’s short stories, and also a part of Williams’s cultural milieu, links Stanley Kowalski to a group of black characters

                                                           

70 The summary of the reviews and the description of the illustration is reprised from Gindt, “En gorillaliknande högpotent hanne”, 288-92. 71 David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 125.

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who are similarly characterized as physically threatening, inarticulate, lacking intelligence, full of desire, and sexually potent.72

Burke stresses the fact that many mechanisms are at work during cultural translation. Not only does a translated text or work fulfill a need and gap in “the host culture”, translations are also introduced into and accepted in a new context in order to “support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present in the culture”.73 We therefore need to be aware of the different layers of racialization, how they formed part of the process of cultural translation when A Streetcar Named Desire made its first stop in Scandinavia, and to what extent they confirmed an already prevailing racist ideology. The Africanist presence was pronounced enough in Williams’ original script to manifest itself on the Gothenburg stage. In the process of cultural translation, however, it was also recontextualized, because the stage production itself took that racialization to the next level. Bergman’s and Ek’s blatantly sexualized interpretation enhanced the otherness of Stanley and firmly situated him in the exoticized surroundings of New Orleans and its inhabitants. The discourse initiated by the reviewers then added yet another layer to this racialization. They were so overwhelmed by this hitherto unseen representation of masculinity and the intense sexuality of the character Stanley that they needed a way to contain and deflect their own fascination and desire for him. Sympathy for Stanley became even more problematic, when numerous critics failed to realize the character’s brutality and recklessness in the penultimate scene of the play and did not acknowledge the actual rape of Blanche. Linde wrote that “mannen haft ett äventyr”,74 and according to Morgon-Tidningen’s Nils Beyer,                                                            

72

George W. Crandell, “Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire”, Modern Drama, XL/3 (Fall 1997), 41. See also Rachel van Duyvenbode, “Darkness Made Visible: Miscegenation, Masquerade and the Signified Racial Other in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire”, Journal of American Studies, XXXV (August 2001), 203-15. 73 Burke, “Cultures of Translation”, 20. 74 Ebbe Linde, “Teaterkrönika” (“Theatre Column”), Bonniers Litterära Magasin, XVIII/4 (1949), 310: “the man has had an adventure.”

  

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Stanley “förförde”, or “seduced”, Blanche.75 The critic was surprised by this twist, given that Stanley had previously not hesitated to display his dislike of his sister-in-law. That rape was the ultimate expression of male abuse did not even occur to him. Similarly, Neander-Nilsson from Göteborgs Morgonpost claimed that “Kowalski är egentligen bara ett stort snällt djur”. He regretted that the audience had to witness “den snälla tambjörnens förvandling till smutsig hyena” and that sympathies were shifting toward Blanche, “vilket uppenbarligen icke har varit författarens mening”.76 With its comparison to specific animals, the quote by Neander-Nilsson represents yet another interesting exoticization and racialization that moves from Northern climates and the image of the bear, an animal that lives in Scandinavia, to the jungle hyena. Although Bergman spoke highly of the play at the time (“Vad kritikerna än kommer att säga, så är det en av de bästa pjäser jag har satt upp, men också en av de svåraste”77), there exist no longer elaboration of how he conceptualized the power dynamics between the main characters. He rarely mentioned Williams in later interviews and ignored him in The Magic Lantern. A quote by Ek might therefore help us understand how the Gothenburg production envisioned Stanley: När han kommer hem lagom full har han inte lust att traska i trappor, utan tar vägen utsidan upp till balkongen. Han slår sönder möbler när han blir arg, och han slänger sin Stella över axeln som en mjölsäck om han tycker det är kul. Så gör många unga arbetare i New Orleans och i Värnamo. Vad är det för märkvärdigt med det?78

                                                            75

Nils Beyer, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”, Morgon-Tidningen, 2 March 1949. Sanfrid Neander-Nilsson, “Amerikansk impressionist”, Göteborgs Morgonpost, 2 March 1949: “Kowalski is actually just a big nice animal”, “the nice tame bear’s transformation into a filthy hyena” and “which obviously has not been the playwright’s intention”. 77 Quoted in “Ingmar Bergman smet från avskedspremiären” (“Ingmar Bergman ran away from farewell premiere”), Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 1 March 1949: “Whatever the critics are going to say, this is one of the best plays I have directed, but also one of the most difficult.” 78 “Spänstigaste skådespelaren har dagligt träningsprogram” (“Most agile actor follows a daily exercise program”), Dagens Nyheter, 4 March 1949: “When he comes home moderately drunk, he does not feel like trudging up the stairs, but takes the way up to the balcony. He smashes furniture when he gets angry, and he throws his Stella over the shoulder like a sack of flour if he thinks that it’s fun. Many young workers do 76

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Stanley’s brutal behavior toward Blanche and Stella was thus normalized by both the stage production and the reviews. During the expansion of the People’s Home, Sweden not only pathologized those deemed unfit to take part in the allegedly collective project; it also renegotiated its idea of normative masculinity. Since the late nineteenth century, political agitators, union activists and other architects of the labor movement represented the interests of the workers vis-à-vis their employers, in addition to educating them and encouraging the development of conscientiousness and character. To guarantee social and political progress, the unions, the emerging temperance movement and the reading circles stressed sobriety, (self-) discipline, solidarity and industriousness as key virtues.79 While it would be unwise to reduce the history of twentieth-century Swedish politics (or the history of the Swedish labor movement) to Social Democracy, that party’s particular ideology had firmly established itself after World War II and, in an almost hegemonic way, governed the country.80 Due to his violent temper, his uncontrolled manners and his drinking habits, Stanley could hardly be considered the personification of a conscientious worker or normative masculinity in the People’s Home. Nevertheless, many Swedish critics were eager to see him as a working-class hero and turned a blind eye to his abuse and brutality, thereby further articulating the prevailing misogyny. He was described as “en enkel och okomplicerad man” by MorgonTidningen, which also stressed that “[ä]ktheten finns hos de enkla, fattiga människorna, förljugenheten … är ett feodalt relikt hos dessa

                                                                                                                                so in New Orleans and in [the Swedish industrial small town] Värnamo. What’s so strange about that?” 79 Ronny Ambjörnsson, Den skötsamme arbetaren: Idéer och ideal i ett norrländskt sågverkssamhälle 1890-1930 (The Conscientious Worker: Ideas and Ideals in a Norrland Sawmill Community 1890-1930), Stockholm: Carlssons, 1998, 69-113 and 247-69. 80 The faith in male authority manifested itself in a long patrilineal tradition of Social Democratic party chairmen and prime ministers, revered as national “father figures” until the early twenty-first century. See Åsa Linderborg, Socialdemokraterna skriver historia: Historieskrivning som ideologisk maktresurs 1892-2000 (The Social Democrats Write History: Historiography as an Ideological Resource of Power 18922000), diss., Stockholm University, Stockholm: Atlas, 2001, 67-113.

  

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stolta, utblottade sydstatsfamiljer”.81 In the same vein, GöteborgsPosten considered Stanley as “den urkraftige, okomplicerade men skarpsynte unge arbetaren med kraft i arm och hetta i barm”.82 Göteborgs-Tidningen finally admitted that Stanley was “inte någon särskilt sympatisk figur”, but also defended the “rättframheten, det virila, hans sanningskärlek och tillgivenhet för hustrun”.83 The normal, the deviant and the triumph of the mediocre According to one of the first Williams scholars, Nancy M. Tischler, the action in A Streetcar Named Desire “moves like a reversal of Darwin’s vision – back to the apes”.84 The Gothenburg premiere of the play suggested this reversal, but the critical choir enhanced and celebrated it, classifying Williams’ characters into those deemed fit to exist and those deemed unfit and weak, just like the politics of eugenics and the mass sterilization program. Sexualization, exoticization, pathologization and racialization were by no means unique to the Swedish reception of Williams’ play. However, these mechanisms worked in a culturally specific way, shifting emphasis and meaning in the process of translation and recontextualization. As Burke explains, cultural translation is a question of two or more different environments or contexts negotiating the meaning of a particular text: From the receiver’s point of view it is a form of gain, enriching the host culture as a result of skilful adaptation. From the donor’s point of view, on the other hand, translation is a form of loss, leading to misunderstanding and doing violence to the original.85

While A Streetcar Named Desire is undeniably a particularly strong play that continues to appeal to audiences in many different parts of the world, its initial run in Sweden hit a cultural nerve,                                                            

81 Beyer, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”: “a simple and uncomplicated man” and “Authenticity lies with the simple, poor people, mendacity … is a feudal relic of these proud, destitute Southern families”. 82 Andersson, “Den fulländade succén”: “the powerful, uncomplicated but clearsighted young worker with strength in his arm and fire in his belly.” 83 Thorén, “Stor kväll”: “not a particularly nice character” and “straight-forwardness, the virility, his love for the truth and affection for his wife”. 84 Nancy M. Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, New York: Citadel Press, 1961, 146. 85 Burke, “Cultures of Translation”, 10.

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bringing out both the deeply rooted misogyny and racism in post-war Swedish society. These factors are an important explanation as to why Williams’ plays in general and why the Bergman’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire in particular became so successful in the country.86 I have argued elsewhere to what extent Williams’ plays allowed Swedish theatre artists, audiences and critics a forum to express their own unresolved sexual anxieties, including the prevailing homophobia and the false reputation of Swedish women as sexually unrestrained. Swedish post-war culture used Williams’ plays to publicly negotiate these anxieties, first by staging them in the theatre and then by debating them in the reviews and editorials. These discourses were facilitated by the fact that Williams was a foreign playwright: the sexual desires of his characters could therefore easily be deflected onto the US and explained away as American phenomena.87 This essay on Bergman’s A Streetcar Named Desire further demonstrates the patterns of exoticization and sexualization in the Swedish understanding of Williams, but it also shows how important social hygiene, health and race were in this process of cultural translation and interpretation. Ultimately, the Swedish theatre establishment, including its critics, had very ambivalent reactions to the desire personified by Blanche and Stanley. Because of their overwhelming sexuality, dramatic characters such as Blanche and Stanley were either pathologized or racialized, marked as the Other and perceived as significantly different from the hegemonic whiteness of the People’s Home with its medical procedures to preserve the nation’s imagined homogeneous and social hygiene.                                                             86

The critical consensus was that Bergman’s last production at Gothenburg City Theatre, which would run for thirty-one performances, had once and for all established him as one of the country’s leading stage directors. Both Linde and Grevenius claimed that he was no longer a talented apprentice, but could legitimately be awarded his “mästarprov”, or “master craftsman’s diploma” (Linde, “Spårvagn till Lustgården”; Grevenius, “Göteborgs stadsteater”). 87 Dirk Gindt, “When Broadway Came to Sweden: The European Premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, Theatre Survey, L/1 (April 2012), 5983; Dirk Gindt, “Torn between the ‘Swedish Sin’ and ‘homosexual freemasonry’: Tennessee Williams, Sexual Morals and the Closet in 1950s Sweden”, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, XI (2010), 19-39.

  

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For a play with such an impressive longevity as A Streetcar Named Desire, cultural translation cannot be limited to opening night and the reviews that appeared the next morning. Given the impressive number of Swedish productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949 (six in total)88 and Williams’ popularity throughout the 1950s, there was no shortage of material for further critical and ideological debates. In these final pages, I therefore propose to broaden the parameters of the essay by looking at the reception of A Streetcar Named Desire in Sweden in the weeks, months and years after Bergman’s production to demonstrate how the interpretations of the play itself became increasingly more complex. In the spring of 1949, the editor of the women’s magazine Damernas Värld invited two respected theatre critics to offer their respective opinions on the reasons for Blanche’s fall and destruction. Svenska Dagbladet’s Urban Stenström expressed his sympathy for Blanche and claimed that lifelong deception was a necessary defense mechanism for many people. Linde from Dagens Nyheter pondered whether Blanche was destined to sink into madness but was inclined to believe that, under the right circumstances and given the right help, she could have been saved. Moreover, he made it explicit that the character displayed no signs of a degenerate predisposition and blamed the traumatic experiences in the past and the social environment for Blanche’s tragic fate.89 This particular position of stressing the social context over psychological predispositions became more and more prevalent and, as a result, Williams was considered as a more political playwright than critics initially realized. In an overview of Williams’ works up until spring 1949, Aftontidningen conceptualized Williams as a poetic playwright whose sympathies always lay with the weak and frail. The essay subjected the marriage between Stanley and Stella to a critical analysis and stated that Williams “avslöjar den amerikanske he-mannens verkliga ansikte”.90 The male violence was thus acknowledged, but also                                                             88

Apart from Gothenburg and Malmö, A Streetcar Named Desire was produced that same year by the City Theatres in Hälsingborg and Norrköping-Linköping, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and Karin Kavli’s touring company. 89 “Är det livslögnen som håller människan uppe?” (“Does living a lie keep people up?”), Damernas Värld, XV (1949), 3-5 and 15. 90 Erwin Leiser, “Tennessee Williams: De besegrades diktare” (“Tennessee Williams: poet of the defeated”), Aftontidningen, 2 March 1949: “exposes the American heman’s true face.”

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conveniently deflected to an American context, implying that Swedish men did not beat their wives. A year later, the syndicalist Arbetaren celebrated Williams as a cultural critic of the US, because he scourged the prevailing Puritanism and demonstrated how it led to the fall of characters such as Laura, Blanche and Alma. Despite his concern for the female characters, the journalist’s basic premise was still a very masculinist one, since he explained that Blanche was driven to “ett sista könsromantiskt rus, under samlag med den tidigare avskydde men nu animalt storsvulna svågern Stanley”.91 The rape scene continued to be downplayed or unacknowledged. Finally in 1955, another essay went so far as to call Williams “en social realist” and compared his pessimistic attitudes toward the US to Chekhov’s descriptions of a once flourishing Russian culture in decline. The journalist felt great sympathy for Blanche, who had become a victim of a cold, ruthless and superficial world, but he regretted the play’s emphasis on the erotic conflict over the social conflict.92 Just how much room was there in Swedish society for those who did not fit into the People’s Home’s normative expectations? After the opening of the fifth Swedish production of A Streetcar Named Desire in May 1949 at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, author and critic Ingrid Arvidsson pointed to the by now inevitable comparison between A Streetcar Named Desire and Miss Julie, but with a completely different agenda this time. Arvidsson, who would later become cultural attaché in Washington (1966-1972) before assuming a leading position as producer at Sveriges Radio (1971-1979), took the play itself, as well as the Stockholm production, as a starting point to put forward a fierce critique of Swedish cultural politics. Her contribution represents the most explicit attempt by a journalist to culturally translate and situate the conflict outlined in A Streetcar Named Desire in a Swedish context, without attempting to exoticize it. Arvidsson was appalled that a substantial part of the Stockholm audiences had cheered at the destruction of a female character by the male parvenu. She lamented the “applåd åt det kulturföraktande, det                                                             91

Örjan Wallqvist, “Amerikansk kulturkritiker” (“American cultural critic”), Arbetaren 11 September 1950: “one last rush of the flesh, during intercourse with the previously detested but now bestially grandiose brother-in-law Stanley.” 92 Sture Sjöblom, “En amerikansk Tjechov” (“An American Chekhov”), DT, 5 August 1955.

  

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normala, det burdusa och slätstrukna och denna skadeglädje åt det förfinades förfall”93 and interpreted these reactions as symptomatic of a larger social and political development. In a social climate that was obsessed with identifying and categorizing any sign of difference to the point that long eyelashes on small children were interpreted as a sign of emotional instability, she pointed to the risks of condemning and disapproving of any distinctive and individual features, while at the same time promoting and embracing the mediocre as a virtue. She found further proof for her concerns in the country’s educational politics and a pedagogical development that actively discouraged children to develop a rich vocabulary by systematically erasing synonyms and complicated words from schoolbooks. Although Arvidsson did not draw this comparison, this process of gradually dumbing down the population was disturbingly reminiscent of the social control exercised by the totalitarian regime that George Orwell envisioned in his then recently published, genre defining novel 1984, in which the simplification of language leads to a simplification of mental reality and the inability to understand the complexity of art and literature or imagine political alternatives. Arvidsson warned of a society that applauded and encouraged Stanley’s despising of the artistically refined and intellectually superior in the name of normality and further pointed out how such poor educational politics were playing into the hands of the entertainment industry by helping it to promote easily digestible products that required little intellectual engagement. Alluding to the “Swedish model”, a Social Democratic mixture of a strong welfare state and an economic system that combined the state and the private sector, she provocatively stated that “den finaste komplimang Sverige någonsin fått sammanfattades i orden The Middle Way”,94 before moving on to a condemnation of how dubious opinion polls offered statistical surveys of normal and average behavior against which any deviant manifestation could be measured, including sexuality. The article ended with a passionate appeal:                                                            

93

Ingrid Arvidsson, “Det slätstrukna idealet” (“The mediocre ideal”), Dagens Nyheter, 2 October 1949: “applause for the cultural contempt, the normal, the rude and the mediocre, and this gloating about the fall of refined values.” 94 Ibid.: “the nicest compliment Sweden has ever got was summarized by the words The Middle Way.”

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Nej, låt oss få behålla det avvikande, det onormala, det exklusiva. Det måste ingå i existensminimum att vi får lära oss “onödiga” synonymer och kunskap om sådant som ligger över vår nivå, att vi får konstverk som kommer oss att andas häftigare och att vi förstår också människor som inte passar i kommunalfullmäktige. Begreppet social konst är en anomali: all god konst är social.95

Without any doubt, both Blanche DuBois and Tennessee Williams would have agreed and applauded wholeheartedly.

                                                            95

Ibid.: “No, let’s keep the deviant, the abnormal, the exclusive. It must be part of our basic existence that we are taught ‘unnecessary’ synonyms and knowledge of that which is above our level of understanding, that we get works of art that make us breathe faster, and that we also understand people who would not fit on a municipal council. The concept of social art is an anomaly: all good art is social.”

  

   

 

   

I feel that if we had made really sacrificial efforts to relieve the distress of Europe the Communists would have no appeal. As it is, the people in their really dire circumstances, bewildered by vacillating and make-shift puppet governments headed by weak blandly opportunistic figures, rooted in no defined party or policy or philosophy, are a natural and easy prey to extremists. What a tragedy it is, that America, our nation, at the one great moment of destiny, suddenly lost the man, Roosevelt, who was apparently the one leader in the Western World who could see realistically and think idealistically and feel humanely enough to get us all through this interval of panic without a catastrophe which now seems to be coming. Tennessee Williams, letter to Justin Brooks Atkinson, 29 March 1948

 

   

 

   

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ LADIES SPEAK ITALIAN: CINEMATIC VOICES ON STAGE AND IN DUBBING ALESSANDRO CLERICUZIO

Except for very experimental performances, voice is unavoidable in theatre. Though we might tend to equate it with verbal language, voice is actually a non-verbal means through which messages are uttered. The same role, the same line of dialogue, the same single word can be spoken in such different ways as to profoundly alter the meaning that is conveyed. Tone, pitch and accent are among the features that can be used or misused as signifiers. British playwright Bernard Kops was reportedly upset at the rehearsal of one his plays, for he felt that something was going wrong. It took him a while to work out what was happening. The actress playing the main role, instead of saying “I can’t sleep with anyone – meaning any Tom, Dick or Harry – had put the stress on the whole word, saying “I can’t sleep with anyone”, and the character was coming across as sexless.1 Some performers are remembered more for their voices than for anything else. Though this was not entirely the case with Uta Hagen, whose performance as Blanche DuBois for the 1949 Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, following her national tour of the previous year, was hailed as memorable for a number of reasons. Still, writing for a New York newspaper, critic William Hawkins felt the need to specify the effects of her voice. He warned readers and potential theatre-goers that when the actress yelled “Fire” in scene ten, one was

                                                            1

 

Anne Karpf, The Human Voice, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006, 12.

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“prompted to look for a near exit, not to escape conflagration but to flee from her wildness”.2 Voice is essential to Tennessee Williams’ staged plays more than, say, to his contemporary Arthur Miller’s work. Anyone who has seen stagings of both authors needs only to delve into their memories for meaningful aural traces: with the sole exception of Willy Loman, the voices of the Kellers, of Abigail Williams, or of Eddie Carbone linger in our minds less than the voices of Amanda Wingfield, Blanche, Maggie, Alma Winemiller, Violet Venable or Catherine Holly. I purposely cited only Williams’ female characters, for there can be no doubt that on an imaginary auditory scale female decibels weigh more than male ones in Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre. Though in The Glass Menagerie Tom is the narrator, and the whole play is thus a product of his voice, it is Amanda’s logorrhea that fills the action. Stanley’s voice in A Streetcar Named Desire is strong, and his body even stronger, but the play revolves around Blanche’s attempt at fighting those strengths with the dreams, the fibs, the flirtations and the despair that she voices from beginning to end. There is little doubt either about the impact of Alma’s nightingale murmurs in Summer and Smoke, or Maggie’s screeching in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in comparison to Brick’s existential mutism. Suddenly Last Summer is dominated by the verbal confrontation between two women, Violet and Cathy. The main male voice of the play, that of Sebastian, is heard only through proxy, and the male lead on stage, Doctor Cukrowicz, acts primarily as arbitrator, whose voice simply has a healing and maieutic effect that induces Cathy’s vocalization of her suppressed memories. If voice is so essential to a Williams play, what happens when that play is delivered in a different language or its film adaption is dubbed? Nowhere in Italy is there a cultural equivalent to the voice of the American South, yet many of Williams’ Southern women have appeared on Italian stages and screens. My aim here is to consider the effect of transcultural practices involved in the adaptation of play and movie dialogue where voice is concerned. More specifically, I will look at a few Italian versions of Williams’ drama in order to determine how and if his female characters gain or lose meaning in the                                                            

2 Quoted in Philip C. Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 35.

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adaptations, and how voice works in the overall process of translating Williams’ major works for the foreign stage and screen. In 1946, the first actress to give an Italian voice to a Williams character was – Russian. Though Rina Morelli, the 1949 Blanche, has remained the foremost embodiment of the Williams heroine on Italian stages, Russian born Tatiana Pavlova deserves attention for a number of reasons. Albeit somehow overshadowed by Morelli (who also played Laura to Pavlova’s Amanda in Lo zoo di vetro [The Glass Menagerie]), Pavlova was actually no amateur performer: she had been acting since the age of fifteen in touring Russian companies and in Moscow theatres. In 1920 she moved to Italy, where she studied acting and made her debut in 1923. For the following two decades she was a very controversial figure, being given the first teaching assignment in stage direction at the newly inaugurated Italian Drama Academy, Silvio D’Amico’s Accademia d’Arte Drammatica. Her innovative directing techniques, her marriage with a gerarca (a Fascist party leader) and not least her Russian accent were some of the “disturbing” elements attributed to her persona. When Luchino Visconti was arranging an early reading of the script of Lo zoo di vetro, he immediately assigned the part of Amanda to this Russian actress, whom he had seen in Chekhov’s Il giardino dei ciliegi (The Cherry Orchard) over a decade earlier. When count Luchino asked Pavlova to take the part and she accepted, it turned out to be a huge comeback for a woman who had fallen into oblivion especially due to her political affiliation at the time of Fascism. During rehearsals, Visconti was very strict. A scene designer who worked on the 1946 production of Lo zoo di vetro purported that Tatiana spoke a perfect Italian with a touch, “a tratti, un ricordino” of Russian, but never in front of Visconti. Unseen by the actress, the director once entered the theatre and heard her pronounce a line with a slight accent, then summoned the stage manager, shouting: “Pausa! Ricominceremo quando la Signora Pavlova avrà smesso di parlare turco!”.3 Ever since the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire posed a threat to Christianity in general – and to Italy in particular – the term “Turkish” has been used in a derogatory way in Italian. When                                                            

3

Quoted in Bruno Villien, Luchino Visconti, Milano: Vallardi, 1987, 50: “We’re taking a break! We’ll start again when Signora Pavlova stops speaking Turkish!” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own.

  

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someone smokes too much, we say they “smoke like a Turk”; whenever we feel the threat of intrusion, we utter a nearly untranslatable exclamation, “mamma li turchi!” (more or less, “help me mother, the Turks are coming!”); and when we do not understand someone’s speech, we are likely to say that they “speak Turkish”. Cultural xenophobia and linguistic otherness prompted Visconti to reproach his actress’s slip from proper Italian. As much as he would later shoot with non-professional, dialect speaking actors in La terra trema (The Earth Will Tremble), a choice that highly impressed Williams during his visits to the set,4 on stage Visconti exacted a perfect pronunciation of standard Italian. In spite of his reproach, some traces of Pavlova’s Russian accent remained in her performances. She had studied Italian with a theatre actor, Cesare Dandini, who would put a cork in her mouth in order to open up her pronunciation, which, according to her, was too “tight”. Visconti’s assistant Gerardo Guerrieri wrote that her Russiansounding Italian was an exotic transcultural equivalent to the Southern accent of the Lady from Columbus, Mississippi.5 For this reason, Visconti’s gamble with casting Pavlova (everybody, apparently, thought him crazy in hiring her) was highly successful, for her personification of Amanda was hailed as a masterwork. Applauses flooded the Teatro Eliseo, Rome’s most prominent theatre, at the end of scene four, when Amanda speaks on the phone, and at the end of scene five, which marked the play’s intermission in the Italian adaptation, as well as at the play’s end. Silvio D’Amico, the foremost theatre critic of the era, who had stopped his journalistic activity during the German occupation of Rome, had just resumed writing reviews at the end of the war and published a review of the play on 15 December 1946, in which he praised an exuberant Pavlova: “che caricò le smanie della madre con colori accesissimi di applaudita comicità.”6 Reviewing the Milan staging of March 1947, a journalist referred to Pavlova’s “amenità ricca di toni” that he thought gave human depth                                                            

4 See Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 472. 5 Gerardo Guerrieri, “I demoni angelici di Ten” (“Tennessee’s angelic demons”), L’Unità, 10 May 1993, 15. 6 Silvio d’Amico, “Zoo di vetro all’Eliseo”, Corriere della sera, 15 December 1946, 3: “Pavlova’s exuberant acting charged the mother’s jitters with a very lively, humorous timbre.”

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to the play.7 Another notorious journalist and literary critic, Giancarlo Vigorelli, who had been banned from his teaching position during Fascism, resumed his work and wrote a long review of this production of Lo zoo di vetro in the weekly paper L’Europeo. The title is revealing of the focus of his interest, “È tornata Tatiana!” (“Tatiana is back!”): Il successo dello Zoo di vetro è dovuto solo alla curiosità per il ritorno della Pavlova. Da anni non c’è e anche stavolta è una partecipazione straordinaria. Non saprei dire se la sua interpretazione della madre di Zoo di vetro sia stata corrispondente e fedele: ne ha fatto una creatura diseguale, isterica, astratta e sentimentale. Tutti concordi, come venti anni fa, sulla sua malìa di donna. Ho trovato un vecchio numero di Teatro del ‘24, era l’anno del suo trionfo americano, dopo il felice esordio italiano. ... Non era la Duse, ma al pubblico piacque una Duse che parlava un esperanto italo-russo e certo, senza togliere nulla alle sue qualità, è chiaro che ancora adesso la Pavlova gioca molto il suo capriccio teatrale sullo charme di quell’esperanto, tanto è vero che in molte battute tira via in un italiano perfetto e in altre, cioè quando ha bisogno di un suo speciale effetto, si inoltra in una civetteria esotica di parole barbugliate, gorgheggiate, sospirate.8

But then again, acting in the theatre has the pros and cons of producing a new and different performance every single night, and if one critic seems to have disliked the Italian adaptation of Lo zoo di vetro, it may depend upon which performance he attended. Though                                                            

7

Renato Simoni, “Lo Zoo di vetro”, Corriere della sera 29 March 1947, 2: “gay variety of tones.” 8 Giancarlo Vigorelli, “È tornata Tatiana!” (“Tatiana is back!”), Europeo, 13 April 1947, 4: “The success of Lo zoo di vetro is only due to the curiosity aroused by Pavlova’s comeback. For years we haven’t seen her and even this time we’re talking of a guest star performance. I wouldn’t know whether her interpretation of the mother in Lo zoo di vetro has been accurate and faithful to the original: she rendered her a hysterical, abstract, sentimental, uneven creature. Everybody agreed, like twenty years ago, on her female charm. I found an old issue of the journal Teatro from 1924, it was the year of her American triumph, following her successful Italian debut .... She was not Duse, but the audience loved this Duse who spoke an Italo-Russian esperanto. And for sure, with no disrespect to her other qualities, I’d say her stage persona is still playing a lot on the charm of that esperanto. So much so that in most of her lines she speaks a perfect Italian, but in others, where she needs a special effect, she indulges in a foreign affectation made of slurred, warbled and sighed words.”

  

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most other critics extolled Visconti’s touch on what they considered an otherwise tenuous play, Ermanno Contini, writing for the monthly magazine Mercurio, did not: he appreciated Williams’ drama but found fault with everybody and everything else. He considered Visconti overrated and unable to grow up artistically, having repeated here the same mistakes he had made in his direction of Le mariage de Figaro earlier that year. Contini equally spewed a few words at the leading lady, writing that “Tatiana Pavlova, alla quale venticinque anni di permanenza in Italia non sono ancora riusciti a togliere un fastidioso residuo di cadenza esotica, ha recitato come suole con una costruita manierosità che può essere, forse, di effetto, ma che è di un’evidente insincerità”.9 Was Pavlova tired that night in which the critic was present? Or was he negatively biased in the same way that the others were positively biased about the stature of this Russian actress? The second option seems to me more appropriate, for, though he was writing for a monthly magazine, it is very likely that Contini was present at the premiere, when the other critics were present too. What we can infer from these reviews is that Amanda’s bravura relies on the voice of the actress, and someone who was able to play with her own voice was perfect for the part, foreign though she was. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the first and the most recent Amanda in an Italian production of the play were both foreigners. Director Andrea Liberovici put up a new and much acclaimed version of Lo zoo di vetro in 2006, casting Claudia Cardinale, very well known outside of Italy, in the role of Amanda Wingfield. Liberovici’s direction – apparently very much aware of the role of the voice for this character – relied heavily on sound. He chose to open the play disembodying Amanda: whereas in the original play Tom speaks as a narrator and then immediately joins his mother and sister, here the director keeps him the only visible character throughout scene one and has Amanda appear only at the beginning of scene two. Before this, we only hear her voice resonate in the darkness of the stage, where the screen legends of the original script illuminate the scene. This is a very interesting choice, making the stage a womb                                                             9

Ermanno Contini, “Tennessee e Visconti”, Mercurio, 29 June 1947, 105: “Tatiana Pavlova, for whom twenty-five years in Italy have not been enough to eliminate the disturbing remnant of her foreign accent, has acted as usual with a faked mannerism. This could lead to some effect, but it is blatantly insincere.”

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to which Tom returns and in which he hears his mother’s voice sometimes muffled and sometimes booming. Tom’s memory thus becomes as much auditory as it is visual, and his trip backwards in time becomes a voyage to the very beginnings of his life. Researchers have long maintained that mothers’ voices are an “audio-phonic skin”, a “container for the child, a sonic version of amniotic fluid”.10 This perfectly fits with Amanda’s need to protect and, at the same time, keep her children to herself, in the apartmentwomb where Tom’s memory takes the audience. Such a clever ploy would have worked perfectly with the right voice: unfortunately, it was not the case in the 2006 staging. The night of the premiere, I was very disappointed by the female lead’s use of her voice – not so much her timbre, which was hoarse and thus original and even at times fascinating, but her accent. Cardinale was born in Tunisia of immigrant parents from Sicily, and as a little girl she learnt to speak Arabic, French and the old Sicilian dialect of her parents, which surely sounded more like Arabic than standard “Florentine” Italian (the equivalent of Received Pronunciation in British English). No wonder in her movie roles before the 1970s she was dubbed into Italian by other actresses for over a decade. Even in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers), where she starred with Alain Delon, or in C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) by the father of spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leone, the voice Italians heard was not hers. In 1963, Federico Fellini kept her voice on the soundtrack, but then she was only playing herself in a small part in 8 e ½. In Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard), which brought her world notoriety, she spoke French in her scenes with Delon, English with Burt Lancaster and Italian in other scenes, but in the Italian version she was dubbed. This dubbing is known as “authorial dubbing”, which is intralinguistic instead of interlinguistic, and is usually required by filmmakers when they are not satisfied with the voice of a performer. In Cardinale’s case, it was not only her imperfect Italian that needed dubbing, but also her deep voice, something filmmakers of the 1950s and 60s thought contrasted with her feminine appearance.                                                             10

Karpf, The Human Voice, 62.

  

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It does not take a critic to determine Claudia Cardinale’s voice inadequate for a role so clearly dependent on voice as that of Amanda. To this day, she still pronounces Italian words with a French cadence. During the production, she actually tried to fight this evidently automatic accent, but with the wrong effect. In the first sentence that she spoke, “Tom, non possiamo dire la preghiera se non vieni a tavola” (“We can’t say grace until you come to the table”) which is delivered in absentia, she completely mistook the natural rhythm of the Italian spoken dialogue. Vocal rhythm, writes voice specialist Anne Karpf, is a non-verbal sign through which “we communicate how much proximity and reciprocity we want from another human being”.11 In the case of Amanda, this technique should be perfectly mastered for the successful performance of a role that revolves so much around the theme of space (inner versus outer; flight versus stasis; loss versus acquisition; past versus present) as to make it the aural expression of stage proxemics. Between Visconti’s 1946 and Liberovici’s 2006 versions of the play, there was an interesting televised dramatization of Lo zoo di vetro. Produced in 1968 by Italy’s public television RAI and directed by Vittorio Cottafavi, it was aired at a time when Italian media were discovering Williams and offering several adaptations of his plays to the audience. The radio broadcasted a reading of three of Williams’ one-Act plays in 1950, and in 1959, Italian TV showed a documentary of the staging of Estate e fumo (Summer and Smoke). In 1962, RAI produced and aired the Eros Macchi-directed play La tua mano, a televised version (now seemingly lost12) of You Touched Me!, the play Williams co-wrote with Donald Windham. In 1963, Cottafavi directed the first TV adaptation of Lo zoo di vetro (which unfortunately has not survived), while in 1969 the radio broadcasted a dramatized reading of the short story “Succede qualcosa alla vedova Holly” (“The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”). If Italy had first encountered Williams and his plays two decades earlier, it was only now relishing that encounter more fully.                                                             11

Karpf, The Human Voice, 70. I had a telephone conversation with Eros Macchi’s son, and he unfortunately told me that he had not found any record of this television production among his father’s belongings at the time of his death in 2007. Nothing was found in the archives of RAI, either. 12

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Cottafavi had showed an early interest in Lo zoo di vetro, and after the first televised version he did in 1963, he returned to the text five years later, with the same company except for Tom’s role (Umberto Orsini in 1963, and a very talented Paolo Graziosi in 1968). Amanda was performed by Sarah Ferrati and Laura by Anna Maria Guarnieri in both versions. During this time, Italian television was used to broadcasting original productions of plays (foreign or Italian), which today is almost unheard of on commercial TV. It was, of course, a preBerlusconi era, when the public broadcasting service was not only public but also of very high quality.13 Vittorio Cottafavi was himself a talented artist, who worked in television in the 1960s but who had started as an assistant director in the movies for the experimental French director Jean Epstein in 1936, for Italian filmmaker Camillo Mastrocinque in 1938 and for Vittorio De Sica in 1943. At the end of the 1950s, he had his directorial debut in commercial cinema, doing some Italian peplums and Fusto films, the so-called sword-and-sandal movies. After a couple of his films flopped, he devoted himself to television serials and dramas. For his Amanda, he chose Sarah Ferrati, whose Italian was definitely “Florentine”, since she was born in Prato, located in the province of Florence. Ferrati’s talent had been recognized as early as 1933 by Max Reinhardt, who directed her as Helena in Shakespeare’s Sogno di una notte di mezza estate (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in a famous performance inside the evocative Giardino di Boboli in Florence. She was later appreciated by Visconti, who cast her as Masha in Chekhov’s Tre sorelle (Three Sisters) in 1952 and as the female lead in Medea (1953). In 1953 she was another Chekhovian heroine, Liuba, in Giorgio Strehler’s staging of Il giardino dei ciliegi, and four years before doing Lo zoo di vetro for television, she had been Martha in Edward Albee’s Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf? (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), directed for the stage by Franco Zeffirelli. Here, she                                                            

13

People who worked for RAI, even managers and CEOs, were still hired through public competitions, and the company still boasted intellectuals of high standing among its producers, like, for example, Andrea Camilleri. The world-famous author of the Inspector Montalbano series of Sicilian thrillers worked as assistant producer during the 1950s and 1960s.

  

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played another American lady who requires formidable vocal capacity on the stage. Sarah Ferrati’s dramatic use of her voice sometimes borders on the so-called birignao. Birignao is a funny onomatopoeic Italian word that indicates affectation in rhythm and pronunciation in acting, and it is considered pejoratively, especially in mediocre actors. It mainly consists of a nasal voice and elongated vowels, but it also is evident in exaggerated non-verbal aspects of speech. In the televised version of Lo zoo di vetro, Ferrati’s Amanda so closely adheres to a continuous balance between voice and body and between verbal and non-verbal elements – all enhanced by the director’s frequent use of close-ups – that her birignao is the perfect transcultural response to Amanda’s “great but confused vitality”, as suggested by Williams’ stage directions. In most of the scenes, Sarah Ferrati’s “clinging frantically to another time and place”,14 again from Williams’ directions, is devised by close-ups that show her wandering eyes, her hands patting herself (a meaningful gesture pointing simultaneously to her disappointment and self-recognition) and by her musical birignao. She turns a trap into a weapon to enhance her performance: her voice sounds marked by an older, classical, now mainly forgotten Italian cadence, as if it were her memory speaking, or Tom’s, or a collective memory, for that matter. Her bravura performance made her succeed where Cardinale, on stage, was later to fail. Reviewers and critics have done nothing but extol Ferrati’s acting technique. In all of their reviews, she is defined as “unsurpassable”, “peerless”, “extraordinarily talented”15, an actress with “great vocal charisma”.16 Her last leading role on stage was in 1968 in Gallina vecchia (Old Hen), a 1911 Florentine comedy by vernacular playwright Augusto Novelli. But in 1972, she performed masterfully on the small screen in a duel between “two female giants”, as was said at the time, in the serialized television version of Aldo Palazzeschi’s 1932 novel Le sorelle Materassi (Sisters Materassi). The other acting giant was Rina Morelli, who had played Laura in Lo zoo di vetro in                                                             14 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 129. 15 Quoted in Maurizio Giammusso Eliseo: Un teatro e i suoi protagonisti, Roma 1900-90 (Eliseo: A Roman Theatre and its Protagonists, 1900-90), Rome: Gremese, 1989, 82, 84. 16 Maria Grazia Gregori, “Sarah, vocazione attrice” (“Sarah, vocation actress”), Unità, 10 March 1980, 10.

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1946 and then Blanche in Visconti’s Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire) in 1949. Morelli soon became one of Visconti’s favorite actresses, someone, he repeatedly said, who really believed in theatre. She starred in over thirty plays directed by Visconti and in three of his films, but as early as the 1930s she had worked as a dubber, thanks “to her extremely versatile and expressive voice”.17 Already a voice virtuoso at the age of thirty, Morelli was hailed as the ultimate D’Annunzio actress in the company of the Teatro Eliseo. Almost ten years later, she gave voice to Laura’s suffering with a professional voice she had trained and polished over the years dubbing American actresses for Italian cinema. Among others, she had dubbed Carole Lombard in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 movie Vogliamo vivere! (To Be or not To Be), which was released in Italy in October 1945; Ginger Rogers in the 1937 Mark Sandrich musical Shall We Dance; and Teresa Wright as Alexandra Giddens in Wyler’s 1941 Piccole volpi (The Little Foxes) from the Lillian Hellman play. To understand Rina Morelli’s versatility with her voice, one need only to recall her dubbing of Bette Davis in Che fine ha fatto Baby Jane? (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). The highs and lows, the baby-talk or the old-marm spite of Jane Hudson were such an ordeal that any average gifted actress would have failed. She has given one of the most impressive Italian dubbings of an American film ever. But that was 1962. At the time that she played Laura Wingfield, the names of dubbers had almost no circulation among the general public, so the first cinematic voice of an Italianized Williams lady – on stage – was not perceived as such by either critics or audiences. A couple of days after the publication of his first review of Visconti’s Lo zoo di vetro, critic Silvio D’Amico produced a lengthy radio review of the play, in which he elaborated on his previously printed account. In the new piece, he also addressed Rina Morelli’s voice and gave a definition of it that perfectly fit both actress and character. For him, Morelli’s speech consisted of “tinte tenerissime sospirate”.18 She had a small, fragile looking body, but her voice                                                            

17

Archivio Multimediale Attori Italiani, available at http://memoria-attori.amati. fupress.net/S100?idattore=2234&idmenu=8 (accessed 5 October 2012). 18 Silvio D’Amico, Palcoscenico del dopoguerra (The Post-war Stage), Turin: ERI, 1953, 161: “extremely tender sighs.”

  

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compensated for her physical lack of strength. She was going to be all voice, because in the forty-five days of rehearsals for Un tram che si chiama desiderio, she was reported to have lost five kilos.19 “Rina Morelli sa ravvivare con sorprendente varietà di toni e con accenti commoventi la monotonia della parte di Blanche”, maintained another journalist.20 But writing about the Milan staging of 1951, Roberto Rebora was very critical about the cinematographic aspects of the play itself, for its episodic nature, for Visconti’s direction, and for Rina Morelli’s Blanche. Rebora wrote that she sounded more like Barbara Stanwyck than a dramatic character.21 This might really have to do with the fact that Rebora felt what scholars of dubbing have considered for a long time, namely that the total leveling effect of few voices dubbing dozens of American actors results in a flat standardization of voices in the receiving culture.22 Stanwyck was dubbed into Italian by more than one voice, but seventy-five per cent of her parts were dubbed by Lydia Simoneschi, the so-called queen of Italian dubbers, someone who had a strong role in the homogenization of female voices on the Italian big screen. Simoneschi had dubbed Vivien Leigh in Via col vento (Gone With the Wind), and of course she was chosen for Leigh’s voice in the film version of Un tram che si chiama desiderio that reached Italian theatres in 1954, three years after the American premiere. This consistency did not diminish the leveling effect: Simoneschi lent her voice to most of Leigh’s films, but altogether she dubbed about five thousand female roles in her forty-year old career. No wonder they all sounded the same. In the early 1950s, a welltrained ear could detect in Rina Morelli’s Blanche the same cinematic voice that was becoming the trademark technique of Italian dubbers. Before doing Blanche in Milan, Morelli herself had gone back to                                                            

19 See Alberto Bentoglio, “La prima edizione di Un tram che di chiama desiderio di Tennessee Williams” (“The Italian Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire”), Luchino Visconti e il suo teatro (Luchino Visconti and his theatre), ed. Nadia Palazzo, Rome: Bulzoni, 2008, 160, n.13. 20 Rosso di San Secondo, “Successo all’Eliseo di Un tram che si chiama desiderio”, Giornale d’Italia, 23 January 1949, 5: “Rina Morelli’s surprising variety of accents and moving tones liven up Blanche’s monotonous role.” 21 See Roberto Rebora, “Lo spettacolo di Visconti come su uno schermo” (“The Visconti spectacle as if on the big screen”], Sipario, 61 (1951), 26. 22 See Mariacristina Petillo, Doppiaggio e sottotitolazione: problemi linguistici e traduttivi nel mondo della Screen Translation (Dubbing and Subtitling: Linguistic and Translational Issues in the World of Screen Translation), Bari: Digilabs, 2008, 33.

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dubbing and had given her voice to, among others, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Lizabeth Scott and Agnes Moorhead. The 1950s and early ’60s saw an increase in new Williams stagings, before the effects of his 1960s flops in the United States and in the rest of the world began to lessen the Italian public’s interest in his works. Estate e fumo was repeatedly presented to our audiences. A small company staged an uneventful Tram che si chiama desiderio in the 1954-1955 season, two productions of Lo zoo di vetro were mounted in 1956 and one in 1960 by the regional but talented director Fantasio Piccoli. La gatta sul tetto che scotta (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) had its Italian premiere in 1958 with Lea Padovani in the role of Maggie. In the 1955-1956 season, Tatiana Pavlova directed a shortlived production of Lo zoo di vetro at the Teatro Stabile of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Radio and television kept broadcasting readings or stagings of Williams’ plays well into the 1980s, with a notorious television adaptation of Lo zoo di vetro by Marcello Aliprandi, again starring Padovani, which aired on 13 March 1984. Then came the era of Silvio Berlusconi and everything changed. Two more recent Williams productions in Italy lend themselves to the study of female voices on stage because the leads are worldfamous Italian actresses with long and established careers in the theatre and in the movies. The 1991 Improvvisamente l’estate scorsa (Suddenly Last Summer) with Alida Valli, and the 1993 Un tram che si chiama desiderio with Mariangela Melato. Alida Valli, known in the rest of the world by her last name, Valli, was yet another Viscontian actress. She played in his Senso (to which Williams had provided, along with Paul Bowles, some English dialogue), and was also admired internationally, directed by Hitchcock (The Paradine Case) and by French filmmakers Yves Allegret, René Clement and Roger Vadim, to name only a few. And when Italians heard her in foreign films, she was, again, Lydia Simoneschi’s voice, that is to say Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Rita Hayworth and dozens of other foreign actresses. Valli had also been a singer, scoring a big hit in 1943 with the popular song “Ma l’amore no” (No, not love). She had a very musical ear and a trained voice, and the impression that one got from seeing her on stage in the 1991 role of Violet Venable was of someone who was running the risk of being unable to strip herself of her film persona. Because the French-Tunisian director Cherif made   

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Violet more crippled and incapable of moving than the original Williams character, Valli relied on her vocal talents to carry off the matriarch’s calm but threatening demeanor. The whole play thus became her vocal fight with her niece, interspersed with verbal attempts at economically and psychologically seducing the young doctor. In the case of Mariangela Melato, who had a recognizable husky voice like Tallulah Bankhead or the American comedienne Bea Arthur, there was no way of playing Blanche DuBois with the same voice as her film heroines. Bankhead’s gravelly pipes had helped derail A Streetcar Named Desire in 1956, and Melato’s risked encountering a similar fate. Melato was best known for her 1974 movie Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away) by Lina Wertmüller, an infamous title for the contemporary American market. Swept Away is, in fact, the same title that was given to the 2002 American remake of the film produced by pop-star Madonna and directed by her former husband Guy Ritchie – one of the most tragic flops in modern cinema history. What Madonna, who also played the lead role, did not manage was to achieve the comic, at times tragicomic, verbal and vocal tour-de-force that Melato had accomplished in the original movie. Melato played a snobby and sassy aristocrat constantly abusing her Southern ship-boy because of her supposedly better, richer and anti-Communist Northern upbringing.23 I do not know whether Wertmüller had in mind Williams’ play or Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version when she wrote and directed her film, though she surely knew both, because she had trained in the theatre before turning to film.24 But the similarities in the two works may have had an impact on Melato’s work in preparing her voice for the role of Blanche later. As a young actress, Melato’s voice had been shrill and only turned hoarse after the filming of Travolti da un insolito destino. It would have been disastrous for her (and detrimental to the play’s gender politics) to attribute to Blanche this now-husky                                                            

23 I must confess that, before working on this article, I had never thought of the coincidences between the Wertmüller movie and A Streetcar Named Desire: the North versus the South, traditionalist gentility versus modern opportunism or the aristocratic lady bested by the working-class “beast”, as he is called in the film. We need only invert the film’s geographical conventions to find its similarities to Williams’ play. 24 She was assistant director for Giorgio De Lullo, who had played Jim O’Connor in Visconti’s Lo zoo di vetro.

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voice, which would carry with it the idea of the rich, aggressive women she was repeatedly identified with in the Italian cinema. It would have sounded like just another of her former movie roles simply transferred from the screen to the stage and distant from Blanche’s truer, moth-like identity. When she walked onstage in 1993 as the lost Blanche, Melato managed, with great strain, to distance herself and her voice from her previous characters. She tried returning to the high-pitched voice of her youth, which for someone like her was now very difficult. I remember seeing her in 1993 at the Teatro Eliseo and being immediately convinced that she had become the right Blanche. In a newspaper article published before the play’s opening in Rome, however, journalist Silvia Vedani singled out Melato’s voice, which she found huskier than usual. She asked her whether or not she was sick: “No, assolutamente. Basta vedere lo spettacolo per capire ...”. Il perché salta all’orecchio. Mariangela Melato è salita in corsa sul Tram che si chiama desiderio, capolavoro di Tennessee Williams e ora cerca di risparmiare fiato. “È un anno che sto usando la voce come se fossi una cantante da quando ho cominciato con L’affare Makropulos. In quell’occasione la Kabaiwanska è venuta a vedermi, lei l’aveva interpretato cantando, ed è rimasta sorpresa dal fatto che io lo potessi fare tutte le sere. Blanche poi, aveva bisogno, o, diciamo, mi piaceva che avesse una voce a tratti diversa dalla mia. Una voce più giovane, più ingenua, più pulita che devo costruire con grande sforzo”. Un modo come un altro per entrare nel cuore e nella testa, ammaccati dalla solitudine, di questa eroina tragica .... “Mi avevano detto che Blanche non faceva per me. È una perdente e tu sei una vittoriosa: falso.”25

                                                           

25 Silvia Vedani, “Anch’io sul tram dei desideri” (“I, too, am on that streetcar”), Corriere della sera, 26 January 1994, 9: “‘No, not at all. You only need to watch the show to understand .... The reason why is acoustically self-evident. Mariangela Melato hopped on A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ masterwork, and now she’s trying to save her breath. ‘I’ve been using the voice like a singer for the past year, ever since I starred in The Makropulos Affair. [Opera singer Raina] Kabiwanska came to see me, she had sung the role, and was surprised by my ability to sing every night. And then Blanche needed, or maybe I wanted her to have a voice somehow different from mine. A younger, more ingenuous, cleaner voice, which I have to produce with great efforts.’ Just another way to enter the heart and the head of

  

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Aided by her vocal talents, Melato was capable of modulating between her dominant celluloid persona and her dominated stage one. True to the Latin origins of the word persona, both her stage and screen identities were created “through sounds”, per sona.26 Due to the current economic crisis that has strongly affected the entertainment industry, very little of the Tennessee Williams repertoire was produced in Italy during the centennial year of his birth in 2011, in comparison to the number of his plays staged in the past by small and big companies alike. One production, however, is worth mentioning, if only through its review, titled “Tante parole senza ritmo” (“So many words without rhythm”). It is the review of a new staging of Suddenly Last Summer and Orpheus Descending done together by director Elio De Capitani. Franco Cordelli devotes all of his column space to Tennessee Williams’ last years in Key West and dismisses the actors’ performances thus: … costoro parlano, non fanno altro che parlare, sono addirittura verbosi, come sempre in Tennessee Williams, ma il ritmo dov’è? …. [C’è] una recitazione pseudo-realistica, psuedo-esasperata, che imita chissà quale antico costume, di mezzo secolo fa. Come già, per esempio, in uno Zoo di vetro proposto dall’Elfo anni fa, sembrano del tutto inadeguati gli interpreti principali …. Tentare è umano, viene fatto di pensare, insistere è diabolico.27

For Tennessee Williams’ heroines, voice is a more pivotal element than for many other playwrights because most of his women shape their identities through a loghorreic reinvention of themselves – a theatrical act in itself – which makes them such great stage characters. Amanda’s garrulous gentility, Blanche’s seductive fibs, Violet’s semiotic war against the truth, Alma’s school-marm notions of                                                                                                                                 this tragic heroine smashed by solitude .... ‘They told me Blanche was not for me. She’s a loser and you’re a winner, they said: false’.” 26 The exact origin of the word lies in the designation of the dramatic masks with a big opening for the mouth, in order to amplify sounds. 27 Franco Cordelli, “Tante parole senza ritmo” (“So many words without rhythm”), Corriere della sera, 15 May 2011, 40: “they speak, they do nothing but speak, they are even verbose, as usual in Tennessee Williams, but where is the rhythm? .... [There is] pseudo-realistic, pseudo-extreme acting, weirdly imitating an old way of performing from some half century ago. As was the case a few years ago with the Elfo Company’s Glass Menagerie, all leading actors seem utterly inadequate .... The first mistake was forgivable, the second is not.”

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sexuality, or Maggie’s verbal catfights are distinctive aural traits of the dramatis personae that can be constructed by actress and director with meaningful differences at each performance. As I have tried to argue here, these features not only need to be intact after translation, but they require a higher degree of attention during the transcultural process involved in dubbing films and in staging adaptations in foreign languages. Dubbing tends to deny the nature of translation: it is indeed used to having a general, unquestioning audience believe that the performance they are witnessing is actually being generated in the received language. As bad as this custom is in that it ignores, or tends to delete, all other linguistic and extralinguistic references to the original culture, it is systematically applied to the theatre for exactly the same reason. A staged performance of a foreign play tends to recreate the linguistic and extralinguistic codes of the host country and of the cultural landscape of its viewing public. It is on the stage, however, that this trend can, and should be, attenuated. The performance of a play should draw upon all potential signifiers that can aid in character construction, and it is here that a critic’s ear should look for failed or successful sound effects. .

  

   

 

   

Regardless of where you may go in Europe this summer of 1950, you will find that places have a sadness under the surface. Everywhere the people seem to be waiting for the next cataclysm to strike them. They are not panicky, perhaps not even frightened, but they are waiting for it to happen with a feeling of fatality which you cannot help sensing unless you stay drunk the whole time or keep your nose in museums. Nevertheless, the people want to survive, they want to keep on living through it, whatever it may be. Their history has made them wiser than Americans. It has also made them more tolerant, more patient, and considerably more human as well as a great deal sadder. If these comments make me seem the opposite of a chauvinist, it is because of my honest feeling, after three years of foreign travel, that human brotherhood that stops at borders is not only delusive and foolish but enormously evil. The Marshall Plan must be translated, now, and amended, into spirit, if the dreaded thing that the Western World is waiting for can still be averted. Tennessee Williams, “A Writer’s Quest for a Parnassus”, 1950

 

   

SEA, SUN AND “QUIEN SABE!”: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND SPAIN LAURA TORRES-ZÚÑIGA

In the winter of 1948, after the successful opening of A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway the previous December, Tennessee Williams embarked on the first of a series of trips to Europe that would become his customary way to avoid the nervous stress that the theatrical life in New York brought him.1 During the following decade, Williams would spend several months every year – usually during the summer – visiting different countries in Europe and, above all, staying in Italy for extended periods of time. Although he traveled alone on that first trip in 1948, a year later his long-term partner Frank Merlo joined him for prolonged stays in Rome and tours along the Italian coast. Despite their undeniable love and concern for one another,2 Williams and Merlo often underwent phases of estrangement, and both kept casual affairs and regular lovers, a habit that they continued when in Rome. Whenever the strain of their cohabitation became too unbearable, Williams impulsively decided to leave Rome in search of cooler climes, where he could work better.                                                            

1

Concerning a later holiday, he would explain this to Jim Adams in a letter of 21 July 1956 from Barcelona: “I was terribly worn out when I left New York, I nearly always go to pieces for a while in the summer as a way of recovering from the strains of the other seasons.” Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 619. 2 On 9 May 1949, a few months into their fifteen-year-long relationship, Williams wrote in his notebook: “I love F. - deeply, tenderly, unconditionally. I think I love with every bit of my heart [but] I’m afraid it will end badly.” Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 501.

 

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One of the first such getaways took place in July 1951 and was rather ill-fated, as Williams would recall more than twenty years later: “having quarreled with Frankie, I split for Barcelona in my towncoupe Jaguar with a thermos of martinis and wrapped that elegant car around a tree when a truck swung out of a side road and my portable Olivetti flew out of the back seat and hit me right smack on the back of my head, knocking me out for I don’t know how long.”3 Though only attempted – he would eventually flee to Paris – we could consider this escape as Williams’ first trip to Barcelona, a visit that would eventually become necessary every summer from 1953 to 1958, whenever he needed “the shock of something new to keep [him] from sinking into the old summer lethargy and stupefaction”.4 During the better part of the 1950s, Williams paid at least one yearly visit to Spain, as his Notebooks attest. Whether he was on his way to or back from Tangier, he would briefly stopover in Madrid or drive through the South of the peninsula. Yet it was the city of Barcelona that became his refuge from the intolerable heat and routine in Rome or the tension in his relation with Merlo. In a country still impoverished by a civil war and the subsequent international isolation after World War II, Barcelona was comparatively attractive as it contained a number of things that were most appealing to Williams at the time: milder weather, cheap wine,5 good swimming facilities, and Spain’s most thriving – and scandalous and shameful, in the eyes of the Francoist authorities – homosexual scene.6 Although Williams’ visits to Barcelona included some promotional responsibilities when he was invited to attend a few of the rare performances of his plays                                                            

3

Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1975), New York: New Directions, 2006, 231-32. Williams, Notebooks, 531 and 569. 5 Tennessee Williams, Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, ed. Maria St Just, New York: Penguin, 1991, 96. 6 The 1944 issue of the report entitled La Moralidad Pública y su Evolución (Public Morality and Its Evolution) placed Barcelona at the head in respect to public cases of homosexuality, and deprecated in particular the situation on the beaches, where homosexuals were considered “a flourishing plague”. Quoted in Arturo Arnalte, Redada de violetas: La represión de los homosexuales durante el Franquismo (The Violet Raids: Homosexual Repression during the Franco Regime), Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2003, 56-59. Already in January 1933, Barcelona had hosted the first gay demonstration in Spanish history, organized by the Iberian Anarchist Association during the Second Republic; it would also be the birthplace of Spanish gay associations in the early 1970s (223 ff.). 4

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that were being produced,7 his stays at the Gran Hotel Colón, one of the most cosmopolitan in the city, were mostly for rest and leisure. They had a decidedly therapeutic effect on him, as he explained to his distant cousin Jim Adams in a letter of 21 July 1956: “I tried Rome for a few weeks but got feeling worse all the time, I flew to Barcelona where there is a good beach only five minutes from this hotel and after a week of sun-bathing and swimming I feel much better and think I can get thru the summer without much further disturbance.”8 An avid swimmer all his life, Williams enjoyed the nearby Playa de la Barceloneta, where he could avail himself of the pools of Sant Sebastià, what he called the “San Sebastian beach” or “San Sebastiano”, a private beach club with separate facilities for men and women. Lunching on the beach and swimming every afternoon not only improved his physical condition but buoyed his spirits as well, especially if his systematic morning work had proved unproductive, which it rarely did, as his work in Barcelona often turned out “better than usual”.9 He soaked up so much sea and sun once that he even caught sunstroke.10 Also on the beach, he could soak up another of Barcelona’s principal attractions. He frequented the trade of young men who loitered around the beach and, “maybe – Quien Sabe!”,11 eventually invited one of them over to the hotel to share his siesta. For, in a country where homosexuals were legally on par with pimps and beggars and could end up in jail for displaying even the slightest sign of deviant sexual behavior,12 it was necessary for Williams to cruise in

                                                           

7

Ramón Espejo Romero has noted in his article in this collection that as early as 1950 Williams was unexpectedly present at one of the performances of El zoo de cristal (The Glass Menagerie) by the Teatro de Cámara in Barcelona. However, this visit is not recorded in his Notebooks or mentioned in any way in his other personal writings. 8 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 619. 9 Williams, Notebooks, 573, 649, 575 and 681. 10 Williams, Five O’Clock Angel, 156. 11 Williams, Notebooks, 679. 12 The Spanish law against vagrancy, Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, was modified in June 1954 to include homosexuals and, theoretically, required proof of a regular practice of acts such as masturbation, fellatio, etc. before convicting suspects for deviant sexuality; in practice, however, courts relied on much feebler arguments to execute their pre-emptive moral function. See Arnalte, Redada de violetas, 66-69.

  

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public spaces like beaches or parks – a situation that continued, even in Barcelona, well into the 1970s.13 To fulfill “The good expected pattern”14 of those summer days in Barcelona, Williams devoted his afternoons to joining thousands of Spaniards in attending the bullfights. He developed “a passion for corridas”,15 as he admitted to Paul Bowles, and attended the Toros every time he had the chance: in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Granada and Tangier. Although he was at times repelled by the violence and blood in the arena,16 he admired the thespian and ritualistic elements of what in an interview with a Spanish newspaper he defined as “el teatro vivo más grande del mundo”, or “the greatest live theater in the world”.17 He did not consider himself an aficionado of the sport, “not someone who knew the fine technique, the fine points of bullfighting, but someone who enjoyed the spectacle of it”.18 Part of that spectacle included admiring the good looks of the bullfighters, whose captivating semblance played a significant part in sustaining Williams’ attraction for the fiesta nacional.19 The evening would continue with dinner back at the hotel and end with a tour through Barrio Chino – the old quarter famous for its restaurants,                                                             13

Oscar Guasch, La sociedad rosa (The Pink Society), Barcelona: Anagrama, 1995, 61-62. 14 Williams, Notebooks, 649. 15 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 484. 16 Williams, Notebooks, 577. 17 J.M., “Crónica de Barcelona”, ABC, 9 July 1955, 28. In his letter of 21 July 1956 to Jim Adams, Williams wrote: “I have seen three bull-fights this week and now I am going to another which is a double-header with twelve bulls and six matadors, twice the usual number of each. It is a great theatre, and pageantry.” See Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 619. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 18 Williams, Memoirs, 67. This enjoyment was not free from a certain remorse. While suffering a “flash cold” in Barcelona in August 1954, Williams wondered: “Is it a punishment for enjoying the brutal poetry of the Toros? 3 times in 1 week!” (see Williams, Notebooks, 651). 19 Williams, Notebooks, 579. One of those toreros with whom Williams got personally acquainted was Antonio Ordoñez, one of the most renowned Spanish matadors of all times; the allusion to their friendship would help Williams break the ice in his first - and potentially awkward - encounter in Havana with Ernest Hemingway, a real toros aficionado. See Williams, Memoirs, 67. For more on Williams, Ordoñez and Hemingway, see John S. Bak, Homo americanus: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Queer Masculinities, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010, 24-26.

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clubs and brothels, where “night turned into day”20 and where, if the afternoon had proven unlucky, there might be one last occasion to find company for the night. Spain in Williams Like so many other autobiographical details, Williams fictionalized his experiences in Barcelona to incorporate them into his dramatic world, although they were not the first references to Spain to find their way into his plays. The largest part of Hispanic references in his works – most prominently in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Camino Real (1953) – come from his trips to Mexico and Cuba.21 But Spain itself had already made an early appearance in Williams’ first Broadway hit, The Glass Menagerie (1945), even if he had not yet had any direct contact with the country.22 Tom Wingfield’s passing reference to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in his opening speech – “In Spain there was revolution .… In Spain there was Guernica”23 – becomes by scene five the ominous indictment of the dictatorial regime under Generalísimo Francisco Franco. The oversized caption in Tom’s newspaper announces: “‘Franco Triumphs’.”24 Spain offered Williams the perfect example by which to contrast the stagnation and isolationism of American society in the late Depression era with the convulsed situation of a country fighting to defend democratic rights and liberties. The civil war provided a fitting metaphor for the conflict between Tom’s desire for escape and action and the stifling Wingfield household.25 While this traditional interpretation of the role of Spain in El zoo de cristal (The Glass                                                             20

Teresa-M. Sala, La vida cotidiana en la Barcelona de 1900 (Everyday Life in Barcelona, 1900), Madrid: Sílex, 2005, 106. 21 Philip C. Kolin, “Compañero Tenn: The Hispanic Presence in the Plays of Tennessee Williams”, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, II (1999), 35. 22 Inclusions of flamenco dancers in plays such as Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) and Summer and Smoke (1948) can also be considered as Spanish references, flamenco being a specifically Iberian dance different from other Latin American folk traditions. 23 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 145. 24 Ibid., 178. 25 Thomas P. Adler, “Culture, Power, and the (En)gendering of Community: Tennessee Williams and Politics”, Mississippi Quarterly, XLVIII/4 (Fall 1995), 65455.

  

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Menagerie) makes its political content subsidiary to the family drama, Eugenio Suárez-Galbán’s analysis of the play reverses such perspectives. Suárez-Galbán emphasizes instead Williams’ social commitment by drawing our attention to “the symbolism established between Laura and the Spanish Republic due to their crippled situation”, thereby reading the Wingfields’ crisis as an allegory for the Spanish and international state of affairs at the end of the 1940s: … the Spanish Republic was crippled by a military coup and by international Fascism. Correspondingly, Tom’s fleeing and abandonment of his sister at the end represents the betrayal by the United States specifically, and by the Western democracies in general, of a sister democracy .… Menagerie’s message, however, goes beyond the West betrayal of a sister democracy. It delves deeper into the causes for that treason, using Tom and his relations with his family to illustrate it. A passive attitude (substituting movies for action), cowardice (fleeing from, rather than standing up to, Amanda, much like Chamberlain and the West with respect to Hitler) and betrayal (abandoning Rose) seems a good way to describe this dual process that mirrors the historical through the Wingfield personal or family plot.

While it may be critically unwise to suggest that “Amanda’s traditional (old South), religious, nagging nature might be interpreted as a reference to authoritarian, equally traditional Spain itself” 26 (the Spain that supported Franco’s uprising), Suárez-Galbán’s approach does serve to reassess the Spanish presence in The Glass Menagerie and to reconsider the play as a regretful tale of the failure to stand up to political injustice. Such an interpretation allows for this play’s inclusion into one of the categories that Philip C. Kolin describes in his study of Hispanic elements in Williams: the revolutionary social commentary. The Glass Menagerie might then be considered a precedent to Camino Real’s surreal but successful attempt to be an “emancipatory manifesto hurled against any rightwing dictator/ oligarchy” – such as a Francoist Amanda – and could therefore become another of the “politicized Hispanic space[s] in the canon”.27                                                            

26

Eugenio Suárez-Galbán, “The Minimal Magnified: Spain in The Glass Menagerie”, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, XII (2004), 171-72. 27 Kolin, “Hispanic Presence”, 41.

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The references to Spain that were directly inspired by Williams’ visits to Barcelona expand this political innuendo and add to the symbolic connotation that Kolin identifies in other Hispanic allusions in Williams’ work: the sexual.28 These references appear in Cat in a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Suddenly Last Summer (1957) and derive from the encounters with the poor Spanish youths that Williams cruised during his long afternoons on the beach or with those procured for him by Franz Neuner, “the M.C. in this town, sexually”.29 As in the case of the Italian contadini that he fictionalized in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), many of these chance encounters were not gratuitous, although Williams affirmed in his Memoirs that prostitution is “the world’s oldest profession in all Mediterranean countries with the possible exception of Spain”.30 However, unlike their attractive Italian counterparts, the Spanish hustlers were characterized by a more grotesque note: “All the little black dwarfettes are still scuttling about, and a few hunch-backs, and the gigolo with the great melting eyes and tiny moustache.”31 It was this sinister image of the Spanish hustler that he later worked into the two plays. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for instance, a play Williams was revising during his October 1953 trip through Spain on to Tangier in Morocco,32 the affluent Big Daddy recounts to his son Brick the one thing he remembers from his visit to Europe: The hills around Barcelona in the country of Spain and the children running over those bare hills in their bare skins beggin’ like starvin’ dogs with howls and screeches, and how fat the priests are on the streets of Barcelona, so many of them and so fat and so pleasant, ha ha! .... Hell I threw [the children] money like you’d scatter feed corn for chickens, I threw money at them just to get rid of them long enough to climb back into th’car and – drive away….

                                                            28

“Hispanics were his quintessential outsiders whose sexuality and violence are signifiers of Otherness [... and] also helped Williams to problematize the darker, more oppressive resistance to his ideas about power” (ibid., 36). 29 Williams, Notebooks, 649. 30 Williams, Memoirs, 141. 31 Williams, Five O’Clock Angel, 121. 32 Williams, Notebooks, 594.

  

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Laura Torres-Zúñiga And then in Morocco, them Arabs, why, prostitution begins at four or five, that’s no exaggeration ....33

The sociopolitical criticism works in two directions here. It denounces the tremendous economic disparity that was the norm throughout Spain, but more noticeable in a city whose post-war industrial resurgence had brought thousands of migrant workers from more depressed parts of Spain to live under miserable conditions in barracks on the slopes of mount Montjuic. Barcelona tried to counter this image by hosting the 35th International Eucharistic Congress from 27 May to 1 June 1952,34 the futility of which Williams perhaps alludes to with Big Daddy’s “fat” priest comment. Williams, who was obviously aware of the Spaniards’ “hopeless inequality of their social conditions”, was more astonished by the fact that “in Spain they don’t want to do anything about it”.35 But while Big Daddy may be displaying “sufficient social conscience to be abhorred by the poverty he saw”,36 his assertions fail to convey a real concern and undermine the validity of his charitable intentions: “the human animal is a selfish beast and I don’t reckon the money I passed out here to those howling children in the hills around Barcelona would more than upholster one of the chairs in this room, I mean pay to put a new cover on this chair!”37 Big Daddy’s economic cynicism, what Colby H. Kullman describes as a reaction against a system of “control and power … profoundly linked to the social structures of marginalization and erasure”,38 engenders a political reading of the play with respect to America’s foreign policies at the beginning of the 1950s. After its political non-intervention, which Williams denounces in The Glass Menagerie, and its rejection of

                                                            33

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, III, 87. 34 David Agustí, Historia Breve de Barcelona (A Brief History of Barcelona), Barcelona: Sílex, 2008, 233-34. 35 Williams, Five O’Clock Angel, 119. 36 Adler, “Tennessee Williams and Politics”, 660. 37 Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, III, 87. 38 Colby H. Kullman, “Rule by Power: ‘Big Daddyism’ in the World of Tennessee Williams’s Plays”, Mississippi Quarterly, XLVIII/4 (Fall 1995), 667. He is quoting Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theatre as if Gender and Race Matter, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 3.

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Francoism in the 1940s,39 the US reconsidered its position vis-à-vis the Spanish government in its struggle against Communism. The treaty signed by both countries in September 1953 (the “Pact of Madrid”) allowed Americans to take advantage of Spain’s strategic military position, while the Spanish dictatorial regime gained a fundamental ally to help launder its international image and exonerate itself from its former Nazi alliances. The political posturing implicit in the treaty could not have gone unnoticed for someone like Williams, who expressed clearly his disgust for the type of political regime in Spain – “Spain stinks. I suppose that’s true of any Fascist country.”40 If Spain stinks, the US reeks by association. In fact, Williams had already denounced this troubling marriage between a Hispanic dictatorship and a McCarthyist republic in Camino Real by creating an ambiguously overlapping halfAmerican half-Hispanic setting that in the play’s latest version is governed by an invisible Generalísimo – General Franco’s epithet – to which Gutman punctually reports all news on Caminoland.41 With respect to Europe’s “great big [post-war] auction”,42 as Big Daddy sardonically puts it, American foreign policy also acted as a selfish beast, especially in the government’s attempt to improve its lot by supporting a dictatorial regime while helping alleviate the penuries that the Spanish “don’t want to do anything about”. In exchange for the setting-up of several military bases, the US provided Spain – which had been previously excluded from the Marshall Plan – with financial credit and donations of food supplies.43 So when the Pollitt patriarch                                                            

39 Such neutrality had not been so absolute, however. Franco’s forces received secret support from US companies during the Spanish Civil War and, once in power, he provided intelligence for the Allies during World War II. See John London, Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre, 1939-1963, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1997, 87-88. 40 Williams, Notebooks, 679. 41 Kolin, “Hispanic Presence”, 41. 42 Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, III, 86. 43 Although he does not mention them directly, Williams could not possibly have failed to notice the contributions of foodstuff, for news about his arrival in Barcelona appeared in the newspaper ABC right beneath the announcement that the American National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Spanish Catholic organization Caritas were to distribute to the underprivileged an American donation of 1,300 tons of powdered milk unloaded in Alicante. See Mencheta, “Cargamento de leche en polvo”, ABC, 9 July 1955, 28.

  

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exclaims, “Y’know I could feed that country? I got money enough to feed that goddam country”,44 he is capturing accurately the patronizing foreign policy that the US had negotiated with Franco in Spain. Williams witnessed this Ibero-American alliance first hand in August 1954, when sailors from seven US battleships docked in Barcelona were making nightlife in the city particularly wild.45 The reappearance of these Spanish children in Suddenly Last Summer imports the political commentaries raised in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but draws them to their sinister conclusion. If Big Daddy confesses to Brick that everything in Europe was on sale after the war and Big Mama was for the buying, Sebastian Venable proves that everyone was as well and, in the Spanish site of Cabeza de Lobo on the Playa San Sebastian, he was for the taking – “all afternoon, everyday”. The chicken-like children to which Big Daddy throws some coins become here a band of “dark naked children that looked like a flock of plucked birds, … all crying out, ‘Pan, pan, pan!’”.46 Like Big Daddy’s “feed corn”, Sebastian gives them bread, passing out “tips among them”.47 Catharine’s description of her cousin’s actions has a precedent in an undated letter Williams wrote to Elia Kazan where he describes the “black-plucked-sparrow children shrilling about for bread and making percussive serenades with flattened out tin cans” whom he had seen in Barcelona.48 But this truelife source does not preclude the dark boys’ infamous appearance in Suddenly Last Summer from contributing to the play’s plethora of symbolic meanings – religious allegory, racial anxiety, gay sublimity – a detailed analysis of which goes beyond the scope of this article.49                                                            

44

Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, III, 87. Williams, Five O’Clock Angel, 96. 46 Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, III, 415. 47 Ibid., 413. 48 Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 492. 49 On the play’s anxieties about racial mobilization, see John S. Bak, “Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations in Tennessee Williams’s ‘Desire’”, The Journal of Religion and Theatre, IV/2 (Fall 2005), 122-45. Andrew Sofer and Annette Saddik explore the power relations of desire, body and language: see their respective articles, “Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Performance, and the Body in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer”, Modern Drama, XXXVIII/3 (Fall 1995), 336-47, and “The (Un)Represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williams’s ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’ and Suddenly Last Summer”, Modern Drama, XLI/3 (Winter 1998), 347-54. For commentary on the play’s homosexual content, see, in 45

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Yet the climactic scene in the play, where the children grotesquely – if not unrealistically – cannibalize Sebastian in their quid pro quo exchange for sexual favors, constitutes an intriguing denouement to this Ibero-American alliance. “Cannibalism also has the power to challenge Western cultural practices”, C. Richard King affirms, and it has often been used metaphorically in relation to capitalism – although there is no general critical accord whether they are equivalent or opposites.50 This disagreement may lie in a structural interdependence between both systems, as Crystal Bartolovich has argued. Following Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s study of how the bourgeois subject defines its identity by the exclusion of something with a “disgust [that] always bears the imprint of desire”, Bartolovich contends that capitalism finds in cannibalism “not only its own limit – that which it must renounce – but also the figure of its own desire”.51 Similarly, Sebastian scorns the children he simultaneously desires: Don’t look at those little monsters. Beggars are a social disease in this country. If you look at them, you get sick of the country, it spoils the whole country for you ….52

Consequently, he establishes with them a relationship based solely on consumerism, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Suddenly Last Summer’s “main theme of predatorily social politics”53 manifests itself by a pervasive consumption trope that governs all of its economic forces: the Hollys’ ambition for Sebastian’s will, Dr Cukrowicz’s fund                                                                                                                                 addition to these three critics, John M. Clum in his article “The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth”, in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1997, 128-46, and Robert F. Gross in “Consuming Hart: Sublimity and Gay Poetics in Suddenly Last Summer”, Theatre Journal, XLVII/2 (May 1995), 229-51. 50 C. Richard King, “The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique”, Diacritics, XXX/1 (Spring 2000), 110. He discusses several current theories and dismantles their formulations of capitalism as a form of neocannibalism. 51 Crystal Bartolovich, “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, eds Francis Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 223. 52 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, III, 415. 53 Bak, “Religious Acts”, 139.

  

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raising for his lobotomy experiments, Mrs Venable’s patronage with provisos and Sebastian’s “contracts” with the boys: “we all use each other”, as Catharine confesses. The contemporary consumerist character of Sebastian’s relationship with the children surfaces from the inherent asymmetry in the sexual-economic exchange between him, who is “famished for blondes …. as if they were – items on a menu”, and those “homeless young people that lived on the free beach like scavenger dogs, hungry children …”.54 While they scavenge to live, Sebastian lives to scavenge only to satiate a sexual hunger.55 If Big Daddy impersonates the most ambivalent face of American capitalism, which cooperates with but also profits from other countries’ disfavored economic situation, Sebastian transposes such commodification of countries and people in Europe’s “big fire-sale”56 into sexual and political (ab)use fuelled by an incessant consumerist drive which, as Bartolovich affirms, finds its limit in cannibalism. For, as John S. Bak and Steven Bruhm have remarked, the children cannibalize Sebastian when he fails to uphold his end of their economic contract,57 or when he takes action for the first time ever – his “fatal error”,58 in Catharine’s words – and decides to interrupt this consumerist relationship and “privilege his libidinal economy over the political”.59 Exposing the perversion of a system where stopping consumption signifies risking death or a sudden reversal of power positions – from being the feeder to becoming the food itself – the real horror of the cannibals in Suddenly Last Summer is, as Bartolovich affirms, their figuration of where the capitalist appetite encounters its limit.60 Suddenly Last Summer therefore becomes an interesting corollary for the political subtext that these motifs, largely inspired in Spain and                                                             54

Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, III, 396, 375 and 413. Williams realized this himself in Barcelona: “All of the beach boys came by and asked me for cigarettes till my pack was empty. A mongrel dog came begging but wouldn’t eat bread. I said, he isn’t really hungry and Sylvestre Bella Vista replied, He is like some people, eats without being hungry. Then I knew he saw through me. That I was a dog living on scraps for which I was not even hungry.” See Williams, Notebooks, 681. 56 Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, III, 86. 57 Bak, “Religious Acts”, 140. 58 Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, III, 419. 59 Steven Bruhm, “Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire”, Modern Drama, XXXIV/4 (Winter 1991), 532. 60 Bartolovich, “Consumerism”, 235. 55

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later applicable to other instances, delineate in their plays.61 While The Glass Menagerie was Williams’ elegy to the downfall of the Spanish Republic ignored by a laissez-faire American government,62 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof his criticism of his nation’s self-interested interventionism, Suddenly Last Summer may very well be Williams’ warning about what such asymmetrical, commodifying political relationships can lead to. Williams in Spain The predominantly private character of Williams’ visits to Spain did not prevent the Spanish press from taking due note of his presence. Williams’ fame in Spain was nothing like the international reputation he had already achieved by the mid-1950s, but Spanish newspapers punctually informed of his arrivals and departures, and placed special emphasis on the author’s opinions on the country. One wonders whether foregrounding positive comments about Spain from foreign figures was one of the consignas (“orders”) that journalists had to follow to adhere to the government’s propaganda.63 His 1953 visit was the first to be reported. As Ramón Espejo mentions later in this present volume, the coverage by the cultural magazine Revista was ample but mostly unfavorable, both to the playwright and to his work.64 ABC, which together with La Vanguardia Española was the most important Spanish general-interest newspaper during Franco’s regime,65 informed it readers about Williams’ visit with just a short                                                            

61

Like Kolin, Kullman examines “how corporate power structures protect their secret investments by aiding and abetting sympathetically corrupt regimes”, in The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975), another Hispanic play. See Kullman, “Big Daddyism”, 673. 62 Due respect here must be paid to the International Brigades that did come in aid of the Spanish Republic; it is the official position of the American government that is referred to. 63 See Philip Deacon, “The Media in Modern Spanish Culture”, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, ed. David T. Gies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 312. 64 Espejo Romero discusses Enrique Sordo’s “Tennessee Williams”, which appeared in Revista: Semanario de información, artes y letras, LXVII (July 1953), 23-29. 65 Francisco Javier Davara Torrego, “Los periódicos españoles en el tardo Franquismo: consecuencias de la nueva ley de prensa” (“Spanish Newspapers in the Later Franco Era: Consequences of the New Press Law”), Comunicación y Hombre, I (2005), 138.

  

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note identifying him as the author of the play Un tranvía llamado Deseo (A Streetcar Named Desire), and stressing the compliments that Williams had paid to Barcelona, which he considered to be the liveliest city after New Orleans and Paris.66 A similar brief item appeared two years later in La Vanguardia Española, announcing that Williams had come once more to Spain to soak up its vitality and to attend several bullfights.67 This 1955 visit deserved a longer column in ABC. Yet despite two brief remarks about Williams’ beginnings as a writer and his opinion of other playwrights – “Miller … belongs to another time …. Sartre is a bit confusing” and Lorca was a great influence, he admits – the interview complacently focuses again on the motives for Williams’ trip. He had come “to rest and watch bullfights … and cheer up thanks to our sun and our life”, because Williams “love[d] Spain and especially Barcelona and Madrid” and was studying the country to be able to write about it. The beauty of the country (“the most beautiful in Europe”68) and the dignity of its people were some of the special features that made it impossible for him to remain impassive. The lack of any commercial production of Williams’ plays in Spain until then did not seem to preclude this admiration from being reciprocated, for according to the article Williams was already very highly regarded following the productions of Un tranvía llamado Deseo and El zoo de cristal by the Teatro de Cámara. Williams curried favor with the Spanish press and audience – a rather debatable point, as we will see – as well as with faithful friends and colleagues that respected and admired him.69 Williams did indeed find some new friends in Spain. Besides frequently meeting old acquaintances such as Maria St Just (née Britneva), Oliver Evans and Paul Bowles, he enjoyed Barcelona’s social life, although it proved to be too intense at times, as he confessed to Merlo on 22 July 1955: [Kenneth] Tynan is here with an English queen …. Claude Marchand, the colored dancer, is also in Barcelona, with his English lover, and

                                                            66

“Piropos de Tennessee Williams a Barcelona”, ABC, 15 July 1953, 22. “Regreso de Tennessee Williams”, La Vanguardia Española, 8 July 1955, 6. 68 Williams’ admiration for Spain’s beauty did not, however, extend to its people: “Spanish men are not beauties”, so they “are very disappointing to look at”, and Spanish women are “the tinniest women I’ve seen”. See Williams, Notebooks, 577, and The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 500 and 543. 69 J.M., “Crónica de Barcelona”, 28. 67

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they are good company. Society snow-balls here. More and more, till you scarcely have a moment to yourself. It takes real strategy to contrive some precious hours of solitude.70

Notwithstanding the language barrier – the struggle to converse in French with the Spaniards got to be a bit too strenuous71 – Williams was introduced to some of the theatre people who were involved in presenting his plays in Spain: actors Adolfo Marsillach and Isidro Sola, who featured in the Teatro de Cámara’s El zoo de cristal,72 and directors such as José Luis Alonso, who would direct La gata sobre un tejado de zinc caliente (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) some years later, and Antonio de Cabo.73 And, just as Williams’ direct contact with Spain had left its mark on his writing, Spain’s direct acquaintance with Williams would have an influence on his later public image. Antonio de Cabo, director of the Teatro de Cámara in Barcelona and translator of Williams’ and Jean Cocteau’s plays into Spanish, remembered some years later the circumstances of his first meeting with Williams. Actually, it was Cocteau, in Barcelona at the time, who at de Cabo’s request became in charge of organizing a soirée for Williams’ coming out in Barcelona society: Durante la cena, Cocteau se mostró de una brillantez extremada. Tennessee, a su lado, por el contrario, muy cordial pero tímido. Le aturdía la vitalidad del exaltado poeta francés y le mareaba el bullicio y el fuerte colorido de la “juerga flamenca”. Aquella noche conocí una de las características principales de su personalidad: su gran timidez y su extremada sensibilidad, tan difíciles de adivinar a través de la fuerza arrolladora y brutal de sus obras.74

                                                            70

Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, II, 581. Williams, Notebooks, 577. 72 Ibid., 648-50. 73 London, Reception and Renewal, 99. 74 Antonio de Cabo, “Mi primer encuentro con Tennessee Williams” (“My First Meeting with Tennessee Williams”), Primer Acto, 8 May-June 1959, 14: “During dinner, Cocteau displayed extreme brilliance. Tennessee, on the contrary, was very friendly but shy. He was befuddled by the vitality of the excited French poet and bewildered by the hubbub and the dazzling colors of the ‘flamenco fiesta’. That night I came to realize one of the main characteristics of his personality: his great shyness and his extreme sensibility, so hard to discern behind the brutal, overwhelming power of his plays.” 71

  

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Despite the incongruity regarding the year of the meeting (de Cabo’s memory dates it during the summer of 1951 and Williams’ Notebooks, more reliably, in 1953), de Cabo’s account is a good reflection of the surprising impression that Williams made on a Spanish man of theatre acquainted with the oeuvre but not with the author.75 Williams had been preceded by his reputation in Spain as the writer of tormented characters, unbound and reprehensible passions, and, above all, existential pessimism; Alfredo Marquerie had described him thus back in 1949.76 The presence of a sensible, shy yet friendly man, who spoke enthusiastically about his work in progress during long hours on the beach, somehow contrasted with the preconceived image of a personality able to produce such gloomy plays. De Cabo was not the only Spaniard to experience this discovery upon meeting Williams personally. For theatre journalist and playwright Ángel Zúñiga, becoming friends with the American writer significantly influenced the theatrical reviews he contributed to La Vanguardia Española. Williams’ close friendship with Zúñiga began in the summer of 1953, when the journalist exceeded hospitality and personally assisted Williams at his hotel when he suffered one of his frequent gastrointestinal attacks – no wonder Williams wryly added the tag “spastic” to the word “Colón” in the hotel’s letterhead.77 “Angel Zuniega [sic] comes to look at me every one or two hours which is extraordinary but a little too much”, Williams wrote down, adding, “He is killing me with kindness”. Regardless of the ingratitude, Williams would remain deeply indebted to Zúñiga for the attention he delivered: “but I have never known a kinder man than Angel”, he concluded.78 Williams would recollect this in his interview for ABC in 1955: Una vez, have tiempo, vine a Barcelona. Caí enfermo grave. Encontré amigos que me cuidaron como si de auténticos hermanos se tratara.79

                                                           

75 De Cabo surprised Williams, too, but in a different sense: “very good looking probably the loveliest eyes I’ve seen in a mortal face.” See Williams, Notebooks, 573. 76 Alfredo Marquerie, “Un autor norteamericano que nos decepciona y un español que nos conforta” (“An American Author who Disappoints Us and a Spanish Author who Comforts Us”), La Vanguardia Española, 13 February 1949, 13. 77 Williams, Five O’Clock Angel, 121. 78 Williams, Notebooks, 575-77. 79 J.M., “Crónica de Barcelona”, 28: “Once, a long time ago, I came to Barcelona. I fell seriously ill. I found some friends that looked after me as if they really were my brothers.”

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Hence his appellative for him: “my dear friend Angel Zuniga”,80 which became reciprocal on Zúñiga’s part: “Mi amigo Tennessee Williams.”81 Their bond was not restricted to this fairly unfortunate first meeting. When in town, Williams would drop by Zúñiga’s apartment;82 he knew that he could not possibly have found anyone more knowledgeable about the city to escort him to the Barrio Chino83 than Zúñiga, who penned the book Barcelona y la Noche (Barcelona and the Night; 1949). They renewed their friendship each summer that William came to Barcelona and even continued in the US when Zúñiga was made foreign correspondent for La Vanguardia Española in New York. Zúñiga remained there from 1955 till 1980, although he and Williams did not meet as regularly as the latter had wished.84 Nevertheless, they would often run into each other on Fifth Avenue or Times Square, and Williams would invite Zúñiga to attend the rehearsals of some of his plays. Zúñiga was often astounded by Williams’ provocation of certain actresses – in one case, Tallulah Bankhead85 – which Williams himself admitted in his New York Times essay “Tennessee, Never Talk to an Actress”.86 Zúñiga’s friendship with Williams marked a turning point in his theatre criticism. His first crónicas on Williams and his plays, which appeared at the onset of the decade, had been in line with those written by other columnists of La Vanguardia Española, such as Alfredo                                                             80

Williams, Notebooks, 679. Ángel Zúñiga, Mi futuro es ayer (My Future Is Yesterday), Barcelona: Planeta, 1983, 155. 82 In Mi futuro es ayer, Zúñiga recalls an undated evening at his apartment in Barcelona with Williams and the actress Nancy Carroll, who sang and danced to his old records (76). Incidentally, on 13 July 1953, two days before Zúñiga’s article on Williams appeared in La Vanguardia Española, Williams wrote in his Notebooks that he had spent “an evening listening to nostalgic old American records at the apt. of the leading critic here, who put on 4 different drags during the evening”. See Williams, Notebooks, 573. 83 Williams, Notebooks, 578-79 and 679. 84 One probable reason for this was that Zúñiga, a teetotaler, disapproved of Williams’ increasing overindulgence with alcohol and drugs. See Zúñiga, Mi futuro es ayer, 215-16. 85 Ibid., 193. 86 Tennessee Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 157. 81

  

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Marquerie, who criticized the absolute pessimism and reproachable passions that Williams’ theatre depicted. Thus, Zúñiga’s 1950 review of the production of El zoo de cristal by the Teatro de Cámara in Barcelona recognizes the play’s poetic quality and effective use of dialogue but laments the playwright’s lack of creativity and excessive use of scandalous formulas to depict a disintegrating materialistic world.87 This latter point is more strongly censured in Zúñiga’s bitter review of Un tranvía llamado Deseo, presented also by the Teatro de Cámara later that year. In his view, the play’s success around the world does not lie in its inherent quality, but in its arousal of a harmful, addictive curiosity for everything – sexual escapades, animalistic delights, sordid atmospheres – which good taste shuns. The few lyrical notes that this monotonous play contains in comparison to El zoo de cristal are lost in the midst of its detrimentally extreme realism, even more so when the reality portrayed is, according to Zúñiga, so distant from the Spanish one.88 Although Zúñiga briefly praises the author’s theatrical technique in both reviews, none of them is particularly flattering or well-wishing for Williams’ success in Spain. Zúñiga’s column on the occasion of Williams’ visit in 1953 shows quite a drastic change in his opinion of both the playwright and his work. Though not written as a traditional interview, the article reveals how Zúñiga’s conversation with Williams tempered the critic’s views. Surprised by the unaffectedness and optimism of the American playwright (as Antonio de Cabo was earlier), Zúñiga comes to condone the pessimistic tone in his plays as long as we understand that they really represent the author’s overall defense of the romantic right to pursue an ideal – the Spanish Don Quixote in Camino Real, his most recent play at the time, being the best example: El teatro de Williams es francamente pesimista. Nadie lo diría viéndole a él. Es un hombre lleno de optimismo, con una mentalidad muy despierta, sencillo y natural, con la naturalidad y sencillez norteamericanas. Recordando sus obras, se hace más difícil suponer que el mismo hombre haya dado una versión, hábil y poética, de un mundo en disolución. El secreto está en que Williams defiende, a

                                                            87

Ángel Zúñiga, “TEATRO DE CÁMARA. – ‘El zoo de cristal’, de Tennessee Williams”, La Vanguardia Española, 18 January 1950, 12. 88 Ángel Zúñiga, “COMEDIA. – ‘Un tranvía llamado Deseo’, de Tennessee Williams”, La Vanguardia Española, 9 May 1950, 20.

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ultranza, el derecho a un ideal, en pugna con la materialización creciente de la existencia.89

Zúñiga’s change of heart clearly diverged from the Spanish critics’ general attitudes towards Williams because, “Unlike their American counterparts, Spaniards did not spend any significant time on the wider meaning of the stories” contained in Williams’ plays.90 It also demonstrated a sea change in Zúñiga’s own analyses of Williams’ plays. If before Un tranvía llamado Deseo was about the literal depiction of a bestial desire and a clinical case study, Zúñiga’s view of the play was how it captured “la consciencia artística frente a la visión más cruel de la existencia” (“Artistic conscience against the cruelest view of existence”). Most striking is his reversal in attitude towards the play’s “extreme realism” that he had censured in previous reviews. Zúñiga no longer subscribed to “the perception of a kind of crude and often disagreeable ‘American’ realism [that] was prominent among Spanish critics” – including himself – when reproaching Williams.91 For Zúñiga, it was now precisely the absence of sophistication, tricks or decadent intellectuality, together with the play’s realist yet poetic dialogue, that endows Williams’ work with “su mayor y más genuina calidad” (“Its main and most genuine quality”). His estimation of Williams as a playwright had also significantly evolved in those few years. If Zúñiga once declared Williams to be “el autor dramático enamorado de los efectos violentos, al técnico, pero en ningún caso al artista”,92 he was now a leading American playwright alongside Arthur Miller and “una personalidad dramática de primerísima línea” (“A first-rate dramatic personality”). When Zúñiga closes the article emphasizing again that under the ostensible pessimism in Williams there hides the optimism of believing in the                                                            

89

Ángel Zúñiga, “Tennessee Williams, en Barcelona”, La Vanguardia Española, 15 July 1953, 17: “Williams’ theatre is really pessimistic. Nobody would tell just by seeing him. He is a man full of optimism, with a quick mind, unaffected and natural, with the typically American naturalness and unaffectedness. Remembering his works, it is even more difficult to imagine that that very man has created a skillful and poetic version of a dissolving world. The secret lies in Williams’ extreme defense of the right to an ideal that struggles with the growing materialism of existence.” 90 London, Reception and Renewal, 102. 91 Ibid., 99. 92 Zúñiga, “Un tranvía llamado Deseo”, 20: “A playwright in love with violent effects, a technician, but not at all an artist.”

  

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possibility of a better world more in accordance with our conscience, he proves to have definitively moved beyond the face value and moral indignation announced earlier in his reviews towards the defense of a deeper understanding of the symbolic values of Williams’ dramas. The consequences of this 1953 interview and the subsequent friendship seem to confirm Zúñiga’s personal credo that “Conocer es amar”,93 for this write-up inaugurates the positive note with which Williams was to be mentioned in each of Zúñiga’s articles in La Vanguardia Española for the rest of the decade, especially after he settled in New York City in 1955. Thanks to Zúñiga’s crónicas, Spanish readers received the latest news from Broadway and, more often than not, that news included an appreciative remark about Williams, even if the article did not deal directly with his works. Some stressed Williams’ poetic emotion and underlying goodness;94 other celebrated the quality of his most recent plays, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955 or Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959;95 and several repeatedly named him the only authentic dramatic writer in America.96 All of these pieces presented a sharp counterpoint to other Spanish critics who, still by 1961, were accusing Williams’ plays of being just “basura”, or a scrapheap.97 Zúñiga even spoke in Williams’ defense against the charges of the offensive references to Spain in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “Puedo asegurar que no es cierto. Hay un pasaje en que se habla de Barcelona, pero no se dice nada que pueda ser considerado ofensivo”,98 he clarified to Spanish audiences, who were still unacquainted with a play that would not arrive in Madrid until 1959. The more disturbing Spanish references in Suddenly Last Summer were dealt with more cautiously, with Zúñiga wondering their source:

                                                           

93

Zúñiga, Mi futuro es ayer, 29: “To know is to love.” Ángel Zúñiga, “La última comedia de Tennessee Williams” (“Tennessee Williams’ Latest Comedy”), La Vanguardia Española, 23 March 1957, 14. 95 Ángel Zúñiga, “Los teatros en las Navidades” (“Theatres at Christmas”), La Vanguardia Española, 22 December 1955, 16; “El Maestro Moreno Torroba”, La Vanguardia Española, 15 March 1959, 14. 96 Ángel Zúñiga, “Homenaje a Benavente”, La Vanguardia Española, 6 May 1958, 17; “Los teatros en Navidad”, La Vanguardia Española, 23 December 1958, 24. 97 London, Reception and Renewal, 100. 98 Zúñiga, “Los Teatros en las Navidades”, 16: “I can assure that it is not true. There is a passage that mentions Barcelona, but there isn’t anything that could be considered offensive.” 94

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La comedia trata de unos niños que en no sé qué playa española se comen a un norteamericano. No es broma, es el tema de la obra. Yo no sé dónde Williams habrá visto a estos niños antropófagos en España. En fin, él se lo sabrá.99

We now know, too.

                                                            99

Ángel Zúñiga, “Fin de Temporada”, La Vanguardia Española, 11 June 1958, 17: “The play is about some children who eat up a North American on some Spanish beach. No kidding, that is the theme of the play. I do not know where Williams has seen those anthropophagous children in Spain. Well, he must know where he’s got those ideas from.”

  

   

Paris is really the end of the world. Unless America is. They are running neck and neck for that distinction. Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, Monday, 1 October 1951

 

   

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN SPAIN: THE EARLY YEARS (1945-1957) RAMÓN ESPEJO ROMERO

The incorporation of Tennessee Williams into mainstream theatrical praxis in Spain certainly took longer than it did in many other European countries. Williams gained a reputation for himself with The Glass Menagerie as early as 1944-1945; and notwithstanding lesser works, between 1945 and 1957 he would give to the stage A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Orpheus Descending (1957). By 1957, Williams’ career had reached its summit in terms of his popularity and artistic achievement, and he was famous worldwide. But in Spain, in 1957, Tennessee Williams was still virtually unknown. The purpose of this essay is to examine the reasons why and the means by which he was steadily brought to the attention of Spanish audiences, critics and theatre practitioners, as well as to determine what difficulties he encountered along the path to his becoming a regular fixture in Spanish theatrical life. Although that process involved the mounting of various productions by theatre companies and dogged directors intent upon modernizing the Spanish stage, the role of the print media in promoting Williams’ work should not be underestimated. While the impact of these small theatre groups on the development of mid-twentieth century Spanish theatre has generally been acknowledged in the secondary literature, that of printed commentary in newspapers and journals has seldom received attention. Spanish theatre of the mid- to late-1940s was far from capable of welcoming such a strong theatrical personality as Williams’. Almost  

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exclusively made up of national plays of questionable quality, Spanish theatre was geared to the tastes of the upper middle classes, who were after all the only ones who could afford tickets.1 The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) had ravaged the country, and the rise of Franco to power coinciding with the outbreak of World War II had certainly not improved the situation. Politics and theatre cannot be tackled separately in Spain. After the insurgent forces of Generalísimo Franco had finally defeated the republican government in 1939 and established a dictatorship, complete isolationism was quickly and inevitably enforced. The country was stricken with poverty, hunger and devastation and thus could not be of much use to the axis powers; consequently, the democratic nations, which had turned their backs on Spain, ignored what was happening in order to concentrate on the menacing German or Italian regimes. As it was, Franco tried to capitalize on this isolationism and pretended that it best served maintaining the purity and superiority of Spain. Unlike other countries, Catholicism was still very powerful in Spain, with the Spanish people living under what was, to all intents and purposes, a theocratic rule. The once vast Spanish empire had vanished (the two remaining colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico, were handed over to the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898), and the Spanish population, however destitute, now tried to cling desperately as a nation to the shadow of what it once was, with its religious faith supplying the link to its “glorious” past. Inevitably this led many Spaniards to view everything foreign with distrust, often with outright hostility.                                                            

1

Throughout the opening paragraphs of this article, I am offering conclusions resulting from my own research into this period of the history of American drama in Spain. The article is thus part of a much more ambitious project. Some of its results (specifically in reference to Arthur Miller and Edward Albee) can be consulted in my book España y el teatro de Arthur Miller (Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Franklin, 2010). A much shorter version in English exists as “Some Notes About Arthur Miller’s Drama in Francoist Spain: Towards a European History of Miller”, Journal of American Studies, XXXIX/3 (December 2005), 485-509. See also my articles “Historia del zoo, de Edward Albee, y el teatro independiente español”, Atlantis, XIX/2 (December 1997), 65-76; “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Edward Albee, en España, y su posterior influencia en el teatro de Alfonso Paso”, REDEN: Revista española de estudios norteamericanos, XV-XVI (December 1998), 111-22; and “Trayectoria española del teatro de Edward Albee”, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, XXIV/3 (1999), 453-71.

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Theatrically speaking, this isolationism has a reflection in the condescending attitude with which foreign plays were received in Spain in the 1940s, as though their authors had to be grateful for the privilege of having their works represented at all. If Spanish theatre of the previous decades had significantly (for the most part) lagged behind what was being done in the rest of Europe, by the 1940s the gap was glaring. To look at the marquees of Madrid theatres is to see the devastating panorama of shows destined only to provide entertainment that could counteract the harsh realities of Spanish life at the time. As large and culturally influential as Madrid was, and still is, it did not have more than a dozen theatres operating. It is potentially redundant to point out that only those foreign plays deemed harmless, upbeat, light and entertaining made their way into Spain, for only they attenuated the severe criticism thrust upon foreign plays or negotiated the censorship apparatus put in place by Franco to insure national stability. It was the contention of Franco’s regime that one of its functions was to police moral standards and to make sure that Spaniards were spiritually safe from foreign contamination. Outside Madrid, with the probable exception of Barcelona, the situation was even bleaker. Throughout the entire 1940s, less than five major productions of American theatre were seen in Madrid, and, with the exception of Our Town by Thornton Wilder in 1944, all of them were Broadway hits, which today have been all but forgotten.2 Given this scenario, it is hard to think of Williams’ absence from the Spanish stage as exceptional, or odd. Even Eugene O’Neill, whose career was at an end by the time Williams’ began, was still virtually unknown in Spain by the end of the decade. Before 1945, only one of his plays had been conventionally staged in Spain: Anna Christie. Presented first in Catalan in Barcelona as early as 1924, Anna Christie was given a                                                            

2

The case of Our Town is exceptional. It was performed at the state-run Teatro María Guerrero, which specialized in serious plays which met certain standards of quality. Director for that production was Luis Escobar, a shrewd, smart and somewhat eccentric personality, who nevertheless managed to produce first-rate plays in the 1940s and 1950s (alongside distinctly minor fare). Certainly the Spanish production emphasized the nostalgic mood all too evident in Wilder’s original, which celebrated a bygone past and a simpler world of good feelings and relish of the quotidian. But its impact in Spain was enormous, mainly owing to its technical daring and unconventional presentation.

  

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more elaborate production at the Fontalba Theatre in Madrid in 1931, but it was a major flop.3 Though he was at least discussed in the specialized Spanish press, and every now and then his neglect was openly deplored by the critics,4 his plays were regarded as inappropriate, too complex and too demanding on contemporary audiences. Like Williams’, O’Neill’s liberal attitudes towards treating sexual and psychological matters in his work clashed with the authorities’ moral and sexual prudery in Spain, which, in accordance with their Catholic views, was strictly enforced. A first response to the mediocrity of the commercial stage during the 1940s and also the early 1950s came from semi-amateur theatre companies, known here as teatros de cámara. The concept is difficult to extrapolate, since there does not seem to be an exact equivalent in other countries. For one thing, they did not have the degree of artistic commitment that the European art theatres had had earlier in the century, and they were not as daring as some of those theatres either. While some clearly fell under the label of amateur, others leaned more towards the semi-professional. None of them could nevertheless earn a living off the theatre. But they were tired of what the regular Spanish theatres had to offer and thus became seriously committed to incorporating into their repertories the most interesting plays being performed abroad. While there are lights and shadows in their work and some plays were certainly ill served in their hands, it would be from the ranks of these teatros de cámara that many of the most reputed Spanish professionals of the second half of the twentieth                                                             3

In the mid-1930s, just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, some art theatres had presented his monologue Before Breakfast (1916). The Glencairn plays Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917) and The Long Voyage Home (1917) were also staged in 1944 by prisoners from the El Dueso penitentiary. They had fought for the defeated Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and were subsequently imprisoned by Franco. The prison itself was an ideal setting for O’Neill’s plays, and the production was directed by Cipriano de Rivas Cherif, one of the leading theatre directors in Spain before the war, responsible for, among other things, the premiere of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma in 1933. After serving his sentence at El Dueso, Rivas Cherif went into exile. On his O’Neill production, see Cipriano de Rivas Cherif, “O’Neill en un presidio de Franco”, Ibérica, 15 April 1956, 8. 4 In 1929, attempting to point to the excruciating absence of O’Neill from Spanish stages, Revista de occidente published a version of The Emperor Jones by Ricardo Baeza, maybe hoping that it would trigger some production of the play, which did not take place, however, until twenty years later.

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century (directors, set designers, actors and translators) were to emerge. Franco’s government tolerated their staging of foreign plays, which would have never been authorized for regular production. Yet still they would have to be approved by the censoring bureau, which would sound them out in search of anything morally offensive or shocking. If a serious play were deemed “immoral”, not even the teatros de cámara were permitted to produce it. If a play was authorized, it would be so for only one performance, which took place very late at night and could not be publicized in any way. The purpose was twofold: first, to limit the effect such plays could have on Spanish audiences (no matter how revolutionary a staging was, it would never be viewed again, and those who had witnessed it were generally people already connected in some way or another to the members of the company); secondly, in a largely cynical fashion, to discourage these groups from working too hard (granted only one night’s performance, who would be likely to commit strongly to its success?). However, particularly in the 1950s, when the regime started to care about its international reputation, these productions were the perfect alibi used by the authorities to deflect the mounting accusations from abroad that Spain was entirely closed to the penetration of foreign theatre and culture. It is for these reasons that, from 1947 to 1957, Tennessee Williams’ plays would only be mounted in Spain by such theatre troupes. I have traced some dozen such productions altogether. In Barcelona, the Teatro de Cámara offered El zoo de cristal (The Glass Menagerie) in 1947, and Un tranvía llamado Deseo (A Streetcar Named Desire) in 1949, both in Spanish. They reprised El zoo de cristal in 1950, this time with the unannounced attendance of Williams himself, who happened to be in Barcelona and was informed of the production.5 In 1956, the Teatro de Cámara de Barcelona                                                             5

According to Enric Gallén, this evening was quite an event, attended by prominent members of the Catalan society, as well as by writers and intellectuals. About the play, some critic objected to its crude form of realism and pointed out how far Williams’ world was from that of the Catalan audience: “Estimamos que espiritualmente estamos aún muy por encima de esos problemas amorales, sucios, asfixiantes, que en otros países - por lo que se ve - no sólo interesan, sino que arrebatan a los públicos hasta el extremo de conceder a la presente producción unos galardones que la proclaman como obra de excepción” (“We believe that spiritually

  

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revisited El zoo de cristal, this time in the guise of a Catalan version, Figuretes de vidre. In Madrid, in 1947 or 1948, La Vaca Flaca (a university-based troupe) performed three short plays in one session: Auto da fé, La dama del insecticida (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) and 27 vagones de algodón (27 Wagons Full of Cotton), all adapted by Alfonso Paso.6 Also in Madrid, La Carátula did El zoo de cristal in 1950,7 and the Teatro de Cámara de Madrid Un tranvía llamado Deseo in 1951. Arte Nuevo offered Verano y humo (Summer and Smoke) in 1952. Murcia was now the locus of significant and serious theatrical activity, and a local group mounted El zoo de cristal there in 1953. In 1955, there was also a local version of El zoo de cristal in Salamanca performed by a university group, and another in 1956 in San Sebastián. Santiago de Compostela also had its own El zoo de cristal in 1957, as did Zaragoza.                                                                                                                                 we are entirely above these immoral, dirty, suffocating issues, even if other countries not only find the play interesting but exceptional as a work of art, given the prizes it has been awarded”). See Enric Gallén, El teatre a la ciutat de Barcelona durant el règim franquista (1939-1954) (Theatre in Barcelona under the Franco Regime [19391954]), Barcelona: Institut del Teatre/Edicions 62, 1985, 226-27. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 6 In a very typical move, Paso, who was to become a very successful playwright throughout the 1950s and 1960s, had not translated directly from the original but from an Italian version (in the second half of the twentieth century, this would tend to change, with the advent of more professional translators and with the widespread teaching of English in Spain; but early in the century, most translations of American or British plays were in fact translated from other languages, most often French). He happened to be the Spanish correspondent of the Italian theatre journal Il dramma, where Williams’ plays had been published in Italian. It was a coincidence, but the translator tried to make the most of it, taking them to the stage with his group, which never mounted anything else and would dissolve after the Williams production. 7 Enric Gallén rightly mentions that La Carátula did not obtain performance rights from Williams’ agents, in spite of having applied for them. This makes Gallén conclude that the performance never took place, and he explains the agents’ refusal by alluding to an eventual fear that the demands of the play were too great to be adequately met by amateurs. See Gallén, El teatre a la ciutat de Barcelona, 225. According to José Gordón, however, La Carátula did do Williams’ play. See José Gordón, Teatro experimental español (Antología e historia), Madrid: Escelicer, 1956, 43. Obviously, they continued with the performance in spite of their failure to obtain legal authorization. When members of the teatro de cámara de Barcelona contacted Williams directly to secure performance rights for the same play, he not only granted them but mentioned that he had never been informed of the request by their Madrid counterparts; he even expressed some indignation at this fact, being as he was so fond of Spain and Spanish culture, and told them to always contact him personally in the future (Gallén, El teatre a la ciutat de Barcelona, 225).

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The above list may not be complete. But even if there existed some other production of which no record is extant (or if any of those above never took place, the absence of reviews on them complicating their traceability), the conclusion would still be that Williams was far from properly handled in the years under consideration. As major a capital as Madrid was, with the exception of three amateur productions, it was almost unaware of Williams. The fact that the little work that was done could not be publicized, and went largely unnoticed given the extremely ephemeral runs of only one night, kept the playwright hidden from the public for years. And among those plays of Williams that a few Spaniards did know, it is not by chance that El zoo de cristal is one of the least shocking. A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke were also done, but The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Camino Real were sidelined for the time being. When Verano y humo was performed in Madrid in 1952 by Arte Nuevo, the reviewer José Luis Cano commented that the translation by Antonio de Cabo (supervised by playwright Alfonso Sastre) was so bad that the audience burst out laughing several times, and not at comical moments in the play. He went on to deride the unbelievability of the play’s characters; whether that was a criticism of Williams’ play or the Spanish cast remains unknown.8 Yet the play is one example of how these cámara productions, albeit important given the paucity of more substantial theatre offerings,9 were more often than not damaging to the reputation of playwrights to whom they had hoped they would render a service. When El zoo de cristal was first produced by La Carátula, another review confirmed that it was a good idea to diffuse the play to a wider audience but went on to characterize the production as having been seriously flawed, complete with lengthy and boring sections, bad acting, clumsy staging, miscast roles and                                                            

8

José Luis Cano, “Teatro de cámara en el María Guerrero. ‘Verano y humo’ de Tennessee Williams”, Ínsula, 15 October 1952, 12. 9 And some consequence they undoubtedly had. In 1955, for instance, writing for La Vanguardia on a Belgian production of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Reviens, petite Sheba, directed by Claude Etienne, which was shown at the Romea theatre in Barcelona, A. Martínez Tomás used his previous exposure to Williams thanks to the teatros de cámara productions to ground his analysis of Inge’s play on a comparison with A Streetcar Named Desire. See Antonio Martínez Tomás, “ROMEA. - Presentación de la compañía ‘Le Rideau de Bruxelles’ con ‘Reviens, petite Sheba”, La Vanguardia Española, 22 October 1955, 20.

  

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uninspired translations. Though the reviewer finally bestowed some praise on the energy and the dedication of the company, he could not help noticing that the Williams’ play far exceeded the company’s limitations.10 While a 1953 article acknowledged how decidedly the teatros de cámara had tried to reveal the work of American playwrights such as Miller, Williams and Saroyan,11 another written in 1952 by José Ayllón deplored how Spain was relying on its amateur theatre companies for drama that, because of its international significance, deserved better productions.12 Ayllón went on to warn producers and impresarios that audiences would soon get tired of the kind of theatre they were offering them (mainly light comedies and plays by a handful of successful Spanish playwrights); and that unless they tried new properties, Spanish theatre would be driven to the brink of extinction. If new plays were potentially bewildering to audiences at first, they were an intelligent investment for theatre companies in the long run. In Ayllón’s opinion, there were plays and playwrights (quite a few were American) that these teatros de cámara simply could not adequately handle, because the artistic and technical demands required of them were way beyond their reach (particularly since performances were one-off, and licenses were granted for only a single night). What in Spain was exclusive territory for the teatros de cámara were throughout the rest of Europe multiple opportunities for major companies to mount successful productions. Ayllón recognized this discrepancy and advised the young actors in these teatros de cámara to pursue their training in theatre schools, which were nonexistent in Spain at the time. Such an absence of professional theatrical training was a consequence of, and further contributed to, the artistic poverty of the Spanish stage at the time. If a play such as A Streetcar Named                                                            

10 Anonymous, “En febrero”, Índice de artes y letras, XXVII (March 1950), 16. Not every production of this kind attracted negative criticism, though. In 1953, critic Julio Coll affirmed that the Teatro de Cámara de Barcelona was not noted for its artistic accomplishments, but mentioned El zoo de cristal as among its finest productions. See Julio Coll, “La 23ª sesión de teatro de cámara”, Destino, 28 March 1953, 28. The 1951 Madrid production of Un tranvía llamado Deseo was hailed by Arbor as one of the most important events, theatrically speaking, of the 1950-1951 season. See Víctor Pradera, “Comentario teatral”, Arbor: Revista general de investigación y cultura, LXVII-LXVIII (July-August 1951), 538-41. 11 Jesús Fraga, “Teatros de cámara y teatros universitarios”, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, XL (April 1953), 105-107. 12 José Ayllón, “Teatros de cámara”, Ínsula, 15 June 1952, 12.

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Desire could be successfully staged by Jean Cocteau in France, Luchino Visconti in Italy or Laurence Olivier in England, only a handful of amateurs had taken it upon themselves to bring the play’s magic to Spain. While it was true that some deplored the marginal way in which foreign theatre was being imported to Spain and urged more frequent and better handling, other critics seemed to push in the opposite direction. It is rare to find reviews of these teatros de cámara productions, as they were hardly deemed worthy of attention by most newspapers, whose critics were too busy discussing really “serious” productions. Such neglect is in itself a way to minimize their impact. Sometimes, however, a review was published, but it could hardly foster further work on the playwright. A case in point is José Antonio Bayona’s review of Verano y humo by Teatro de Hoy in Madrid in 1952.13 While admitting that America had produced some significant work in the past (he alludes to the plays of O’Neill, Wilder and Rice), Bayona suggests that contemporary playwrights, including Williams, were merely a fad, failing to measure up to the standards set by these American masters of the genre. To him, Williams’ realism, attractive to some because of its crudity, lacks the poetry and lasting qualities that could give it a more timeless appeal. While admitting that the dramatist was not entirely devoid of interest, particularly for the younger people, those audiences who would never see a Williams play could rest assured that they were not really missing anything substantial, as the passing of time would surely make clear.14 Taking into account the dozen or so performances of Williams in Spain between 1947 and 1957, and considering that each drew an average audience of about fifty spectators, one may easily conclude that only around six hundred people saw a Williams play performed in Spain throughout the entire decade (even less if one person attended

                                                            13

José Antonio Bayona, “‘Verano y humo’ en el María Guerrero”, ABC, 8 October 1952, 31-32. 14 Beyond these general comments on Williams, he stated in particular that the play was largely a failed work, inane and clumsily written, not aided a bit by a translation of the worst quality imaginable, a fact which, as mentioned before, another critic had already observed.

  

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several performances).15 Any single daily issue of a widely-circulated newspaper reviewing a play could have multiplied that figure by the thousands. Thus, to understand the impact of Tennessee Williams and his theatre in Spain in these years, it seems necessary as well to look at its repercussion and presence in both newspapers and specialized journals. The Williams that the Spanish eventually came to know was the one presented in the press and not the one performed onstage. Though brief, the first critical article on Williams was published in Spain in 1948. Signed by Alfonso de Sayons, it was entitled “El teatro de Tennessee Williams”,16 and published in Ínsula, the most prestigious and influential cultural publication in Spain. Sayons declares he had met Williams in person and had attended the premiere of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, which he compared at length with the Parisian version of 1947. In Buenos Aires, he had seen Margarita Xirgú do the play. He comments on the inappropriateness of the Spanish translation, as “zoo” does not actually mean “menagerie”. Sayons also informs readers about later Williams productions, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (with Jessica Tandy playing Blanche) and You Touched Me!. After mentioning that the last Williams play to have premiered on Broadway, Summer and Smoke in 1948 met with a lukewarm response, Sayons concludes that the playwright showed promise for American theatre – mentioning specifically his mastery in creating female characters, the poetry of his dramatic idiom, the value of his subtexts and the disturbing dreamlike atmospheres of his plays – and that he was someone to watch in the future. Throughout 1950, another prestigious publication, Índice de artes y letras, devoted its attention to Williams in almost every one of its monthly issues. Starting with the London premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Olivier in 1949, the journal covered most new plays by (or remarkable productions of) Williams. The playwright’s trip to Hollywood to participate in the shooting of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire also received coverage. In December 1950, the journal informed its readers about the house he had bought in Florida and the premiere of The Rose Tattoo in                                                            

15 Some film could help, like Elia Kazan’s famous version of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. However, it was not shown in Spain until October 1956, more than five years after its US premiere. 16 Alfonso de Sayons, “El teatro de Tennessee Williams”, Ínsula, 15 December 1948, 8.

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Chicago. A 1951 issue, aside from indulging in gossip about the playwright’s fondness for a certain kind of T-shirt, announced that he was planning an incognito visit to Spain. In 1952, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos published “El teatro de Tennessee Williams”,17 in which J. López Clemente provides a panorama of his life and early plays and analyzes The Glass Menagerie in some depth. He points out that Williams’ drama can be termed “expressionistic”, grounding his assertion in the way that every element of a given play serves to express the playwright’s view rather than being deployed in the service of verisimilitude. López Clemente comes down a little hard on Summer and Smoke, however. He expatiates on Williams’ fascination with Hispanic (mostly Mexican) culture and establishes as major traits of his drama the psychological depth of characters, the prominence of the South, and the poetic breath that crosses it. A year later, in 1953, Revista devoted a great deal of attention to Williams’ visit to Barcelona.18 This time, however, the dramatist was said to be as vulgar as his plays (and his country); his last play, Camino Real, was, we are told, a flop because of its rambling nature. About Barcelona, it mentions that Williams compared the city to New Orleans and confessed to being fascinated with its Mediterranean character and its chaotic and bustling life. As it was, the information offered by the Spanish print media did not always present Williams in a favorable light. For instance, Ramona T. de Masip, reviewing the Broadway premiere of Camino Real in 1953 for the young and promising theatre journal Teatro, lamented its confusing structure and the little hope it offered its characters, confirming the unsuitability of Williams for Spanish audiences, who, in her view, needed instruction, as well as encouraging lessons, about life.19 Masip nonetheless acknowledges Williams as a substantial playwright, but only for limited circles of people who were properly prepared and intellectually strong. In doing so, Masip demonstrates that it was possible to step outside the pro- or anti-Williams factions (the former coincided with the most                                                            

17

J. López Clemente, “El teatro de Tennessee Williams”, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, XXIX (May 1952), 208-12. 18 Enrique Sordo, “Tennessee Williams”, Revista: Semanario de información, artes y letras, LXVII (July 1953), 23-29. 19 Ramona T. de Massip, “Un camino hacia la nada”, Teatro, VI (April 1953), 14.

  

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progressive, and generally the youngest critics,20 the latter with the more reactionary, usually older ones) and adopt a more ambivalent standpoint. She concedes that it is a good idea to have a teatro de cámara production of Williams every now and then (so as to be reassured that we were not missing much), but that Williams should be entirely confined to that theatrical milieu, at least as far as Spain was concerned. He was a phenomenon for the minorities, and needed to remain as such; any commercial venture of his work was sure to meet with disapprobation by the average theatre-goer. The fact that Williams was discussed relatively frequently in the Spanish press in those years does not mean that he was a well-known figure in Spain. True enough, readers were reminded of his existence every now and then, and, in the regrettable absence of productions which could serve that function, what was published about him served to promote his name. However, in 1952, in an article on American theatre, critic Arturo del Hoyo managed to keep Williams off the radar screen by not dedicating a single line to him in his essay “El teatro de los Estados Unidos”.21 Critic Antonio Rodríguez de León, in 1953, surveyed contemporary American drama and concluded that the four main figures were O’Neill, Rice, Saroyan and Sherwood. He did not even mention Williams (or Miller, for that matter, whose Death of a Salesman had been a sensation in Madrid and throughout the rest of Spain just a year before).22 The longest article about Williams throughout this whole period appeared in 1955, two years before his official debut on the                                                             20

Juan-Germán Schroeder was among the most vocal in denouncing that Williams remained, in 1951, exclusive territory of the amateur companies. See Juan-Germán Schroeder, “Enviad el inspector …”, Rumbos, LIII (October 1951), no page number. By 1952, our most distinguished mid-century playwright, Antonio Buero Vallejo, expressed admiration for Williams, especially The Glass Menagerie, but complained about the use of techniques borrowed from the cinema, quite inappropriately from his point of view. See Santiago Albertí, “Teatro y cine. Hablando de teatro con Antonio Buero Vallejo”, Revista: Semanario de información, artes y letras, XII (3 July 1952), no page number. The same accusation would be leveled against the other major American playwright of the mid-twentieth century, Arthur Miller. See José Manuel Dorrell, “Teatro cinematográfico”, Teatro, IX (September-October 1953), 53-54. 21 Arturo del Hoyo, “El teatro de los Estados Unidos”, Ínsula, 15 November 1952, 1112. 22 Antonio Rodríguez de León, “En el Teatro María Guerrero se estrenó anoche la obra de Saroyan ‘El momento de tu vida’” (“Last Night the Maria Guerrero Theatre Premiered Saroyan’s Play The Time of Your Life”), ABC, 12 March 1953, 31.

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mainstream Spanish stage. It was entitled “Poesía y realidad en el teatro de Tennessee Williams”23 and in it Enrique Sordo argues that poetry in the theatre does not have to be (and probably should not be) accomplished by means of wordy and grandiloquent speeches by the characters. For most critics and theatre-goers in Spain, this was the bar by which true literary drama was measured against merely entertaining plays. Language may be colloquial, as long as poetry was still achieved, and in Williams’ drama it often was (similar protestations had recently been made about Arthur Miller). The symbolism of Williams’ plays, which were realistic but not in a photographic sense, and the profound humanity of his characters coexisted with his use of the American vernacular. Comparing him with Lorca and Chekhov, Sordo points out that Williams is more interested in getting into the essence of his characters than in surface details. Considerably long, the article has time to review Williams’ female characters and analyze the clash between their yearnings and their bleak realities. The critic concludes that Williams’ drama illustrates a conflict at the heart of American society between the traditionally dominant classes and emerging groups which had traditionally been the victims of oppression and disenfranchisement. As we move closer to the moment of the first conventional production of Williams in Spain, the discussion of him and his plays in the print media became more intense.24 To begin with, Atlántico published in 1956 an article by Williams in Theatre Arts, “El mundo sin tiempo del teatro”.25 This was a translation of Williams’ “Concerning the Timeless World of a Play”, which he first published on 14 January 1951 in The New York Times as a commentary on The Rose Tattoo. Starting from a consideration of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (already very popular in Spain), Williams concludes that the                                                            

23

Enrique Sordo, “Poesía y realidad en el teatro de Tennessee Williams” (“Poetry and Reality in the Theatre of Tennessee Williams”), Teatro, XIV (January-February 1955), 5-8, 77. 24 The most important Williams event in Spain in 1956, however, was the appearance of his first Spanish translation: Verano y humo, subtitled El angel de piedra, in the theatre journal Teatro. 25 Tennessee Williams, “El mundo sin tiempo del teatro” (“Concerning the Timeless World of a Play”), Atlántico: Revista de cultura contemporánea, I (February 1956), 23-28. This journal was published by the US Embassy in Madrid and entirely devoted to American cultural affairs.

  

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most important goal of theatre is to suspend time so that we can concentrate for as long as a play lasts on a reality we could encounter just outside the theatre, but which we have neither the time nor the willingness to observe in detail or with critical distance. Time is the most important tool a playwright has at his disposal. Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, is according to Williams a man to whom we would be wary of devoting more than two minutes of our time outside a theatre; but plays offer us a world which stands still and in which, quoting Linda Loman, we can “pay attention”, since “attention must be paid” to it. Early in the essay, Williams mentions alcohol and narcotics as a way to put up with the artificiality of the world, in what seems an anticipation of future developments in the playwright’s life. The piece ends by insisting that it is not possible to write plays without reflecting, in one way or another, the passing of time. In his view, there cannot exist a more relevant topic. The Spain of 1957 was not that of the 1940s. The country was slowly recovering from years of attrition, and towards the end of the 1950s the Spanish economy enjoyed a steady recovery, which reached its height during the 1960s thanks in part to the developing tourist industry. The nation was also moving ahead in cultural terms, with universities largely leading the process. Still limited but also growing was the Spanish audience, which began demanding a different kind of theatre. The Pact of Madrid with the US government in 1953 ended the nation’s isolation and paved a path toward international legitimacy for the Spanish dictatorship (the first head of state to ever visit Franco’s Spain in an official capacity was President Eisenhower in 1959). As a consequence, Spain would be admitted into the UN in 1955. This context created a favorable climate for the importation of American cultural products. Spain began to consider the US as its major (and initially its only) international ally. Detente thus opened new channels for the importation of American plays, which soared dramatically from 1954 to the end of the decade. José Tamayo, the founder and director of the Lope de Vega company, had initiated a crusade against the mediocrity of Spanish theatrical life in the early 1950s, bringing to the major theatres the jewels of Spanish and worldwide classical theatre, including Greek and Renaissance plays, as well as indispensable contemporary playwrights, one of the most significant being Williams’ compatriot Arthur Miller.

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Critic Julio Coll had remarked in 1950 on how surprising it was that the plays the Spanish teatros de cámara were then offering were not necessarily daring or revolutionary, but plays that were box-office draws in the rest of the world. He exemplifies the argument precisely with The Glass Menagerie.26 In general terms, the play had been warmly received when it was mounted by the teatros de cámara. As early as 1950, Ángel Zúñiga, writing for La Vanguardia Española,27 deplored the play’s pessimism and nihilism and its lack of an uplifting theme (oddly, what Spanish audiences seemed to expect from serious drama) but added that, in comparison to the sensationalism that often characterizes Williams’ other plays, The Glass Menagerie was surprisingly subdued and restrained. What seems to save it for Zúñiga is the play’s poetic streak, not so readily observable in later plays by the American dramatist. He goes on to mention that it is still an early play, with a conspicuous influence by O’Neill, but which reveals a talent that he was in the danger of spoiling if he persisted in the kind of sensationalism displayed, for instance, in A Streetcar Named Desire. It was probably not by chance, then, that the first extended production of Williams in Spain was El zoo de cristal. It opened in August 1957 at the Eslava theatre in Madrid28 and inaugurated a series                                                            

26

See Gallén, El teatre a la ciutat de Barcelona, 189. Ángel Zúñiga, “TEATRO DE CÁMARA. - ‘El zoo de cristal’, de Tennessee Williams”, La Vanguardia Española 18 January 1950, 12. The patronizing tone regarding The Glass Menagerie marks a striking contrast with the attitude displayed by the same critic months later on the occasion of the Barcelona presentation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Uncompromisingly, he regarded it as melodramatic, vulgar, offensive, abject, unnecessarily scandalous, boring, empty and pretentious. Curiously enough, the play is subjected not only to theatrical analysis (and its lack of poetry much foregrounded), but also to moral scrutiny, leading Zúñiga to conclude that “[Williams] se olvida de que el teatro dramático debe ser una escuela de buenas costumbres” (“dramatic theatre must teach proper manners and customs”). “Perverts” who have clearly lost it and behave like animals were hardly what Spain needed, implicitly warning other companies that Williams was entirely unfit for anything but an occasional production like this. See Ángel Zúñiga, “COMEDIA. - ‘Un tranvía llamado Deseo’, de Tennessee Williams”, La Vanguardia Española, 9 May 1950, 20. It is hardly surprising that no regular production of A Streetcar Named Desire would be undertaken in Spain until 1961. 28 The company was headed by Pepita Serrador, an admired actress from Argentina, and her brother, Esteban Serrador - Argentinean actors and companies were often responsible for some of the best theatre that could be seen in Spain in those years. 27

  

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of productions which were to give the American playwright his rightful, albeit long-delayed, place within Spanish theatrical life. What is interesting about this production is how it toured the provinces for a few months before opening at Madrid, replicating an American play’s tryout runs before being brought to Broadway. Equally curious is that fact that these tryouts occurred in August, a month when many theatres were closed and most people were away on holiday. Fearful of the kind of reception that regular audiences in Madrid would offer to Williams, the company tried as much as possible to refine and polish the production through which they were to introduce Williams in Spain. Furthermore, and probably resulting from such fear, no theatre would allow the company to open the season with Williams’ play, so they had to do so before the season actually started in midSeptember. El zoo de cristal ran for barely a month at the Eslava, around fifty performances. While it is undeniably true that Williams’ debut in Spain was not a major sensation, at least it was not a flop. Something else deserves mentioning here. For a week before the play actually opened in Madrid, the company kept inserting a very significant advertisement in the most important newspapers: ¡Nada de personajes torturados por violentas pasiones ni caracteres histéricos con apariencias de normalidad! Es la historia humorística y sentimental de una pequeña familia, narrada con tal ternura que llega al fondo del corazón.29

No psychological turmoil or scandalous characters awaited the audience, only humor, sentimentality, tenderness and family values. Fearful that Williams’ salacious reputation would precede him, Pepita Serrador’s company tried to make it clear that there was nothing in El zoo de cristal of that uncompromising character with which Williams was credited. Some print media in Madrid also insisted that this was                                                            

29 “No character is here tortured by violent passions, and there is none who is a hysteric at bottom even if he passes as normal. This is the humorous and sentimental story of a small family, and it is narrated with such tenderness that it cannot fail but be deeply moving.” This quote, and others like it, kept appearing for over a week in early August 1957 in a section of the newspaper ABC that preceded the paper’s proper theatre section. In them, companies would publicize the shows they were performing by inserting phrases that they thought would attract audiences. What is key here is that the idea expressed in this and other quotes was being hammered into the minds of potential spectators of the play, thereby to a large extent conditioning their response towards it.

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not Williams’ most scandalous play, nor the most obsessively psychological. It was, in a word, safe. Repeatedly insisted upon was the fact that Williams was quite an irregular dramatist, the author of both good and not so good plays. In the Madrid newspaper ABC, the most important of the period, the characters of El zoo de cristal were confirmed to be “normal”, that is, not the degenerates that populate Williams’ later plays.30 Adapted by José María de Quinto and José Gordón, indispensable names in the history of the Spanish teatros de cámara, El zoo de cristal was described as being among the best plays written by Williams:31 tender, realistic, bitter, moving, ironic, poetic, quotidian, symbolic, complex and not as pessimistic as his other plays.32 Williams is to them the great playwright of the losers, the flawed, always sympathetic to human frailty. They confess to having tampered with the text in order to “salvar las diferencias psicológicas de nuestro público … acercándola a nuestras preferencias”.33 The play had been apparently stripped of anything offensive and shocking or whatever else censors could have objected to. They also referred to the play’s two Acts, which suggests that their tampering with the text went beyond merely making it more decorous and acceptable to Spanish audiences. Probably the magic-lantern slide announcing “‘Franco Triumphs’”34 in the original text was kept intact, as was perhaps the line “In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and                                                            

30

M.R., “La compañía de Pepita Serrador estrenó en el Eslava ‘El zoo de cristal’, de Tennessee Williams”, ABC, 24 August 1957, 35. 31 José Gordón and José María de Quinto, “Antecrítica de la comedia ‘El zoo de cristal’, que esta noche se estrenó en el Eslava” (“A Preview of the Comedy The Glass Menagerie, which Premiered Tonight at the Eslava Theatre”), ABC, 23 August 1957, 41. 32 Their words echoed Williams’ compatriot Arthur Miller’s, who wrote that The Glass Menagerie “in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it.” See Arthur Miller, “Tennessee Williams’ Legacy: An Eloquence and Amplitude of Feeling”, in Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000, ed. Steven R. Centola, New York: Penguin Books, 2001, 203. 33 Promotional quote, ABC, August 1957: “bridge the psychological distance with our audience, and make the play closer to our inclinations.” 34 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 178.

  

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confusion”; but no doubt the references to the bombing of Guernica were cut.35 Obviously, Franco did not tolerate references to the civil war that reflected badly on him, so the mere reference to the bombing would never have been permitted in a Spanish theatre. Over the following years, Spain saw major productions of Williams’ most significant plays: Camino Real, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Between 1957 and 1964, he went from being relatively ostracized to being celebrated as Madrid’s most-performed foreign playwright. Translations of his work were soon published. In 1959, a Catalan translation of The Glass Menagerie as Figuretes de vidre appeared in Quaderns de teatre, a journal published by the Agrupación Dramática de Barcelona. In 1960, El zoo de cristal was published by Alfil/Escelicer (though the actual translation dates from the early 1950s), as well as La gata sobre el tejado de zinc, also by Escelicer. A year later, Un tranvía llamado Deseo appeared in a collective volume of American plays by Aguilar, Teatro norteamericano contemporáneo, which also included plays by Miller, Wilder, Inge and others. Throughout the 1960s, and mainly in the inexpensive Alfil/Escelicer collection, a string of other Williams plays would follow.36 Knowledge of Williams’ fate in Spain informs us a great deal about Spain’s own theatre history, but it also shows us how his plays eventually surmounted that collective conspiracy in Spain that had silenced them for an entire decade. Williams’ integration into mainstream Spanish theatre and culture was long and hard in coming, aided by factors extraneous to the theatrical establishment itself. At the same time, and however careful we need to be in assessing their work, the teatros de cámara made it possible for such a beacon of American (and international) drama in the twentieth century to shine brightly in Spain and elsewhere.37 Spain would eventually experience                                                            

35

Ibid., 145, 145 and 179. In the 1950s, several of Williams’ plays had also been translated and published in Argentina. By 1951, Losada had already brought out Verano y humo and El zoológico de cristal (the Argentinean title is slightly different from that in Spain). Most productions by the Spanish teatros de cámara were based either on their own translations (often based on a French translation) or on these Argentinean books, which were available in Spain at the time. 37 Williams seems to agree. In an article published in Spain in 1989, he was quoted from an unmentioned source as saying about amateur and young people’s theatre groups: “Tal vez el 90% no conduzcan a ninguna parte … pero si los eliminamos 36

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another chapter in its relationship with Williams, a story that remains untold in theatre criticism but which would be indispensable to the larger narrative of Europe’s encounters with the American playwright.

                                                                                                                                imponiendo la pauta del conformismo - nadie en América será nunca realmente joven y nos quedaremos de pie en el punto muerto de la nada” (“Maybe 90% of them lead nowhere … but without them we will spread conformism, and nobody in America will ever really be young, and we would be standing in the deadlock of nothingness”). See Belén Gopegui, “Sueño, realidad y pesadilla de una sirena grotesca” (“Dream, Reality and Nightmare of a Grotesque Mermaid”), El public, LXVIII (May 1989), 2627.

  

   

Traveling alone in a 1st class wagon-lits compartment is one of the pleasantest things you can do in Europe. Tennessee Williams, notebook entry, Monday, 28 July 1952

 

   

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ON THE BULGARIAN STAGE: COLD WAR POLITICS AND POLITICS OF RECEPTION KORNELIA SLAVOVA An amusing thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago in the London dressing-room of a great English actor. The actor was receiving a visit from a star of the Bulgarian theatre. This visitor said to me, “You know, Streetcar Named Desire is being done in Moscow and Sophia now.” I told him I’d heard about that and had also heard that Blanche did not go mad over there. “She goes mad in Bulgaria,” he told me, “but not in Moscow.” And I thought to myself, “Those Moscow cats must have a lot on the ball to keep Blanche in her right mind.”1

Tennessee Williams has been one of the hottest names in the Soviet theatre world for a long time, but there have been few attempts to consider the ways in which his transatlantic reception was caught up in the Cold War politics of confrontation and containment. It is not accidental that one of the most divisive ideologies of the twentiethcentury – the Iron Curtain – is also etymologically related to the world of the theatre. As a public arena, the stage is embedded in the real context of political and social conflicts, functioning as a site where various ideologies are both established and contested. The study of Tennessee Williams’ disruptive presence in Communist Bulgaria – one of the most loyal partners of the Soviet bloc – can provide an interesting, behind-the-Curtain look at the complexities in the                                                             1

Tennessee Williams, “We Are Dissenters Now”, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 163.

 

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intercultural theatre exchange that was conducted between East and West during and after the Cold War. On the whole, the American playwright has enjoyed unwavering enthusiasm among Bulgarian spectators and theatre-makers, as demonstrated by the many productions and revivals of fourteen Williams plays over the last fifty years. Yet, the politics of interpreting his drama in Bulgaria has often been marked by the realpolitik of suspicion and rivalry that has defined Soviet and US relations since World War II. The history of the productions reveals that Williams’ journey to the Bulgarian audience was winding and uneven. Starting as late as 1961, it was influenced by Bulgaria’s national theatrical tradition, as well as by its historical context and acting methods, but especially by its Cold War culture and Communist ideology, both of which played a significant role in controlling interpretative procedures and evaluative modes. In chronological terms, three major patterns in appropriating Williams for the Bulgarian stage can be observed: firstly, the 1960s’ productions were strictly filtered through the dominant ideological code, emphasizing the representation of social problems and class conflicts; secondly, in the 1970s and 1980s theatre-makers focused on aesthetic problems, whereas thirdly, after the fall of Communism, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. In an attempt to radically reject Communist ideology and clichés, all previously suppressed taboos and differences exploded with a vengeance to meet the growing demands of the country’s commercial theatre. In order to trace these paradigms, I have opted for a combination of historical and production analysis rather than text-based analysis, relying on theatre critics’ reviews, program notes for specific performances, commentaries in the Bulgarian media, as well as my personal observations. The theoretical premises for this study include intercultural performance theory, drama reception theory and historiography. Theatre as social practice is always embedded in structures of power and knowledge, often imposing particular values and norms or masking inequalities as discussed by theatre theorists such as Susan Bennett, Patrice Pavis, Marco de Marinis, Fernando de Toro and especially those coming from the postcolonial turn in performance studies. In their article “Toward a Topography of CrossCultural Theatre Praxis”, Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert propose a detailed typology of intercultural theatre (subcategorized into

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transcultural, intracultural and extracultural) in order to accentuate power relations and issues of agency in cross-cultural transfer. Although I fully accept the authors’ insistence that theatre practice should be “critically situated within a historicized and politicized configuration”,2 the two modes they propose for conducting intercultural theatre (in its extracultural form) – collaborative and imperialistic – cannot be applied unproblematically in discussing the presentation of Western drama in Communist Eastern Europe for at least two reasons. First, the latter process involves both superstructural and institutional politics of cultural negotiation, as well as politics of inequality and dominance, therefore collapsing the neat and tidy separation of the two modes; and second, Soviet bloc countries do not fit in the traditional imperialist scheme associated with the West. For the purpose of my analysis, I will rather draw upon Patrice Pavis’ hourglass model of interculturalism in the theatre, where the flow between the different contexts and traditions is organized through a “filtering system”. More precisely, I will rely on his concepts of “reception-adaptors” and “levels of readability”, narrative, thematic, formal, ideological, socio-cultural and others. As Pavis explains, some of the levels of readability tend to be more influential than others. For example, the ideological and socio-cultural levels of interpretation usually control the lower levels of interpretation (related to genre, theme, form, style, etc.), thus turning the receiving dominant ideology into “a normative model of sociological or cultural codification”.3 In his later elaboration of the hourglass model, Pavis provides further explanation of the intervening role of the receptionadaptors: They are subject to the institutional imperatives of the target culture, which tends to preserve from the foreign culture whatever suits its expectations, reinforces its convictions, and renews it in adapting to the restraints of actual production. In this sense, every intercultural

                                                            2

Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis”, The Drama Review, XLVI/3 (Fall 2002), 31. 3 Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Cultures, London: Routledge, 1992, 1718.

  

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By tracing the ideological filters in the intercultural transfer of Williams’ theatre into a highly politicized setting, we can ask many significant questions: how did the American playwright fare inside the Communist bloc? What limits and limitations have been imposed on his art by the ideological and socio-cultural adaptors at the Bulgarian end of the hourglass, and to what effect? What elements from his drama have been recognized as relevant for the receiving culture, and what meanings have they been given? How do the symbols of his fictional universe correlate with the symbols of Communist reality? The ideological turn in the 1960s Orfei sliza v ada (Orpheus Descending) was Williams’ first play presented in Bulgaria, staged simultaneously in 1961 by three companies in the country (Trudov Front Theatre in Sofia, Bourgas Theatre and Pleven Theatre). The choice of this particular play was not accidental: the Bulgarian premiere took place right after the 1961 Soviet premiere at the Moscow Theatre, which initiated Williams’ troubled journey with Russian audiences. The belated admission of Williams into the Soviet theatrical repertoire can be attributed primarily to the content of his drama, dismissed by Soviet critics in the late 1940s as “vulgarnyi”, “dekadentskyi” and “pornograficheskyi”.5 Orpheus Descending turned out to be the dramatist’s                                                            

4

Patrice Pavis, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?”, in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis, London: Routledge, 1996, 16. 5 I. Lapitsky, “Krizis amerikanskogo burzhuaznogo teatra” (“The Crisis of American Bourgeois Theatre”), Teatr, IV (April 1950), 101: “vulgar”, “decadent” and “pornographic”. Lapitsky, observer of the Anglo-American literary scene, criticizes the Marshallization of Europe and the conquering of the London stage by American plays: “Under the Marshall Plan, the London stage is literally inundated by American plays, the heroes of which are gangsters, detectives and prostitutes. A major uproar was provoked in London at the end of last year by the production of T. Williams’ pornographic A Streetcar Named Desire …” (quoted in David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 64). The Glass Menagerie also came under attack for lacking social critique. M. Morozov argues that “v piese ni slova podlinnogo sotsialnogo protesta” (“no word of genuine social protest is uttered in the play”). See his essay “Dve Kulturi” (“Two Cultures”), Teatr, II (November 1947), 62. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Russian and Bulgarian in this article are my own.

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admission ticket in the Soviet world because it exposed racism and religious bigotry in the US, as well as introducing “the painful and complex subject of the Black in the American South”.6 The 1961 contemporaneous “discovery” of Williams in both countries reveals a long-lasting tendency in Bulgarian cultural politics during the 1950s and 1960s to emulate Soviet models in all spheres, especially when it came to risky endeavors such as importing cultural products from the West. The green light from Moscow was twice secured by the fact that the Bulgarian text of Orpheus Descending was not translated from the original but was safely re-translated from the Russian version.7 In 1968, two other Williams plays premiered on the Bulgarian stage: Стъклената менажерия (The Glass Menagerie) at the Sofia Youth Theatre, and Трамвай „Желание” (A Streetcar Named Desire) at the Sofia Army Theatre. Again both were produced right after their Soviet premieres, though considerately lagging behind the productions in Rome, London, Paris and other cities around the world.8 These early productions were meant to familiarize the Bulgarian audience with the art of the American playwright, but they also functioned as an instrument of Communist propaganda by emphasizing social problems in American society, such as the tragic isolation of the individual and his loneliness and failure to adapt to society, and by attacking “the decadence of capitalism” and the “moral and spiritual degradation” of the United States. This is not surprising as the 1960s were still haunted by the specter of the Cold War (despite the thaw in the late 1950s and early 1960s under Khruschev), and the struggle for cultural supremacy had penetrated all spheres, including theatre. The Communist counter-strategy of fighting American politics of containment on the terrain of theatre practices, subsidized by the state, was twofold: a combination of enforced Socialist optimism and censorship. The first level of ideological screening functioned through special state committees, which determined what plays could be                                                             6

Maurice Friedberg, “The US in the USSR: American Literature through the Filter of Recent Soviet Publishing and Criticism”, Critical Inquiry, II/3 (Spring 1976), 535. 7 Published in Innostrannaya literature, VII (Spring 1960), 26-122. 8 Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire by leading theatre directors, such as Luchino Visconti (Rome, 1949), Ingmar Bergman (Gothenburg, 1949), Laurence Olivier (London, 1949), Jean Cocteau (Paris, 1949) and others, are discussed in Philip C. Kolin’s Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  

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translated and how. Works were usually chosen for their social material and for the potential they had to produce social engagement. For example, both in Bulgaria and in the Soviet Union, American playwrights such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Albert Maltz had been introduced much earlier than Williams because their social messages were crystal clear and their styles followed that of dramatic realism.9 The second ideological filter operated through the imposition of a rigid repertoire system: Western drama was restricted to only five percent of a company’s repertoire (usually social-protest drama), leaving very little room for the individual philosophical and aesthetic preferences of stage directors and actors. And the final stage of state regulation involved the control over the pre-performance horizon of expectations and postperformance interpretations by theatre critics and reviewers, who often acted as inspectors of ideology. The official policy of the Communist state is best revealed in Gotcho Gotchev’s 1949 manifesto-like article, where, in referring to Lenin and the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist party, he lists a catalogue of objectives for the theatre: da sochi na trudeshtete se tehnite priyateli I vragove, da podpomaga borbata za mir kato ostro izoblichava podpalvachite na nova imperialisticheska voina, da podkrepya razvitieto na realistichnata bulgarska drama, sledvaiki bogatite traditsii i primeri na suvetskoto teatralno izkustvo i marksistko-leninskata estetika; kum aktivno uchastie v borbata na ideologicheskiya front za razgromyavane na vrazheskata kapitalisticheska ideologiya kakto i nasurchavane na progresivno-ideen repertoar i vulnuvashti emotsionalni spektakli, koito da otrazyavat pravdivo zhivota v negovoto revulyutsiono 10 razvitie ot pozitziite na bolshevishkata partiinost.

                                                           

9

Detailed evidence is given in Y.N. Zasursky, Amerikanskaya literature XX veka (Twentieth-century American Literature), Moscow: Izdatelstvo Moskovkogo universiteta, 1966. 10 Gotcho Gotchev, “Problemi na bulgarskiya teatr” (“The Problems of Bulgarian Theatre”), Izkustvo, IV (1949), 307-15: “to reveal to the working people their friends and enemies; to help the struggle for peace by exposing the warmongers who are preparing a new imperialist war; to support the development of Bulgaria’s Social Realist drama, one based on the rich traditions and models of the Soviet theatre and Marxist-Leninist aesthetics; to participate actively in the ideological struggle to crush the enemy’s Capitalist ideology; and to encourage a progressivist repertoire and

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This highly politicized agenda is no surprise, as all arts and media were harnessed by the ideological apparatus of the totalitarian regime; what is surprising, however, is that Williams’ theatre was used by Communist propaganda as an instrument for legitimizing this very totalitarian ideology. During the Cold War, the relationship between the theatre and the Communist regime was not an easy one: the former had the mission to educate literate spectators and cultivate their tastes as proper builders of Socialism,11 but in many ways that meant spectators who had been properly educated in the ideological sense. Most theatre reviews and archival materials related to the 1960s performances reveal a similar commitment to a policy of containing Capitalist values and lifestyle. For example, one reviewer of the 1961 Bourgas Theatre production of Orpheus Descending criticizes the director for taking too many liberties by rearranging scenes, cutting the lynching scene, erasing the figure of Uncle Pleasant – failing, in short, to reveal the “fanatizma, hishtnichestvoto i ogranichenostta na amerikanskoto obshtestvo”.12 Another review of the 1969 Youth Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie emphasizes the playwright’s recurrent social-psychological motifs (such as “otchuzhdenieto, pulniyat kruh na burzhoaznoto semeistvo, staromodnata romanticheska vyara v nyakakva abstraktna lyubov mezhdu horata”), lauding Williams’ representation of “mizeriyata na obiknovenite hora” during the Great Depression in the US and his “prisuda nad tova bezchovechno obshtestvo”.13 Similar interpretations of the play in strictly class terms – at the expense of its lyricism and psychological depth – can be found in Soviet sources too, with almost                                                                                                                                 exciting emotional performances that truthfully reflect life in its revolutionary development along Bolshevik Party lines.” 11 Theatre was not an elitist art form in the Soviet bloc countries, as it was in the US. Resources were frequently invested into educating the public about the theatre. Students and workers visited theatres in a collective manner as part of organized events for factories, institutions and high schools; special programs even existed for young theatre-goers. 12 Vladimir Polyanov, “Orfei v Ada” (“Orpheus Descending”), Teatr, X (1961), 38: “the fanatic, predatory and philistine nature of American society.” 13 Vladimir Karakashev, “Stuklenata Menazheriya v Narodniya Teatr za Mladezhta” (“The Glass Menagerie at the People’s Youth Theatre”), Plamuk, V (1969), 93-94: “alienation, the total disintegration of the bourgeois family, old-fashioned romantic belief in some abstract love among people”, “the misery of ordinary people” and “verdict on this inhumane society”.

  

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identical wording. For example, the Soviet critic Y.N. Zasursky praises The Glass Menagerie for depicting “tragediya millionov prostih amerikantsev, kotoryue vospitani na goryachem vozduhe i slabyi narkotik amerikanskoi mechtui”.14 During the 1960s, the most popular Williams play in Bulgaria was A Streetcar Named Desire, staged for the first time at the Sofia Army Theatre in 1968 (under the direction of Elka Mihaylova and starring some of the best Bulgarian actors). Critical discourses surrounding the play show a strong ideological bias, connecting Stanley Kowalski’s Polish descent with class and ethnic conflicts to “amerikanskata dushevna pustinya” and blaming the American lifestyle for turning him “mashina za igra na karti i kegelban, za piene na uiski i bira”.15 Along similar lines (and, naturally, along Party lines), some critics present Blanche as “zhertva na edin moralno bankrutiral svyat, koito prevrushta horata v zverove”16 – totally ignoring the conflict between Blanche and Stanley, as well as Williams’ favorite pattern of pairing opposite characters – in order to reframe the play as an epic battle between the common man and American society. The ways in which the state apparatus codified and controlled signification on and off stage are highly visible in the theatre program of the 1968 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. At its centre is an essay, enigmatically entitled “Kruv i gortchitsa” (“Blood and Mustard”), a reference to the playwright’s recollections of the ugly houses in the poor St Louis neighborhood, which had the color of dried-up blood and mustard. The essay was meant to introduce spectators to what the critic describes as Williams’ exploration of “t. nar. amerikanski nachin na zhivot, za da razkrie urodlivoto litse na suvremenniya burzhoazen svyat, koito osakatyava i zadushava naisvetlite porivi na choveka”.17 The author, Grigor Pavlov, shows                                                            

14 Y.N. Zasursky, Istoriya amerikanskoi literatury (History of American Literature) (Мoscow, no publisher, 1971), 271: “the tragedy of millions of ordinary Americans who are brought up on hot air and the weak narcotic of the American Dream.” 15 Diana Balkanska, “Tramvai Zhelanie” (“A Streetcar Named Desire”), Srednoshkolkso zname, XIX (February 1969), 22: “America’s spiritual wasteland” and “into a machine for playing cards, going bowling, and drinking whisky and beer”. 16 Lada Paneva, “Tramvai Zhelanie”, Narodna Kultura (January 1969), sec. 2, 3: “victim of a morally bankrupt world, which has turned humans into beasts.” 17 Grigor Pavlov, Programa na Tramvai Zhelanie (Theatre Program: A Streetcar Named Desire), Sofia: Army Theatre, 1968, 2: “the so-called American way of life, revealing the ugly face of the contemporary bourgeois world that cripples and stifles human aspirations.”

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sympathy for both Blanche (victimized by the “razrushitelni sili” in America) and her victimizer Stanley; he attributes the latter’s “zhivotinska brutalnost” to his class status of “na otchuzhdeniya i klasovo neosuznat rabotnik, pokvaren ot burzhoaziyata”, directly quoting Marx’s explanation about the conditions of alienated labor under capitalism “kudeto pechalbata e krainata tsel i rabotnicheskata klasa e svedena samo do izpulnenie na zhivotinskite si funktsii – yadene, piene i polov akt”.18 The victim figure was archetypal in Communist interpretations of the West because it offered both a convenient position to expose the forces of evil (the Capitalist system exploiting its victims) and an entry point for the working-class audience to identify with their proletarian brothers across the Atlantic. Ironically, victimhood and exploitation were not seen as problems of the totalitarian state because sacrificial logic was an inherent part of the rationale of the Communist system, where all people were supposedly working-class heroes. By framing the play in the discourse of victimization, it is additionally implied that humanism is impossible in an inhumane world – a favorite mantra of Communist propaganda.19 What is more, Williams is accused of “abstrakten burzhoazen humanizum” as he is incapable of overcoming his class bias and “da otkrie tezi obstestveni sili v suvremennoto amerikansko obshestvo, koito rano ili kusno, shte donesat izbavlenie i na negovite tragichni i razdvoeni choveshki sushtestva”.20 This is yet another ideological cliché, often used in approaching Western writers whose criticism of Capitalism was considered appropriate, but from an inappropriate position.                                                             18

Pavlov, Programa, 3: “brutal social forces”, “animal brutality”, “a typical alienated worker who has no class conscience as he has already been corrupted by the bourgeoisie” and “where profit is the ultimate end, and working-class people are reduced to performing the animalist functions of eating, drinking, and having sex”. 19 Williams’ passionate humanism had nothing to do with the empty ideological cliché. For example, Irene Shaland attributes the popularity of the American playwright among the Soviet spectators precisely to his acknowledgment of “people’s eternal need for one another”. See her Tennessee Williams on the Soviet Stage, Lanham, MD, and London: University Press of America, 1987, 18. 20 Pavlov, Programa, 6: “abstract bourgeois humanism” and “finding those forces in contemporary American society, which sooner or later will bring salvation to its tragic and split human beings”.

  

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The essay on Williams ends optimistically, however, prophesying with zest and hyperbole that “No edin den, kogato tsyaloto chovechestvo se otursi ot kapitalisticheskata plesen, budnite pokoleniya shte gledat na negovoto poetichno nasledstvo kato na gnevno proklyatie, zakleimili nespravedliviya burzhoazen svyat”.21 The ideological rant is visually reinforced by seventeen pictures included in the program notes. These paratextual elements are not photos from the performance itself but lithographs and paintings by left-wing Social Realist artists in America from the 1930s to the 1950s that depict unrelated images of police brutality and poverty, as well as abstract images bearing titles such as “American tragedy” and “We want peace”.22 Having no relation whatsoever to the play, they simply trigger the audience’s free associations with helplessness, entrapment and the failure of the American Dream. Bulgarian social-cultural adapters thus reduced A Streetcar Named Desire to a few thematic layers translated into the language of ideologemes, appropriated and domesticated for the prevailing expectations of the proletarian audience and the dominant Communist ideology. Similar encoding and decoding of the playwright’s messages in terms of the crisis of Capitalism can be found in all popular and academic reviews in the 1960s.23 Soviet criticism follows the same interpretative model. For example, the entry on Williams in Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya describes his drama as revealing “glubokii moralnui krizis v amerikanskom obshtestve”, but it is “neizmenno omracheni biologizma, sensatsionnosti i zakonyi teatra zhestokosti i absurda”.24 Although the entry fails to explain why                                                             21

Ibid., 7: “one day, when all humanity finally gets rid of the Capitalist fungus, future generations will look at his poetic legacy as an angry curse on the injustice of the bourgeois world.” 22 The most prominent artists include Jack Levin, Philip Evergood, Dong Kingman, Andrew Whyte and Ben Shahn. 23 See Georgi Boyadzhiev, “Krizata v kapitalisticheskiya teatr” (“The Crisis in Capitalist Theatre”), Teatr, III (1961), 87-88; Todor Kirov, “The Drift of Talent in American Drama”, Annuaire de L’Universite dé Sofia LX (1966), 485-99; Atanas Natev, “Amerikanskata mechta: Miller, Williams, Albee” (“The American Dream: Miller, Williams, and Albee”), Teatr, I (1965), 15-21; and Georgi Zlobin, “Amerikanskiat anti-teatr” (“The American Anti-Theatre”), Teatr, III (1969), 48-52. 24 Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya (An Abridged Literary Encyclopaedia), Moscow: Izdatelstvo Sovetsie Entsiklopedii, 1972, VII, 748: “the profound moral crisis in American society” and “invariably marred with biologism, sensationalism, and the laws of the Theatres of Cruelty and of the Absurd”.

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Williams’ plays should be aligned with those of the Theatre of Cruelty and of the Theatre of the Absurd, it is clear in its affront to their having deviated from the principles of Social Realism championed at that time. In fact, many Bulgarian and Soviet critics believed that Williams’ method of blending fantasy and realism partially ruined the success of his drama. For example, Zasursky speculates that, because of its content, A Streetcar Named Desire might have become “drama visokogo realizma takih kak Lisichki na Lillian Hellman”, but the dramatist “isportil piesu, vklyuchaya stzenui s sliskom mnogo yavnoi seksualnosti i poetizuruya mir sashol s vetrom”.25 Clearly, the critical discourses that have framed the initial reception of Williams in the Soviet world are bifurcated: they tend to praise his depiction of social injustice (“strashnaya vlast deneg”, “ekonomicheskie lisheniya”, “anti-chyernui predrassudok” and “holodnost burzoaznii tzivilizatzii”), while simultaneously accusing him of having committed at least seven sins (“chrezmernaya ozabochenost seksa”, “netzenzurnaya leksika”, “sotzialnaya slepota”, “ne-realisticheskyi metod i eklektizm”, “biologizm”, “sensatsionnost” and “sklonnost k otritzatelnogo i razrushitelnogo”).26 The rhetoric of crisis (political, social, moral, emotional and other) was a favorite leitmotif in the Soviet criticism of the Western world, but it also featured prominently in the American criticism of the Soviets themselves. For example, in his exploration of the Cold War as a cultural agon between two imperial ideologies, David Caute argues that the struggle for cultural supremacy produced strategies of containment and distortion on both sides, as “Western Cold War                                                             25

Zasursky, Istoriya, 273: “a drama of high realism – such as Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes” and “spoiled the play by including scenes far too sexually explicit and by poeticizing a world gone with the wind”. 26 Ibid., 270-78: “the frightening power of money”, “economic deprivation”, “antiBlack prejudice”, “the coldness of bourgeois civilization”, “excessive preoccupation with sex”, “obscene language”, “social blindness”, “non-realistic method and eclecticism”, “biologism”, “sensationalism” and “a penchant for the negative and the destructive”. M.M. Koroneva harbors a similar dual attitude of appreciating Williams’ yearning for justice, while accusing him for “nesposobnyi priznat polozhitelnogo v zhizni, i poetomu, podchyorkivaet degradatsii”, or “failing to recognize the positive in life, and therefore emphasizing only degradation”. See her “Strasti po Tennessi Wiliams” (“Passions for Tennessee Williams”), in Problemy literatury S. Sh. A. XX veka (Problems of Twentieth-century American Literature), eds M.O. Mendelson, A.N. Nikoluynkin and R.M. Samarin, Мoscow: Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1970, 13.

  

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cultural criticism resembled Stalinist airbrushing in reverse”.27 Along similar lines, theatre historian Bruce McConachie claims in his study American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War that the metaphor of containment (structured around the contrast between “inside” and “outside”) was a routine figure in American mainstream theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, employed to control fears of the enemy within and without.28 Obviously, in those years political and social reality was strictly filtered through the lens of the Cold War; therefore, its impact could hardly be ignored in the theatre. Both in the Soviet world and in the West, the politics of “containing the enemy” had become the “normative model of social and cultural codification” in Pavisian terms, producing the highly politicized and ideologized critical assessments of Williams just mentioned. The 1960s critical response to Williams’ drama in Bulgaria was the product of specific circumstances and deliberate political agendas, yet it triggered unexpected consequences and paradoxical effects. Although a Soviet-style theatre was ideologically and financially supported in Bulgaria, in direct opposition to the ideals and values of corporate America, Williams’ theatre did not entirely fall prey to this anti-American sentiment. The state’s commitment to financing public education and raising literacy rates, thereby “containing” the enemy and reinforcing proletarian art, actually worked to increase Williams’ popularity among Bulgarian audience. That commitment was based on an ideological censorship that more often than not fueled the public’s hunger for autonomy than it taught them to respect what the Party deemed “unhealthy” for the national diet (for instance, everything in Williams’ works that had to do with sex, non-social violence, existentialism, consumerism and popular culture). Resentment, following the principle that what was forbidden was to be most desired, grew over time. Within this context of economic deficit and political constraint, any neon sign advertising American products that were used on stage in a Williams play to denote the evils of its Capitalist consumer culture soon began to signify another American export, the “super-sign” of freedom.                                                             27

Caute, The Dancer Defects, 66. Bruce McConachie, American Theatre in the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. More precisely, he discusses three archetypal figures of containment, such as “the Empty Boy”, “the Family Circle” and “the Fragmented Hero”. 28

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Paradoxically, while Williams’ works often suggest helplessness and despair, they also induced an unknown sense of freedom among Bulgarian audiences – a freedom from norms and institutions, from emotional control and from state-sanctioned dogma that preached collective goals were more valuable than individual desires. The neurotic behavior, the loneliness and frustration of his characters, all of which were meant to scandalize Bulgarian spectators, inevitably attracted them as potential antidotes to the tyranny of enforced collective optimism. The norms of political prudery and anesthesia, which once protected the spectators’ sensitivity, yielded to the raw passions of Williams’ characters. Ironically, the very weapon of Communist indoctrination – the ideological lens, through which Western reality and art had been projected – had backfired, deforming but also transforming the signification chain, disrupting the very process of meaning-making on and off the stage, and eventually turning established meanings upside down. The aesthetic turn in the late 1970s and the 1980s In the 1970s, there were few new productions of Williams’ plays, as Bulgarian theatre-makers began turning their attention to other American playwrights, in particular Edward Albee. However, the 1980s saw the explosion of his drama on the Bulgarian stage as a new play opened every year: Kotka vurhu goresht tenekien pokriv (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Kamino real (Camino Real), Period na adaptatsiya (Period of Adjustment), Tatuiranata roza (The Rose Tattoo), Chudesna nedelya za Krev kyor (A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur). There were also many revivals of Stuklenata menazheriya (The Glass Managerie) and Tramvai zhelanie (A Streetcar Named Desire).29 The renewed interest in Williams was fueled by the opening up of Soviet politics and culture, which, after the long freeze under Brezhnev, had started changing just before and during Gorbachev’s era of glasnost and perestroika. In the 1980s, Williams was the hottest ticket on the                                                             29

The most popular Williams play in the 1980s was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, produced in 1981 by the National Theatre Company (it ran for seven seasons), as well as by the Drama Academy Theatre (1979), Stara Zagora Theatre (1981), Yambol Theatre (1983), Silistra Theatre (1985) and Shumen Theatre (1986). Other prominent productions included Camino Real (Drama Academy Theatre, 1984), Period of Adjustment (Haskovo Theatre, 1984), The Rose Tattoo (Rousse Theatre, 1986) and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Theatre 199 in Sofia, 1985).

  

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Soviet stage, and the most celebrated Russian directors competed to produce his plays.30 The fashions on the Bulgarian cultural scene were also rapidly changing: the previous state agenda for the theatre to enlighten, rather than to entertain, had been abandoned, and aesthetic pleasure was rehabilitated. This transformation in the political and cultural climate brought about changes in the public perception of Williams as well. In the 1980s, the critical discussions of his plays focused more on his innovative techniques, the plasticity of his theatre, the ascription of his plays to specific genres, his plays’ philosophical issues and, as you might expect, sexual content. A cursory look at the popular and theatre critics’ reviews of the four new 1980s productions of The Glass Menagerie reveals that interpretations are centered on the playwright’s “mnogoplastova drama, kato ne natrapva svoite mneniya, a gi vnushava chrez psihologicheskite harakteri”.31 The younger generation of Bulgarian directors and actors sought alternative trajectories to Williams beyond the ideologically charged approaches. In the 1980s, some directors established a long lasting connection between their own aesthetic preferences and the signature method of the American dramatist. One example is Zdravko Mitkov, who directed three Williams plays based on his own translations. Innovation came through his experimentation with alternative methods of acting (as in the case with the production of The Rose Tattoo in 1987 at Rousse Theatre by the visiting American director Jonathan Bolt), as well as through his bold decisions concerning costumes and scenic design.32 During the 1980s, both popular and academic criticism unanimously judged Williams’ theatre by artistic                                                            

30 The productions of Summer and Smoke by Anatoly Efros, The Rose Tatoo by Lev Dodin and The Glass Menagerie by Genrietta Yanovskaya are discussed in Olga Bugrova’s piece, “Tennessee Williams à la Russe”, Moscow Time, 26 March 2001, sec. 3, 3. See also Serge Schmemann, “The Russian Theatre Goers Take Tennessee Williams to their Hearts”, The New York Times, 21 June 1982, 13. 31 Kiril Kostov, “Otkaz ot teatralnostta” (“Rejected Theatricality”), Teatr, III (1980), 20-23: “multi-layered drama, psychological characterization, and power to suggest rather than impose.” See also Svetla Beneva, “V ochakvane na zritelite” (“Anticipating Spectators”), Teatr, VIII (1987), 25-28. 32 For example, Encho Halachev’s production of Camino Real at the Drama Academy Theatre was praised by Orlin Stefanov for its “kaleidoscopic play with colors, experimental work and free associations, as well as its 112 brilliant costumes”. See his “Sleda I spomen ot spektakula” (“Traces and Memories from the Performance”), Izkustvo, II (1987), 6-7.

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aesthetics and taste, rather than by political protocols or moral standards, and no longer recast the many plays’ psychological and sexual issues as mere social problems in order to placate the censors. One of the best examples to illustrate the aesthetic shift is the 1977 Bourgas Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which managed to express Williams’ symbolism of despair against the background of the empty symbols of optimism of developed Socialism. The performance paid special attention to symbolic objects, gestures and body language, as well as to acoustic and visual effects. The director (Krassimir Spasov) and the scenic designer (Chaika Petrousheva), who worked together on several Williams plays, created a rather sophisticated visual scheme that translated for the audience what could not be said through words under existing conventions. The brilliant set, costumes, lighting and music all functioned in a coherent semiotic system, complementing the dialogue rather than spelling out social messages. For example, when designing the set for A Streetcar Named Desire, the scenic designer took the creative license of transforming the dilapidated New Orleans building into something quite different. The interior of the Kowalski apartment was very similar to the one described in the stage directions, but the set, together with the furniture props, was embedded inside a larger structure of a streetcar depot. With its arched ceiling and ancient clock suspended on two chains, this final stop of the streetcar resembled an old-fashioned railway station – full of the “raffish charm” Williams insists on in his sketching of the set. From the very beginning, this scenic transformation suggested that, no matter how many stops Blanche rides on the streetcar “Desire”, she is always already doomed to get off at “Elysian Fields”. Beautiful Dreams are nothing but nonexistent stops along the inexorable route of “Desire”. The same director and scenic designer used a similar technique in staging The Glass Menagerie a few years later by transforming the stage into a cinematographic studio, with its floor covered with dusty reel-boxes, an old camera and lighting equipment. These symbolic objects remained present on stage as a visual reminder of Tom’s passion for the movies, although the light is dimmed on them when Amanda and Laura appear. The cinematographic equipment created the impression that the narrator is playing back in his mind moving pictures from his former life with mother and sister. By presenting   

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Tom’s recollections as fragments of an old feature film, the performance achieved a similar effect to that of the gauze curtains, behind which Williams presents some of the illusory reality, staged and managed by Tom. In the Bulgarian production, Tom is still master of illusion-making, but the production created further associations with a movie director, who relies on cinematic tricks. These more complex interpretations of theatre-makers and critics signal a new aesthetics-oriented approach to Williams’ works – received now with less political alertness and more inspiration for poetic beauty and truth. There was still emphasis on the themes of loss and decay, failed love and lack of communication, which form a kind of negative hermeneutics, yet the themes were no longer interpreted as a denunciation of Capitalism but rather as a covert experiment by the directors to smuggle in new dramatic styles. The 1960s ideological clichés had given way to more allegorical and poetical interpretations, with theatre-makers focusing on the need to probe the unconscious for clues to our neuroses and our sexual desire. Issues related to sexuality and homosexuality were still toned down by the Communist rhetoric of pseudo-prudery and gender equality, however. Yet the dominant ideological code was gradually producing multiple double codes: viewers learned to read what was said between the lines, and although the new symbolic language was still talking about the crushed dreams of the bourgeois world, it was also, by implication, pointing to the failure of Communist utopia as well. The post-Soviet/Postmodern turn in the 1990s After the collapse of Communism, theatres in Bulgaria were liberated from the oppressive political control, and theatre-makers were fueled by the desire to make up for what had been forbidden them for over forty years and to catch up with the latest developments in Western theatre practice. The cultural and social scene after 1989 was marked by painful negations of the Soviet past and a radical explosion of differences in Bulgarian society, social, generational, gender, ideological and aesthetic. Despite the severe financial problems, the 1990s were pregnant with experimentation. The Bulgarian stage was dominated by parody, derision, punning, eccentricity of sense and vision, as well as by new theatrical forms: from classical text-based theatre to visual histrionics, from melodrama to rock opera, from Surrealism to Postmodernism.

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In this context of turbulent political and cultural changes and in addition to several regularly revived plays, five new Williams plays premiered on the Bulgarian stage: Sladkata ptitza na mladostta (Sweet Bird of Youth; Plovdiv Theatre, 1999), Noshta na iguanata (The Night of the Iguana; Off the Canal Theatre, Sofia, 1991), Lyato i dim (Summer and Smoke; Sofia Theatre, 1995), Kostyum za leten hotel (Clothes for a Summer Hotel; Plovdiv Theatre, 1998) and Zemno Tzarstvo (Kingdom of Earth; Haskovo Theatre, 2001).33 In the postCommunist transition, the interest shifted toward Williams’ representation of the body and its eroticization (at times presented on stage in vulgar and reductive forms), toward a greater emphasis on physicality, nudity, sexuality and the explosion of suppressed passions. Hidden meanings were now made explicit. The postCommunist atmosphere of eclecticism, random choice and inhibition encouraged a greater freedom in interpretations in order to shock or seduce the audience. To illustrate the more frivolous postmodern fashion in interpretations, we need only to look at the 1993 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Sofia Army Theatre, directed by Nikolai Lambrev. Despite Williams’ insistence in the “Notes for the Designer” on the use of pale colors and lyrical atmosphere, the set (designed by Nina Pashova) featured a solid black backdrop and furniture in dark or dull metallic colors, making the stage look like the interior of a prison cell more than the home of the Delta’s wealthiest cotton planter. Some symbolically loaded objects, such as the big double bed and the phonograph-cum-liquor cabinet, were conspicuously missing, replaced now by strange items. Downstage right, there was a huge wire net cage, inside which Brick sleeps – perhaps to suggest his alienation and desire to escape through drinking. Downstage centre, there was a small pool of water where the characters cool their passions at climatic moments, as in the scene where Brick tells Big Daddy the truth about his illness: he clears his alcohol-soaked mind by submerging his head underwater, then spraying the audience. This comic trick made the audience laugh and the situation looked more ridiculous than tragic. Another intervention was a trite device to                                                            

33

These include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Army Theatre, 1998), The Glass Menagerie (Stara Zagora, 2006; Sfumato Theatre, 2012), A Streetcar Named Desire (Army Theatre, 2005) and Camino Real (Drama Academy, 2004).

  

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highlight Brick’s emotional entrapment: in the few moments of sobriety that he enjoys on stage, a red rectangular frame with a light bulb inside drops, suspended on a fly, perhaps to suggest the rawness and futility of the characters’ emotions or the irony behind their ambitions. All these devices looked contrived and poorly integrated into the overall system of the performance. They created a rigid and mechanistic atmosphere, which had nothing to do with the poetical and warm southern setting of the original design. What is more, there were several overdone, and unjustified, nude scenes garnished with too much shouting and violent gestures – blatant attempts to seduce the audience into filling the theatre’s seats. All in all, these transgressions ruined the ambiguity of Williams’ drama. Many of the liberties taken by the director and the scenic designer can be explained by the new restrictions facing Bulgarian theatres after 1989. This time, however, those restrictions were not ideological but economic and financial, forcing theatres to pander to popular tastes for shock and the exotic or to risk closing all together. A certain tendency to flatten Williams’ texture can be observed, resulting from the sudden changes in post-Communist Bulgarian society, which erased the distinctions between high- and lowbrow cultures, between theatre aesthetics and reality TV, and between genres and styles. The latter produced a kind of leveling effect on all cultural phenomena. Thus American pop culture became as important (if not more so) as a Williams play, and A Streetcar Named Desire became as good as any other of his plays. Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, the negative legacy of the past was gradually processed, as the radical extremes of Communist ideology and hedonism melted away. Williams’ plays continued to be revived – often announced as “retro-drama” – because the labels “classical” or “masterpiece” reverberated ironically in the post-Communist transition period. Paradoxically enough, one of the best productions in Williams’ fifty-year presence on the Bulgarian stage materialized in 2005, almost sixty years after its American premiere in New York (1947). Not surprisingly, this was A Streetcar Named Desire (his most popular play with Bulgarian audiences), produced again by the company of the Sofia Army Theatre, where its 1968 Bulgarian premiere had taken place. Krikor Azaryan’s production, for which a new translation was commissioned, demonstrated coherence in directing style and scenic design, rendering

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visually and acoustically the whole gamut of emotions in Williams’ drama. This latest production – the longest to date (eight seasons, and still running) – demonstrates that the playwright’s reputation and success have been permanently secured on the Bulgarian stage, despite the many short cuts and short circuits on his way to popularity. The case of Williams’ reception on the Bulgarian stage has revealed some of the stumbling blocks in intercultural theatre encounters behind the Iron Curtain. The material analyzed has shown that these stumbling blocks were not related to the quality of his plays or issues of cultural incommensurability, but rather to the ideological prescriptions, norms and conventions of the receiving Bulgarian culture. During the peak years of the Cold War, the American playwright was appropriated mainly for the didactic and moralizing purposes of Communist propaganda, but since the late 1970s his plays have been subject to more heterogeneous appropriations for the purpose of aesthetic renewal, cultural prestige, experimentation and escapism. Despite the ideological imperatives to contain Williams within politically digestible lines, his artistic achievements have profoundly influenced Bulgarian culture by bringing in new sensitivities and aesthetic models, breaking representational taboos and invigorating theatre practices. Therefore, the Iron Curtain, drawn over his performances as a “safety curtain” to contain the spreading of “Western fire” on the Bulgarian stage, ultimately failed to “contain” the imaginative power of Williams’ more translucent curtains.

  

   

 

   

PART THREE: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND EUROPE’S TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES

   

We are supposed to sail May 31st for Europe on a Greek boat I’d never heard of, the Queen Frederica [sic], because Jane Bowles will be on it and it puts in at Gibraltar where we can see Paul. However I might just, at the last moment, switch plans and go West instead. That is, East by way of West. I feel that I’ve had Europe and would like to see places like Japan and Ceylon and China. Tennessee Williams, letter to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 12 May 1956

   

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS?: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY DAVID SAVRAN

Until the 1920s, Europe supplied almost all of what counted as elite culture in the United States: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Brahms, Cervantes, Molière. But with the advent of Modernism and the Machine Age, the US became the world’s leading economic power and began to export a wide range of goods, from soda fountains and slot machines to jazz, movies and plays. This is not to say that la mode américaine was universally embraced. On the contrary, it became a source of great controversy among European elites. After World War II, the Marshall Plan and the start of the Cold War, cultural exportation became highly charged politically as the US State Department tried to disseminate what it deemed salutary, antiCommunist art, like the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, to a devastated Europe. More covertly, the CIA founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1950 to try to prove that liberal democracies could produce elite culture that outshone that of the Soviet bloc. Because the US “was struggling against the international view that it was essentially a nation without culture”, culture became “a crucial arena” in which to fight for global dominance.1 In Europe, Tennessee Williams (who, in fact, had attended the inaugural meeting of the CCF) became a favorite import and A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin notes, “took the world stage by storm”.2 The play was quickly translated or directed by some of Europe’s most eminent theatre                                                             1

Charlotte M. Canning, “‘In the Interest of the State’: A Cold War National Theatre for the United States”, Theatre Journal, LXI/3 (October 2009), 415-16. 2 Philip C. Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 40.

   

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artists, Jean Cocteau, Luchino Visconti, Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman, and became a popular success and subject of critical controversy. (A notable exception to this rule was Spain, which, for political reasons, had to wait until 1961 to see it onstage.3) No other US play received such an impressive European welcome, and A Streetcar Named Desire continues to hold the stage around the world. If Tennessee Williams remains the best-known US playwright outside his native land, however, it is due in large part to the fifteen feature films made of his plays between 1950 and 1970, films far better known than his plays in the non-Anglophone world. Say Un tramway nommé Désir or Un tranvía llamado Deseo to a cultured French or Spaniard, and he or she will likely think of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Indeed, Williams’ films continue to ghost his European stage productions, despite the fact that most represent distorted, melodramatic and ruthlessly expurgated versions of his plays. The relentless slippage, however, between stage and screen, Broadway and Hollywood, is indicative of a serious difficulty in analyzing the reception of Williams’ plays both in the US and abroad. No other major US playwright has been the subject of as much controversy as Williams, over his works’ alleged sensationalism, violence and frank treatment of sexual desires, practices and identities. A similar slippage between the playwright and his work made Williams’ homosexuality the subject of opprobrium long before he came out in 1970 and then later with the publication of his notorious Memoirs. These problems are compounded by the widely propagated, erroneous and, I would venture, homophobic myth that Williams and his writing suffered an irreversible decline following The Night of the Iguana in 1961. (The wages of sin, and all that.) Thomas Keith points out that the marketing of his films, and of the Signet movie tie-in editions of the plays, “solidified the image of Tennessee Williams in the public imagination as that of a writer of violence, sex, scandal, and shock”.4 In Europe even more than in the US, Williams’ sensational                                                             3

See Philip C. Kolin, “‘Cruelty ... and Sweaty Intimacy’: The Reception of the Spanish Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire”, Theatre Survey, XXXV/2 (November 1994), 45-66. See also Laura Torres-Zúñiga’s and Ramón Espejo Romero’s articles in this collection on Tennessee Williams reception in Spain. 4 Thomas Keith, “Pulp Williams: Tennessee in the Popular Imagination”, in Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Kaplan, East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen Publishing Group, 2011, 173.

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themes – fetishism, castration, rape, homosexuality, cannibalism – became the source of persistent controversy. Williams’ plays provide an especially telling example of my thesis, which I have developed elsewhere, that serious theatre in the US since the 1920s has been constructed by the arbiters of taste as representing an “unnatural intercourse” of highbrow and lowbrow.5 Williams’ work in particular has been perceived as recycling and recombining elements of, on the one hand, popular entertainments like pulp fiction, vaudeville and melodrama, and, on the other, poetic, high Modernist, symbol-laden art. Neither high nor low – or rather, both high and low at the same time – his work has repeatedly been branded with those characteristics that historically have been regarded as middlebrow: the promiscuous mixture of commercial entertainment with art, the profane with the mythological and sex and violence with the philosophical. After World War II, the US was admired in much of Europe for its stable functioning democracy, scientific and technological know-how, affluence, dynamism and pragmatism but was accused of infecting the continent with mass culture, consumerism, standardization, antiintellectualism, virulent anti-Communism, as well as monstrosities like Coca-Cola, Reader’s Digest and Levis. All these qualities have been sites of angry contestation in France and Germany (and elsewhere), as anti- and pro-Americanists have often traded blows, at least figuratively, despite the fact that each nation has harbored very different fantasies about the US, its own culture and its role on the world stage. The contradictory responses generated by Williams’ plays in France and Germany attest to the fact that these responses are inextricably linked to French and German desires, anxieties, fears and aspirations vis-à-vis the United States and its culture. Historians emphasize that France has been especially prone to antiAmericanism because of its self-appointed mission civilisatrice, its misgivings about Modernism and modernization and its antipathy to US mass culture and economic imperialism. Indeed, in French, “américaine” is the only nationality to which the prefix “anti-” can be

                                                           

5

See Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult: II”, Partisan Review, XXVII/4 (Fall 1960), 592.

  

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added.6 And it is telling that the best-selling book in France during the 1960s was titled Le défi américain (The American Challenge). Germany, however, because of its historically high regard for the US, the role of the US in the occupation of Germany and the creation of the West German state and Germany’s position on the front lines of the Cold War, became the most Americanized of Western European nations despite its more ardent support of the welfare state and aversion to US military imperialism. Given these differences, Michael Ermarth is correct, I believe, to describe the West German attitude not as anti-Americanism, but counter-Americanism, at the heart of which was a “third social religion, the democratic-socialist way” (Soziale Marktwirtschaft) that dates back to Bismarck’s social reforms of the 1880s and that designated an alternative to both Soviet Communism and US market capitalism.7 The plays of Tennessee Williams provide a fascinating test case for exploring national fantasies in part because of their insistent association with the most mythologized region of the United States, the South, which, paradoxically, makes them seem in the eyes of many Europeans to be quintessentially American. More important, I would argue that Williams’ mixed reception in Western Europe, especially through the 1970s, is also a result of the resistance his work displays to being pigeonholed as either popular or elite culture. The European premieres of most of his plays generated divergent responses that continue to be echoed in recent discourse about Williams and his work, especially in France. I want to position Tennessee Williams as a kind of cultural ambassador, the representative of a US culture towards which the French and German elites, as well as the middle and working classes, have – for very different reasons – harbored contradictory attitudes. When the film of A Streetcar Named Desire opened in Paris, it was a popular success but was savaged in Cahiers du cinema as a middlebrow exercise, “un louable effort vers la qualité” that at least was “nullement été conçu et réalisé pour complaire les goûts du                                                             6

See Philippe Roger, L’ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français (The American Enemy: The Genelogie of Anti-Americanism), Paris: Seuil, 2002, 16. 7 Alfred Weber, quoted in Michael Ermarth, “Counter-Americanism and Critical Currents in West German Reconstruction 1945-1960”, in Americanization and AntiAmericanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan, New York: Berghahn, 2005, 37.

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spectateur moyen américain dont, selon les statisticiens, l’âge mental est environs douze ans”. For the reviewer, however, the play and film alike were aimed instead “au publique assez exclusif et ‘sophisticated’ de Broadway” that likes “se sentir quelque responsabilité culturelle, quelque intérêt pour les pamoisons [sic] nuancées d’intrigues dramatiques dites avant-garde”.8 Even in 2011, the decision of the Comédie-Française to present A Streetcar Named Desire as its first US play in the prestigious Salle Richelieu sent shock waves through the cultural world. For some French critics, Lee Breuer’s production was a revelation, a carnivalesque New Orleans-Japanese fantasy, “si puissante, si profonde, si grande, si unique”.9 For others, in an almost uncanny echo of Cahiers du cinema, it was a middlebrow assault on the traditions of one of the most famously conservative state theatres in the world, an all-American circus, polluting the Comédie with tawdry “kitsch”.10 Tennessee Williams was first performed in Europe during a period when France was attempting to reassert its political and cultural leadership on the continent after World War II and an Allied-occupied Germany was reeling from the destruction of its cities, economic infrastructure and many of its cultural institutions. Although France had long deemed British culture a challenge to its hegemony, it now looked further west to what it saw as a more urgent threat to traditional French ways of life and to French culture. Germany, too,                                                             8

Renaud de Laborderie, “A la recherche de l’hypertendu”, Cahiers du cinéma, XII (May 1952), 59: “a laudable effort at quality ”, “by no means conceived and produced to please the tastes of the average American spectator, whose mental age, according to statisticians, is about twelve years old”, “at the rather exclusive and ‘sophisticated’ Broadway public”, and “to feel cultural responsibility and show interest in the staged swooning that tries to pass itself off as a self-styled ‘avant-garde’ dramatic plot”. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 9 Armelle Héliot, “Entrée fracassante d’Un tramway nommé désir à la ComédieFrançaise” (“Streetcar’s Sensational Debut at the Comédie-Française Theatre”), Le Figaro, 8 February 2011: http://blog.le-figaro.fr/theatre/2011/02/entree-fracassantedun-tramway.html (accessed 1 March 2012): “so powerful, so profound, so grand, so unique.” 10 Fabienne Darge, “Un ‘Tramway’ arrêté à la station ennui” (“Streetcar Stopped at the Station named Boredom”), Le Monde, 10 February 2011, 25. See also Judith Sibony, “Un Tramway nommé désir ou le symptôme de la Comédie-Française”, Le Monde, 9 February 2011: http://theatre.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/02/09/un-tramwaynomme-desir-ou-le-symptome-de-la-comedie-francaise (accessed 1 March 2012).

  

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wished to retrieve its lost prestige, but its occupation dampened cultural nationalism and its partition meant that the Federal Republic (BRD) set its eyes less on the west than the east. If the French post-war theatre was haunted by the specters of André Antoine and Jacques Copeau, the German was by that of Joseph Goebbels. Each country’s theatre responded to its changed circumstances by retrenching, which resulted, Marvin Carlson notes, in “reverential” and “fairly conservative” productions of classics deemed the cornerstone of national heritage: “Theatre was considered uplifting and spiritual”, and “distinctly removed from the political realm”; “the playwright reigned supreme, and very few works”, especially in the state theatres, “challenged the rites in this temple of high art”.11 In France, the Comédie-Française remained a bastion of conservativism and custodian of the French dramatic tradition. Although a handful of non-French playwrights, like Ibsen and Pirandello, had entered the Comédie’s sacred répertoire before World War II, the post-war years saw an influx of exclusively European plays, by Aristophanes, Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht and others.12 But the Comédie was not alone in its fixation on classics. Even the most celebrated metteurs en scène of the post-war years directed only European plays. The monopolization of the French state theatres by European drama meant that the boulevard theatres became the forum for US plays, thirty-six of which were performed between 1944 and 1949, among them The Glass Menagerie in 1947 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949. The precision and economy of Williams’ tragedies, people by impassioned, mutilated protagonists, seemed to hold a special fascination for Parisian audiences which appreciated him far more than the French press. A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular, was slammed by most of the critics whose “condemnation of [its] vulgarity and brutality”, Lewis Falb notes, “seem[ed] to have encouraged people to see it”.13 One dissenter, the outspokenly proAmerican André Maurois, described it as “a beautiful play”,                                                            

11 Marvin A. Carlson, Theatre Is More Beautiful than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009, xi. 12 See Agathe Sanjuan, “Le répertoire de la Comédie-Française”: http://www.theatrecontemporain.net/spectacles/Un-Tramway-nomme-Desir-4855/ensavoirplus/idcontent/21472 (accessed 1 March 2012). 13 Lewis W. Falb, American Drama in Paris, 1945-1970: A Study of Its Critical Reception, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973, 25.

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reminiscent of Strindberg and Chekhov, filled with “terror [and] compassion”.14 But Robert Kemp’s review in Le Monde was more typical, in its praise for the acting and mise-en-scène and dismissal of the writing as a “miteux exemple de l’art américain!”. For Kemp, the play’s “Alliance du naturalisme et du vaudoo” makes it not tragedy, but merely “les rogatons de vieux mélos accommodés à la sauce américaine, arrosés d’alcool”.15 Although The Rose Tattoo was more warmly received in 1953, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, despite Peter Brook’s direction and Jeanne Moreau’s starring role, was denounced even more vehemently than A Streetcar Named Desire. One critic described it as a “stupefying magma of hideousness and obsession”, while another called it a “nauseating story of skin and alcohol”.16 By the end of the 1950s, however, after the assault on neoclassicism by the likes of Ionesco, Genet, and Beckett, the theatre was becoming more open to innovative work and the critics somewhat more sympathetic to Williams.17 Both Orpheus Descending in 1959 and Suddenly Last Summer in 1965 garnered appreciative and thoughtful notices. In order to understand the ambivalent French response to Williams, one must examine the several accusations that recur persistently in reviews. First, his plays represent violent, salacious tranches de vie, melodramatic reinventions of a naturalism that the French long considered outmoded. Despite the protestations of the first director of Un tramway that Williams was “un grand poète”, critics were unable until the late 1950s to come to terms with his originality and, what one belatedly judged, the “poésie profonde de son réalisme”.18 Second, the                                                            

14

André Maurois, quoted in Liliane Kerjan, “Présence du théâtre de Tennessee Williams en France”, Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la Comédie-Française, 8: Tennessee Williams, Paris: Paris: L’Avant-Scène, 2011, 107. 15 Robert Kemp, “Un tramway nommé Désir”, Le Monde, 19 October 1949, 9: “seedy example of American art”, “Alliance of naturalism and voodoo”, and “leftovers of old melodramas prepared à la sauce américaine, laced with alcohol”. 16 Jean-Jacques Gautier and Max Favalelli, quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 26. 17 See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Forgers of Myths”, in Sartre of Theater, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Frank Jellinek, New York: Pantheon, 1976, 33-43. 18 Raymond Rouleau, quoted in J. Fo., “Arletty va conduire ‘Un Tramway nommé désir” (“The Actress Arletty will Drive the Streetcar”), Le Monde, 12 October 1949, 9: “a great poet”; Georges Lerminier (1960), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 27: “the profound poetry of his realism.”

  

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press accused Williams of forsaking an elevated, literary style for plays comprised of brief, fragmentary scenes which were more like movies than theatre. In their eyes, Williams’ was a Hollywoodized stage, and his plays were “comme les films … et les bêtes de toujours. Il a pour lui le mouvement, la couleur, le relief, il ne lui manque que la parole.”19 Third, and most interestingly, critics repeatedly insisted that Williams’ protagonists are emotionally disturbed, suffering erotic and schizophrenic pathologies, more suitable for “les cliniques psychiatriques” than the stage.20 His plays, therefore, represent psychiatric case histories rather than social or political documents. This insistent pathologization of his characters made the playwright into a kind of faux Freud, his audience into “voyeurs”, and each of his plays into a freak show.21 In Germany, by contrast, the critical response was more generous and the cultural politics more complex. In the first years of the Allied occupation, the US military’s Information Control Division (ICD) judged the theatre to be “one of Germany’s most vital propaganda mediums” and used it for “the reeducation of the German people by making available plays that promoted democratic and antimilitaristic ideas”.22 At the same time, however, the State Department warned the ICD against using “hard-sell propagandistic methods, tempting as it was …, because that was precisely what the Germans had been rendered immune against”.23 Nonetheless, the ICD “found itself the proprietor of virtually all the vital contemporary drama”, “translat[ing] and licens[ing] for production some 40 American plays”, among them The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.24 Avoiding the hard sell, the ICD translated patently non-realistic plays like Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which was “a huge box-office hit” in                                                             19

Claude Jamet (1953), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 34: “like films … and beasts. They have movement, color, relief, and can almost talk.” 20 Lerminier, quoted in ibid., 119: “psychiatric clinics.” 21 Marcelle Capron (1957), quoted in ibid., 120. 22 Winthrop Sergeant, “Europe’s Culture: Amid Incredible Devastation Its Age-Old Arts Still Show Surprising Powers of Survival”, Life, 4 November 1946, 54; Jürgen C. Wolter, “The Cultural Context of A Streetcar Named Desire in Germany”, in Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism, ed. Philip C. Kolin, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993, 200. 23 Ermarth, “Counter-Americanism”, 39. 24 Sergeant, “Europe’s Culture”, 54.

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1946, “performed from one end of Germany to the other”.25 Winthrop Sergeant noted that intellectuals approved it as strongly as they disapproved of US popular culture because they responded to its “fantasy and symbolism”.26 Although the West Germans may have been more positively disposed to US drama than the French, one must bear in mind that German “elites were dependent on the Western powers, in particular on the Americans”, and as a result, they “could not afford”, Kasper Maase argues, “to conjure up conflicts by openly attacking ‘Western decadence,’ as the German Democratic Republic [GDR] did ad nauseam”.27 Given this context, A Streetcar Named Desire, whose German title had been curiously rendered as Endstation Sehnsucht (Terminus Longing) “created a sensation” in the Federal Republic. Despite an inaccurate and clumsy translation for its 1950 premiere in Pforzheim (in the US occupation zone), it “opened completely new avenues of experience”.28 Yet at the same time, Endstation Sehnsucht came under critical fire both for its allegedly heavy-handed symbolism and, as in France, for its “crudely naturalistic” style.29 The German critics viewed the play more sociologically than the French, however, prizing its local color and interpreting it as an expression of a “specifically American problem”. Yet they, too, censured the play for its “shock value”.30 Summer and Smoke, produced in 1951, was, as in France, reviewed negatively, while The Rose Tattoo was greeted more warmly as “a glorification of sexus …. a glorious invocation of the god Pan”.31 Despite the German appreciation for a theatre of fantasy, Camino Real in 1954 sowed confusion, as it had elsewhere. Some critics called it an existentialist “mystery play”, some an over-elaborate allegory, some                                                            

25

Ibid.; Horst Frenz and Ulrich Weisstein, “Tennessee Williams and His German Critics”, Symposium, XIV/4 (Winter 1960), 267. 26 Sergeant, “Europe’s Culture”, 52. 27 Kaspar Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, ‘Americanization,’ and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture”, in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968, ed. Hanna Schissler, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, 444. 28 Jutta Friedrich (1965), quoted in Wolter, “The Cultural Context”, 199. 29 Quoted in ibid., 203. 30 Review in Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 20 February 1953, and Fritz André Kracht, quoted in ibid., 206. 31 Frenz and Weisstein, “Tennessee Williams and His German Critics”, 261.

  

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“nonsense” and still others (the most perceptive of the lot) a play whose meaning lay in its performance and mise-en-scène. Unlike the French, the German critics mostly approved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at its 1955 premiere for its emotional complexity and kinship with Ibsen.32 Although Williams’ plays were not attacked, as they had been in France, for being archaically naturalistic, they were censured for their cinematic character and for their focus on allegedly psychopathological individuals. The recurrence of these two critiques is, I believe, especially important because it is symptomatic of persistent post-war European fantasies not only about Williams, but also about US society and culture. Because the implications of each fantasy are different, let me begin by taking up the question of cinema. When French and German critics wrote that The Glass Menagerie “approximate[s] the movies” because of its supposed “cinematographic elements” or that his plays’ “sensational content” smacks of melodrama, these accusations cannot help but evoke the long history, that dates back at least to the 1920s, of European attacks on mass culture.33 (There is also a certain irony in their choice of The Glass Menagerie, considering that the play goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from the cheap movies to which Tom is addicted.) Mass culture, which fascinated and appalled so many Europeans, was understood as the product of a US “culture industry” that degraded and depersonalized human beings and mass-produced a shallow, vulgar, mongrelized pseudo-art. Whether jazz, movies, or rock ‘n’ roll, US popular culture was widely perceived, especially by intellectual elites, as a serious threat to high cultural forms and to civilization itself. Between the world wars, the attacks came mainly from the right, but after World War II, the leftist elites in both France and Germany condemned US mass culture for plotting to destroy European high culture and to turn Europeans into Americans’ Doppelgängers: commodity-crazed, one-dimensional militarists. At the same time, one must bear in mind that anti-Americanism historically has been less about the US than Europe; that it betrays deep-seated European anxieties over modernization, national identity and the aggressive competitiveness that is reputedly endemic to the US but which, in fact, is characteristic of all forms of capitalism. It also                                                             32 33

Ibid., 261-62 and 262-63. Ibid., 262 and 264. See also Falb, American Drama in Paris, 33.

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betrays a profound ambivalence insofar as every anxiety conceals a furtive desire for that which is scorned. The work of Tennessee Williams, poised between elite and popular cultures, became an especially telling gauge of these anxieties in part because it issued from the commercial Broadway stage. Jean-Paul Sartre, who was as fascinated by US culture as he was repelled by its politics, carefully distinguished between what he called “the brilliant fantasies of Broadway” and the universal currency offered by the long tradition of French neoclassicism.34

Figure 19: Lee Breuer’s Un tramway nommé Désir at the Comédie-Française. Photograph: © Cosimo Mirco Magliocca. Reproduced with the permission of Lee Breuer.

Although the European disdain for these ephemeral, “brilliant fantasies” has moderated over the years, certain cultural elites, accustomed to staunchly independent, state-supported theatres, still                                                            

34

Sartre, “Forgers of Myths”, 41.

  

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distrust a theatre as nakedly commercial as that is the US. Even in 2011, Le Monde attacked Lee Breuer’s Un tramway nommé Désir for a “mise en scène se fourvoie tantôt dans tous les écueils: entre mauvaise comédie musicale, folklore caricatural, faux-semblant de cinema ...”, while bearing all the damnable hallmarks of “les ‘Broadway Shows’”.35 The second critique, repeated endlessly in French and German (and, for that matter, Spanish) reviews of Williams’ plays, is that his is a “théâtre thérapeutic”, that A Streetcar Named Desire represents “a clinical demonstration of a case of progressive hysteria ending in insanity”, that The Glass Menagerie could have come from “l’imagination d’un Zola au rabais qui aurait lu Freud”, and that Summer and Smoke is a “psychoanalytical seminar for beginners”.36 Blanche and Brick, in particular, were repeatedly singled out as clinical studies of psychosexual disease. In critical discourse, this pathologization of Williams’ protagonists readily slips into a pathologization of the playwright himself, a man preoccupied with “Les questions sexualles” and a “tendency to represent the morbid and the decadent”.37 Words like “degeneracy”, “madness”, “perversion” and “depravity” echo through reviews. This pathologization of Williams was hardly unique to Europe – US critics similarly attacked the playwright for writing work that “wears the scent of human garbage as if it were latest Parisian perfume”.38 The European critics, however, were less reticent, especially during the 1950s, to imply that the sexual issues in Williams’ plays were linked to the playwright’s own homosexuality. One French critic, for example, described Orpheus Descending in 1959 as an example of a “ce théâtre thérapeutique [que] n’était qu’un immense effort de l’auteur pour que son homosexualité ne devienne pas une                                                            

35

Sibony: a “kitsch mise-en-scène” that alternates “bad musical comedy, grotesque folklore” with the “pretense of cinema”. 36 Robert Kanters (1959), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 32: “therapeutic theatre”; Frenz and Weisstein, “Tennessee Williams and His German Critics”, 260; Jean-Jacques Gautier (1947), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 32: “the imagination of a Zola reading a bargain-basement Freud”; K. St. (1951), quoted in Frenz and Weisstein, “Tennessee Williams and His German Critics”, 271. 37 Morvan Lebesque (1959), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 28: “sexual questions”; Frenz and Weisstein, “Tennessee Williams and His German Critics”, 269. 38 Review of One Arm and Other Stories, Time, 3 January 1955, 76.

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névose mortelle”.39 And even in 2010, in an appreciative article in Le Figaro, Williams is characterized as an “éternel voyageur qui ne voit pas vraiment les beautés du monde mais se laisse happer par des rêves de midinette, vit dans la torture ses amours pour des garçons égoïstes …”.40 In Germany, the first paragraph of the 2011 Literatur-Kalender entry on Williams focuses almost exclusively on the playwright’s alcoholism, drug addiction, Freudianism, nervous breakdowns, psychoanalysis and obsessive homosexuality, and labels A Streetcar Named Desire “ein Neurotikerstück”, or a neurotic play.41 The pathologization of Williams and his plays cannot, I believe, be disentangled from the effort on the part of certain champions of European art to pathologize US culture. This effort is linked to the widespread caricature of the United States during the post-war years as a nation hooked on Freud in which everyone was in psychoanalysis and social problems were disguised as psychological ones. According to Sartre, Americanism is a “monstrueux complexe” whose “grands mythes, celui du bonheur [et] celui de la liberté” and “la croyance souriante au progrès” mask inequality and oppression. US men, meanwhile, are those who, “après dîner, plantent là fauteuils, radio, femme, pipe, enfants et vont se sauler solitairement au bar d’en face”.42 Americans, in short, represent a pathological instance of the form of self-deception that Sartre calls mauvaise foi. Sartre, moreover, is hardly the only European to diagnose middle-class Americans as suffering from an acute social disease. Even in the late 1960s,                                                             39

Robert Kanters (1959), quoted in Falb, American Drama in Paris, 32: “therapeutic theatre [that] was nothing more than an immense effort by the author to ensure that his homosexuality does not become a fatal neurosis.” 40 Armelle Héliot, “Tennessee Williams, quelque chose de très modern” (“Tennessee Williams, Something Very Modern”), Le Figaro, 1 February 2010, 36: “an eternal voyager who does not see the beauties of the world but who lets himself get caught up in the dreams of a romantic schoolgirl [and who] lives tormented by his love for selfish boys ….” 41 Reclams Literatur-Kalender, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010, 101-102. 42 Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations III (1949), quoted in Jean-Philippe Mathy, “‘L’Américanisme’ est-il un humanisme? Sartre aux États-Unis (1945-46)” (“Does “Americanism” also Mean “Humanism”? Sartre in America [1945-46]”), The French Review, LXII/3 (February 1989), 458 and 465: “monstrous complex”, “great myths of happiness [and] freedom”, “smiling belief in progress”, and “after dinner”, they abandon “radio, wife, pipe, and children to get drunk by themselves at the bar across the street”.

  

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Americanization was regarded as being marked by “various afflictions: the fetishism of products; a constant escalation of unsatisfied desires; … [and] dependence on alcohol, drugs, and psychoanalysis”.43 I would like to suggest that the pathologization of both Williams and his plays, as the emblems of an alien and fearsome culture in the ascendant, represents an attempt by Europeans to reassert the universality and health of their own cultural enterprises as well as an antipathy to psychoanalysis as a practice that merely reinforces social anomie. For if not Williams himself, then certainly most of his protagonists display precisely the kinds of unsatisfied desires and dependence on intoxicants that so chagrined Europeans. This pathologization also seems to me to mark an oblique attempt to take revenge on a nation that long stigmatized European culture as weak, effeminate, decadent and exhausted. Although the effeminization of Western Europeans in the US imagination climaxed in 2003 during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, there is a long history of sexual stereotyping by both Europeans and Americans. As Timothy Garton Ash notes: If anti-American Europeans see “the Americans” as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see “the Europeans” as limpwristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can’t get it up.44

By the 1980s, most Western Europeans, even the French, had largely succumbed to the consumer culture once decried by antiAmericanists. As a result, the transatlantic traffic in cultural commodities, under the aegis of neoliberal globalization, has become less freighted with nationalist anxieties. The last decades of the twentieth century also marked the low point for Williams’ reputation in both the US and Europe, during which time he was relegated, in the words of one French critic, to “purgatoire – trop bavard, trop                                                            

43

Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 201-202. 44 Timothy Garton Ash, “Anti-Europeanism in America”, New York Review of Books, 13 February 2003: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/feb/13/anti-europeanism-in-america/ (accessed 27 May 2012).

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psychologique”.45 His late plays virtually unknown, he was dismissed as a has-been whose early plays seemed old-fashioned and shopworn to a new generation of directors and theatre-goers who rejected the culture of their parents. But in the twenty-first century, Williams’ work has enjoyed a renaissance in US and European cultural centers that pride themselves on their artistic, social and sexual broadmindedness. Williams, in short, has become enough of a fixture on world stages that directors, especially in Europe, no longer feel obliged to bow to tradition. For Europeans, the primary challenge in performing Williams today is to rediscover his plays’ contemporaneity. Most American audiences are content to be fed old-fashioned productions of what are deemed classics, unlike most Europeans, who expect that the theatre will speak to them directly in a contemporary theatrical idiom. The difficulty of making Williams’ plays relevant has been especially well articulated by Pedro Almodóvar, a film director with a deep love of theatre, especially Tennessee Williams’, and who, interestingly, equates theatricality with authenticity. Not only is his production company named Deseo, but his most celebrated film represents an homage to A Streetcar Named Desire. He sums up the European attitude when he declares that he has … always had a problem with the modern relevance of the questions raised in [Williams’] plays. That sexual urge, those characters who repress themselves – I’m not sure that’s very contemporary. It appeals to me because it’s what makes the characters’ desires so strong. But it’s something that in Spain no longer exists.46

Almodóvar solved this problem not by staging A Streetcar Named Desire, as he once considered, but by making a film, Todo sobre mi madre, in which the play in performance emerges as a primary referent, a precipitating event in the film’s narrative and a parallel intertext that works to undo the history of European reception by de                                                            45

Darge, “Un ‘Tramway’ arrêté à la station ennui”, 25: “purgatory - too talky, too psychological.” 46 Almodóvar on Almodóvar, ed. Frédéric Strauss, trans. Yves Baignères, London: Faber and Faber, 2006, 190-91.

  

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pathologizing Blanche DuBois and, with her, his own transgendered characters. I would like now to consider two recent productions of A Streetcar Named Desire that succeed in making Williams “very contemporary”: Lee Breuer’s at the Comédie-Française and Frank Castorf’s adaptation titled Endstation Amerika, to argue for a new, cosmopolitan Williams who is now a citizen of the world. Both these productions rethink the play and interrogate its status as an icon of US culture, claiming Williams less as a US regional writer than, to borrow Le Figaro’s word, “un classique”.47 Both are heteroglossic in James Clifford’s sense of the term, speaking several languages simultaneously: “With expanded communication and intercultural influence, people interpret others, and themselves, in a bewildering diversity of idioms …. languages [and cultures] do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways.”48 Castorf’s mise-en-scène is much the more radical and, like Almodóvar’s film, uses A Streetcar Named Desire as point of reference, a cultural landmark or found object it references along with many others. Breuer’s, however, stages almost all of Williams’ text, submitting it to the kind of directorial sleight of hand Breuer has perfected over decades, in this case, using techniques drawn from Japanese theatre. “We needed a metaphor for the South”, Breuer said, “but a south that makes sense within the French cultural context .… A Japanese Orientalist style was not so distant from the faux aristocratic style of a Southern belle and it was popular in Paris.”49 In collaboration with Basil Twist, Breuer borrows conventions from Kabuki and Bunraku, including Japanese-inspired costumes for Blanche, onstage musicians and black-hooded stage assistants who, in the words of critic Philippe Chevilley, create “un continuel ballet flottant où les objets volent”.50 Employing a distinctively contemporary theatrical idiom, Breuer seems to be setting the                                                            

47

Héliot, “Tennessee Williams, quelque chose de très modern”. Quoted in Marvin A. Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 5. 49 Doreen Carvajal, “In the Land of Molière, an Oriental ‘Streetcar’”, The New York Times, 14 February 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/arts/15comedie.html (accessed 1 March 2012). 50 Philippe Chevilley, “Un tramway nommé désir de Tennessee Williams: Le ‘Tramway’ ivre” (“The Drunken Streetcar”), Les echos, 10 February 2011, 13: “a continual, floating ballet in which objects fly.” 48

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production in three different periods simultaneously: the fantasy Orient of the late nineteenth century, Williams’ own late 1940s and the present. In Breuer’s visionary world, the pictorial content, exaggerated refinement and movement of the screens function to plumb the unconscious of both Blanche and the play itself and are contrasted with a violence derived as much from martial arts as from the streets of New Orleans. Using the screens’ capacity both to evoke movie screens and to cut the action in an almost cinematic way, Breuer pays homage to cinema and to Kazan without in any way reproducing Kazan’s style.

Figure 20: A Kabuki-like Blanche (Anne Kessler) and Stanley (Éric Ruf) in the Breuer production. Photograph: © Cosimo Mirco Magliocca. Reproduced with the permission of Lee Breuer.

Breuer’s use of Japanese theatre techniques has proven the most controversial feature of his A Streetcar Named Desire. Their application makes it clear that the play is not a naturalistic tragedy but a metatheatrical dream play about the staging of fantasy whose texture is repeatedly shattered by the force of memory and desire. Some   

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critics found this “cocktail shaker of bourbon and sake” richly suggestive and commended his reinvention of “the exoticism of Williams’ world”.51 Others demurred. Le Monde, predictably, led the attack, finding the Japonaiserie irrelevant and distracting, Breuer’s “kitsch” mise-en-scène reminiscent of “une veille avant-garde des années 1970” which provides audiences with only “de rares moments, noyés dans un océan d’ennui profond”.52 It overlooks the fact that the kitsch it pawns off on US culture is, in fact, emblematically European. It represses the memories of the Orientalism of the late nineteenth century, of Madame Butterfly, Lakmé and The Mikado and of the tremendous influence of Japanese graphics on Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Monet, whose house in Giverny is still filled with the 231 Japanese prints that the painter collected over his lifetime. In other words, Le Monde conveniently forgets the histories of French cultural appropriation and imperialism that Breuer’s miseen-scène so shrewdly invokes. Frank Castorf became the enfant terrible of the German theatre during the 1990s, revolutionizing the stage by, among other things, using live video to transmit offstage action, to show scenes from multiple perspectives and to multi-mediatize metatheatricality. When Endstation Amerika premiered in Salzburg in 2000, it was greeted with boos and bravos, but it became a hit at Berlin’s Volksbühne, where it was received less as a production of A Streetcar Named Desire than as Castorf’s riff on the play. (The Williams Estate refused to let Castorf use the standard German title.) Castorf highlights the difference between his mise-en-scène and the text by running Williams’ stage directions, which he utterly ignores, as Englishlanguage supertitles. Set on a long, shallow, depthless stage, “reminiscent of a cinemascope screen”, Endstation Amerika updates and displaces Williams’ play to post-unification Germany, in which a buffoonish, pot-bellied, Polish Stanley is a former member of Solidarity, who makes his living selling chewing gum and a blondwigged, Madonna-like Blanche is a teacher of Polish. Castorf, however, scrupulously maintains Williams’ antagonism between “the old and new social orders”, between the genteel country and the                                                            

51

Carvajal, “In the Land of Molière, an Oriental ‘Streetcar’”; Héliot, “Entrée fracassante d’Un tramway nommé désir à la Comédie-Française”. 52 Darge, “Un ‘Tramway’ arrêté à la station ennui”, 25: “of the old avant-garde of the 1970s”, “drowned in an ocean of profound ennui”.

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commercialized, dehumanizing city, but overlays that with the opposition between “East-Bloc authoritarian[ism]” and “Western capitalis[m]”. Placing a video camera in the Kowalski’s bathroom and a television set center stage, Castorf fills his production, in Klaus van den Berg’s words, with “citations of constructed media images and hyped American culture”.53 Like so many contemporary German directors, Castorf makes liberal use of US pop music, including songs by Lou Reed, Nirvana, Britney Spears and Don McLean (his “American Pie”). Perhaps his boldest use of citation is in the seduction scene between Blanche and Mitch: at the first mention of Mitch’s mother, he abruptly exits and Blanche goes into the bathroom. As Marvin Carlson describes it, “A moment later Mitch re-enters and we are suddenly plunged into that American pop culture locus classicus of mother-fixation, Hitchcock’s Psycho”. Mitch pushes in “a wheelchair with a dark bundled body in it”, while repeating his conversation with his mother “in a thin parodic ventriloquist style, … seizes a large knife” and furiously “rushes [in]to the bathroom”, where he is seen on the TV “frantically stab[bing] Blanche through the shower curtain”.54 Despite its repeated use of US references, Castorf’s Endstation Amerika could just as well have been titled Endstation Deutschland because it testifies not only to the relentless erosion of the distinctions between US and German mass-cultural forms, but also to the obsolescence of, if not the concept of anti-Americanism, then certainly its force as a rallying cry. Given the ever-increasing internationalization of capital and Europe’s economic clout, the United States must be recognized today for what it is: an empire in decline that is no longer the fountainhead of technology, consumerism, cutthroat capitalism and mass-mediation. Both Breuer and Castorf, directing a play written when US imperial power was at its apogee, use A Streetcar Named Desire, as Williams does, to critique the unfulfillable desires being generated by consumer culture. They do so, moreover, like Williams, not by waxing nostalgic for a bucolic paradise that never existed but by breaking open the social                                                             53

Klaus van den Berg, “Scenography and Submedial Space: Frank Castorf’s Final Destination America (2000) and Forever Young (2003) at the Volksbühne Berlin”, Theatre Research International, XXXII/1 (2006), 60-61. 54 Marvin A. Carlson, “Psycho Streetcar”, Hunter On-line Theater Review: http://www.hotreview.org/articles/psychostreet.htm (accessed 1 March 2012).

  

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fabric represented in the play, by highlighting the discontinuities and surrealistic juxtapositions already present in A Streetcar Named Desire, and in each character’s private world. Most important, Breuer and Castorf, like Almodóvar, rewrite the pathologization long ascribed to the play’s characters for an age in which sanity, authenticity and truth are universally sabotaged by media overload. As the program for Endstation Amerika puts it: “A Streetcar Named Desire is a demonstration of sickness for the sick, those whose sickness is symptomatized by their very inability to distinguish between sickness and health.”55 As Tennessee Williams has become a citizen of the world, his plays have become increasingly unmoored both from their national origin and from the post-war triumphalism on which they launch a trenchant critique. In the increasingly multi-polar world being constructed at the expense of US hegemony, Breuer, Castorf and Almodóvar seem to understand A Streetcar Named Desire as a memorial to the post-war economic miracle the US helped engineer, that is, to the success and catastrophe of commodity culture, in the same way that Chekhov’s Three Sisters has become a memorial to the utopian dreams of pre-revolutionary Russia. In that sense, the Comédie’s Muriel Mayette is absolutely correct to describe the play as staging “la violence de la lutte des classes”.56 Breuer, Castorf and Almodóvar, meanwhile, by re-historicizing Williams’ tragedy about a society in the throes of transformation, have discovered a new contemporaneity and relevance in the play’s message, which is perhaps best summed up in an assertion quoted in the Endstation Amerika program: “An individual life [now] is a serialized, capitalist mini-crisis, a disaster carrying your name.” A disaster carrying your name as surely as that mythological streetcar – that now travels the Champs-Élysées, Kurfürstendamm and the Gran Vía alike – carries the name “Desire”. But then again, Tennessee Williams has always depended on la bienveillance des étrangers, or perhaps I should say, die Freundlichkeit der Fremden or perhaps, la bondad del desconocido.                                                             55

Quoted in Carl Hegemann, “Endstation Amerika”: http://www.volksbuehne-berlin. de/praxis/endstation_amerika/ (accessed 1 March 2012). 56 Muriel Mayette, “Éditorial”, in Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la Comédie-Française, 8: Tennessee Williams, 3: “the violence of class struggle.”

   

I think we’re a little less abhorrent of it [the incongruity of brutality and elegance], of the combination of it, than you in England are at the present time. I think you’re still a little frightened of treating brutality in a fashion which is almost elegant or graceful. Tennessee Williams, comments to Dilys Powell, interview with Edward R. Murrow, 8 May 1960

   

   

THEIR DATE WITH EACH OTHER FROM THE BEGINNING: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND HAROLD PINTER MICHAEL PALLER

Near the end of 1961, just as The Night of the Iguana had gone into rehearsals, Tennessee Williams gave an interview to Lewis Funke and John Booth. It was a pivotal time, and he was feeling the accumulated weight of his successes and failures since the debut of The Glass Menagerie almost exactly seventeen years earlier. He had recently turned fifty; his relationship with Frank Merlo had entered its final, rocky period; and he was feeling, as he told the interviewers, that his kind of writing – long and “pseudo-literary”1 – was on its way out. He felt invigorated by a new generation of European and American playwrights including Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Jack Gelber and Edward Albee. He singled out one for special praise: Harold Pinter and his new play The Caretaker. The Caretaker’s spare language and ambiguity of character made Williams, he admitted, “... crazy with jealousy. I love it. While I’m in the theater I’m enthralled by it and I say, Oh, God, if I could write like that.”2 If he felt an Ibsenesque fear of being overtaken by the younger generation, he never showed it. Although he could be mean-spirited towards some of his contemporaries, such as William Inge, he was only full of praise for the young playwrights whose critical stars were rising while his was soon to begin its long eclipse. In recent years, scholars have looked at Williams in the light of these playwrights. Given that Williams frequently denied the                                                             1

Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986, 99. 2 Ibid., 98.

   

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influence of anyone on his work other than Chekhov, what could be said of his relationship between Pinter’s and his plays? Was there influence, despite Williams’ denials? Was there just an occasional similarity? There are several angles from which one could explore this question, including their depictions of women, the waxing and waning of humor, the growing visibility of politics, as well as the decreasing length of their plays as both got older. In this essay, I will limit these angles to three: the worlds of their plays, their use of ambiguity and the ways in which they employed language. The worlds of their plays The constant factor in Pinter’s world is danger: his universe is a place of a struggle, for control of territory and people. The sound of a knock at the door may be a death knell for the person inside. A character will be dominated, physically or psychologically, if he does not dominate his opponent first. That is the understood if unspoken fact of Pinter’s world. In Pinter’s second play, The Birthday Party, Stanley resides in a seaside boarding house. As the lone boarder in this house run by Meg and her husband Petey, and as the reluctant object of Meg’s affections, which can be characterized as somewhere between maternal and obscene, Stanley is in effective control of the house until the arrival of Goldberg and McCann – two men who hover between the comic and the deadly. After a night devoted to celebrating Stanley’s birthday – a landmark the veracity of which, like so much else in the play, is in considerable doubt – Stanley, broken and unable to speak anything but sounds such as, “Uh-gug” and, “Caahh”, is removed from the house by the two intruders and driven away. In Pinter’s next play, The Caretaker, the intruder, Davies, attempts to come between two brothers but ultimately is cast out. In The Homecoming, the battle is for control of Teddy’s wife Ruth, as well as for the North London home ruled over by her father-in-law Max. In Old Times, Deeley and Anna vie for possession of Deeley’s wife Kate; in Mountain Language, a government dominates an ethnic group by outlawing its language. No matter the victor, this battle for power recurs in almost every play Pinter wrote through to his last one, Celebration, of 1999, as if the world of his plays emerged fully grown with The Birthday Party. In 1988 he told theatre critic Mel Gussow that the story of The

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Birthday Party, written in 1957, was the same as that of One for the Road of 1984: “It’s the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual.”3 Unlike Pinter’s work, Williams’ varied in style over the years. Indeed, in his later years, the look or sound of the world of one play differed radically from the one preceding or following it, as he varied his style in an attempt to record the world as he was then experiencing it. The basic qualities of the plays’ worlds, however, are as consistent as those of Pinter’s. Looking at the plays written after 1961, one immediately sees a similarity to Pinter’s world. It is quite obvious that the worlds in these plays are dangerous places. They offer little or no shelter or comfort; characters enter them at their own risk and the weak or sensitive may well be destroyed. It is the world of The Gnädiges Fräulein, in which Molly, the landlady, laughs as she watches her tenant suffer multiple bone fractures and the loss of both eyes. It is a world of chaos, as in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, where two ladies take refuge from the violence in the streets. It is a world of revolutions and dictatorships as in This Is (An Entertainment) and The Demolition Downtown. It is a post-nuclear world of betrayal in The Chalky White Substance, and a horrific Guignol in The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde. Even the quieter The Traveling Companion and Something Cloudy, Something Clear take place in a world defined by the use people make of each other and the bargains they strike in order to survive. It is a universe characterized by violence, death and disregard for the feelings and lives of others – rarely is it not harsh and unforgiving. So it might seem at first glance that Williams, influenced by what he saw in The Caretaker and shortly after that in The Birthday Party, picked up on Pinter’s world. On second look, however, it becomes apparent that this world of danger and cruelty had been present in Williams’ work from the beginning, obscured somewhat by the plays’ other qualities. Sometimes this harsh world was offstage entirely, but it never failed to determine characters’ behavior. In The Glass Menagerie most of Amanda’s actions are in response to a world that is a dangerous, cruel place, dominated by the hard                                                             3

Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter, New York: Grove Press, 1994, 69.

  

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economic facts of the Depression. The most significant circumstance of the play is the Wingfields’ poverty; it explains why mother, son, and daughter share an apartment too small to afford any privacy. Amanda resolves that Laura should be able to provide for herself either by learning a trade or, failing that, finding a husband. She sees to it that Tom, who is out till all hours, is awake in time to labor, however unwillingly, in the shoe warehouse. She herself works a number of jobs, from demonstrating brassieres in a department store to selling magazine subscriptions over the phone. Far from the gentle, nostalgic atmosphere in which the play is often said to occur, then, the world of The Glass Menagerie is a desperate environment. Williams described it in 1945, writing of the neighborhood that inspired the setting: There were a great many alleycats in the neighborhood [in which the Williams lived] which were constantly fighting the dogs. Every now and then some unwary young cat would allow itself to be pursued into this areaway which had only one opening. The end of the cul-de-sac was directly beneath my sister’s bedroom window and it was here that the cats would have to turn around to face their pursuers in mortal combat.4

This is an excellent description of the world of most Williams plays. The desperation of this world is ameliorated in this instance, however, by Amanda’s flights of rose-colored memory (fed by a desire to escape the desperate world she lives in), by the love that binds the family despite their differences and especially by the play’s humor and lyrical language. So veiled are the world’s harsher aspects that the play’s single greatest act of cruelty seems wrapped in velvet. When Tom exits the apartment for good, he leaves his mother and sister completely to their own devices. With him gone, they will have to subsist on the very little that Amanda earns – or she will have to take on yet more work. Tom exposes the family to the deprivations of the world, deserts those who have loved him most and deprives his sister of her best friend and her single uncritical connection to the outside world. He mentions none of these consequences to us. Instead, he                                                             4

Tennessee Williams, “The Author Tells Why it is Called The Glass Menagerie”, in New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak, New York: New Directions, 2009, 27.

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shows us Amanda – now a figure of “dignity and tragic beauty”5 – comforting Laura, and we hear, in haunting, poetic language, the price that Tom himself pays: he is never able to leave them behind; his escape from them has failed. Similarly, in A Streetcar Named Desire, the cruelty that destroys Blanche is almost balanced by the world’s other major quality. Its sensuous nature as expressed in the music of the blues piano and the long, multi-phrased, lyrical language that unwinds like a skein of silk. And again, by the play’s humor. These qualities can soften the impact of the world’s harshness: Stanley’s abuse of his wife and sister-in-law; Stella’s refusal to believe Blanche’s story of rape; Mitch’s cowardice and need for the approval of his friends and mother; and Blanche’s cruelty towards her husband which drove him to his death. And so it goes through almost all of the first half of Williams’ career. Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, Battle of Angels, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth – all of these plays, to varying degrees, occur in a world of insensitivity, brutality and violence. In it, we often witness, to recall Pinter’s phrase, “the destruction of an individual”. When it comes to the worlds of Williams’ plays, then, we do not see Pinter’s influence. Rather, we see an affinity between the two in the way that they experienced the world. One might say that The Birthday Party picks up where A Streetcar Named Desire leaves off. After Blanche is taken away by two characters who appear in the last scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, Goldberg and McCann appear in the first scene of The Birthday Party to take away Stanley. The play’s entire action is about Stanley’s removal from his temporary sanctuary. Perhaps Williams and Pinter had their own date with each other from the beginning. Over time, as other, ameliorating qualities receded or fell away altogether – the lyrical language, the affirming humor and the rich sensuousness of the mise en scène – the cruelty and danger in Williams’ plays became a more dominant note. The increasing visibility of these qualities began in earnest with Orpheus Descending and continued with Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth.                                                            

5

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 236.

  

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They receded temporarily in The Night of the Iguana, manifesting themselves only as the family of vacationing Germans who occasionally disrupt the play with their marching songs and the sound of Hitler’s voice barking over their radio. Marginal caricatures though they are, they would engulf the globe in flames if given the chance. They represent what would happen if the Judith Felloweses of the world metastasized, and it is against them that the Hannah Jelkeses and Maxine Falkes are ranged. The uses of ambiguity In Pinter’s work, identity is slippery and elusive. When we think we know his characters, they slip from our grasp. We rarely know for certain where people come from or what their experiences have been; we never know who anyone is or whether anything anyone is saying is, objectively speaking, true. All we know for certain about Pinter’s characters is what we can verify with our own eyes. Early in his career he wrote, “we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning.”6 Rather than a single verifiable past, there are likely to be many pasts in a Pinter play, all or none of which may be true. In Old Times, for example, Anna says, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.”7 Thus follows: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”8 What we do know is that any version of the past, as Anna in Old Times says, is completely true at the moment a character recalls it. In The Homecoming, when Max speaks of his late wife Jessie, he tells us that “she wasn’t a bad bitch” to whom he gave the best years of his life; he remembers her “rotten stinking face”, but he also acknowledges that she was the backbone of the family and that she was “a slutbitch of a wife” who nonetheless taught their sons “Every                                                            

6

Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, New York: Grove Press, 1998, 17. 7 Harold Pinter, Old Times, in Complete Works, New York: Grove Press, 1981, IV, 27-28. 8 Pinter, Various Voices, 15.

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single bit of the moral code they live by”.9 Even allowing for the irony present in the last statement, one is prompted to ask, “Who was Jessie, anyway?”. She was, Pinter would say, all these women. Without knowing the relevant information of a character’s past – where she has been, what has brought her here, what events shaped her prior to her appearance – it is impossible to know with certainty why she behaves the way she does, or what she hopes to achieve by her actions. Add to this the absence of any knowledge of the world beyond what we actually see, and the choices for motivation and meaning multiply by a significant factor for both actor and audience. This ambiguity was one of the key characteristics that attracted Williams to Pinter. In his praise of The Caretaker, Williams said: To me the play was about the thing that I’ve always pushed in my writing – that I’ve always felt was needed to be said over and over – that human relations are terrifyingly ambiguous. If you write a character that isn’t ambiguous you are writing a false character, not a true one …. You see, they’re exploring subtleties of human relations that haven’t been explored.10

Like the violence in the world of his plays, this interest in ambiguity was present in Williams’ work before he had ever heard of Harold Pinter. He drew attention to its artistic importance in a long stage direction in Act Two of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in which he makes the case for complication and complexity. It occurs near the height of Big Daddy’s fierce cross-examination of Brick about the root of his mysterious drinking habit. When Big Daddy suggests that he has heard of something not “normal” in Brick’s relations with Skipper, Williams writes that this “inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them may be at the root of Brick’s collapse or may only be one part of it and not the most important”: “Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.” Playwrights, he suggests, should steer clear of the pat conclusions and “facile definitions that                                                            

9 Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, in Complete Works, New York: Grove Press, 1978, III, 25, 63 and 62. 10 Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, 98.

  

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make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience”,11 a line of reasoning he tried using to convince Elia Kazan not to alter the play’s ending.12 Here is another affinity with Pinter. Most characters in good plays have something ambiguous about them, but many of Williams’ characters display it particularly. Even in a play as relatively uncomplicated as The Glass Menagerie it is apparent: Tom is closer to his sister than to anyone else, and he loves his mother but is capable of deserting them when the need to become his own authentic person is overwhelming. At first glance, Laura is a fragile young woman who retreats into a fantasy world; but could a person who is merely fragile defy every wish of a woman as determined as her mother? As for Jim, the Gentleman Caller, just how nice a young man is he? Tom tells us that he is the most realistic character in the play and comes from “a world of reality”13 from which the other characters are set apart. We know what the characteristics of that world are, and we know that Jim, who is mightily impressed by his own shadow and who fails to listen to Laura as she tells him about her collection of glass animals, is interested in money, power and the knowledge required to get them. Surprised at finding himself falling under Laura’s spell, he becomes tongue-tied and then suddenly announces that he must meet his fiancée Betty at the train station. The question arises: does Betty exist, or is she is a quickly-invented way out of an awkward situation? From what we have seen of Jim, it is clear that Laura would hardly make the kind of wife he would require on his rise to the top. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche urges her sister to appreciate civilized things and not to hang back with apes like Stanley; but she has performed a purposeful act of cruelty towards her husband, which led to his suicide. Stanley may exhibit the qualities of a brute, but he also cries like a child and, reasonably, wants his wife – and home – back from his sister-in-law, who has commandeered both.                                                            

11

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, III, 114. 12 See Williams’ letter of 31 November 1954 to Kazan in which he explains that “paralysis in a character can be just as significant and just as dramatic as progress, and is also less shop-worn” (Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957, eds Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, New York: New Directions, 2004, 555-58). 13 Williams, The Glass Menagerie, I, 145.

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However, Williams’ ambiguity is different than Pinter’s. It is much less in the foreground, a less central, operating characteristic than it is in Pinter’s plays. Williams generally uses ambiguity in ways similar to those of other sophisticated playwrights: to demonstrate that human beings are complex and act out of multiple motives. If he learned this from another playwright, it was likely Chekhov, Ibsen or Strindberg. Williams gives us more information about the world in which his characters act than Pinter does, so the number of possible motivations and meanings that his characters convey is limited compared with the possibilities when a character is a blanker slate. In The Chalky White Substance, for example, we know that a few hundred years earlier, the planet had been a battleground for domination by two or three hostile powers and that, as a result, a poisonous white powder floats through the air. Consequently, there are few natural resources to support a shrinking population ruled by a brutal, ruthless government. These facts provide an unambiguous context for the play’s action: two lovers share a dwelling concealing an illegal water source. Mark, the older man, betrays Luke to the authorities for a reward and to forestall any charge that he might be colluding with him in the knowledge of the water source. If the play had been written by Pinter, we would have only the relationship between the two characters and the action we see before us: one seeking to dominate the other. We would be left to guess the reasons why. However, in plays such as I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen …, Williams holds his cards close to his vest. In these plays, he reveals less than usual about his characters’ pasts or the immediate worlds in which they live. However, this is not Williams’ natural métier. Indeed, some of the later plays – from the absurdist The Gnädiges Fräulein, Kirche, Küche, Kinder and The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. Le Monde, to the impressionistic Something Cloudy, Something Clear to even The Traveling Companion, a comparatively rare foray into material Realism – display much less ambiguity.14 To this extent, they                                                            

14

I use the term “material Realism” to refer to plays whose world resembles the surface operation of everyday life. “Realism” by itself is a slippery and vague term that does not distinguish between the psychological realism of a Pinter play and the realism of Chekhov play, for example, which also encompasses the physical world in which the characters live. Pinter himself made a similar distinction.

  

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are less complex, less revealing enquiries into the human condition. The same might be said of some of Pinter’s later plays, particularly those with more overt political content, such as One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order and Party Time. Compared with Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes, they have little ambiguity about them at all. Language Ambiguity in Pinter’s work also stems from the fact that in his dangerous world of power-struggle, to speak the truth at any moment about one’s feelings is to reveal a weakness that another character will exploit. So his characters, particularly in the plays prior to 1984, often use language to mask their true feelings. In The Birthday Party, when Meg lets slip that two men have made inquiries about taking a room in the boarding house, Stanley does not express explicit fear beyond a very few lines. Instead, he claims to have been offered a job playing the piano in several continental cities, and then seeks to frighten Meg with the news that an unnamed party is due to arrive any moment in a van, and that they are bringing with them a wheelbarrow. In The Homecoming, Ruth’s arrival with Teddy rattles her brother-in-law Lenny, but he betrays no surprise and disguises any hint that he may recognize her from a previous relationship. Instead, with behavior that echoes Stanley’s, he covers his discomfort with trivial banter and then attempts to intimidate Ruth with stories of his brutal treatment of a prostitute and an old woman. The stories may or may not be true, but he recalls them (if that is the word) with tremendous relish. But characters in Williams’ plays rarely hide their true feelings – no matter how vulnerable this may render them – any more than do those in the work of most American dramatists who live in a culture that puts more emphasis on personal confession than do the British. If anything, Williams’ characters tend to make their feelings quite clear, often at length. Pinter deepens ambiguity in yet another way. As Austin Quigley points out in his seminal work, The Pinter Problem, rather than employing words exclusively to refer to the objects or ideas that they stand for – Wittgenstein’s reference theory of meaning – Pinter’s characters also use them to impose status on a relationship, or to accept or refuse the status offered by another. That is, they deploy language as an instrument, and its meaning is to be understood by

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recognizing the relational context of the characters who are speaking and the end they wish to achieve at a given moment. He cites an example from The Dumb Waiter of 1957. Ben, the senior of two hired assassins, tells his junior partner Gus to “light the kettle” and make tea. Gus takes issue with this expression, arguing that what Ben means is to light the gas burner on the stove, since he does not understand how one can light a kettle. The argument over what seems a trivial point becomes so heated that it does not end until Ben grabs Gus by the throat, and the younger man gives in. In truth, rather than arguing about semantics, they are struggling to establish the upper hand in their relationship. Gus’s refusal to accept Ben’s unexceptional term for heating the water in the kettle is his attempt to undermine the older man’s status as leader; Ben’s reaction is to reinforce that status. What seems trivial is actually at the heart of their relationship at that moment and the conflict, as Quigley points out, will not be resolved until either Ben or Gus accepts the status that the other demands. A great many exchanges in Pinter’s plays work this way. Both long scenes between Ruth and Teddy in The Homecoming play out in this fashion as she rejects all of his attempts to define her and dominate her as her husband. Similarly, she fends off Lenny’s attempts at intimidation in Act One, as well as his climactic offer in Act Two to work for him as a prostitute. She agrees, but only after bargaining for terms that are far more favorable to her than to him. As Quigley puts it: The language of a Pinter play functions primarily as a means of dictating and reinforcing relationships [rather than as a means of solely communicating or sharing information]. This use of language is not, of course, exclusive to a Pinter play and is a common component in all drama and in all language; but in giving this use such extensive scope, Pinter has … achieved his own individual form of stage dialogue ….15

Although critics and audiences reacted as though Pinter and, in his later plays, Williams were being willfully obscure, nothing was farther                                                            

15

Austin E. Quigley, The Pinter Problem, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, 52.

  

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from their minds. Like most artists, they tried to represent the world as they experienced it with scrupulous accuracy. As Pinter wrote in 1961, “I’m convinced that what happens in my plays could happen anywhere, anytime, at any place. If you press me for a definition, I’d say that what goes on in my plays is realistic; but what I’m doing is not realism.”16 In a 1975 interview, Williams said, “My thing is what it always was, to express my world and experience of it in whatever form seems suitable to the material”.17 He, too, was concerned with recording real experience, but material realism, including the use of language as we usually employ it in our daily lives, was not always suitable. Sometimes the suitable method for Williams in his later work included dialogue composed of sentence fragments, mangled syntax or both. In In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, the severely fragmented sentences often end without punctuation. On the page this seems odd. However, when the dialogue is spoken the way that Williams wrote it, with very few pauses, two qualities become apparent. First, it is greatly heightened, highly rhythmic and almost musical. Allean Hale has pointed out that In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and the play from which it was drawn, The Day on Which a Man Dies, use elements of Noh theatre, to which Williams was introduced by Yukio Mishima in the late 1950s.18 Noh’s traditional elements include dropped words, incomplete lines, music, singing and dance. The second quality that this stylized dialogue produces is the feeling that time is being radically condensed. The result is a hallucinogenic, out-of-body effect, which seems exactly right for the strung-out and fatal situation in which the characters find themselves. Williams employed language to achieve this specific effect. In I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, Williams uses sentence fragments interrupted with dashes to portray two characters who may once have been lovers or just very close friends, but who in either case still know each others’ thoughts well enough to finish their sentences. Here, too, Williams is using the language most appropriate for recording the details of a specific reality: the isolation brought on by the impending                                                            

16

Harold Pinter, Introduction: “Writing for Myself”, in Complete Works, New York: Grove Press, 1977, II, 11. 17 Williams, Converstations with Tennessee Williams, 284-85. 18 Allean Hale, “The Secret Script of Tennessee Williams”, The Southern Review XXVII/2 (Spring 1991), 363-75.

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death of the character called One, and the crippling, clinical depression of the other, called Two. In calling them One and Two, Williams adds ambiguity to the world of the play. By definition, One and Two are separate entities, yet they are also dependent on each other. The concept of One implies the existence somewhere of the concept of Two, and Two cannot exist without One. Despite its stylization of language, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow is a powerful demonstration not only of psychological realism but of material realism, as well. Williams recorded, with a fidelity ratified through first-hand experience, the manner in which a deeply depressed person often speaks: in brief sentences and fragments. In the 1975 interview quoted earlier, Williams made quite clear the stylistic path he was following: My plays of the 1940s and 1950s were relatively conventional in their construction, because my mind was relatively balanced. You see, the dreadful period of almost clinical depression had not set in. But as my life became most desperate I had to change the style, because the conventional style of a play no longer could contain that kind of frenzy.19

Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws has not a depressive but a manic quality about it. Two women meet for lunch while outside there is panic and riot in the streets – there’s a feeling about the play that the world is shortly to come to an end. The women, Bea and Madge, engage in a prickly, fast-paced game of one-upsmanship with each other and the other characters. Rarely is there a moment of silence from beginning to end. There are occasional sentence fragments ending in a period, echoing the manner of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, that require an immediate pick-up by the next speaker. At many moments, Williams calls for this intensely rhythmic and often rhyming language to be sung, and there are also interludes of dance. In other words, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws also employs elements of Noh to lend this play about the breakdown of civilization the same heightened qualities belonging to In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. Williams’ varied use of language should be seen in the overall                                                             19

Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, 285.

  

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context of multiple kinds of experiments in which a play’s world departs from material realism in ways beyond the linguistic. Williams denied the influence of anyone other than Chekhov on his work multiple times20 and could be quite sensitive on the subject. During rehearsals for the surrealistic This Is (An Entertainment) at the American Conservatory Theater in 1976, Elizabeth Huddle, who was playing the Countess, made the mistake of asking Williams about the origin of some lines and situations. Williams got quite angry and snapped at her, “Are you saying that I’m derivative?”. She stopped asking after that.21 Still, to deny specific influences on one’s work does not mean that they do not exist. The styles of Pinter, Beckett and Albee were very much in the air in the 1960s and 70s; it was the theatrical element that everyone breathed, Williams included. On the face of it, it is hard not to see something of these younger writers in Williams’ late works mentioned here, as well as in others. Yet, many of these experiments had their origins in work created before any of these writers appeared on the scene. The grotesque cartoon worlds of The Gnädiges Fräulein and Kirche, Küche, Kinder are rooted in Williams’ desire to recreate the “one-dimensional clowneries and heroisms of the nickel comic and adventure strips” that partly inspired Camino Real in the late 1940s and early 1950s.22 Before he saw The Caretaker or likely heard of Harold Pinter, Williams had met Mishima, who inspired the interest in Asian theatre that led him to write the Noh-inflected The Day on Which a Man Dies in 1960. This may well have been the play he was referring to when he remarked to his interviewers in 1961, “Right now I’m engaged in … trying to express a play more in terms of action. Not in terms of physical action; I mean in a sort of gun-fire dialogue instead of the long speeches that I’ve always relied on before.”23 Williams wrote in a style resembling Pinter’s laconic sound on occasion – both before and after he saw The Caretaker – when it suited his material. This was one of many affinities the writers shared,                                                            

20

See, for example, ibid., and Tennessee Williams, Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays, New York: New Directions, 1984, iv. 21 Elizabeth Huddle, telephone interview, 10 July 2002. 22 Gilbert Parker, “Documentary Sources for Camino Real”, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, I (1998), 41-52. 23 Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, 98.

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and perhaps the least significant when compared with their mutual worldview and a common belief in the importance of ambiguity, even as the latter manifested itself differently in their work. If Williams borrowed images occasionally from the new generation of writers, it was just that: he borrowed, as all good writers do. Did Williams influence Pinter? Williams’ most Pinteresque work is Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen …. Two young people, simply called Man and Woman, are living in a small room on the west side of Manhattan; the outside world is largely absent, beyond the faint sounds of children, pigeons and a mandolin. Are they lovers? Were they? Are they brother and sister? Williams tells us only that they have lived together in an intimate situation for a long time, without defining “intimate”.24 The play, like any by Pinter, takes place entirely in the present. The Man, who may or may not be a professional hustler, speaks of waking up in an unfamiliar, trashed hotel room in a bathtub filled with ice water, his lips turning blue. “People”, he says, “do terrible things to a person when he’s unconscious in this city …. Vicious people abuse you when you’re unconscious.”25 Despite a desperate need to communicate with the woman, he is largely unable to reach her. She withdraws into the solitude of an imagined world in which she lives alone for fifty years in a seaside hotel. One day, she says, as she walks along the esplanade, the wind will come up and she will become, “thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner! …. – Till finally I won’t have any body left at all, and the wind picks me up in its cool white arms forever, and takes me away!”26 At the end of the play, it remains unclear whether the Man’s attempts to reach her will succeed, and we know little more about their situation than we did at the beginning. Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen … bears a remarkable resemblance to Pinter’s play Landscape, in which a husband, Duff, and his wife Beth sit in a kitchen. They talk but make no contact, despite Duff’s wishes. The stage directions tell us that for the length of the play, he looks at her but never hears her voice, and she neither                                                             24

Tennessee Williams, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen ..., in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1981, VI, 265. 25 Ibid., 267. 26 Ibid., 272.

  

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hears nor sees him. Although we see them together, it is clear that they are not in the same space at the same time – which is exactly the nature of their relationship. Duff tells Beth about waiting out a storm beneath a tree; an encounter with a lout in a pub; the lover he once had; and an image – maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t – of raping Beth. The unhearing Beth has withdrawn into a past world where she was loved: perhaps by her husband, perhaps by another man. She talks about meeting this man on the beach and perhaps in a hotel bar where they had a drink; of being watched by him as she watered the flowers in her yard; of drawing him in pencil; of making love on the beach. As Duff describes the rape, Beth recalls looking up at the man she made love to, saying: So sweetly the sand over me. Tiny the sand on my skin. So silent the sky in my eyes. Gently the sound of the tide. Oh my true love, I said.27

However much Duff may wish to possess Beth, or even to simply communicate with her, she is forever receding. Williams wrote Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen … around 1950; Pinter wrote Landscape in 1967. Both plays demonstrate a point that Williams made in Orpheus Descending in 1957: “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement within our own skins, for life!”28 One is tempted to ask, was Harold Pinter influenced by Tennessee Williams? Perhaps the key to the question of Pinter’s influence on Williams is a response Williams gave to Lewis Funke and John E. Booth in their 1962 interview about the spareness of Pinter’s language. Williams told them: It’s something that drives me crazy with jealousy. I love it. When I’m in the theatre, I’m enthralled by it and I say, Oh, God, if I could write like that.29

No matter whom he might have wished to have written like – if anyone – in the end, Williams wrote like himself in the ways in which he had to write. Withholding words and information, wielding                                                             27

Harold Pinter, Landscape, in Complete Works, III, 198. Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, III, 271. 29 Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams, 98. 28

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language like a weapon or using it as a mask, were natural strategies for Pinter. They were not for Williams. Loquaciousness of expression and rich information about context and background were second nature to Williams, even as he worked in different styles, and he returned to these habits like a touchstone throughout his later years. Williams’ admiration for Pinter never flagged, and over the years they became friends as well as colleagues. In 1979, he referred to Pinter as “the greatest living contemporary playwright”30 and Pinter called Williams “the greatest American playwright”.31 In the last week of his life, Williams saw Pinter’s three one-Act plays Other Places at the National Theatre.32 They may have been the last plays he saw. In 1985, Pinter directed Sweet Bird of Youth in London’s West End. Later that year, as he was playing Deeley in an American tour of Old Times, Pinter and his wife Antonia Fraser visited Williams’ grave in Calvary Cemetery in St Louis. At the graveside, he had an image of a young man standing in a fierce white light. He made a note; from that image came Party Time, a play about the sudden death of a young man while the wealthy and powerful people responsible for his murder laughed, drank and partied.33 It was the most fitting tribute he could pay to Tennessee Williams.

                                                           

30

Ibid., 319. Albin Krebs and Robert McG. Thomas, Jr, “Notes on People; Playwrights Spotlighted”, The New York Times on the Web, 20 November 1981: http://www. nytimes.com/1981/11/20/nyregion/notes-on-people-playwrights-spot-lighted.html?scp =1&sq=Notes+on+people%3B+playwrights+spotlighted&st=nyt (accessed 15 September 2012). 32 Tennessee Williams, Five O’Clock Angel: The Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, ed. Maria St Just, New York: Penguin, 1990, 392. 33 Antonia Fraser, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, New York: Doubleday, 2010, 180. 31

  

   

   

   

I am so longing to get to London for a while to be among friends …. Please in your own subtle way try to get Paul [Scofield] to sign an agreement. You see, in the American theatre, Maria, ladies and gentlemen hardly exist anymore and the word honor is not in the American dictionary not even the present vocabulary, my dear, and that has a lot to do with my intentions to buy a little farm with goats in Sicily. [Inserted in handwriting] and engage an attractive youngish wop gardener, to prevent abuse of the goats. I prefer baa-baa to oink-oink-oink. Tennessee Williams, letter to Maria St Just, 1972

   

   

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND IVO VAN HOVE AT HOME ABROAD JOHAN CALLENS

Among the many Williams plays which have been produced in the Low Countries, A Streetcar Named Desire has been a staple, as could have been expected from its status within the Williams canon and that of twentieth-century American drama. Its earliest production dates from 17 November 1948. This was a few months after the by-now venerable Holland Festival had wrapped up its inaugural season, and Pjortr Sjarov had directed a melancholic version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country for Toneelgroep Comedia. Sjarov was a former student of Stanislavsky and for a brief time worked with his artistic rival Meyerhold in St Petersburg before becoming Stanislavsky’s assistant at the Moscow Art Theatre.1 For the next twenty years, until his death in 1969, Sjarov’s guest productions in the Netherlands would establish the standard performance style of Chekhov’s plays, with the lyrical and dreamlike atmosphere arguably befitting a disappearing landed aristocracy incapable of coping with the demands of a new era. The Chekhovian performance style was frequently adopted for productions of Williams, too, as if retroactively to substantiate J. Brooks Atkinson’s somewhat puzzling assessment of A Streetcar                                                             1

Saskia de Leeuw, “1947: Pjotr Sjarov regisseert bij Comedia Toergenjevs Een maand op het land. Begin van een bijzondere periode in de Nederlandse toneelgeschiedenis” (“1947: Pyotr Sjarov directs Toergenjev’s A Month in the Country at the Comedia: The Start of a Special Period in Dutch Theatre History”), in Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed. R.L. Erenstein et al., Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996, 666-71; Loek Zonneveld, “Pjotr Sjarov in Holland”, De Groene Amsterdammer, 1991: http://www. loekzonneveld.nl/docs/ sjarov.htm (accessed 25 March 2012).

   

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Named Desire as a “quietly woven study of intangibles”, an assessment hard to account for on the evidence of Kazan’s Broadway production.2 In a 1960 interview with Edward Murrow, Williams toned down the resemblance to Chekhov when recalling the movie adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire: … we had a screenwriter ... working on it, and he started off like it was The Cherry Orchard. You know, he said that outside the mansion, outside Belle Reve, you could hear them chopping down trees. And I said, “Oh no, this isn’t The Cherry Orchard quite”. And so this poor gentleman from Hollywood [Oscar Saul] was taken off the script and I had to write it myself, which I probably subconsciously wanted to do all along, so I gave him the axe. [laughter]3

In a subsequent interview with John Gruen, Williams appeared more lenient or honest when identifying Chekhov as a major, if not “the chief[,] influence on [him], as a playwright”.4 Since his undergraduate days Williams has indeed been partial to Chekhov, to the point of creating in The Lady of Larkspur Lotion an alter ego of himself who identifies with the Russian master and of adapting The Seagull in The Notebook of Trigorin. Blanche DuBois’ name is also meant to recall The Cherry Orchard. As she explains to Mitch, it means “white woods. Like an orchard in spring! You can remember it by that.”5 For those with a short memory, certain translations, like Eric de Kuyper’s, which was used by the Flemish director Ivo van Hove in 1995, rendered explicit the reference to Chekhov. They insisted it be a “cherry” orchard and thereby anticipated the Young Man’s “cherry soda” in a passage van Hove especially appreciated.6 This slight poetic                                                             2 J. Brooks Atkinson, review of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, The New York Times, 4 December 1947, 42. 3 Edward R. Murrow, “Interview with Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, and Dilys Powell”, in Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin, Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 1986, 71. 4 Ibid., 114. 5 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 299. 6 Ibid., 338. Joyce Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil: Regisseur Ivo van Hove over geweld, liefde en De Tramlijn die Verlangen heet” (“Blanche Is a Snow-owl: Director Ivo van Hove on Violence, Love and A Streetcar Named Desire”), Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, 27 January 1995: http://archief.nrc.nl/index.php/1995/Januari/ 27/Overig/3/Blanche+is+een+sneeuwuil%3B+Regisseur+Ivo+van+Hove+over+gewel d,+liefde+en+De+Tramlijn+die+Verlangen+heet/check=Y (accessed 10 October

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license with Blanche DuBois’ name presumably also alerts spectators to Natasha’s dismissal of the musicians in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, when Stella sends the poker players packing.7 Such deliberate metatheatrical recapitulations of theatre history supplement A Streetcar Named Desire’s forceful re-enactments of idyllic and traumatic pasts, already doubled by the secular routines of poker games, movies and bridge.8 These re-enactments contribute to what van Hove considers an “angstwekkend pessimistisch stuk, dat niemand toestaat zich te ontwikkelen en iedereen vast zet in de modder”.9 Hence, the director, whose theatrical roots go back to the performance tradition, troubled these re-enactments’ repetitive temporality by what seemed an undodgeably present, catastrophic time. In the same performance tradition, van Hove also used explicit nudity, no longer hampered by the constraints that governed Kazan’s 1947 Broadway stage or his 1951 screen adaptation. As such, van Hove provided perhaps less A Streetcar Named Desire for the 1990s than a restoration of what Williams may have intended, regardless of those reviewers faulting the Flemish director for having drowned the playwright’s lyricism.10 By the same token, van Hove built on the Dutch premiere. For when the Amsterdam Comedia produced Williams’ De tramlijn die verlangen heet (A Streetcar Named Desire), it was not directed by Sjarov but by the equally famous Johan de Meester Jr, whose spectacular Parisian guest productions of Lucifer and Tijl with Het Vlaamse Volkstoneel (Flemish Popular Theatre, 1927) accrued mythic proportions. It was partly due to de Meester, so theatre historians tell us, and to the raw sexual battle between Stanley                                                                                                                                 2012); Tennessee Williams, De tramlijn die verlangen heet (A Streetcar Named Desire), trans. Eric de Kuyper, Amsterdam: International Theatre and Film Books; Eindhoven: Het Zuidelijk Toneel, 1995, 51. 7 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 302. 8 Judith Thompson, Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol, Bern: Peter Lang, 2002, 25-50. 9 Quoted in Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”: “frighteningly pessimistic play, which permits no one to develop and traps everyone in the mud.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 10 Marjan Buijs, “Een begeerte zonder enige broeierigheid” (“Desire without Sultriness”), De Volkskrant, 23 January 1995: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2844/ Archief/archief/article/detail/402722/1995/01/23/Een-begeerte-zonder-enige-broeierig heid.dhtml (accessed 12 October 2012).

  

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and Blanche that dramatic realism was introduced in the Low Countries, or at least the latest phase in that concept’s ongoing redefinition, from Chekhov, Meyerhold and Stanislavsky to Williams and on to van Hove. Since de Meester’s 1948 premiere, Dutch language revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire have followed each other, north and south of the Dutch border, on a fairly regular basis. An unpublished spot check in 2010, courtesy of Christophe Collard, yielded at least twenty-four stagings (one-third of them amateur ones) out of a tentative total of a hundred-and-thirty-three Williams productions, or slightly less than twenty percent. Van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire premiered 20 January 1995 when he was still artistic director of Zuidelijk Toneel Eindhoven (1990-2000), one of the more important Dutch resident theatres, founded in 1954 as Stichting Brabants Toneel and relocated to Tilburg in 2009. In September 1999, he remounted his A Streetcar Named Desire with an American cast at the New York Theatre Workshop, after he had already taken on the joint responsibilities of manager and artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, a move until then unheard of in the Dutch theatre establishment. At that point, van Hove was also artistic director of the Holland Festival, a position he would combine with his duties as head of the largest Dutch repertory company until 2004. In these capacities, van Hove confirmed and expanded his pre-eminent role as one of several Flemish directors who improved on de Meester when establishing successful careers abroad and a fertile traffic between different national theatre scenes. In this venture, van Hove was aided by the designer Jan Versweyveld, his partner and artistic collaborator since the very beginning of their joint career. In 1981 they established the experimental Antwerps Kollektief voor Theaterprojekten (Antwerp Collective for Theatre Projects), whose Dutch acronym, AKT, provided a clear programmatic statement. Soon enough the company merged with Vertikaal Gent (1984-1987), then with De Witte Kraai and De Tijd in Antwerp (1987-1990), which van Hove and Versweyveld in turn left for Zuidelijk Toneel Eindhoven, because they deemed the cultural climate in the Netherlands more favorable and the art scene taken more seriously by its critics. At the time the official Flemish theatre appeared in ruins, the political wave of the 1970s abated. For the first ten years, van Hove and Versweyveld worked in the margin of the major city

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theatres. Their earliest devised productions, Ziektekiemen and Geruchten (Germs and Rumors, 1981-1982), were staged in an empty launderette and in the Montevideo hangar in the port of Antwerp. Though they instantly attracted international attention,11 it would take another ten years before the Schauspielhaus Hamburg coproduced Die Bakchen and fifteen years before the collaboration with the New York Theatre Workshop materialized. Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was the second play van Hove did in New York, following More Stately Mansions (1996). The latter belongs to O’Neill’s unfinished cycle, A Tale of Possessors SelfDispossessed, and demonstrates the Flemish director’s occasional predilection for unusual or seemingly unproducible texts, though A Streetcar Named Desire is a classic. It takes courage, self-confidence and ambition in wanting to take Williams and O’Neill to the US, whether to the Theatre Workshop, the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where in 2009 van Hove’s second Dutch staging of Mourning Becomes Electra was showcased. Fellow Flemings like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Lauwers and Jan Fabre, to name a few, would seem to have risked less when going international with their devised theatre and dances. But O’Neill and Williams are sufficiently hallowed icons for critics to find fault with foreign productions, especially those dubbed revisionist Eurotrash.12 The “Eurotrash” label was more than literalized in van Hove’s Misanthrope (2007), when Alceste (Bill Camp) first gorged himself with fast food and smashed a watermelon on his head to criticize the cannibalistic consumerism of Célimène’s gossiping friends, and then won over the woman of his dreams (played by Jeanine Serralles) by wallowing in the garbage he had brought in from the sidewalk outside the New York Theatre Workshop to trash her with. In van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the “real” made similar incursions, and on the occasion of its original Dutch staging the director already expressed his desire to make “dirty theatre”: “Uiteindelijk hoop ik                                                            

11

David Willinger, “Van Hove’s Disease Germs”, The Drama Review, XXVII/1 (Spring 1983), 93-97, and “Van Hove’s Geruchten”, The Drama Review, XXV/2 (Summer 1981), 116-18. 12 Randy Gener, “A Passion for Extremes”, American Theatre, November 2009, 25; Robert Brustein, “Revisioning Tennessee Williams”, The New Republic, 25 October 1999, 34-36.

  

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eens een voorstelling te maken die zo vol zit met rommel dat je je afvraagt waar de regisseur heeft gezeten. Maar de troep is er, onzichtbaar, hypergeconstrueerd. Vuil theater moet het zijn ….”13 When going international, van Hove hedged his bets by finding coproducers and recasting the plays with excellent local performers. Collaboration seemed the key to success, though Williams himself was reproached for relying too much on Kazan, out of an inner insecurity at times preventing him from being a better judge of his own writing. When reviving his A Streetcar Named Desire in New York, van Hove was equally faulted, this time for counter-casting an uncharismatic Bruce McKenzie as Stanley, who was nonetheless praised for bringing out the territorial battle with his opponent. Blanche remained the odd bird out, scapegoated for pretending to hold on to bygone standards of femininity, but Elizabeth Marvel seemed visibly “exhausted with the charade”.14 McKenzie’s Stanley for his part seemed to fumble the rape, as he first got entangled in his bright orange, spandex pajamas and subsequently lacked the necessary energy for the showdown. Van Hove’s counter-casting thus challenged, if not dispersed, the memory of Brando, just as the director’s bare-stage production of Angels in America (2008) tended to pre-empt recollections of the star-studded American TV adaptation (dir. Mike Nichols, HBO, 2003). Naturally there is no telling how Brando would have fared when utterly exposed on Broadway’s prurient stage, but Brantley, for one, felt that McKenzie’s performance was the ultimate “retribution for five noisy decades of second-rate Kowalski interpreters and Brando impersonators”.15 To van Hove, Brando’s equivocal interpretation of Stanley behaving towards women as an “undeniably sympathetic” “male pig” has long ago become impossible. Nevertheless the director still showed his performers at Zuidelijk Toneel a screened interview with                                                            

13 Quoted in Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”: “Ultimately I eventually hope to make a production that is so full of trash that you wonder where the director has been. But the mess is there, invisibly hyperconstructed. It has to be dirty theatre.” 14 Jonathan Kalb, Play by Play: Theater Essays and Reviews, 1993-2002, New York: Limelight Editions, 2003, 213-14. 15 Ben Brantley, “A Brimming Bathtub as the Focus of Desire”, The New York Times, 13 September 1999: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/13/theater/theater-review-abrimming-bathtub-as-the-focus-of-desire.html?scp=1&sq=Brantley%252 (accessed 14 October 2012). For a more positive assessment, see Brustein, “Revisioning Tennessee Williams”, 34.

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the actor, as well as the first hour of Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Victor Fleming), to illustrate “waar Blanche vandaan komt en hoe ze is grootgebracht”, and to explain why she experiences the sweltering noisy Elysian Fields in New Orleans as enemy territory, in keeping with Mitch’s reference to General Lee’s crossing of the Potomac during the Civil War.16 No published reports are available on how van Hove actually rehearsed A Streetcar Named Desire, but the notorious physical romp in More Stately Mansions, as Simon and Sara Harford try to revive their marriage – played at the New York Theatre Workshop by a naked Tim Hopper and Jenny Bacon to the strains of Bach – in the Netherlands at least was rehearsed between Chris Nietvelt and Warre Borgmans, while Nirvana’s “Rape Me” blasted through the loudspeakers. If this helps to explain the performers’ shameless ardour during the nude scene, the dramatic parallel with A Streetcar Named Desire is also noteworthy, since Sara’s lust cooled off due to the omnipresence of Simon’s mother, Deborah, in their home.17 Just so, Blanche’s intrusion in the Kowalski household provides a disturbing check on Stanley’s Dionysian revelry. Though it would be misguided to see her simply as another Pentheus,18 van Hove’s translator again foregrounded the theatre historical parallel by rendering the “epic fornications” of Blanche’s family as “bacchanalen”.19 Intruders and non-conformist outsiders figure as prominently in Williams’ as in van Hove’s repertoire, not just in Euripides’ Bacchae, which he first staged in Flanders (1987), before reviving it in Hamburg (1992), and which forms the intertextual model of Theorem (1968), the film script Pier Paolo Pasolini novelized, so van Hove could fall back on both sources for his 2009 production at the Ruhrtriennale. From this historical perspective,                                                            

16 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 308. Quoted in Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”: “to illustrate where Blanche comes from and how she had been raised.” 17 Hein Janssen, “Vleeskleurig latexpak” (“A Flesh-colored Latex Suit”), De Volkskrant, 18 October 2001: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2844/Archief/archief/ article/detail/ 599598/2001/10/18/Vleeskleurig-latexpak.dhtml (accessed 12 October 2012); Robert S. MacLean, review of van Hove’s More Stately Mansions, Eugene O’Neill Review XXI/1-2 (Spring/Fall 1997), 178-82. 18 Thompson, Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol, 39-43. 19 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 284; Williams, De tramlijn die verlangen heet, 37.

  

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Marvel’s and Bacon’s performances in van Hove’s New York A Streetcar Named Desire were more than “truly memorable performances”, as Robert Brustein put it, the one for seeming “to emerge out of another generation of actors, notably the age of Tallulah Bankhead”, the other for sounding “a lot like Estelle Parsons in Bonnie and Clyde”.20 While evidence of Brustein’s encyclopedic memory, this impression provides a further clue to the manner in which van Hove, inspired by Williams’ own intertextual and metatheatrical memorial dramaturgy, fleshed out his version of A Streetcar Named Desire with theatre historical citations, as was already clear from his first, Dutch production of the play. The Flemish cast featured Johan van Assche (Stanley), Chris Nietvelt (Blanche), Katelijne Damen (Stella) and Steven van Watermeulen (Mitch) in the four leads. Possibly drawing on Noh’s minimalist theatre, an influence on Williams following his encounter with Yukio Mishima, evident in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, the stage was bare except for the fully exposed bathtub with working taps, some chairs and a beer crate. The two rooms were simply staked out by lit squares on the wooden floor, surrounded by large semi-lit zones in which Blanche thrives and the performers hover when not on, thus rendering fluid realism’s fourth wall by blurring the boundary between fiction and reality. Upstage steel piping formed an open cage-like structure with an assortment of instruments amidst which circulated three live musicians (the composer Harry de Wit, Willem Brink and Norbert Mannaert). During their cacophonic musical intro, the lights subtly formed a ramp spreading from downstage left and along the upstage tubular installation, like the single headlight of a locomotive, slowly making its way through the cityscape. In the meantime, Nietvelt was putting on a fancy dress, as if for a Sunday outing. The role of the high-strung, resilient yet breakable Blanche was as much the actress’s creation as that of Williams and van Hove, whose work is meant to reawaken the spectators’ emotions and shares a strong sensorialness. Nietvelt was daunted by the role, fearing she would never pull it off, but by her own admission she succeeded in making Blanche’s “extreme emoties theatraal hanteerbaar”.21 The paradoxical goal she set herself throws                                                            

20

Brustein, “Revisioning Tennessee Williams”, 34. Hein Janssen, “Uit het donker naar het licht” (“From Dark into Light”), De Volkskrant, 16 November 2000: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2844/Archief/archief/

21

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into relief Williams’ emotionally invested metatheatrical dramaturgy and Blanche’s volatile mix of heart-felt passion and histrionics, the consummate achievement that comes from practicing and honing an inborn talent and drive as a means of survival. Van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire built on this paradox by teetering on the cusp of realism and performance art, as can be illustrated by a brief discussion of selected scenes. To begin, three German shepherd dogs were initially chained to the stage.22 These were warranted by A Streetcar Named Desire’s reference to St Barnabas’ lecherous pet and to the fluid symbolic setting in an Elysian Fields closer to Purgatory and Hell than Heaven.23 As in Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno (2008), these dogs were the offspring of the mythical Cerebus, the three-headed beast guarding the banks of the rivers Styx and Lethe, as if to remind Blanche of her fugitive status after losing Belle Reve, a corruption of Belle Rive or Beautiful River Bank. Blanche’s crossing from the family’s burial grounds to the Elysian Fields proves a strenuous one, if not a fatal drowning on account of that “baying hound” of a Stanley.24 Dogs have not been the only live animals on van Hove’s stage. His earlier production of O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms (1992) was set in a stable featuring eight massive cows whose presence and odor could be felt and smelt deep into the house. The effect, however, is ambiguous. Live animals embody the point at which realism’s obsessive search for verisimilitude tips over into its own dissolution, due to the phenomenal instability of its aesthetic.25 For all its vampiric                                                                                                                                 article/detail/554036/2000/11/16/Uit-het-donker-naar-het-licht.dhtml (accessed 14 October 2012): “extreme emotions theatrically manageable.” 22 Though the program for the Zuidelijk Toneel production lists four dogs - Elsa, Ruth, Ivan and Nobi - and credits their trainers (Hans van den Boomen from the Lykos company), only three dogs at a time seemed to be used on stage (Buijs). 23 The reference to St Barnabas and his dog can be found in the version of A Streetcar Named Desire published in Tennessee Williams: Plays, 1937-1955, eds Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch, New York: Library of America, 2000, 469, but not in New Directions’ The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (I, 244), which starts with Stanley’s meat delivery, even if the colophon of De tramlijn die verlangen heet credits New Directions’ first edition (New York: New Directions, 1947). 24 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 306. 25 Stanton B. Garner, Jr, “Staging ‘Things’: Realism and the Theatrical Object in Shepard’s Theatre”, in Between the Margin and the Centre, ed. Johan Callens, special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review VIII/3 (October 1998), 55-66.

  

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colonializing force, always threatening to transmute into a functional or symbolic prop any object framed by the proscenium, the realist stage can incorporate only so much reality until its magic bubble bursts. Despite or perhaps because of its connection with Lee Strasberg’s Method and psychological realism, Williams’ drama deconstructs fixed material settings. Space is fluid in his “plastic theatre”,26 a change of light enough to move from “the exterior of the two-storey corner building” into the downstairs, two-room flat.27 Bathed in the appropriate soundscape the events just as easily transport us into a lurid jungle or Blanche’s psychotic mind in which the obsessive strains of a Varsouviana compete with the roar of passing trains. Harry de Wit’s live sound design allegedly evoked or “‘revived’ on stage the city of New Orleans”,28 besides Blanche’s confused mind, but here, too, the associative range was rich and non-restrictive, now wistful, now ominous. Williams’ New Orleans conflates urban, rural, mythical and ideological territory. For a southerner born and raised in a racially conflicted society, wildly baying dogs bring back the relentless chase for runaway convicts, as in Orpheus Descending. Throughout Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Combat de nègre et chiens (1979), the prerecorded howling and barking of dogs creates a tense atmosphere. Live dogs vastly increase the terror as they tug at their chains. Still, after a few performances van Hove did without the dogs. Either they were too unruly or made aggressive by the outbursts onstage. Whatever the reason, the decision only confirms that animal reality is hard to reconcile with the stage illusion. Van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire nevertheless insisted on a kind of undiluted reality in several performative actions, which brought out the difference between Stanley and Blanche, yet also drew them together, as if A Streetcar Named Desire were governed by a deeper mimetic                                                            

26

See Williams’ “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 131-34. 27 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 243 and 288 (Williams’ italics). 28 Liner Notes to the CD, “Harry de Wit - on stage: 4 scores for theatre and film, directed by Ivo van Hove”, Stemra 7201, produced by Zuidelijk Toneel and Stichting de Wit, n.d. Besides the soundtrack of A Streetcar Named Desire, those for Faces, Thuisfront and India Song are excerpted on the CD. The sound design for Duras’ India Song (1998-1999) incorporated “Indian street sounds recorded by Bart van den Eynde”, one of van Hove’s dramaturgs, thus providing further illustration of how the real is made to intervene in van Hove’s stage productions.

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force. Despite the narrative disruption which these intense performative moments in their seeming autonomy cause, they served Williams’ fiction, as well as Jan Peter Gerrits’ dramaturgy, much as Nietvelt tried to make Blanche’s excessive emotions theatrically manageable. The conundrum is compounded by the fact that the repetitiousness of these performative moments in real time further tends to inscribe them into the characters’ histories determined by the re-enactment of traumatizing events. In the absence of the dogs, the first conspicuously performative moment in van Hove’s production marked Stanley’s entrance, which here coincides with his return from the bowling alley and not with his famous meat delivery to Stella, which was cut (the point is nonetheless preserved in Blanche’s animalistic portrait of Stanley as “survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle!”). The script at this point has Stanley retrieve the whiskey bottle and check its depletion, like a younger James Tyrone. This may be a rather unrealistic craving for a working-class man after a game of bowling, but it does show Stanley’s possessiveness and possible suspicion of Blanche who has been and will be abusing his bottle.29 Van Assche heads straight for the beer crate and, in slow succession, downs three bottles, taking all the time in the world to slake his (fictional? real?) thirst, and giving Nietvelt all the time in the world to size up her opponent, though she right away draws the obvious conclusion: “You must be Stanley. I’m Blanche.”30 With only the barest gallantry, she instantly berates Stanley for his boorish neglect of her and draws a clear territorial line between the two of them. Certain artists, whether Fabre, Tim Etchells, Peter Stein or Robert Wilson, believe it takes durational performances – lasting hours, days, even weeks – to free the spectators from narrative continuity. For van Hove, a few protracted minutes can last ages, or, as Blanche confides to the Young Man collecting for the Evening Star, when it rains in New Orleans “an hour isn’t just an hour but a little piece of eternity”.31 Blanche’s light-heartedness, however, betrays her dire need to hold on to the moment. Three times she calls back the Young Man, whose timidity in Pol Pauwels’ performance soon enough turns into brazen                                                            

29

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 323, 266, 250 and 398. Ibid., 265. 31 Ibid., 337-38. 30

  

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opportunism, as if to demonstrate that boys will be men, no matter Blanche’s preference, hence her miscasting Stanley.32 If Pauwels’ suddenly bared chest was meant to confirm his resemblance to “a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights”,33 then she was still Sheherazade, compelled to keep talking, lest she lose her life. Blanche will lose her sanity, but first Stella and her unborn baby are threatened by a drunken Stanley’s own “lunacy”,34 when his poker game is disrupted by the little party Blanche and Mitch get going. In van Hove’s production, no radio played “Wien, Wien, nur du allein”, but de Wit’s percussive music burst out over the sound system. Van Assche, dressed in his “Number 1” bowling T-shirt (similar to the one Damen [Stella] was wearing at the play’s start), seemingly joins the party with an electric guitar, until its dissonant wails and his obscene gestures with the instrument reassert his dominance. The conflict was visually enhanced by relegating him to one of the lit squares and the partygoers to the other. In a renewed demonstration of the temporal dynamics of van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire, his partygoers gradually slow down and ultimately come to a standstill, mesmerized by the ongoing reverb of van Assche’s guitar. The heavy silence that follows is finally broken by Stella’s outburst against her “Drunk – drunk – animal thing” of a husband.35 Van Assche’s subsequent manhandling of Damen was closer to rape than a beating until she manages to escape, and van Assche is shoved into the full bathtub instead of under the shower. It is then and there that he intones Stanley’s ever louder show-stopping cries for Stella, interrupted in turn by Eunice (Camilla Siegertsz), who pushes him under, not once, but three times, forcing him to catch his breath, each time he struggles free of her lethal grip. Meanwhile she reminds him that he should have been “locked” up and “hosed down”, “same as the last time!”,36                                                             32 Van Hove said that, whereas Stanley insists on sexual satisfaction (colored lights), Blanche longs for something she cannot name because she knows it will undo her: “Haar geheim is dat ze van jongens houdt, omdat ze de gedachte aan een man niet aankan. Geef een man seks en hij is je beu, leerde ze als meisje” (“Her secret is that she loves boys, because she cannot handle the thought of a man. Give a man sex and he grows tired of you, she learnt as a girl”). Quoted in Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”. Hence she imagines that men are boys you can flatter with kisses and provocations, as when she sprays perfume on Stanley in scene two (I, 281). 33 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 339. 34 Ibid., 303. 35 Ibid., 302. 36 Ibid., 306.

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the discomfiting implication being that Stanley’s behavior is as compulsive as Blanche’s. The next series of enhanced or hyperreal performative moments follow immediately after van Hove’s single intermission. Having omitted Kazan’s first intermission after scene four, van Hove resumes the play with scene seven, in which Blanche insists on make-believe by singing Edgar Yipsel Yarburg and Billy Rose’s 1933 hit “It’s Only a Paper Moon”.37 Van Hove substituted an instrumental tune, which Harry de Wit plays on saxophone, romantically serenading Nietvelt’s Blanche in her bluishly lit metal tub, thereby betraying van Hove’s and Williams’ reliance on the dramaturgical method of defining character through musical motifs, used in cinema, too.38 Structurally, however, the musician’s frame-breaking and Versweyveld’s light design at this point underscore her delusive high spirits after Mitch’s confession that they need each other.39 In traditional realistic productions, the radical disruption of the intermission requires an extra effort to resume the illusion, to believe, that is, in the phony Barnum and Bailey world. In A Streetcar Named Desire, however, Stanley’s gloating revelation of Blanche’s lies and Stella’s unwilling counter-revelation, providing further details of the unhappy marriage that “killed” her sister’s “illusions”,40 keep pace with Williams’ metatheatrical deconstruction of the stage illusion.41 Ironically, van Hove and van Assche respond in kind by blatantly reconstructing the actorly illusion, a far cry from Stanislavsky’s strenuous emotional recollection but totally in keeping with Nietvelt’s literal exposure in the bathtub and her character’s express belief in make-believe. While Damen is putting into place three wooden chairs for the birthday supper, van Assche grabs hold of his gleaming metal one, its seat and back the same garish green of his sweater. No more is needed, Versweyveld must have thought, to bring home the possessiveness of the “gaudy seed-bearer”, imprinting with his                                                             37

Ibid., 360. See Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”. 39 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 356. 40 Williams, De tramlijn die verlangen heet, 105. 41 Blanche’s line (“she had an experience that - killed her illusions! ... I mean her marriage, when she was - almost a child!”) and Stanley’s interjection (“What experience was that?”) are not in New Directions’ A Streetcar Named Desire (I, 364), but are in Gussow and Holditch’s Library of America version (533). 38

  

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“emblem” everything that is his.42 Still, there is no “animal joy”43 but sheer frustration in van Assche, as he visibly exhausts himself trying to pull apart the chair, in a mock sparagmós now substituting for the unwanted guest criticizing his Dionysian revelry, his arm and back muscles straining in vain, until he plunks down the lifeless object for a disapproving Damen to pick up and place next to the ordinary wooden chairs.44 Still breathing heavily from the physical effort, the actor then crouches and launches into the scene’s opening line without having to pretend that he is all worked up by Blanche’s renewed siege of “his” bathroom, once again causing seconds and minutes to stretch into hours, short of her blissful eternity with the Young Man.45 Reviewers neglected van Assche’s shadow fight (repeated at the end of scene eight, where it is followed by a hysterical fit in which he trashes and flails on the wooden floor).46 Instead they focused on his actual smashing of wooden chairs, plates and a beer crate – not to mention a perfectly good guitar in New York (as Brustein pined) – during the gradual build up towards the no-holds-barred rape scene, at the end of which he dumps Nietvelt in the bathtub so she almost                                                            

42

Frédéric Maurin considers the green metal chair Blanche’s, but this is Stanley’s, which Eunice (Siegertsz) offers Blanche upon her arrival at the Kowalski home, thus announcing right away the threat of his dispossession. See his “‘Oh! You do have a bathroom! First door to the right at the top of the stairs?’ La salle de bains dans la mise en scène d’Un tramway nommé Désir”, Études anglaises, LXIV/1 (janvier-mars 2011), 86-100. 43 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 265 (Williams’ italics). 44 For parallels between A Streetcar Named Desire and Euripides’ Bacchae, see Thompson, Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol, 39-43; Paul J. Firenze, “The Social Mask and the Dionysian Figure in Pirandello’s Liolá and Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire”, Neohelicon, XXIV/2 (1997), 327-39; and Mary Koutsoudaki, The Dionysiac Myth in Camus and Williams, Athens: Saripolos Library, University of Athens, 1987. 45 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 257 and 366. 46 Brantley, “A Brimming Bathtub as the Focus of Desire”; Brustein, “Revisioning Tennessee Williams”, 34-36; James Hannaham, “A Formalist Affair”, The Village Voice, 14 September 1999: http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-09-14/theater/aformalist-affair/ (accessed 11 October 2012); Kalb, Play by Play, 212-16; Marian Buijs, “Een begeerte zonder enige broeierigheid”; Anneriek de Jong, “Magnifiek spel in A Streetcar Named Desire door Het Zuidelijk Toneel: De kloof tussen begeerte en verlangen” (“Magnificent Acting in A Streetcar Named Desire by Het Zuidelijk Toneel: The Gap between Desire and Longing”), Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, 21 January1995: http://archief.nrc.nl/index.php/1995/Januari/21/Kunst/7/ Magnifiek+spel +in+A+Streetcar+Named+Desire+door+Het+Zuidelijk+Toneel%3B+De+kloof+tusse n+begeerte+en+verlangen//check=Y (accessed 11 October 2012).

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drowns. Stanley’s “smashing things” and “putting on the dog”47 can easily be naturalized by his violent character or war-time past. However, from the performance art perspective some of van Assche’s “real-time” actions acquire a more disruptive anti-narrative and antiillusionary force as Benjaminian “excitable gestures”, a coinage combining Brecht’s epic notions of interruptibility (the reciting of citation), with the dislocation (resiting) and renewed investigation (resighting) of the theatre’s public exposure.48 In the Flemish context, the smashing of plates, in particular, resonates not only with Brando’s stage and movie performance but also with Jan Fabre’s Macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden (The Power of Theatrical Madness), which premiered 11 June 1984 at the Goldoni Theatre in Venice as part of the city’s Biennial. After all, through the authorial figure of the typist, van Hove in Ziektekiemen (Germs, 1982), the second of his productions, may already have referenced Fabre’s very first production, Theater geschreven met een “K” is een kater (Theatre Written with a “K” is a Tomcat, 1980). De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden, which originally lasted five hours, combined recited references to canonical stage productions, theatrical and choreographic (title, author/director, time and place of premiere), with projections of paintings and a musical score of romantic operas. This durational, highly repetitive and physical performance also featured lots of porcelain plates, which the performers manipulated, moved in stacks, stood on and ultimately smashed, an apposite end to their art historical journey from their diverse figurations in projected paintings like Bernardino Luini’s Salomé Receives the Head of John the Baptist (1527, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and on to their more material presence in some of the collages of Julian Schnabel, whose work, like that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, augured the return of recognizable imagery in 1970s painting, albeit in the guise of real objects, disrupting the two-dimensional plane. In Fabre’s production, then, the                                                             47

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 312 and 396. See in this regard Samuel Weber, “Citability – of Gesture”, in Benjamin’s -abilities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 95-114, and van Hove’s remark to Roodnat that “De monologen van Blanche zijn niet emotioneel, ze zijn episch” (“Blanche’s monologues are not emotional; they are epic”). Quoted in Roodnat, “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”. 48

  

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reality of the plates is seriously undercut or suspended by the art historical and representational context in which they feature. Once Robert Mapplethorpe had photographically chronicled the production, Fabre’s plates became new art historical icons in their own right, exploited in the cover of Emil Hrvatin’s study of Fabre.49 The workshop and performances leading up to De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden also explored different acting styles, an approach Fabre dubbed the “Schnabel method” after the American painter’s eclecticism. And H.C. Andersen’s fairytale about the naked emperor’s new clothes, Fabre’s central image for the collusive lie shared by performers and spectators, can just as easily be applied to Blanche’s playing “Queen of the Nile” and Stanley’s royal demeanor: Remember what Huey Long said – “Every Man is a King!” and I am the king around here, so don’t forget it! (He hurls a cup and saucer to the floor) My place is cleared! You want me to clear your places?50

As a memorial presence in van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Fabre’s Macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden supports the production’s tension and confusion between reality and representation (art, illusion), act and re-enactment, as well as Williams’ theme of madness, building as Fabre does on Foucault’s L’histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization, 1961) and other writings, so much so that the first performance of Fabre’s show during the Inteatre PolveriggiFestival in Jesi, following shortly after the philosopher’s death on 25 June 1984, was dedicated to him. Displaying a similar ambiguity, van Assche’s shadow-fights can either be glossed over as a symptom of Stanley’s maddening frustration or taken for an allusion to Meyerhold’s acting techniques, an early influence on Kazan when he was still a member of the Group Theatre, hence as a biomechanical challenge to the Method’s and Stanislavsky’s emotional recollection.51                                                            

49

Emil Hrvatin, Herhaling, Waanzin, Discipline: Het theaterwerk van Jan Fabre (Repetition, Madness, Discipline: The Theaterwork of Jan Fabre), trans. Koen Geldof and Sigrid Bousset from the French by Moïka Zbona, Amsterdam: International Theatre and Film Books; Leuven: Kritak, 1994, 53-83. 50 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 398 and 371 (Williams’ italics). 51 Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 13. While van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire contains plenty of violence, he refuses on principle to exploit the performers’ emotional recollection of actual violence to flesh out their part. Hence

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From that perspective, van Assche’s subsequent mimicry of the army roll-call, when Stanley anticipates the phone call from the hospital, also functions as a “theatre historical” citation, exceeding the script’s fusion of paternal and nationalist pride in the image of a father, waving the coat of his silk wedding pyjamas “like a flag”, or its casting of Blanche, once more, in the role of army prostitute, seemingly deserving no respect.52 By the same token, Steven van Watermeulen’s evocation of Mitch’s silver cigarette case becomes a Brechtian social gestus, capturing to perfection the meretricious, commodified and patriarchal world that Williams’ characters are trapped in. In fact, Williams, when he enrolled at the New School for Social Research, studied under Erwin Piscator, Brecht’s colleague at the Volksbühne in Berlin,53 though Meyerhold’s “positions-postures” or “short-cuts”, “silhouettes” and “gestures” already sum up a character’s fundamental social outlook, and biomechanical exercises are a means of discovering that outlook.54 Apart from the costumes, bathtub, chairs, plates and beer crate, van Hove in his A Streetcar Named Desire did without props but let his performers physicalize them. When Stanley in scene two grabs the box of love-letters Allan Grey sent Blanche, van Assche brutally paws Nietvelt’s breasts. And instead of showing an actual cigarette case, van Watermeulen simply hooked his thumbs behind the waistband of his trousers, the tips of his fingers joined on his belly button, and beaming with pride, slowly turned around, like a coin-operated mechanical puppet on top of a music box. After all, Mitch works “the precision bench in the spare parts department” of the plant, and he is the kind of man who might change his poker winnings into quarters and deposit them “one by one in a piggy bank his mother gave him for Christmas”.55 In van Hove’s production, Mitch, like Stanley and the Young Man from The Evening Star, ultimately cashes in, and van Watermeulen’s body posture at the start                                                                                                                                 when one of his actresses at Zuidelijk Toneel had difficulties playing a scene of abuse, he right away eliminated it (as he told Roodnat in “Blanche is een sneeuwuil”). 52 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 374 and 389. 53 Thomas Molzahn, “Bertolt Brecht”, in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, ed. Philip C. Kolin, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004, 20. 54 Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire du théâtre, Paris: Dunod, 1996, 152, 281; Robert Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 52-60, 74-77. 55 Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 292 and 296.

  

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of the farewell scene deliberately recalls his social gestus during his first encounter with Blanche. By exposing Mitch’s meretriciousness, van Hove remained faithful to Williams’ script, even if that made it so much harder to see in Mitch echoes of the Gentleman Caller from The Glass Menagerie. But then the doctor, absent from the Dutch A Streetcar Named Desire, is not exactly “the gentleman [Blanche] was expecting from Dallas” either.56 The physical brutality of van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire further detracted from the romantic and outdated Chekhovian image of Williams that theatre audiences, especially in the United States, have cherished for such a long time. To the extent that the violence derives from the performance tradition to which van Hove was indebted at the start of his career, it functions as a force that complicates the re-enactments of traumatic and idyllic pasts in Williams’ drama. The physical wrangling and the demolition of chairs and plates infuse the play with a presence that could augur well for characters mired in the past and therefore deprived of a future. However, the very repetitiousness of the violence reinscribes it in the characters’ habitual behavior from which there seems no escaping. In Williams’ script, Stella’s cathartic sobbing “with inhuman abandon” and her “complete surrender”57 might signal her renewed submission to Stanley’s authority and seductiveness. In Kazan’s screen adaptation, the hardships facing single mothers in post-war America and Stella’s earlier returns to her husband hypothecate the promise “of a longer lasting rebellion”, when she announces that she is “never going back. Never.”58 The conclusion to van Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire seems bleaker than ever, since Damen, after Blanche’s departure, undresses and straddles the semi-naked van Assche lying on the floor, but when neither can work up any desire, she angrily stomps away. However, the disruptiveness of the performative violence in van Hove’s production may sufficiently have loosened up things to make for change. Similarly, the array of performance styles alluded to in the course of the production – an extension of Kazan’s pitting Tandy and Leigh’s British technique against his Method-trained performers –                                                            

56

Ibid., 411. Ibid., 419 (Williams’ italics). 58 A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, screenplay by Tennessee Williams and Oscar Saul, Warner Brothers, 1951. 57

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revalorizes choice, possibility and responsibility. Ultimately these may be shunned by Williams’ characters, but no longer so by van Hove’s spectators. That much seems implied by de Kuyper’s translation of Williams’ last line, “This game is seven-card stud”, as “De kaarten liggen op tafel”, or “The cards are lying on the table”, a formulation that harks back to Blanche’s assessment of Stanley as a man who can only be interested in a woman who lays “her cards on the table”:59 BLANCHE. Om jou te boeien moet een vrouw … [Ze onderbreekt haar zin and maakt een vaag gebaar.] STANLEY [traag]. Open … kaart spelen.60

Either the game is up, or the move is ours.

                                                           

59 60

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 279. Williams, De tramlijn die verlangen heet, 33.

  

   

Darling, I have no fixed date of return to the States. I feel that I am totally washed up there and must start a fresh career in some English-speaking place like Australia or England. A ghastly write-up ... has appeared in Playboy ... and I feel that it has completed the annihilation of my character in the States, can only hope it isn’t read in London or Sydney. Tennessee Williams, letter to Maria St Just, 4 April 1973

   

   

UN TRAMWAY: WARLIKOWSKI’S DESIRE TO REIGNITE AMERICAN THEATRE IN EUROPE XAVIER LEMOINE

What kind of magic can a French Blanche directed by a Polish director staged in a European theatre create? Warlikowski’s staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, called Un Tramway, opened in Paris in spring 2010 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe before starting a yearlong European tour to Warsaw, Grenoble, Berlin, Luxemburg, Amsterdam, Geneva, the Hague and back to Paris in 2011.1 In Paris, the work was both a success and a failure, as it received mixed reviews but played to sold-out houses. The renown of Krzysztof Warlikowski, a Polish director produced throughout Europe, was magnified by the casting of French film and theatre star Isabelle Huppert as Blanche. The French translation by the famous LebaneseCanadian playwright, Wajdi Mouawad, was the icing on the Odéon cake that co-produced and premiered the work. Consequently, the rather negative reaction to the play from professional critics and the general audience alike came as a surprise.2 Why was the play snubbed? Warlikowski’s theatrical language was not altogether unexpected given his history of rearranging original                                                             1

Paris, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, 4 February to 3 April 2010 and 25 November to 17 December 2011; Warsaw, Nowy Teatr, 30 April to 2 May 2010; Grenoble, MC2, 2-9 December 2010; Berlin, Théâtre Berliner Festspiele, 20-25 November 2010; Luxembourg, Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, 15-16 December 2010; Amsterdam, Holland Festival, 3-5 June 2011; Geneva, Comédie de Genève, 14-18 June 2011; The Hague, De Koninklijke Schouwburg, 23-25 June 2011. 2 Critics like Fabienne Darge (Le Monde), Armelle Héliot (Le Figaro) and numerous unhappy spectators walked out, blogged or voiced their disapproval. “Pitié!”, or “No more!” was shouted near the end of the play on opening night. Favorable reviews nonetheless appeared in national newspapers such as Libération and La Croix.

   

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scripts and blurring linear narratives in order to confront human suffering. This formula had won him universal acclaim in his (A)pollonia, which was performed in Avignon and Paris in 2009.3 Was it because French highbrow audiences still found Williams’ work too conventional or simply too American? Or, on the contrary, was Warlikowski’s theatrical style too radical for such a classic play? Or did the casting of a French movie star derail this Streetcar? Warlikowski’s Postmodern staging of a playwright who has recently thrived in commercial theatres in France renewed critical interest in A Streetcar Named Desire.4 This interest centered mostly on the concerns voiced in the press about the need for a film star to insure the success of a theatrical production. But Un Tramway also raised a number of ideological questions regarding the status of Williams in Europe and the contemporary European stage. By misrepresenting his star, Williams’ canonical play and the Eurocentric universal, Warlikowski plunged his audiences into the murky depths of desire. As a result, in deviating from European and American theatre conventions, he invented a new vernacular of performance. Misrepresenting A Streetcar Named Desire: a star, a canonical play and the Eurocentric universal Un Tramway’s tepid French reception could be explained by the failure, on the part of the audience, to recognize the film star on stage.5 Huppert’s star status sent the wrong message to a number of                                                             3

Krystyna Duniec, “Romantique?”, in Alternatives théâtrales: Krzysztof Warlikowski, Fuir le théâtre, CX-CXI (2011), 15. 4 There has actually been a number of productions of Williams’ work in state-funded theatres in recent years, including: Baby Doll at the Théâtre de l’Atelier (2009); La nuit de l’iguane at the Théâtre MC93 in Bobigny (2009); Soudain l’été dernier (Suddenly Last Summer) at the Théâtre de la Tempête (2009); La ménagerie de verre (The Glass Menagerie), which toured throughout France in 2009 and again in 2011; Un tramway nommé Désir (A Streetcar Named Desire) at the Comédie-Française (2011), the Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré, which toured in Strasbourg, Paris, Dijon and Toulouse in 2010-2011; Le paradis sur terre (Kingdom of Earth) at the Théâtre Édouard VI in Paris (2011); and La rose tatouée (The Rose Tattoo) at the Théâtre de l’Atelier (2012). 5 Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, “Un metteur en scène nommé désir et un tramway nommé Huppert” (“A Director Named Desire and a Streetcar Named Huppert”), Rue 89, 9 February 2010: http://www.rue89.com/balagan/2010/02/09/un-metteur-en-scenenomme-desir-et-un-tramway-nomme-huppert-137273 (accessed 20 June 2012): “Starisée à l’extrême, Huppert relègue dans l’ombre ses partenaires …” (“Playing up

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spectators who came for the wrong reasons, namely to see her in the flesh on stage. The extent of the confusion became clear when the show quickly sold out despite its unusually long run (over two months, rare for an international production in Paris). The choice of Isabelle Huppert in the role of Blanche might have been one of the reasons behind the French critics’ and audiences’ negative responses to the production. And yet, it was Huppert who, reportedly,6 chose Williams and Warlikowski,7 as Piotr Gruszczynski, Warlikowski’s dramaturg, explained: “Le spectacle répond au désir d’une comédienne, Isabelle Huppert, qui a voulu travailler avec Krzystof intéressé depuis longtemps par l’œuvre de Tennessee Williams, et jouer Blanche dans la pièce.”8 This double misunderstanding – that of not recognizing the star nor the play – was no doubt the main reason why a number of people walked out at the intermission. First of all, witnessing the film star’s descent into the abyss of fragility, anxiety and madness unsettled mainstream audiences. The audience’s initial desire in attending the play was to be close to the film star, yet that pleasure was denied them, or at least disrupted,                                                                                                                                 her star status, Huppert outperforms the rest of the cast ….”) Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 6 However, Warlikowski was quoted as saying: “Nous avons beaucoup discuté et nous nous sommes revus à chacun de mes spectacles. Elle m’a dit qu’elle voulait aller plus loin que ces discussions et j’ai alors pensé à elle pour le rôle de Blanche dans Un tramway nommé Désir de Tennessee Williams, qui touche à des tabous toujours présents : l’homosexualité, la place de l’étranger, le désir féminin ...” (“We talked a lot and met each time I had a show on. She told me she wanted to go further than our mere talks so I thought about casting her for Blanche’s part in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams as it deals with taboos still alive today: homosexuality, the social position of foreigners, feminine desire …”). See Anon., “Théâtre: Huppert dans les coulisses d’‘Un Tramway’ de Warlikowski” (“Theatre: Huppert Backstage in Warlikowski’s Un Tramway”), 4 February 2010: http://www.lesinrocks.com/actualite/ actu-article/t/42572/date/2010-02-04/article/theatre-huppert-dans-les-coulisses-duntramway-de-warlikowski (accessed 21 June 2012). This might tend to illustrate that the director also wanted or had his share of stardom. 7 Morin noticed this reversal in the star system in his 1950s study. See Edgar Morin, Les stars (1957), Paris: Seuil, 1972, 11. 8 Krzysztof Warlikowski, Théâtre Ecorché, ed. Piotr Gruszczynski, trans. MarieThérèse Vido-Rzewuska, Arles: Actes Sud, 2007, 24: “The play was produced due to the desire of an actress, Isabelle Huppert, who had wanted to work with Krzysztof, who had himself been interested for a long time in Tennessee Williams’ work, and to play Blanche in the play.”

  

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because Huppert’s acting style deviated from her film roles. Juxtaposing painful madness with stand-up comedian glibness, she worked against audience expectations and intentionally invited misrecognition. This refusal to look beyond her star status was not just limited to the audience. Theatre critic Fabienne Pascaud described the play as “Une adaptation très recentrée sur le personnage de Blanche, incarnée par une Isabelle Huppert magistrale. Trop?”9 Pascaud reproached the star with shining too brightly and the director with giving her, through her character, too much significance in a play that, when traditionally-performed, achieves a delicate balanced between two or even three main characters. Along these lines, some critics thought that Blanche became Huppert, instead of the actress incarnating the heroine. Critics were annoyed by the number of costume changes indicated in a note in the theatre program that singled out Huppert as wearing haute couture dresses by Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior. Warlikowski was surely aware of Huppert’s special position in France and decided to play with this symbol of fame and fortune, which also defines Blanche in the play. Blaming the production solely for focusing on the Blanche/Huppert duality proved shortsighted. Stanley (Andrzej Chyra), Stella (Florence Thomassin) and Mitch (Yann Collette) were hardly marginalized in the play. And even minor roles like the Young Man (Cristián Soto) and Eunice (Renate Jett) were expanded through the use of video uplinks (by Denis Guerin) and songs that the opera-trained Jett performed. Critics and audiences clearly missed the point that Warlikowski and Huppert willingly played with her star status by grotesquely magnifying it on stage and simultaneously debunking it.10                                                             9

Fabienne Pascaud, “Isabelle Huppert, plus Blanche que Blanche” (“Isabelle Huppert, More Blanche than Blanche”), Télérama, 5 February 2012: http://www.telerama. fr/scenes/huppert-plus-blanche-que-blanche.52359.php (accessed 21 June 2012): “An adaptation very much centered on the character of Blanche, masterly interpreted by Isabelle Huppert. Too masterly?” 10 The reference to “Hollywood glamour” can also be found in the text of la version scénique of the play: “Stanley: Y’a des hommes qui se font avoir par le genre starlette d’Hollywood et d’autres pas.” See Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 279; and also “Un Tramway: D’après Un Tramway nommé Désir de Tennessee Williams”, trans. Wajdi Mouawad, Manuscript, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe Archives, Mediathèque Jean-Louis Barrault, 3 February 2010, Ms. 13-14. This interest in working with the meaning of stardom is not new and has been noticed by Georges

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They intentionally mirrored the spectators’ own misrepresentations of the star, thus exposing their exaggerated expectations and the totemic process that creates stars in the first place. Such an interpretation of Huppert’s performance deconstructs not only the consumption but also the production of the star.11 The second line of criticism was directed at the defacing of A Streetcar Named Desire, the only American play that immediately comes to mind when the French think about American theatre. As such, many viewers, whose preconceived notions about the play were largely informed by Elia Kazan’s film, were made to sit through a loose adaptation that was, at best, a shadow of the original production, and, at worst, not even that. Excerpts from Claude Roy’s Bestiaire du coquillage (prologue), Gustave Flaubert’s Correspondance (scene two), Tennessee Williams’ Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas fils’ La dame aux camélias (scene three), St. Matthews’ gospels, Oscar Wilde’s Salome (scene three), Ertah Kit’s interview (scene four), Plato’s Symposium (scene ten), Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (scene ten) and a skit “Fesse qui te plaît” by French comedian Coluche (scene ten) clearly offered audiences an entirely different play. The title Un Tramway, which had to be modified for legal reasons,12 announced that this was Warlikowski’s personal vision of Williams’ classic. Among the changes he implemented were the removal of the minor parts of Pablo and Steve, the reorganization of some scenes and the addition of non-Williams material. And yet, despite the additions and the alterations, Un Tramway remained essentially Williams’ play. It retained the plot and the main characters, and the play’s eleven scenes and main actions were readily identifiable, at least by its more discerning and tolerant audience members and critics. Still, there were those French critics who understood Warlikowski’s intentions but nonetheless chided him for having tampered with the original script. Two arguments against the adaptation thus emerged. The first was that the play was overloaded                                                                                                                                 Banu about another show in his article “‘L’éternel féminin’ ou Emilie Marty et son double, Marilyn”, in Alternatives théâtrales, 18-21. 11 Richard Dyer, Stars (1979), London: BFI, 1998, 3. See also his sequel Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (1986), London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 12 The Tennessee Williams Estate, enforcing an article in his last will and testament that expressly prohibits the altering of his work upon his death, forbade the play’s use of Williams’ original title.

  

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with references that defaced the play. The majority of these critics argued that Warlikowski’s interpolations were sterile, pretentious, even useless. The play not only did not look like the original, even its sense of pastiche was unrecognizable. The second argument followed that, since Williams’ original script was already so flawed, no additional writing could have improved it: … et comme le texte de toute façon n’est pas un grand texte, ce n’est pas plus mal. Mieux vaut convoquer les dieux et les tragiques grecs et baroques que se repaître de clins d’œil dégoulinants à la psychanalyse pour acteurs formés à l’Actor’s [sic] Studio.13

In short, the criticism concerning the adaptation was a strange mixture of those who faulted Williams’ script for being too realistic, or too imbued with Freudian psycho-babble, and those who felt that Warlikowski’s interpolations were too highbrow or vapidly fashionable. This evaluation might be an accurate reflection of Williams’ ambivalent situation in France today. Williams and his work in France have repeatedly fallen short of success. He was either too American for his detractors – a criticism veiled by the evocation of the overly psychological acting inherited from the Actors Studio (even though this style is often praised in the film version) – or not American enough for his supporters. Georges Banu’s praise for Un Tramway clearly emphasized the latter position, which approached Warlikowski’s own vision of the play: “Ce spectacle ne cesse pas de nous renvoyer à nous-mêmes, à d’autres, audelà de la Nouvelle Orléans de Tennessee Williams. Spectacle européen de la mémoire et du déchirement, de la névrose glacée et de l’élégie inachevée.”14 Banu’s critique offered an astute reading of Warlikowski’s interpolated texts as an attempt to make Williams’ play                                                            

13

Pascaud, “Isabelle Huppert, plus Blanche que Blanche”: “… and anyway since the text it not a great one, it was for the best. Better conjure up the Gods and the Greek and Baroque tragedies than wallow in mawkish hints at psychoanalysis designed for actors trained by the Actor’s [sic] Studio.” 14 Georges Banu, “Le Tramway de Warlikowski: Son élégie et son horizon” (“Warlikowski’s Un Tramway: Its elegy and horizon”): http://www.criticalstages.org/ criticalstages2/entry/Le-Tramway-de-Warlikowski-son-eacuteleacutegie-et-son-horizon (accessed 21 June 2012): “This show ceaselessly brings us back to ourselves and to others well beyond the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams. It is a European show about memory, wrenching, glacial neurosis and unfinished eulogy.”

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more universal. That it came from an academic theatre critic in France, as opposed to commercial critics, is perhaps telling. But what does this universalizing impulse mean exactly? Given the choice of interpolated texts, the answer is quite straightforward. Flaubert, Plato, Wilde and Tasso all belong to the European canon that defines universality. Warlikowski was, without question, interested in making the American play European. And why not? After all, one of his strengths lies in including a play’s many contexts in all of the productions he has worked on. So why not borrow from Plato to pay Williams? Such transatlantic exchanges have become commonplace among European director’s or writers whom Williams has influenced over the years. Moreover, Warlikowski’s productions often explore the director’s relation to Poland more or less directly – a connection easily established in Un Tramway through the character of Stanley. As such, the European references were not pedestrian but rooted in his vision of theatre and life, as he explained in an interview: Kowalski est d’origine polonaise. D’une manière générale, j’ai besoin de garder un lien fort à mon identité. Et la relation avec mon origine polonaise est contradictoire. Attiré par la France, où j’ai étudié la philosophie à la Sorbonne, mais incapable d’y rester, d’assumer le destin d’un immigré, je sens toujours une dichotomie: en Pologne, la France me manque et inversement.15

Similarly, Williams’ play can be read as staging the contradictions gnawing at the human heart and the tragedy of human fate through mythical figures.16 Warlikowski’s focus on the tragic, then, echoed William’s vision which could emphasize a European, if not                                                             15

Anon., “La contradiction au cœur du désir” (“Contradiction at the Heart of Desire”), La Terrasse, CLXXXIX (June-July 2011): http://www.journal-laterrasse. com/krzysztof-warlikowski-1-4907.html (accessed 21 June 2012): “Kowalski is Polish. Generally speaking, I need to keep a strong connection with my identity. And my relationship to my Polish identity is conflicted. I’m attracted to France where I studied philosophy at the Sorbonne but I’m incapable of living here and accepting the fate of being an immigrant. I always feel the dichotomy, whereas in Poland, I miss France and vice-versa.” 16 For a recent synthetic account, see Agnès Roche-Lajtha, “Dionysus, Orpheus and the Androgyn: Myth in A Streetcar Named Desire”, Études anglaises, LXIV (janviermars 2011), 58-73.

  

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necessarily a universal, frame of reference. But is it possible to return to European canonical texts without being considered Eurocentric, or, to put it in other terms, without predicating the tragic on the exclusion of that play’s essential Americanness?

Figure 21: Stanley (Andrzej Chyra) and Blanche (Isabelle Huppert) during the rape scene in Warlikowski’s Un Tramway. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt.

Arguably, European characteristics are already finely woven into the fabric of A Streetcar Named Desire and, therefore, Un Tramway can hardly be considered as Eurocentric.17 The crisscrossing of languages and nationalities here (French, American and Polish) destabilized any simplistic understanding of a dominant European or American paradigm. Stanley Kowalski’s status as a Polish immigrant in the script was redeployed on the stage by Andrzej Chyra, the director’s loyal Polish actor. The fact that Chyra learned his part in French without knowing the language emphasized the significance of language as a matrix to his immigrant status.18 Beyond the obvious                                                             17

White America could be considered Eurocentric, but many critics did not even take that into consideration. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 1. 18 As Chyra explained, “Il y a là une sorte de déresponsabilisation du fait que je joue dans une langue étrangère que je ne contrôle pas” (“Here, I felt that any sense of

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practical benefits for the audience of having Blanche and Stanley speak the same language, this choice reflected the fragile European unity where no common language could pretend to produce a cultural hegemony. But this became true even with a single language, implying a broader reflection on the limits of any linguistic system. The French language cracked under the veneer, as its many forms and histories were highlighted by the production. French was in essence deterritorialized, in the Deleuzian sense, by a proliferation of minor languages19 emerging not only through the production’s many Quebec expressions and its Polish accent but also through specific inflections identified with Huppert’s tone. This crisscrossing of languages is not foreign to A Streetcar Named Desire, since it fully incorporates Spanish and French into the English dialogue. Moreover, the play makes specific references to the French influence in the American South – especially Cajun Louisiana (displaced Arcadians who fled francophone Canada after the French and Indian War) – but also to Williams’ knowledge of French. The lines of the play evoking this history were clearly spoken on stage in the French adaptation: MITCH. Vous êtes française, de France? BLANCHE. Notre origine est française, huguenote.20

This deviates much from the original script but underlines a similar concern with the rapport between language, nationality and identity: BLANCHE. DuBois. MITCH. Miss DuBois?

                                                                                                                                responsibilty was removed because I performed in a foreign language that I cannot control”). Quoted in Dorota Kowalkowska, “L’acteur émigré” (“The Immigrant Actor”), in Alternatives théâtrales, 54. This must be nuanced if we are to believe Yann Collette, who explained that, little by little, Chyra learned how to speak French fluently (68). 19 Gilles Deleuze, Kafka, pour une littérature mineure (Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature), Paris: Minuit, 1975. 20 Mouawad, “Un Tramway”, Ms. 21. In the actual production, Blanche says simply: “Oui, huguenote.” Many variations like this one exist between Mouawad’s manuscript and Warlikowski’s production. As such, I have attempted in this article to analyze both the script and the performance.

  

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Xavier Lemoine BLANCHE. It’s a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring! You can remember it by that. MITCH. You’re French? BLANCHE. We are French by extraction. Our first American ancestors were French Huguenots.21

Williams’ careful filiations here explore a typical historical perspective within the American South, whereas Mouawad’s translation makes little sense within a contemporary French context. Rather, it (dis)placed the spectator in a francophone perspective and revealed the implicit feeling that nationality and language were dissociated. While pointing out the cracks in a homogenized history that erased colonization, but the translation also stretched the limits of language to capture universal meaning, as time, space and identity have repeatedly resignified words. As Gertrude Stein famously put it: “In China china is not china it is an earthen ware. In China there is no need of China because in china china is china.”22 This failure to signify meaning in cultural transference is another form of interpolation worth mentioning. In this second stage direction in French, Warlikowski had hoped to attenuate the supremacy that a foreign language and culture holds over those constructed as the foreigner other. He justified this quite bluntly when asked why he chose Mouawad to adapt the play: Je n’avais pas envie d’être entouré de français. Je voulais me protéger .… Le problème, c’est d’entrer dans une culture étrangère, et de participer à un projet complètement imprégné par cette culture.23

By multiplying the play’s contextual and cultural perspectives, Warlikowski thus engineered a staging strategy that resisted all dominant systems, including Eurocentrism.                                                            

21

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 299. Quoted in Marianne Moore, “Perspicuous Opacity”, The Nation, 24 October 1936, reprinted in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2000, 99. 23 Quoted in Brigitte Salino, “‘Un Tramway’ entre à l’Odéon”, Le Monde, 31 January 2010, 19: “I did not want to be surrounded by French people. I wanted to shelter myself .… The problem was to enter a foreign culture and collaborate to a project fully imbued with that culture.” 22

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Warlikowski also relied on changes in the script itself to carry out his decentering intentions. References to Greek tragedy and mythology are part of the meshwork of symbols Williams repeatedly used in his plays, most obviously with the name of the place where the story unfolds: Elysian Fields. In the end, then, Warlikowski’s own interest in European culture did not so much as erase Williams’ Americanness as it emphasized its European components. The European influences in Un Tramway were, perhaps, a return to the diaphanously veiled European influences in Williams’ own writing. Claiming that those European elements erased Williams’ text would be to ignore the very texture of that play and the paramount status of European culture within the United States. However, reducing the play to its European influences would also be a misrepresentation of American culture and of the play. Obviously, the European ancestors who settled in Louisiana developed their own idiosyncrasies. Attached to the French origins of the DuBoises and to their house “Belle Reve” is the whole history of plantation and slavery. Attached to Kowalskis is the whole world of the American working class and the industrial power of the North supplanting the agricultural aristocracy of the South. But this history is precisely something that is not coherent with the Europe of today – nor perhaps with a contemporary American one either. One may wonder, then, how Warlikowski resisted the urge to reassert a conventional theatrical ideology and offered in its place a new theatrical poetics. Reigniting the spark of performance: epistemological poetry, ghosts and theatre Un Tramway hybridized A Streetcar Named Desire not to reassert the domination of a European theatre but to explore a stage idiom articulated through subversion and magnification. First, if Warlikowski rejected a simplistic historical vision, which reified national identities were based upon, he did not altogether ignore the effects of the context of productions on his work and the way historical elements are put together. Warlikowski’s more recent work has been known to confront the classics with various other literary materials in order to explore intimacy and human suffering. He explained that in his theatre he was   

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not interested in directly confronting historical material: “Les mécanismses de l’histoire ne m’intéressent pas tellement.”24 This led him sometimes to remove specific historical references. For instance, when he worked on Le Dibbouk (The Dybbuk, 2003), he decided to suppress references to the religion emending the word “Torah” and only retaining “tribunal”.25 However, this might not be so much a rejection of history as a rejection of a systematic analysis of historical conditions. This attitude could very well be connected to his rejection of a Marxist framework that led Poland to suffer under the previous Communist regime and doxa. Warlikowski could not abide by that kind of ideology. But this does not mean that he is not interested in the environment where he produces his plays, as he has detailed in interviews about his past productions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2004) or Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (2006). When he worked on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which premiered in Nice in March 2003, he hired actors from the acting school of Marseilles, and he included their local argot in the performance.26 As such, Warlikowski addresses society directly by mixing art with life through poetic composition. Perhaps what matters most for him is avoiding a systematic approach to the past and inviting contradictory positions. This would explain the sweeping statement Warlikowski made in 2005: “… le théâtre n’existe réellement qu’en Europe.”27 He quickly contradicted himself by staging two American plays: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 2007, and A Streetcar Named Desire in 2010. The contradiction between his statement and his choice could be resolved by the idea that he had erased the Americanness of both plays – just as he had dismissed the Jewish folklore in Le Dibbouk. In Un Tramway, it seemed that the elements that contribute to the play’s local color were ignored or entirely discarded. The opening of the Williams’ play takes us from the lively streets of New Orleans                                                             24

Warlikowski, Théâtre Ecorché, 100: “The mechanisms of history do not interest me that much.” 25 Ibid., 87-88 : “Je tenais à voir ce texte dépouillé de tous ses attributs folkloriques juifs” (“I wanted to have a text devoid of any Jewish folklore”). He qualifies this a few lines later: “Je me préoccupe plutôt de la spiritualité de cette communauté et je n’avais pas besoin de son folklore” (“I am more interested in the spirituality of this community than with its folklore”). 26 Ibid., 128, 132 and 115. 27 Ibid., 47: “… the theater exists really only in Europe.”

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filled with the “music of Negro entertainers” to the decaying tenement apartment “on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields”.28 This is radically different in Un Tramway, where Huppert is at the center of a moveable stage and sits on a bar stool repeating slowly and woefully a children’s poem by Claude Roy: Si tu trouves sur la plage Un très joli coquillage Compose le numéro Océan 0 0 Et l’oreille à l’appareil La mer te racontera Dans sa langue des merveilles Que papa te traduira.29

Figure 22: Blanche (Huppert) in the opening scene. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt.

                                                            28

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 243 (Williams’ italics). Mouawad, Prologue, in “Un Tramway”, Ms. 2: “If you find on the beach / A very pretty seashell / Dial this number / Ocean 0 0 / And with your ear to the receiver / The sea will tell you / In its own language wonders / That Daddy will translate for you.” 29

  

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We are immersed directly into Blanche’s interior world, as her madness was amplified by microphones that made Huppert’s voice either too loud, too distorted or too distant. The reference to the sea shells and the sea shore in the poem was vague enough to fit many places, but it did not seem to be associated with New Orleans – even though the city is below sea level, as the Katrina catastrophe has reminded us. Warlikowski renounced a specifically American flavor to avoid the city’s local color and substituted French poetry in its place. But did Williams not precisely use local color to convey his poetic vision? Williams’ local color creates the play’s atmosphere, the rhythm and the symbolism associated with his “plastic theatre”. Like Warlikowski after him, Williams sought to conjure up a sense of the magic, the nightmare and intimate tragedy of his world. And, above all, just like Blanche/Huppert, who recorded the poem live and then replayed it for the audience, both stage settings were meant to reflect the distortion of memory and its theatrical representation. Williams and Warlikowski worked in their distinct registers to reproduce onstage what is essentially internalized in the heroine’s mind. Contrary to what has been asserted in the French press,30 this production set out to question theatre as a medium by foregrounding various theatricalized operations on the performing process. This is a similar quest that we find at the inception of A Streetcar Named Desire when, from the chaos of the street, we are brought to the inner world of the DuBoises and Kowalskis, confronting the articulation of the inside and the outside in theatre. The use of screens, translucent or opaque,31 in the original 1947 production is echoed in the (partly opaque) plexiglass structure created by Warlikowski’s scenographer, Malgorzata Szczesniak, which dominates the set and fragments the play’s action. Another visible change was the reorganization of the scenes. Most strikingly, Warlikowski’s opening took the audience directly to the end of the play, thus inverting the linear plot. It could be argued that                                                            

30

Duniec, “Romantique?”, 12: “Il ne procède pas, comme c’est la mode aujourd’hui, à la déconstruction du théâtre comme médium” (“He does not work, as is fashionable nowadays, to deconstruct theatre as a medium”). 31 For a detailed account of the first production staged by Elia Kazan, see Philip C. Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 13.

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this is the real order of the play since, in the original story, what brought Blanche to New Orleans in the first place was her desperate attempt to escape the effects of her unruly sexuality in Laurel – a symptom of her pathology. The difference lies in the fact that Blanche’s madness is announced only at the end of Williams’ script, whereas in Warlikowski’s version, we are confronted with Blanche’s madness right from the start and not, as, at times, it has been argued in

Figure 23: Visual signs of Blanche’s madness. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt.

Williams scholarship, witnessing its gradual progression. Building from this abrupt vision of the heart-rending truth, Un Tramway then gradually helps the audience to recover from the initial experience. In privileging a linear evolution of Blanche’s madness, A Streetcar Named Desire attempts to bring the audience from surface ignorance towards deeper truth. The conventional narrative of unveiling – seeing through the lies and bringing forth the truth – in Un Tramway was turned inside out. The performance laid bare the truth from the very beginning, obliterating any expectation of revelation and disputing the epistemology constructing rationality as a linear progress subjected to   

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causal logic. The contextual and fictional elements – Huppert’s stardom transformed into poetic madness – were weaved together to make us experience the multiplicity of theatrical perception and the intimacy of tragedy. Kazan had called the play a “poetic tragedy”,32 and Warlikowski translated that poetic madness right from the start. The opening poem evokes the typically tragic theme of incest, as Piotr Gruszczynski has suggested: “C’est la dernière ligne qui est importante ici: ‘Que papa te traduira.’ On a beaucoup parlé entre nous de possibles relations incestueuses entre le père et ses filles ….”33 The significance of incest has been underlined elsewhere34 and was just one connection to ancient tragedies that Warlikowski would develop further through other references to famous mythical figures, such as Salome in scene three. Warlikowski escaped a master narrative of history by repeatedly trumping a game that would trap the play into a linear illusion – that would allow New Orleans, Paris or any other country to take over his show. Yet, his work can never be fully detached from its cultural references either, nor reduced to a single one.35 Un Tramway did ultimately retain fragments of the play’s original Americana. First, a few sections of the show were performed, and a number of its songs sung, in English. The actress playing Eunice, Renate Jett, for example sang a song about “Common People” (1995) at the end of scene two, while Stanley and Mitch actually bowled a few frames, whose wooden lanes dominate center stage. The other longer section in English was Jett’s rendition of American artist Eric Carmen’s 1975 hit “All By Myself”. Jett interpolated her rendition with lines from a 1982 interview with the celebrated American cabaret singer Eartha Kitt, offering a pastiche on the song’s sappy lyrics:                                                            

32

Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, 9. Piotr Gruszczynski, interviewed by Cécile Roy on 28 November 2009, in Cécile Roy, “Un Tramway”, Pièce (dé)montée C (January 2010), 25: http://crdp.acparis.fr/piece-demontee/piece/index.php?id=un-tramway (12 October 2012): “It is the last line that is important here: ‘That Daddy will translate for you’. We all discussed the possible incestuous relationship between the father and his daughters ….” 34 Harold Bloom, Introduction, in Tennessee Williams, updated edition, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007, 1-10. See also Roche-Lajtha, “Dionysus, Orpheus and the Androgyn”, 58-73. 35 Consider, for instance, the play’s reference to Paris: “Stanley: On dirait que tu as dévalisé les boutiques les plus chicos de Paris” (Ms. 13), and “Stanley: It looks like you raided some stylish shops in Paris” (I, 277). 33

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Stop please. To compromise? A man comes into my life and I have to compromise? Stupid! Compromising for what? Compromising for what reason? To compromise? What is compromise? A man comes into my life and I have to compromise. You have to think about that one again. If a man or a woman comes into your life you have to compromise? (laughs) For what? For what? For What? A relationship is a relationship that has to be earned and not to compromise for. And I think relationships are wonderful, they are magnificent, they are great!36

Figure 24: Eunice (Renate Jett) performs “Common People” by Pulp. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt.

The song’s interpolations exhibit Warlikowski’s penchant for the pastiche and for ignoring narrative norms. The song’s extended interruption could even be considered as a mise en abyme of Warlikowski’s entire staging of the play, since he repeatedly                                                             36

Un Tramway, captation DVD, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe Archives, Mediathèque Jean-Louis Barrault, 1h9’37’’ to 1h10’46’’. The original interview that Jett draws upon, which is not in the Mouawad manuscript, is from the documentary All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story, directed by Christian Blackwood, Blackwood Productions, 1982.

  

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interrupted Williams’ script to unhinge it from what he considered to be stifling Modernist conventions that turned the classic into a sacred text. Thus the American (and British) music here was neither New Orleans jazz nor Varsouviana waltzes, but it established both a clear connection with the United States and the careful attention Williams gave to music in his original play. A similar principle of importing Americana to offset the play’s Eurocentrism could be explained by Wajdi Mouawad’s word choice in translating certain lines and references from the original text. He does remove the Americanness evident in certain passages, such as his rendering the “great big place with white columns” of Belle Reve into the French slang of “La grosse baraque avec des colones blanches”,37 or his erasing the play’s geographical reference to Mississippi (“And you’re from Mississippi, huh?”). Yet, elsewhere in his script, Mouawad chose to retain a number of archetypal American expressions, such as “feeling” (scene three) or “bullshit” (scene eight); they help to evoke the spirit of the North American continent with French Quebec. The use of rather colloquial French shocked some spectators, but it brought immediacy to the text that aimed at severing the ties of theatrical conventions held by linguistic norms and performing codes. If anything, an American aesthetic haunted the performance through contemporary Europe’s perception of the United States. This was certainly true of the music, but the play also contains certain visual metaphors that recall America. The strikingly rich lighting of the play, which literally drenched the stage in blue, pink, green and yellow, could be linked to the shows of American director Robert Wilson, famous for his use of lighting and color on the stage. The atmosphere that was created also nodded to the cinematic work of American auteur David Lynch, whose films Warlikowski greatly admires.38 Moreover, the grainy black and white video feeds of Stella                                                            

37

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 249; Mouawad, “Un Tramway”, Ms. 3: “The big shack with white columns.” 38 Nicolas Poinsot, “Krzysztof Warlikowski à la Comédie de Genève, fange et démons” (“Krzysztof Warlikowski at the Comédie de Genève: Mud and Demons”), Les Quotidiennes.com, 3 June 2011: http://www.lesquotidiennes.com /culture/ krzysztof-warlikowski-%C3%A0-la-com%C3%A9die-de-gen%C3%A8ve-fange-etd%C3%A9mons.html (accessed 22 June 2012): “A la limite, il préfèrerait le cinéma. Il ne s’en cache pas. Lynch et ses opus torturés lui procurent davantage de frissons que tout ce qui pourrait se passer sur des planches devant lui” (“Ultimately, he would

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and Stanley harked back to Kazan’s 1951 film version of the play. Their ghostly images on stage provided a subtext to American culture in the same way that European ghosts haunted the Williams play (with its many references to Europe) and the Kazan film (with its cinematic traces of German Expressionism and Italian Neorealism). This intercultural aesthetic underlined Warlikowski’s interest in creating a kind of performance that blurred reality and fiction, which was initially problematized by the mixing of theatre and cinema. As Warlikowski explained in an interview: A film, especially if it is live, helps me to create different language, different narration. It is neither theatre nor film. It is rather something in between and it is very appealing .… A film helps me to do so [blur the borders between the theatre and life]. It creates an actor’s presence in a different way, depriving it of this theatrical existence that is so unreal. The film creates reality that theatre deprives itself of.39

The point was not to imitate life, nor to imitate A Streetcar Named Desire, nor to replicate an American or a European theatre: it was, rather, to invent differences and variations in order to tread on unknown territories or on territories of the unknown. Un Tramway struggles against stage and social conventions to transgress any form of restraint – which corresponds nicely to Blanche’s own quest in the play. Warlikowski’s vernacular of textual expansion through interpolation was an experiment in theatrical performance. The intertextuality suggested by the original script led Warlikowski to magnify the mythical references by summoning the ancient Greeks, such as Sophocles or Plato. Similarly, this magnifying principle is what justified the live video feed that was used mainly for close-ups, including extreme close-ups of oversized red lips during scene four, when Blanche kisses the young man. This principle also explained the giant bowling alley lanes covering the entire upstage, as if Stanley’s playground controls even the audience’s perception of reality. The                                                                                                                                 prefer cinema. He does not hide that fact. Lynch and his tortured opus provide him with more thrills than anything on the stage”). 39 Summer Banks, “I do not criticize my critics”, Exberliner, 10 November 2010: http://www.exberliner.com/reviews/i-do-not-criticize-my-critics (accessed 22 June 2012).

  

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lines formed by the bowling lanes seemingly stretch the stage space to infinity, sharply contrasting the narrow confines of the Kowalski’s small, two-room apartment. The moveable space above the lanes demarcated by the large, plexiglass room is where the more intimate moments of the play are set. It is a place that is supposed to be “off stage”, such as the bathroom where Blanche bathes and Stanley relieves his “kidneys”.40 These two spaces – the bowling lanes and the transparent, aquariumlike structure – visualize the encounter or, rather, the superposition of Stanley and Blanche, as one glides slightly above the other over the course of the play’s action, hovering, as it were, between the private and the public. The intersection of these two spaces brings about the destruction of both Blanche and illusion as a principle of representation. The realistic downstage space, featuring a bed, three chairs, a table and a couch, turns out to be only one layer of the story, whereas the larger upstage space reveals deeper issues through spatial expansion.

Figure 25: Blanche awaits the kindness of her stranger. Photograph: © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt. Reproduced with the permission of ArtComArt.

                                                            40

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 364.

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The multiple acting styles within these two spaces nullified any form of realism, which was prevalent in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Huppert’s intense hysteria, her casual tone and her club-like dancing; Chyra’s machismo, his childlike fragility and his violence; Colette’s cross-dressing (as a boxer); Jett’s songs and her direct addresses to the audience – all were hallmarks of Warlikowski’s theatrical style. Just like other recent productions of Williams’ plays that have haunted – or stalked – Europe, such as the Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré or Lee Breuer’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Comédie-Française – Warlikowski’s Un Tramway helped rejuvenate interest not only in A Streetcar Named Desire but also in the whole of contemporary American-European theatre.

  

   

* * * Abruptly, space running out, let me take up the subject of the film. (It also had its poetes maudits such as Pasolini and Visconti.) In the States the film is taking precedence over the stage. It has cast off its censorship, its bondage – the Hayes [sic] and Breen offices and the over-powering surveillance of The Church, the general terror of honesty and of poetic alleghory [sic] which prevailed when nearly all of my plays were adapted to the screen. For you in Europe the break-through came earlier and more dramatically with your so-called “nouveau vague” [sic] and in Italy with its “neo-realism”: your Godard, Italy’s Rosselini [sic], De Sica, Visconti, and Fellini, Zeffirelli, Renoir, Truffaut, Bruñel, Jean-Luc [manuscript breaks off here] This great adventure of the new film will surely continue as rapid as history itself. It is like a wild stallion, clean and noble as all wild things are. I shall have more, much more, I hope, to say about this brilliant phenomenon when I see you at the Festival in Cannes. Tennessee Williams, manuscript draft for Le Figaro article “Le cinéma et moi”, c. April/May 1976

   

   

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR’S “HOMAGE” TO TENNESSEE WILLIAMS MICHAEL S. D. HOOPER “A Streetcar Named Desire has marked my life.”1

The filmic qualities of Tennessee Williams’ plays and stories, their perceived adaptability and the writer’s own willingness to explore the possibilities of an emergent Hollywood cinema in the early part of his career have contributed in no small part to the wide reach of his success and reputation. Indeed, his experimentation with dramatic forms, evident as early as 1944 with The Glass Menagerie and its “plastic theatre”,2 has been seen as an extension of the techniques Williams no doubt assimilated from a youth spent in movie houses: The drama of Tennessee Williams derives its lyric naturalism from the adaptation of the modern short story for the cinematic theatre. Throughout the canon, film techniques undermine the conventions of stage realism. Music comes out of nowhere. Lighting is symbolic.3

Williams often seems to have had one eye on a broader canvas, one which eschews the limitations of theatrical mimesis and which measurably assisted the transition of his work to the big screen. Notwithstanding these artistic overlaps, we have, in the post-war Hollywood versions of his plays, a second Tennessee Williams, one that may, for a variety of reasons, have reached a receptive public                                                             1

Manuela in Todo sobre mi madre, directed by Pedro Almodóvar, El Deseo, 1999. In his “Production Notes” for The Glass Menagerie, Williams writes about this as a concept that “must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions”. See Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 131. 3 Roger Boxill, Tennessee Williams, London: Macmillan, 1987, 23. 2

   

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ahead or instead of his work for the stage. And, because adaptations can themselves become influential or even adaptable properties, Williams’ affinity with the theatre risks being diluted further still. This is not to say that the playwright has been sacrificed amidst the wider commercial distribution of the films – Williams is still a considerable draw at the theatre – but just that some of the exclusivity of theatrical productions has been transcended. While Williams’ writing continued to be a source of inspiration beyond the heyday of the Hollywood adaptations, few directors have acknowledged the legacy of the films as openly as the Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodóvar, especially in his most celebrated film to date, Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999). The winner of seven Goyas in Spain and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this story of Manuela’s search for her transsexual ex-husband after the death of their son, Esteban, draws on scenes from Elia Kazan’s 1951 version of A Streetcar Named Desire, especially its ending – an enforced change from that of the original play. An obvious admirer of Williams, Almodóvar has also earned a reputation for referencing a plethora of artistic works in his films – anything from visual echoes of familiar Hitchcockian scenes to the subtle inclusion of novels by celebrated writers like Alice Munro in his recent film La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In). A complex patchwork of allusion, his films fully exemplify the postmodern sensibility of crafting art from the fragments of earlier works, on the premise that originality in the conventional sense does not exist; it is only to be located in a simultaneous admission of its impossibility and in the plagiaristic amassing of conscious and unconscious influences. Todo sobre mi madre is no exception in this respect. Indeed, it represents a zenith of intertextuality and references – visually or in its script – texts and artists as seemingly disparate as All About Eve, Music for Chameleons, Blood Wedding, Gaudí and Chagall.4 None of these, though, either singly or in conjunction with the others, is quite as instrumental as A Streetcar Named Desire, which “takes on an active role” by marking the protagonist’s life.5                                                             4

Ann Davies, Pedro Almodóvar, London: Grant and Cutler, 2007, 92. Pedro Almodóvar, “An Act of Love toward Oneself”, interview by Guillermo Altares, in Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004, 146.

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This essay will trace Williams’ transnational influences on Almodóvar and seek to evaluate Almodóvar’s use of both Kazan’s film and Williams’ play, which he seeks to capture in essence, if not in certain crucial details. Should this process be correctly labeled “homage”, reverence for texts and an author or merely a set of values they embody? Or is Almodóvar’s approach more utilitarian, an unashamed use of a recognizable source for his own ends? As we will see, Almodóvar is not averse to talking about this subject in interviews, though he tends to elide his film and Williams’ play, with the result that the former’s apparent justification of single motherhood in certain circumstances seems to become part of Williams’ legacy. Reversing the focus on filmmaker and dramatist will reveal how motherhood, though not ignored beyond the birth of the Kowalskis’ child, is secondary in Williams’ play to a seemingly inexhaustible sexual desire heightened by class difference. Drawn to the metatheatrical role-playing of Williams’ characters, Almodóvar prioritizes motherhood as a performance, not as a biological imperative; and, by extension, he appears to free parenthood from traditional models, including the assumption that it should be the preserve of cohabiting couples. This preoccupation with role-playing is foregrounded in the scenes on stage in Todo sobre mi madre, first in Madrid and then when the production of A Streetcar Named Desire transfers to Barcelona; and in Manuela’s readiness to resume a role – that of Stella Kowalski – that she had taken years before when she met her husband (appropriately enough playing Stanley). The theatrical world is a vital element in the characters’ lives, not least because it allows Almodóvar to invert fact and fiction and make A Streetcar Named Desire more than just a series of artistic moments or a cultural artifact. The relationship between stage and screen has been further complicated by Samuel Adamson’s play adaptation of Almodóvar’s film for the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2007. This is another instance of medium-bending, since scenes from a play, adapted for a film (Kazan’s) then performed as a play in another film (Almodóvar’s), finally become a play again (Adamson’s). It was a project apparently premised on the staginess of Almodóvar’s film, and, perhaps with a view to emphasizing that still more, Adamson’s adaptation returns to Williams’ play for scenes from A Streetcar   

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Named Desire. And yet, as will become clear, this attempt at greater fidelity to the original source changes the dynamic between Williams and Almodóvar and serves to highlight the way in which the latter has, with the help of Kazan’s ending, skewed the story, making it Stella’s rather than Blanche’s. So, it is possible to approach Almodóvar’s debt to Williams from more than one direction and (of interest as well) to (re)consider Williams after viewing Todo sobre mi madre. However, with the exception of Stephen Maddison, very few viewers of Almodóvar’s film have probed the link with the American playwright/screenplay writer to any great depth. Marvin D’Lugo, perhaps more intent on bridging the gap between Todo sobre mi madre and its predecessor, Carne trémula (Live Flesh, 1997), merely mentions those scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire that are dramatized, irrespective of whether they were taken from the play or the film or whether they were altered or cut.6 Mark Allinson considers Almodóvar’s use of color and lighting on his stage for A Streetcar Named Desire without delineating its influence beyond Manuela’s obsession with the play;7 and Paul Julian Smith merely notes that Manuela’s acts of love are made in the name of Blanche DuBois, not Christ.8 Though it makes useful comparisons with other Almodóvar films, Maddison’s article, “All About Women: Pedro Almodóvar and the Heterosocial Dynamic”, is more concerned with the filmmaker’s gender dissent and establishing “a heterosocial reading of All About My Mother” than appraising his oeuvre.9 By this, he means that Almodóvar, taking his lead from Williams rather than Kazan, identifies himself with women and this enables him to express a homosexual aesthetic. This alignment opposes the homosocial bonds first identified by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and commonly found in literature and film: those relations between men that exclude women, or view them as objects of exchange, and which police homosexuality. Key to Almodóvar’s success here is his fragmentary reading of A                                                            

6 Marvin D’Lugo, Pedro Almodóvar, Urbana, IL, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 102. 7 Mark Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, 184 and 212. 8 Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited, New York: Verso, 2000, 193. 9 Stephen Maddison, “All About Women: Pedro Almodóvar and the Heterosocial Dynamic”, Textual Practice, XIV/2 (Summer 2000), 276.

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Streetcar Named Desire: the way he subtly changes Kazan’s ending to criticize Stanley’s heterosexuality. Samuel Adamson’s reworking of Almodóvar’s film has attracted little attention beyond the original newspaper reviews. However, Gwynne Edwards’ article, “From Screen to Stage: Almodóvar’s All About My Mother”, implicitly questions the point of staging a film that is already very theatrical. Furthermore, the adaptation seems inferior in several important respects: the sets cannot, practically, replicate those of the film and yet more of Almodóvar’s vibrant colors could have been reproduced; Adamson is unable to capture the intensity of the film’s close-ups but, equally, the acting in his production is judged to be of uneven quality; and, though Adamson is bound to use more words to capture the inner life of the characters, his script is prolix and “rarely has the sure touch and finesse of Almodóvar’s screenplay”.10 These criticisms represent a somewhat outmoded, hierarchical analysis in which the play as the adaptation is always likely to come off second-best, but though Edwards does not probe Adamson’s use of A Streetcar Named Desire very thoroughly, he correctly concludes that inappropriate scenes have been used (and repeated) and that this, in turn, affects the coherence and artistic integrity of Almodóvar’s diegesis. Adamson is at liberty to depart from the original, but he is also obliged to do justice to that original, including its use of sources. Overwhelmingly, then, Almodóvar’s connection with Williams is cursorily acknowledged by scholars of Spanish culture and ignored completely by Williams specialists. Stephen Maddison, writing with a greater appreciation of A Streetcar Named Desire (particularly the film versions) and its appeal to Almodóvar, nevertheless approaches his subject from a more general perspective of cultural studies and with a theoretical agenda. This may help us to see how Almodóvar has been influenced by Williams’ “queer spectatorship, [his] queer subjectivity”, but it does not shed much light on how we read Williams through Almodóvar or the way in which Todo sobre mi madre preserves a version of part of A Streetcar Named Desire in European culture.11                                                            

10

Gwynne Edwards, “From Screen to Stage: Almodóvar’s All About My Mother”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, VI/3 (December 2008), 299. 11 Maddison, “All About Women”, 277.

  

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A second education Pedro Almodóvar’s early experience of Tennessee Williams was through the film versions of his plays. Growing up in the small village of Calzada de la Calatrava – coincidentally in La Mancha, the home of Don Quixote, a character whose dream frames Williams’ 1953 play Camino Real – during the years of Generalísimo Franco’s dictatorship hardly helped to expose the young Almodóvar to American culture, let alone Williams’ subversion of contemporary sexual mores.12 Yet, at roughly the same age that Williams was forced to move to St Louis, Almodóvar was dispatched to a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, and it was here that he received alternative “instruction” in a nearby cinema. Captivated as he was by both European and Hollywood films, Almodóvar has since singled out Williams’ films as “my second education … stronger and more powerful than the priests”.13 These films, themselves part of a break with the conservative Hollywood cinema made prior to World War II, were Almodóvar’s guilty, sinful secret. Coincidentally, they were also what saved John Waters, the director of Hairspray and other low-budget movies and someone to whom Almodóvar has been likened in his early years, from the tedium of conservatism.14 Acknowledging this formative experience, Almodóvar parodies a speech from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a work that “absolutely corrupted me”, in his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap, 1980).15 The intercultural significance of Williams becomes still more evident here when we consider that this film, like others that would follow it, delights in the plurality newly afforded by the uninhibited pop culture of Madrid’s movida, an underground youth movement that flourished in the post-Franco years. However, the allusion is not integral to the plot in quite the same, unavoidable way that A Streetcar Named Desire functions within Todo sobre mi madre. Samuel Adamson attributes this to an artistic refinement that gradually values sources                                                            

12

See Laura Torres-Zúñiga’s and Ramón Espejo Romero’s articles in this collection on the role Franco played, directly or indirectly, in Williams’ Spanish productions. 13 Pedro Almodóvar, “Pedro Almodóvar on the Verge … Man of La Mania”, interview by Vito Russo, in Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, 64. 14 Waters recently commented that “Tennessee Williams saved my life”. See John Waters, Role Models, London: Beautiful Books, 2010, 37, as well as his Foreword to the 2006 edition of Williams’ Memoirs. 15 Almodóvar, “Pedro Almodóvar on the Verge”, 64.

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and their potential functionality more earnestly: “Where once Almodóvar irreverently parodied a Williams play in a sequence that didn’t have much to do with anything, in All About My Mother he ingeniously lodged one – A Streetcar Named Desire – in the heart of the story.”16 Before addressing this transposition and Almodóvar’s selection of scenes from the original, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that the Williams films are only versions of the plays, and sometimes very loosely adapted to meet Hollywood’s standards or abide by American mores. Tennessee Williams did not always write their screenplays, and even when he is attributed as having done so, his contribution may have been negligible or overshadowed by a collaborator. Furthermore, though they might appear racy to someone receiving a strict Catholic education from Salesian brothers in Francoist Spain, these adaptations were often diluted, toned-down versions of their sources. Richard Brooks’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), for example, studiously avoids the controversy of Brick’s sexuality, and Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire necessarily removes, or represents differently, the three areas of the play that troubled Hollywood’s Production Code Administration (PCA): namely, Allan Grey’s homosexuality, Blanche’s history of promiscuity and the rape. The scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire Whether or not later viewings of the plays confirmed his fascination with Williams, Almodóvar’s borrowings are essentially already second-hand, something he tends to overlook. This important technicality aside, we can detect many of A Streetcar Named Desire’s themes in Todo sobre mi madre. Aside from the two central ones already mentioned, death, journeys and mental illness also feature significantly. Like Blanche, Manuela makes a decisive journey. Though also prompted by death, hers has little to do with sexual desire; nor is it a route to madness and spiritual decline. Her bid to track down the father of her son – formerly Esteban, too, but now an

                                                           

16

Samuel Adamson, Introduction, in All About My Mother, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar, a play by Samuel Adamson, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, vi.

  

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HIV-infected

transsexual known as Lola – initially takes her from Madrid to Barcelona.17 To a Spanish audience in particular, this broadly signifies decentralization, the recognition of both Catalonia and Catalan after the passing of Franco’s regime. For the character, it marks a journey into her past, for, just as Blanche must relive her disastrous marriage and the collapse of Belle Reve, so must Manuela recall both the time she met her husband whilst playing the part of Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and the final period of their relationship on the Barceloneta beach. Like Blanche, Manuela is betrayed sexually, initially by Esteban’s first-stage sex change and then by his/her promiscuity as Lola. Unlike Blanche, though, she is not responsible for Lola’s self-inflicted death – a result of transsexual prostitution and drug use. Manuela has managed to live without men, in large part because of the close, consolatory relationship with her son. Hers has not been a life spent seeking affirmation and male protection, but one where she has happily excised the memory of Esteban/Lola: photographs have been ripped in half so that there is no visible trace of him when young Esteban seeks information about his father. Esteban/Lola is an absence, less immediately noticeable than is Mr Wingfield, staring out at the family from his picture in The Glass Menagerie, but nevertheless part of a tension in the film between the nurturing mother figure and the elusive father. For, though Lola is a father, he/she knows nothing of young Esteban or his premature death until the latter stages of the film, when, reversing the symbol of the incomplete photograph, she sees a picture of him for the first time. The younger Esteban’s death has two textual echoes or connections. Firstly, knocked down by a car trying to get Huma Roja’s (the actress who is Blanche, played by Marisa Paredes) autograph, he and his mother are victims of a play that ultimately created him. Secondly, his obsession with the actress recalls Eve Harrington’s devotion to celebrity in All About Eve (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a film we have already seen Esteban                                                            

17

I have resisted giving a detailed summary of the plot of Almodóvar’s film at the outset for fear it would be too convoluted. Almodóvar himself has conceded that any synopsis would be “like a serialized novel with innumerable installments”. See Pedro Almodóvar, “Almost All About Almodóvar”, interview by Alicia G. Montano, in Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, 133.

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watching with his mother. The first scene from A Streetcar Named Desire that precedes this terrible moment confirms Manuela’s decision to leave Lola and allow him/her no part in their son’s upbringing. It is the end of the play, the climax of a production in Madrid that Esteban has been taken to on his birthday. As with other sets used in the film, the stage is awash with a boldness of color that has become Almodóvar’s signature – an uninterrupted blue background that might distantly echo either the azure New Orleans sky or Blanche’s della Robbia blue dress. However, the set’s bareness – its lack of furniture and its use of simple gauze or chicken wire to fence off the poker players – very obviously signals that we are watching a play. Moreover, the bare wooden floor of the stage contributes to the idea of a dance as Blanche’s noisy shoes clomp around in a bid to evade the doctor and nurse. The scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire may be an integral part of the film’s diegesis, but our attention is also drawn to their theatricality, their spectacle. Blanche is shown to be lucid and strong enough to negotiate the terms on which she will be led away from the apartment by the doctor before we focus on Stella; the insanity suggested by Elia Kazan’s film is by no means certain. Unlike the play, where Blanche alludes to her difficult passage past Stanley and the poker players, Almodóvar’s version concentrates on Stella’s journey. She is stopped by Stanley and cautioned for her bad language before proceeding on in full view of the poker players. Stanley calls to her half-heartedly, seemingly convinced that she will not go far, but Stella adamantly and vociferously states that she will not return. As Stephen Maddison notes, “Stella is leaving the stage all together” – a bold move that admits no uncertainty.18 In Kazan’s film, Stella, played by Kim Hunter, tells the baby that they will never return this time, but, significantly, there is no possibility that Stanley can hear this since she has already rushed out beyond the courtyard fronting the tenement building in pursuit of Blanche. Understandably, Hunter’s Stella, leaving Stanley for the first time and not necessarily for good (she returned to him on the poker night), lacks the insouciance of Almodóvar’s modern interpretation of the role played by his character, Nina Cruz.                                                            

18

Maddison, “All About Women”, 267.

  

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Stripped of much of the original dialogue, Almodóvar’s scene quickly establishes a thematic parallel with Manuela’s life and serves to indicate her capacity for role playing at the expense of complete fidelity to Williams’ work. She is an actress who has already performed Stella’s part some twenty years before for an amateur company, but, more loosely, she is also adaptable to the many roles thrown up by her life. When her son remarks on her emotional reaction to the actress, Nina Cruz, Manuela is quick to correct him by saying it is the role of Stella that continues to preoccupy her. Unlike Williams’ original character, the Stella of both Kazan and Almodóvar appears unwilling to compromise or even entertain Stanley’s version of events. For Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, forced into a corner by the PCA, Stella could at least have the chance to become a more liberated woman, prepared to break her dependence on her husband. Almodóvar and Manuela take this prerogative for granted because the notion of the family is far more flexible for the director: though young Esteban is desperate to search for his father, the film shows that families can survive without paternal figures and are not defined by them; women can quite easily form their own family unit or “emotional nucleus”.19 Ironically, the conservatism of the PCA, which decreed that Stanley should be punished for his sinful behavior, created a statement of women’s independence markedly at odds with the family values advocated in 1940s and 1950s America. And it is precisely Stella’s ability and preparedness to leave, at variance with the artistic intentions of the original play, which interest Almodóvar, not Blanche’s fate. Needless to say, the different, generally more enlightened social climate of Spain and Europe at the end of the twentieth century means that Stella is allowed to seem brazen. Her decision to run away with the child does not appear to be clouded by the moral issues impinging on Kazan’s adaptation of the original play (that is, whether rape should be punished and whether single motherhood could be condoned). The only conservative attitude appears to be Stanley’s concern, ridiculous and hypocritical in the circumstances, that Stella should not use offensive language, especially within the hearing of his fellow poker players who would surely judge this to be a sign of failing patriarchal control.                                                             19

Almodóvar, “Almost All About Almodóvar”, 130.

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“I’m shaking things up, making them my own”20 It is perhaps not surprising that the iconoclastic Almodóvar should seize on a moment resulting from Williams and Kazan’s collision with authority, though it is by no means certain that, when he first saw the film, he was aware of the enforced changes or even the play itself with its different ending. After all, the first commercial premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Teatro Reina Victoria in Madrid was delayed until 1961, by which time many Spaniards would have had the opportunity to see Kazan’s film as part of an influx of foreign cinema.21 Philip C. Kolin even postulates that both the director and the leading actress of that premiere, González Ruiz and Sancho López, “undoubtedly saw and resaw” the film and based Blanche on Vivien Leigh’s interpretation of the character.22 Before I assess Almodóvar’s debt to Williams more precisely, it is worth noting how an authorized stage adaptation of Todo sobre mi madre revisits Williams’ play (not the film) and uses scenes in an alternative sequence, if only to highlight further what Almodóvar has both used and discarded. Samuel Adamson, already known for both completely original plays like Southwark Fair (National Theatre, 2006) and adaptations of classics like A Doll’s House (Southwark Playhouse, 2003), was encouraged by Almodóvar himself to create as discrete a work as possible. Like the auteur, he accepted a license to use rather than faithfully reproduce. Indeed, Adamson claims that Almodóvar repeatedly cautioned him that the play “must be its own                                                            

20

Esteban in Samuel Adamson, All About My Mother, 70. A Streetcar Named Desire’s first Spanish premiere, as Laura Torres-Zúñiga and Ramón Espejo Romero demonstrate in their respective articles in this collection, was ten years early in 1951 at the Teatro de Cámara de Madrid (or even a year earlier with Antonio de Capo’s one-night performance in May 1950). Because the status of the teatros de cámara hovered between amateur and semi-professional, art theatre and the commercial stage, they often flew under the radar of the Spanish press and rarely elicited theatre reviews. By 1961, when the Madrid commercial premiere was staged, Williams’ play was well-known throughout Spain, though more from the Kazan film than the cámara production. For more on these avant-premières, see John London, Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre, 1939-1963, London: W.S. Maney and Son, 1997, 98-99. 22 Philip C. Kolin, “‘Cruelty … and Sweaty Intimacy’: The Reception of the Spanish Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire”, Theatre Survey, XXXV/2 (November 1994), 51. 21

  

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thing”23 and that, on inspecting the first draft, he was far more interested in what had been changed. And the published version attempts, perhaps more than we might expect, to capture a sense of dual authorship: the main title (the same as the film) stands out in red lettering but is accompanied by a further statement in black: “based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar, a play by Samuel Adamson.” With regard to the scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire, Adamson returns directly to Williams’ play and, though also cutting for economy, uses far more of the original dialogue. Just as significantly, he changes the order of Almodóvar’s scenes: whereas Almodóvar reverses Williams’ action consistent with his film’s journeys into the past, Adamson chooses to begin at an earlier point. His first inclusion is the scene celebrating Blanche’s birthday (Act One, scene five in Adamson; scene eight in Williams) and incorporating the “gift” of the Greyhound bus ticket and Stella’s first contractions. The intention is evidently to parallel Esteban’s birthday and so establish thematic links between the ill-fated pair: deprived of love, Blanche will be compelled to leave and confront the spiritual death of the asylum; Esteban will soon be killed by an oncoming car, denied the opportunity to meet, and know the love of, his father. The birthday cakes and the tickets, both that for the Greyhound and Manuela’s present to see Huma Roja as Blanche in Madrid, are auguries of doom and signal the premature termination of happiness. Adamson even forges the connection before the end of scene four when Nina Cruz, as Stella, appears with a birthday cake and repeats Blanche’s name ominously, a line moved from the last scene of Williams’ play. As we have seen, Almodóvar is more preoccupied with Stella’s fate than Blanche’s, and the film, as its title leaves us in no doubt, explores Manuela’s life. So, though not entirely “arbitrary and haphazard”, Adamson’s choice of scene fails to make the strong connection between Manuela and Stella, between two women who become fugitive mothers (at least in Kazan’s version).24 In the film, Esteban comments on his mother being moved by Stella’s role, and we witness her tears during the performance; in Adamson’s adaptation, the same distinction is made between the role and the actress, though attributing Manuela’s emotional state to “the writing,                                                             23 24

Adamson, All About My Mother, vii. Edwards, “From Screen to Stage”, 298.

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not the acting” is a subtle difference. Adamson’s character is – as her next comment, “I’ve been in Streetcar”25 reveals – affected by the play and not simply the role in it. It is this greater fascination with Williams’ play than Almodóvar’s film (which, again, drew much of its inspiration from the Kazan film) that characterizes Adamson’s adaptation. As far as the audience is concerned, Adamson’s Manuela first remembers Stella in the context of what happened to Blanche, not as someone breaking out on her own. But even Blanche’s fate appears mishandled: when she returns from vomiting in the bathroom, Adamson’s Blanche incongruously sings “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, when in A Streetcar Named Desire she either makes no reappearance or she recites the words of a Mexican creation myth to close the scene: “El pain de mais ….”26 In Williams’ play, the song is an ironic musical counterpoint to Stanley and Stella’s conversation in scene seven: Blanche, as she has done throughout, urges a world of make believe, but Stanley’s investigations mean that he has “got th’dope”27 – irrefutable evidence, as he sees it, that dismisses Blanche’s fantasy as willful deceit. Whilst Adamson’s Blanche is, appropriately enough, unable to complete “If you believed” with “in me”,28 the jaunty song is decidedly out of context, given the now irreversible rejection of Blanche. Moreover, Adamson proceeds to use the song as something of a leitmotif. Sister Rosa randomly sings a different verse in the famous scene involving the principal female characters at Manuela’s apartment; and Lola returns to the earlier verse, humming most of it as a lullaby for baby Esteban. He/she can complete the line, but Esteban will never know, let alone believe in, him/her. If Adamson wants to salvage some sympathy for Lola after Manuela’s earlier claims that he/she has “the worst of a man and the worst of a woman” and is an “epidemic”,29 this seems unnecessary. Manuela has already permitted Lola to kiss the                                                             25

Adamson, All About My Mother, 15. The Penguin edition has Blanche whispering the Mexican words whilst “twisting a wash-cloth”. The New Directions version does not contain these lines. See Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, 199. 27 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, New York: New Directions, 1971, I, 358. 28 Adamson, All About My Mother, 13. 29 Ibid., 50 and 105. 26

  

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baby and reassured him/her that he is healthy: sure signs of a measure of forgiveness in keeping with her charitable nature. Because the next scene from A Streetcar Named Desire in Todo sobre mi madre is one which has to record the change in Manuela’s life following the death of Esteban – heartrendingly symbolized by the vacant seat next to her – it also has to be the same as the first, if somewhat truncated. Almodóvar films his scene from behind and to the right of Manuela’s head, so that we hear the exchanges between Stella and Stanley but initially only see the impassive poker players. This simple but effective camera work reinforces the absence felt by Manuela and also serves to connect her more directly with the words spoken on stage. Once again, Adamson’s choice of the birthday party scene and Blanche’s song seem tangential to Manuela’s situation, given that she is reliving the loss of a son she once took away from an unreliable father. When Adamson does use material from the denouement of A Streetcar Named Desire, it appears in a scene towards the end of Act One which corresponds to Almodóvar’s Manuela refamiliarizing herself with Stella’s part backstage and then, with the help of a loudspeaker, in Huma’s dressing room. In neither the original film nor its stage adaptation is Manuela consciously preparing to replace and upstage Nina Cruz. Though the basic scenario from All About Eve is followed, Manuela is no ambitious Eve Harrington. On the contrary, she is a nurturing figure or, as Adamson’s Esteban puts it, a woman who “makes herself crucial to the people she meets”.30 Almodóvar’s scene merely takes us up to the point where his others have commenced, that is, where Blanche asks about her appearance. Adamson must go further because he has not, hitherto, ventured beyond Stella’s departure for the hospital. Astonishingly, though, his performance of A Streetcar Named Desire ends abruptly after Blanche’s exit with the doctor and nurse and Stella’s plaintive cry of “Blanche! Blanche, Blanche!”.31 Ignoring Stella’s subsequent actions and only re-enacting the scene once, Adamson fails to make any direct correlation between Manuela’s life and the role of Stella. The fact that life can take its cue from fiction, an idea central to Todo sobre mi madre and reflected not only in the use of A Streetcar Named Desire but also in the cruel irony of a real interview regarding organ donation                                                             30 31

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 57.

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following the mock one at the start of the film, is lessened in Adamson’s version. Adamson’s use of A Streetcar Named Desire is, then, more extensive but less effective in telling Manuela’s story. Apparently relishing the prospect of returning to a playwright he admits to having been “a bit obsessed with … when I was younger”, he nevertheless extracts and re-orders text without a sensitive appreciation of the original or its relation to Todo sobre mi madre.32 We can only assume that, writing for the theatre, he judged Williams’ original play to be the better, more appropriate resource for this part of the narrative. Yet, as Gwynne Edwards reminds us, Almodóvar’s film is so stylized as to be more theatrical than many stage plays, Adamson’s adaptation included; and, when Adamson employs the meta-theatrical device of Esteban’s monologues, he only succeeds in “switching the focus away from his mother’s tenacity” in the eyes of one theatre reviewer.33 Though he regards Adamson as “a skilled adapter” who is making “a sincere attempt to re-invent a great movie”, this same reviewer, Michael Billington, calls into question the whole adaptation process when he concludes his Guardian review by asking rhetorically: “But who would want a copy, however well done, when they can have the original?” Artistically, the transition from screen to stage merely underscores Todo sobre mi madre’s theatricality and Almodóvar’s reverence for actresses in any context. Billington’s final verdict implies that the creative latitude offered Adamson is ultimately unimportant because his version will be viewed and evaluated as a “copy”, as second-rate. Thus Adamson’s claims that the “classical structure” of the film explains its adaptation ahead of other Almodóvar films and that, in the process, he has shifted “some things … into the light where others have gone to shade”,34 in itself a very Williamsian metaphor, barely conceal the redundancy of an exercise that might be more cynically viewed as franchising. Billington’s view stems from what adaptation theorists label pejoratively “fidelity                                                             32

Samuel Adamson: http://www.whatsonstage.com/interviews/theatre/london/e8821 195406817/20+questions+with+%85+samuel+adamson.html (accessed 21 June 2012). 33 Michael Billington, review of Adamson’s All About My Mother at London’s Old Vic, 5 September 2007: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/sep/05/theatre1 (accessed 21 June 2012). 34 Adamson, All About My Mother, vii.

  

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criticism”: an underlying suspicion that the adaptation is, by definition, inferior to the original and can, anyway, only be judged by its degree of (dis)similarity. Though I may not have entirely escaped this charge in the preceding analysis, my comparisons are only intended to spotlight the double constraint on Adamson: to reinterpret A Streetcar Named Desire (admittedly at least two texts here) also means reinterpreting Todo sobre mi madre in such a fundamental way as to risk making the earlier text redundant – a tribute without narrative plausibility. Almodóvar’s use of Tennessee Williams’ text does not properly constitute adaptation. His omissions, loose paraphrasing of lines and interweaving of A Streetcar Named Desire into the very fabric of the plot suggest something akin to sampling in modern music, as Maddison also observes.35 We come to realize the importance of the original play/film as inspiration but also see it acquire new artistic life embedded within another work. Almodóvar almost trusts that his viewers will be familiar enough with Williams’ work that its most famous line – “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”36 – can be taken out of the context of the play/film altogether and be used as an admission of vulnerability by Huma Roja as she tries to locate Nina and tackle her drug addiction. He also takes liberties with Blanche’s appearance. As noted earlier, Almodóvar’s Blanche seems surprisingly lucid, if not composed, before she departs with the doctor and nurse, and, as if to make this more plausible, she is dressed in a smart red suit and has a blond wig in the birthday party scene, as on the imposing promotional poster. This is hardly the uniform of the fading Southern belle, the “worn-out Mardi Gras outfit”37 that Stanley alludes to before he rapes her. However, Blanche’s power dressing points to the pre-eminence of the actress, Huma Roja, over the role and the way that her image, on billboards and in newspaper advertisements, is invariably our point of entry into the play itself. Indeed, the implication is that Esteban wants to see Huma Roja as much as he wants to see Williams’ play.

                                                            35

Maddison, “All About Women”, 277. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 418. 37 Ibid., I, 398. 36

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Motherhood in A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche DuBois’ meta-theatrical capacity for role-playing, her wardrobe and armory of props are an inspiration for Almodóvar, though the long list of real actresses he pays tribute to before the film’s credits would again suggest an interest in the craft of the actor, perhaps even in celebrity, as much as the fictional parts performed. But what of Manuela’s selflessness and endless capacity for mothering? Surely this role cannot be traced back to Stella Kowalski except in her decision (in the Kazan film only) to look after her baby independently? Whilst Todo sobre mi madre seems to valorize motherhood and the bonds between women to compensate for absent or inadequate fathers, A Streetcar Named Desire appears to offer only perfunctory reference to it. However, Williams does make it dramatically important in two ways: first, to enable Blanche and Stanley to be alone together and make the rape seem all the more appalling (whilst Stella is having Stanley’s baby); and second, to highlight Blanche’s widowhood, the unlikelihood of her ever being a mother. In truth, though her pleasure at the news of Stella’s pregnancy is clear, Blanche has other needs ahead of motherhood. It is a subject little discussed, partly, we feel, because it confirms Blanche’s exclusion still further. When the baby is born, there will be no room for Blanche in the apartment and almost no opportunity for Stella to rebuild her sister’s confidence in the motherly way we see her do in the play. Blanche’s few comments about the unborn child, typically poetic, seem to underline its symbolic purity. And yet the hope that candles “are going to glow in his life” and the simile extending this – “that his eyes are going to be like candles”38 – are shot through with worldly cynicism. The aspiration is retracted in the same breath because “Auntie knows … electric light bulbs go on and you see too plainly”, because life is full of an unpalatable honesty and mediocrity.39 Though not explicitly directed at Stella, these words convey reservations about motherhood that temper both Blanche’s dreamy reaction to the news of her sister’s pregnancy and her remark that Kowalski blood may,                                                            

38

Ibid., I, 373 and 373-74. This is another textual variation of the Penguin edition (196) that does not appear in the New Directions version. 39

  

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after all, ensure the survival of the DuBois line. The “broken world”40 of the play, telegraphed in the epigraph from Hart Crane, is one which makes new life problematic and, for the DuBoises, literally impossible. Their non-reproductive “epic fornications”41 and their “long parade to the graveyard” supply the only other reference to pregnancy in the play: the ghastly image of an unspecified ancestor, Margaret, dying “that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put in a coffin!” Of all the deaths Blanche claims to have witnessed firsthand, this and the incineration of the bodies “like rubbish”42 must surely have been the most traumatic. Yet Blanche’s emotional scars and her widowhood are not the only reasons for the play’s virtual silence on the subject of motherhood. Stanley and Stella’s highly sexualized relationship, seemingly the reason Stella turned her back on a life of privilege and refinement, permits no discourse on the practicalities of family life. Unquestionably proud of his imminent fatherhood in scene ten of the play, Stanley equates the moment with all the passion of his wedding night, when he promises to wave his pajama jacket triumphantly above his head. When he looks ahead to the removal of Blanche, he does so not with a sense of excitement at the prospect of a Kowalski family unit but with the expectation that normal sexual relations will resume and obliterate the awkwardness and inconvenience of Blanche’s stay. Stanley assumes fatherhood will be a continuation of his married life, not a radical adjustment of it. The “auxiliary channels of his life”, the male pursuits that complement and even help to sustain “the center of his life … pleasure with women” will persist, and parenthood will have to fit around them. The “gaudy seed-bearer”43 procreates but only to prove the very ability to do so: we sense that the child (Stanley confidently talks of its being a boy) is further evidence of his potency and a means of perpetuating the patriarchal order, an economic imperative in part bound to Stanley’s understanding of the Napoleonic Code. The play’s final tableau is where we witness the extension of this sexuality at the expense of a more conventional depiction of the family. Understandably, Stella is caught up in the emotion of her                                                            

40

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, I, 239. Ibid., I, 284. 42 Ibid., I, 261. 43 Ibid., I, 264-65 (Williams’ italics). 41

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sister’s departure; she momentarily forgets her role as mother and has to have the baby placed in her arms by Eunice. The act of holding the baby symbolizes the continuation of life without Blanche – motherhood over sisterhood – but the “luxurious”44 nature of her sobbing is both incongruous with the conscious positioning of the baby in a snapshot of family life and an act of self-indulgent grief made possible by the knowledge that Blanche’s destiny cannot be altered. As Stanley crouches before her, a deliberate echo of the conciliatory kneeling at the end of scene three, Stella is fleetingly the matriarch, but, just as Stanley was accepted back earlier, so here his crude fingering of her blouse goes unopposed. His presence further parodies an image of the Madonna and Child and ensures that the play reinstates heterosexual desire at the expense of the more conventionally acceptable tenderness of motherhood. Though Williams’ description of him implies rampant promiscuity, and though this is borne out by the rape, Stanley ostensibly denies his wife the role of mother and tries to recreate the monogamy that he takes every opportunity to reaffirm as dynamic and endlessly exciting. Like Serafina delle Rose in The Rose Tattoo, Stanley’s love is predicated on an untenably inexhaustible desire, the premise of which is the virtual denial of maternity. Stella lacks the willpower to escape Stanley and his definition of her, and so her future will not, as Bert Cardullo would have us believe, be a “steady retreat” from her husband in which the child offers “the opportunity (however limited) for self-fulfillment implicitly denied her from the start”.45 Rather, Stanley’s freedoms will continue within the context of his wife’s narrow sexual role. This point is underlined in the John Erman film version (1984) of the play where, with no distraction from the baby lying in its pram, Stella throws her arms around Stanley as if he provides both direction and protection and as if his putative betrayal is not even worth considering. Conclusion Though the works of Tennessee Williams and Pedro Almodóvar may share an admiration for “feminine sensitivity”, for the “greater                                                             44

Ibid., I, 419 (Williams’ italics). Bert Cardullo, “The Role of the Baby in A Streetcar Named Desire”, Notes on Contemporary Literature, XIV/2 (March 1984), 4.

45

  

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mystery inside women”, this does not broadly extend to maternity.46 The central irony that Todo sobre mi madre makes use of a play/film source where motherhood as a theme is somewhat negligible, and that many of Almodóvar’s earlier films freely explore aberrant desire in a way that Todo sobre mi madre seems to avoid, is not lost on us. Lesbianism in Pepi, Luci, Bom, sado-masochism in ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1989) and a prolonged representation of rape in Kika (1993), to name but a few examples, give way to a film “purified of desire”.47 Ironic, too (if not perverse), is Almodóvar’s exploration of motherhood at a time when birth rates in Spain were the lowest in the world, as Barbara Zecchi reminds us.48 Yet he revives our interest in the subject and makes Manuela the heart of the film, not in celebration of the conservative pronatalist values that characterized the Francoist agenda but to distill the essence of mothering and insist on its wider application, irrespective of gender constructions. Like womanhood, motherhood is a performance, an instinctive role that some embrace more fully than others but which is theoretically accessible to anyone. For Zecchi, this is not as liberating as it would first seem. If Almodóvar wants to posit a new order in which men only have a role when they, too, adopt the values of mothering, then Esteban’s understandable and sympathetically presented need to learn about his father, no matter what he has done, militates against this. As Zecchi expresses it, “the absence of the law of the father is precisely the origin of the characters’ problems”.49 True, the few male characters in Todo sobre mi madre are all noticeably flawed – hypocritical in their attitudes to promiscuity, selfish in their sexual demands or, in the case of Sister Rosa’s father, childlike in their dementia – but not all of their conventional roles can just be dismissed. Though the Stella–Manuela equation effectively refocuses and recenters A Streetcar Named Desire to make Stella Kowalski both its most victimized and potentially liberating character, Almodóvar is not                                                             46

Pedro Almodóvar, “Interview with Pedro Almodóvar: Dark Habits”, in Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, 23-24. 47 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Almodóvar’s Girls”, in All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, eds Brad Epps and Despina Kaloudaki, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 249. 48 Barbara Zecchi, “All About Mothers: Pronatalist Discourses in Contemporary Spanish Cinema”, College Literature, XXXII/1 (Winter 2005), 147. 49 Zecchi, “All About Mothers”, 157.

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ultimately as concerned with artistic reinterpretation as integration and making this particular source a narrative marker, both in the sense of punctuating and giving symmetry to the story and negatively defining its protagonist’s history. Manuela’s life is, like her position vis-à-vis Williams’ play/film, one which combines passive spectatorship (powerlessly watching her son’s death) and active performance (assisting almost everyone in the film at some point). And there are two further ways in which the use of A Streetcar Named Desire echoes, and justifies its grafting onto, events in Todo sobre mi madre. Firstly, the brutal lifting, rewriting and transplantation of only those lines and moments that will serve a purpose in a different narrative and medium recalls the surgical removal of vital organs discussed before and after Esteban’s death. Secondly, Almodóvar’s bricolage, his amassing and reconstitution of cultural fragments, is paralleled and ironized by the transsexual character, La Agrado. She gives a memorable autobiographical performance (replacing the canceled A Streetcar Named Desire) in which she proudly itemizes her plastic surgery and claims, paradoxically, that her artificiality is her authenticity. Similarly, Almodóvar’s assemblage of texts is, as he in fact shamelessly claims, an act of plagiarism that results in greater originality.50 Moreover, he freely describes authors as “tools” for his films and admits that what he creates “is almost like a theft” of the film memories that have entered his experience.51 Though the title of Todo sobre mi madre seems to prioritize the influence of Mankiewicz’s film, A Streetcar Named Desire is, despite its comparatively brief screen time, clearly the mother text. Yet it is also one to which Pedro Almodóvar and Samuel Adamson, following his lead, pay homage. In doing so, they give Tennessee Williams, arguably America’s most exportable playwright, new artistic life in Europe at the same time as they claim ownership of scenes from his most celebrated work.

                                                            50

Marvin D’Lugo cites the filmmaker’s comment in his prose work Patty Diphusa: “The more we plagiarized, the more authentic we were.” Though this refers to an early recycling of elements of pop culture, it can equally describe the principle behind his later “cultural hybridity”. See D’Lugo, Pedro Almodóvar, 19. 51 Almodóvar, “An Act of Love”, 145 and 147.

  

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

John S. Bak is Professeur at the Université de Lorraine in France, where he teaches courses in literary journalism and American drama and theatre. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois, Ball State University and the Sorbonne in Paris. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Univerzity Palackého in the Czech Republic in 1995 and a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University (2011), Columbia University (2013) and the University of Texas at Austin (2014). He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His articles have appeared in such journals as Theatre Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, The Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, American Drama, South Atlantic Review and Studies in Musical Theatre. His edited books include New Selected Essays: Where I Live (New Directions, 2009) and (with Bill Reynolds) Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). He is the author of the monographs Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009) and Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2013). Johan Callens holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he is Professor of English. He is a CRB Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation, a Salzburg Seminar Fellow, a former Visiting Scholar at Boston University, a Fulbright Scholar and a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association. He has served terms on the boards of the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association (as President) and the Belgian Association for Anglicists in Higher Education (as President and Vice-President), as well as on the boards of the European Society for the Study of English and the European Association for American

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Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Dramaturgies series published by the Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes (Peter Lang), the European Journal of American Culture, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, and the theatre studies journal Documenta. Essays of his have appeared in such journals as American Studies/Amerikastudien, The Journal for Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Theatre Research International, The Drama Review, Theatre Journal and PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art. Recent books of his are Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard (Peter Lang, 2007) and Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Alessandro Clericuzio teaches English and American literature at the Università di Perugia in Italy. His fields of interest are film studies, comparative drama and twentieth-century American literature. He has lectured and chaired sessions at conferences in Italy, France and Spain. He has written extensively on American playwrights, Asian American poetry and southern novelists. In the field of queer studies, he has published essays on Mae West, the movie Gilda and the reception of Death in Venice in the US (in Morte a Venezia. Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti: un confronto, 2014). His recent publications include “The Foreign Route of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 1949-2009” (in Translating America, Peter Lang, 2011) and “Luchino Visconti’s Williams: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire in Italy, 1946-1951” (in A Streetcar Named Desire: From Pen to Prop, Les Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2012). He is completing a book titled Tennessee Williams and Italian Culture: A Transnational Perspective and recently edited One Hundred Years of Desire: Tennessee Williams, 1911-2011 (Guerra Edizioni, 2012). James M. DelPrince is a Professor of Floral Design and Interior Plantscaping Design at Mississippi State University. He is author of Interior Plantscaping: Principles and Practices (Cengage, 2013) and co-author (with Pat Scace, Missouri Botanical Garden) of Principles of Floral Design (Goodheart-Wilcox, 2014) and the reference book Guide to Floral Design (American Institute of Floral Designers, 2006). Writing numerous publications for trade press, DelPrince has given over a hundred floral design demonstrations, exhibitions and

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workshops throughout North America. He holds degrees in Horticulture and Agricultural Education from Mississippi State University and The Ohio State University. Ramón Espejo Romero is Associate Professor of English at the Universidad de Sevilla. For almost fifteen years, he has been teaching American literature, mostly colonial and nineteenth century. His publications include work on American writers Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Tom Wolfe and Paul Auster, as well as on playwrights Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. He has done extensive research on the way American playwrights have impacted Spanish theatre throughout the twentieth century. Among his recent publications are España y el teatro de Arthur Miller (Instituto Franklin, 2010) and critical editions of both Miller’s Death of a Salesman (Cátedra, 2010) and The Crucible (Cátedra, 2011). He has also co-edited El teatro del género. Las artes escénicas y la representación de la identidad sexual (Fundamentos, 2009) and Violence in American Drama: Essays on its Staging, Meanings and Effects (McFarland, 2011). He has participated in the organization of the Third International Conference on American Theatre and Drama in Cádiz, 2009 and helped host the Fourth in Seville in 2012. Dirk Gindt has a PH.D. in Theatre Studies from Stockholms Universitet and is an artist-in-residence at the Theatre Department at Concordia University. His research on the international reception of Tennessee Williams’ plays has been published in Theatre Journal, Nordic Theatre Studies, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Survey and Theatre Research in Canada, in addition to several book chapters. Gindt is co-editor of Fashion: An Interdisciplinary Reflection (Raster, 2009), and he is also the associate editor book review editor of alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage. His current research project is a transnational study of how the performing arts have reacted to and continue to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Sweden and Canada. Richard Hayes is a graduate of University College Dublin, where he completed doctoral research on the relationship between American theatre and the cinema. He has published a number of articles on

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American playwrights in Hollywood, including pieces on Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman. He is currently Head of the School of Humanities at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. Michael S. D. Hooper teaches English at St Margaret’s School in Hertfordshire, England. He is the author of Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire Over Protest (Cambridge University Press, 2012), has edited the Methuen student edition of A Streetcar Named Desire (2009) and has had two articles published in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, “Warring Desires: Sex, Marriage, and the Returning Soldier” (2009) and “‘Hysteria is the condition of this place’: This is the Peaceable Kingdom and the Failure of Quietism” (2012). He has presented at the New Orleans Scholars Conference; his paper for the “Tennessee Williams in Europe” conference, upon which his essay here is largely based, was translated into German and included in the program notes for the Burg Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Vienna in 2012. Thomas Keith has edited over a dozen titles by Tennessee Williams for New Directions Publishing, including three collections of previously unpublished one-Acts – Mister Paradise and Other OneAct Plays, The Traveling Companion and Other Plays and The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays – as well as Williams’ last full-length play, A House Not Meant to Stand. Keith serves as an advisor to the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival. He is the editor of a collection of LGBTQ essays, Love, Christopher Street: Reflections of New York City (Vantage Point Books, 2012), and has written essays for American Theater Magazine, Tenn at One Hundred, The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, Studies in Scottish Literature, The Drouth, Robert Burns in North America, Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century and The Burns Chronicle, among others. Keith has taught acting and theatre at The Lee Strasberg Institute, Ohio University, Southeastern University and currently at Pace University in New York, and has served as a dramaturg for the Sundance Institute Theatre Program.

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Xavier Lemoine is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) at the Université de Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, where he teaches courses in American Studies. He defended his PH.D. on queer theatre in the United States at the Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense. He co-edited Understanding Blackness through Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His publications on US THEATRE and contemporary performance include articles in books and journals such as GRAAT, Authenticity and Legitimacy in Minority Theatre: Constructing Identity, La Fabrique du genre, Théâtre Anglophone: De Shakespeare à Sarah Kane and Dissidence et identités plurielles. He translated Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz thanks to a grant from La Maison Antoine Vitez and worked as an assistant stage director in Paris. His latest research includes essays on Tennessee Williams in Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la ComédieFrançaise (2011), Minority Theatre on the Global Stage (2012) and the online journal Miranda (2013). Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Dean (2012-2014) of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She received ATHE’s Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education Award (2001) and The Betty Jean Jones Award for an Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama (2011). She was Honorary Co-Founder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival (1991), the founding secretary of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America (19911993), dramaturg for Missouri Repertory Theatre (1978-1999) and Nebraska Shakespeare Festival, and elected to the National Theatre Conference in 2001. Her first book was Tennessee Williams (Ungar, 1979). Her twelfth book, The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theatre, 1870-1930 (University of Missouri Press, 2007), won the Theatre Library Association’s 2007 George Freedley Memorial Award. She is currently working on French and American theatre artists in the Great War (1914-1918). She earned her B.A. in French at the University of Montana (1998 Distinguished Alumna Award), her M.A. in Romance Languages at the University of Washington, and her PH.D. at the University of Wisconsin. Dr Londré has taught at UMKC since 1978, with visiting professorships at Hosei University, Tokyo; Marquette University,

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Milwaukee; and lecture tours to universities in Hungary and France, including the Sorbonne. Michael Paller joined the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) as resident dramaturg and Director of Humanities in August 2005 and since then has dramaturged over forty productions, workshops and readings. He also teaches in its M.F.A. program in acting. He began his professional career as literary manager at Center Repertory Theatre (Cleveland), then worked as a play reader and script consultant for Manhattan Theatre Club, and has since been a dramaturg for George Street Playhouse, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Barrington Stage Company, Long Wharf Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company and others. He dramaturged the Russian premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings at the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow. He is the author of Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Tennessee Williams in an Hour: The Playwright in Context (Smith and Kraus, 2010). His writing on Williams may be found in several anthologies. Before his arrival at ACT, he taught at Columbia University in New York City and the State University of New York at Purchase. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs both the Global Cultural Studies and Cinema and World Cultures degree programs. Palmer is the author, editor or general editor of nearly fifty volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects. He was written, with William Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (University of Texas Press, 2009) and, with Bray, has edited Modern British and Modern American Drama on Screen (Cambridge, 2013). His most recent books, both forthcoming, are Shot on Location: The Use of Real Space in Postwar Hollywood Cinema (University of Rutgers Press) and Dixie After Dark: Southern Film and the Traditions of Film Noir (University of Georgia Press). David Savran, Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is one of the nation’s leading theatre critics. He earned a PH.D. in theatre arts from Cornell, an M.F.A. in directing

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from Carnegie-Mellon, and has a background in directing theatre and opera. Prior to coming to the Graduate Center, he was professor of English at Brown University. His eight books look at New York experimental theatre and such American playwrights as Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel and Tennessee Williams. His most recent book, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (University of Michigan Press, 2009) won the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on theatre or drama published in 2008-2009. He is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and former vice president of the American Society for Theatre Research. In recognition of his groundbreaking work in American theatre, he was selected to be a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards. More recently, he served as Juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Henry I. Schvey is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis, where he served as Chair of the Performing Arts Department from 1987-2007. Prior to that, he was Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 1974-1987. At Leiden, he founded and was principal director of the Leiden English Speaking Theatre. He has published extensively on modern American drama, including New Essays on American Drama, co-edited with the late Gilbert Debusscher (Rodopi, 1990), and has published widely on European expressionism, including Oskar Kokoschka: the Painter as Playwright (Wayne State University Press, 1982). He has published numerous essays on Williams, including recent pieces on “The Tragic Poetics of Tennessee Williams” for Études anglaises, and a personal essay, “Discovering Tennessee” for River Styx. In 2004, he organized an international conference on Williams in his hometown of St Louis, and the following year discovered the previously unpublished poem, “Blue Song” in a New Orleans bookstore. A theatre director and playwright as well as scholar, his adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had its professional premiere in 2013. Kornelia Slavova is Associate Professor of American culture and literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Sv.

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Kliment Ohridski, Sofiyski Universitet, Bulgaria. She has also taught at the State University of New York-Albany, and at other institutions. Her publications are in the field of American drama and literature, comparative literature, cultural translation and feminist issues in Eastern Europe. She is the author of The Gender Frontier in Sam Shepard’s and Marsha Norman’s Drama (Polis Publishers, 2002) and The Traumatic Re/Turn of History in Postmodern American Drama (Sofia University Press, 2009). She has edited and co-edited eight books on gender theory and cultural studies, including Gender/Genre (Sofia University Press, 2010) and Identities in Transition: Gender, Popular Culture and the Media in Bulgaria after 1989 (Polis, 2010). She has translated many Anglo-American plays for the Bulgarian stage and is co-founder of the Drama in Translation Club “From Page to Stage”. She has been awarded the Christo Gruev Danov National Prize in the humanities and the Paul Celan International Award. Since 2008, she has served as associate editor of The European Journal of Women’s Studies. Laura Torres-Zúñiga teaches English at the Universidad Católica de Murcia (Spain). Her research on Williams focuses on postmodern psychoanalytical readings of his short stories. Her publications include “Comida, mujeres y poder en la obra de Tennessee Williams/Food, Women and Power in the Work of Tennessee Williams”, Dossiers Feministes 17 (2013), and “Autofiction and Jouissance in Tennessee Williams’s ‘Ten Minute Stop’”, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review (2014). She has also co-edited Constructing Good and Evil (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011) and Into Another’s Skin: Studies in Honor of Mª Luisa Dañobeitia (EUG, 2012). She has been Visiting Researcher at the Universität Osnabrück and at the University of Manchester. .

INDEX

ABC (Spanish newspaper), 192, 197, 201, 202, 204205, 221, 224, 228, 229, Academy Awards, “Oscar”, 328 Accademia d’Arte Drammatica, 171 Actors Studio, 20, 328 Adams, Jim, 189, 191, 192 Adamson, Samuel, 20-21, 349, 351, 352, 353, 357-63; All About My Mother, 20-21, 351, 353, 357-63; A Doll’s House, 357; Southwark Fair, 357 Aftontidningen (Swedish newspaper), 147, 162 Agrupación Dramática, La, 230 Aguilar (Spanish publisher), 230 Ahlin, Harry, 146 Albee, Edward, 177, 214, 247, 281, 294; Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf?, 177; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 177, 214 Alfil/Escelicer (Spanish publisher), 230 Aliprandi, Marcello, 181

All About Eve (Mankiewicz), 348, 354, 360 Allegret, Yves, 181 Allinson, Mark, 350 Almodóvar, Pedro, 20-21, 273-74, 278, 347-67; ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), 366; Carne trémula (Live Flesh), 350; Kika, 366; Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap), 352, 366; La Piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), 348 ; Todo sobre mi madre, 20-21, 273-74, 278, 348-67 Alonso, José Luis, 203 American Conservatory Theater (San Francisco), 294 American Film Institute, 125 Andersen, Hans Christian, 316 Andrew, J. Dudley, 98 Antoine, André, 264 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 122; Blow-Up, 112 Antwerps Kollektief voor Theaterprojekten, 304 Arbetaren (Swedish

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Tennessee Williams and Europe

newspaper), 163 Aristophanes, 264 Armitage, Allan M., 46 Arte Nuevo, 218, 219 Arthur, Bea, 182 Arvidsson, Ingrid, 163-65 Ash, Timothy Garton, 272 Assche, Johan van, 308, 311, 312, 313-15, 316-17, 318 Atkinson, J[ustin]. Brooks, 10, 65, 71, 167, 301-302 Atlántico: Revista de cultura contemporánea (Spanish magazine), 225 Australia, 11, 321: Sydney, 321 Austria, 11: Salzburg, 276; Vienna, 11 Avant-gardism, 55, 94, 122, 127, 263, 276 Ayllón, José, 220 Azaryan, Krikor, 252 Bachardy, Don, 9, 257 Bacon, Jenny, 307-308 Bak, John S., 2, 32, 39, 67, 95, 105, 107, 150, 192, 198, 199, 200, 205, 235, 284 Bankhead, Tallulah, 182, 205, 308 Banu, Georges, 326-27, 32829 Barthel, Sven, 137-38 Bartolovich, Crystal, 199-200 Baudelaire, Charles, 34 Bayona, José Antonio, 221 Bazin, André, 111, 124 Beckett, Samuel, 265, 281, 294

Belgium, 11: Antwerp, 304305; Flanders, 307 Belleau Wood, 3, 32 La Belle et la Bête (Cocteau), 34 Bennett, Susan, 236 Bentley, Eric, 98 Bérard, Christian “Bébé”, 34, 121, 127, 128 Berg, Klaus van den, 277 Bergman, Ingmar, 12, 1516, 122, 136-65, 239, 260; The Magic Lantern, 138, 158; Spårvagn till Lustgården (A Streetcar Named Desire), 1, 136-65, 239 Berliner Festspiele, 323 Berlusconi, Silvio, 181 Bernhardt, Sarah, 29-30 Beyer, Nils, 157-58, 160 Bigelow, Paul, 4 Bigsby, Christopher W.E., 104 Billington, Michael, 361-62 Bismarck, Otto von, 262 Blake, William, 66; Songs of Innocence and Experience, 66 Blow-Up (Antonioni), 112 Bolt, Jonathan, 248 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 308 Booth, John E., 283, 296 Bordwell, David, 91, 97, 98, 99, 104, 106 Borgmans, Warre, 307 Bourgas Theatre (Bourgas, Bulgaria), 238, 241, 249 Bowles, Jane, 257 Bowles, Paul, 17, 34, 181, 192, 202, 257

Index Bradbury, Malcolm, 89 Brahms, Johannes, 259 Brando, Marlon, 126, 222, 260, 306, 315 Brandt, George, 94 Brauns, Marcel, 303; Lucifer, 303 Bray, Robert, 93-94, 114, 117, 129 Brecht, Bertolt, 70, 264, 315, 317 Breen, Joseph, 114-15, 116, 117, 118-19, 345 Breuer, Lee, 263, 269-70, 27476, 277-78, 343 Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich, 247 Bright, Ethyl “Tommy”, 48 Brink, Willem, 308 British Board of Film Censors, 121-22 Britneva, Maria (see Lady St Just) Broadway, 7-8, 9, 10, 11, 70, 71, 94, 111, 112-13, 116, 117, 125, 127, 130, 169, 189, 193, 208, 215, 222, 223, 228, 260, 263, 269-70, 302, 303, 306, Brook, Peter, 265; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 112, 115, 124, 265, 353; Sweet Bird of Youth, 112 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 305 Brooks, Richard, 124, 353 Brown, Harcourt, 30-31 Bruhm, Steven, 200 Bruñel, Luis, 345

379 Brustein, Robert, 305, 306, 308, 314 Bulgaria, 10, 17, 235-53: Sofia, 238, 239, 242, 251, 252 Bulgarian theatre, 17, 235-53 Bunraku theatre, 274 Burke, Peter, 137, 157, 160 Cabo, Antonio de, 203-204, 206, 219 Cahiers du cinema (French magazine), 124-25, 128, 262-63 Callens, Johan, 19-20, 309 Camp, Bill, 305 Cannes Film Festival, 9-10, 345 Capitalism, 7, 8, 18, 240, 241, 243-44, 246, 250 Capote, Truman, 127; Music for Chameleons, 348 Carátula, La, 218, 219 Cardinale, Claudia, 174-76, 178 Cardullo, Bert, 365 Carlson, Marvin A., 264, 274, 277 Carmen, Eric, 338-39; “All By Myself”, 338-39 Castellucci, Romeo, 309; Inferno, 309 Castorf, Frank, 274, 276-78; Endstation Amerika (A Streetcar Named Desire), 274, 276-78 Caute, David, 238, 245, 246 Central Intelligence Agency

380

Tennessee Williams and Europe

(CIA), 259 C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (Leone), 175 Cervantes, Miguel de, 259; Don Quixote, 259 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 27, 257 Chagall, Marc, 348 Chamberlain, Neville, 194 Chanel, Gabrielle “Coco”, 127 Chaplin, Charlie, 91, 127, 128 Che fine ha fatto Baby Jane? (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) (Farrel), 179 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 28-29, 163, 171, 177, 225, 264-65, 278, 282, 289, 294, 301-304, 318; The Cherry Orchard, 171, 302-303; Il Giardino dei ciliegi (The Cherry Orchard), 171; The Seagull, 29, 302; Three Sisters, 278, 303; Tre sorelle (Three Sisters), 177 Cheney, Sheldon, 91 Chevilley, Philippe, 274 China, 257 Choukri, Mohamed, 34 Chyra, Andrzej, 326, 330, 343 Ciccone, Louise (see Madonna) City Theatre (Gothenburg, Sweden), 135, 137-38, 139, 141, 142, 147, 161 Civil War (US), 307 Classification and Ratings Administration, 120 Clement, René, 181 Clemente, J. López, 223

Clericuzio, Alessandro, 16 Clifford, James, 274 Clurman, Harold, 90, 92, 107 Cocteau, Jean, 12, 34-35, 127, 152, 203, 221, 239, 260; La Belle et la Bête, 34; Blood of a Poet, 35; The Diary of a Film, 34; The Eagle Has Two Heads, 152; Orphée, 127 Cold War, 17-18, 235-36, 239, 241, 245-46, 253, 259, 262 Coll, Julio, 227 Collard, Christophe, 304 Collette, Yann, 326, 331 Colucci, Michel (see Coluche) Coluche, 327 Columbus, Christopher, 25 Comédie de Genève (Geneva), 323, 340 Comédie-Française (Paris), 18, 363-64, 269, 274, 276, 278, 324, 343 Communism, 7, 17-18, 167, 182, 197, 235-42, 247, 25053, 261-62, 334 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 259 Contini, Ermanno, 174 Copeau, Jacques, 264 Cordelli, Franco, 184 Corneille, Pierre, 7 Cottafavi, Vittorio, 176-77 Crandell, George W., 94, 156 Crane, Hart, 38, 81, 364 Crawford, Cheryl, 106 La Croix (French newspaper), 323 Crowther, Bosley, 120

Index Cruz, Nina, 355, 356, 358, 360 Cugat, Xavier, 103 Cullberg, Brigit, 152

381 D’Lugo, Marvin, 350, 367 Drama Academy Theatre (Sofia), 247, 248, 251 Dreiser, Theodore, 91 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 327; La dame aux camélias, 327 Duras, Marguerite, 310; India Song, 310 Dylan, Bob, 113 Dyson, James, 48

Dagens Nyheter (Swedish newspaper), 138, 146, 158, 162, 164 Dakin, Reverend Walter Edwin, 1-3, 32, 35, 45, 47, 56 Damen, Katelijne, 308, 312, 313, 314, 318 Damernas Värld (Swedish magazine), 162 D’Amico, Silvio, 171, 172, 179 Dandini, Cesare, 172 Darge, Fabienne, 263, 273, 276, 323 Darwin, Charles (see Social Darwinism) Davis, Bette, 179 De Capitani, Elio, 184 Deep Throat (Damiano), 112 Le défi américain, 262 Degas, Edgar, 276 Deleuze, Gilles, 331 Delon, Alain, 175 De Lullo, Giorgio, 182 DelPrince, James M., 13-14 De Sica, Vittorio, 28, 177, 345 The Devil in Miss Jones (Damiano), 112 Devlin, Albert J., 2, 4, 28, 49, 65, 76, 92, 93, 189, 281, 289, 302 Dior, Christian, 326 Disney, Walt, 91

Edschmid, Kasimir, 66 Edwards, Gwynne, 351, 358, 361 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 226 Eisenstein, Sergei, 12, 14-15, 34, 89-107; Alexander Nevsky, 14, 96-97, 100101, 104; Battleship Potemkin, 91; Close-Up, 91; The Film Sense, 91, 99; “The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR”, 99-100; October, 104 Ek, Anders, 16, 136, 139, 143, 153, 154, Elfo Company, 184 England, 11, 12, 34, 221, 279, 321: London, 11, 14, 27, 48, 54, 90, 123, 222, 235, 239, 282, 297, 299, 321, 349 Epstein, Jean, 177 Erman, John, 365 Ermarth, Michael, 262, 266 Espejo Romero, Ramón, 8, 17, 191, 201, 260, 352, 357   

382

Tennessee Williams and Europe

Etchells, Tim, 311 Euripides, 307; Bacchae, 305, 307, 314; Die Bakchen (Bacchae), 305, 307; Medea, 177 L’Europeo (Italian magazine), 173 Evans, Oliver, 4, 5, 202 Evergood, Philip, 244 Expressen (Swedish newspaper), 146, 147, 148, 150, 153 Expressionism, 14, 66-69, 71, 81, 84, 85, 341 Fabre, Jan, 305, 311, 315-16; Macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden (The Power of Theatrical Madness), 315, 316; Theater geschreven met een “K” is een kater (Theatre Written with a “K” is a Tomcat), 315 Falb, Lewis, 143, 264, 265, 266, 268, 270, 271 Faulkner, William, 90 Feldman, Charles K., 116-17, 128 Fellini, Frederico,122, 175, 345; 8 e ½ (8½), 175 Ferrati, Sarah, 177-78 Festival of Two Worlds (Spoleto, Italy), 11 Le Figaro (French newspaper), 271, 274, 345 film noir, 124-25 Flaubert, Gustave, 327, 329; Correspondance, 327 Fleming, Victor, 180, 307,

285; Gone With the Wind, 180, 306-307; Via col vento (Gone With the Wind), 180, Folies Bergères, 3 folkhemmet (“People’s Home”, the Swedish welfare state), 151, 159, 161, 163 Ford, John, 124 Foucault, Michel, 316; L’histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization), 316 France, 1, 9-10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 28, 31, 32, 35, 85, 122, 143, 221, 259, 261-64, 267, 324-29, 331: Avignon, 324; Cannes, 9-10, 345; Giverny, 276; Grenoble, 323; Marne, 3, 31-33; Marseilles, 334; Nice, 5, 334; Paris, 1, 3, 4, 5, 20, 28, 32, 34, 35-36, 89, 90, 190, 202, 211, 222, 239, 262, 264, 270, 274, 303, 315, 323-24, 325, 338 Franco, Francisco “El Generalísimo”, 7, 16-17, 190, 193-94, 197-98, 201, 214-15, 216, 217, 218, 226, 229-30, 352-54, 366 Fraser, Antonia, 297 French and Indian War, 331 French Quarter, 4, 58, 71, 73, 75, 139-40, 149 Freud, Sigmund, 266, 270, 271, 328 Fuller, Samuel, 124 Funke, Lewis, 281, 296

Index Gabler, Neil, 92 Garland, Judy, 181 Gaudí, Antoni, 348 Gelber, Jack, 281 Genet, Jean, 265, German theatre, 276-78 Germany: 1, 11, 18, 34, 63, 104, 141, 261-62, 263, 26667, 268, 271, 276; Berlin, 27, 276, 277, 317, 323; Cologne, 36, 135; Hamburg, 27, 305, 307; Pforzheim, 18, 267 Gerrits, Jan Peter, 311 Gershwin, George, 259 Gershwin, Ira, 259; Porgy and Bess, 259 Gilbert, Danièle, 9-10 Gilbert, Helen, 236, 237 Gindt, Dirk, 8, 15-16, 136, 151, 156, 161 Girgus, Sam, 91 Glenville, Peter, 112; Summer and Smoke, 112 Godard, Jean-Luc, 345 Goebbels, Joseph, 264 Gogh, Vincent van, 12, 14, 7274; Night Café, 72-74 Goldoni, Carlo, 7 Goodman Theatre (Chicago), 305 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 247 Gordón, José, 218, 229 Gotchev, Gotcho, 240 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (Swedish magazine), 137, 146, 154, 155, 158

383 Göteborgs Morgonpost (Swedish newspaper), 141, 158 Göteborgs-Posten (Swedish newspaper), 142, 150, 160 Göteborgs-Tidningen (Swedish newspaper), 141, 149, 152, 157-58, 159, 160 Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg (Luxembourg), 323 Gran Hotel Colón (Madid), 191 Graziosi, Paolo, 177 Great Depression, 5, 193, 241, 284 Great War (see World War I) Greece, 10, 11, 257: Athens, 27, 314 Greek mythology, 6, 328, 333 Greek theatre, 226, 328, 333, 341 Grevenius, Herbert, 138, 140, 148, 154, 161 Gronbeck-Tedesco, John L., 93 Group Theatre, 90, 92, 316 Gruen, John, 302 Gruszczynski, Piotr, 325, 338 The Guardian (British newspaper), 361 Guarnieri, Anna Maria, 177 Guerin, Denis, 326 Guerrieri, Gerardo, 172 Le guignol, 283 Gussow, Mel, 282-83, 309, 313 Hagen, Uta, 169

  

384

Tennessee Williams and Europe

Hale, Allean, 29, 292 Hall, Berta, 141 Hammarén, Torsten, 138, 147 Hansen, Miriam, 91, 107 Harrington, Eve, 354, 360 Harvard Theatre Collection, 39, 41 Haskovo Theatre (Haskovo, Bulgaria), 247, 251 Hawkins, William, 169 Hayes, Richard, 14-15 Hays, William, 345 Hayworth, Rita, 181 Helander, Karin, 137, 143-44, 152, 153 Helburn, Theresa, 91-92 Héliot, Armelle, 263, 271, 274, 276, 323 Hellman, Lillian, 90, 179, 240, 245; The Little Foxes, 179, 245 Hemingway, Ernest, 113, 192 Hepburn, Katharine, 181 Hitchcock, Alfred, 124, 181, 277, 348; The Paradine Case, 181; Psycho, 277 Hitler, Adolf, 104, 194, 286 Holditch, Kenneth W., 53, 309, 313 Holland (see The Netherlands) Holland Festival (Dutch theatre), 301, 304, 323 Holland, Willard, 67 Hollywood, 9, 15, 21, 47, 89107, 111-130, 222, 260, 266, 302, 326, 347-48, 35253 Holocaust, 87, 141 Hoogland, Claes, 140

Hooper, Michael S.D., 20-21 Hopper, Tim, 307 Hove, Ivo van, 19-20, 301-19; Angels in America, 306; Geruchten (Rumors), 305; Misanthrope, 305; Ziektekiemen (Germs), 304305, 315 Hoyo, Arturo del, 224 Hrvatin, Emil, 316 Huddle, Elizabeth, 294 Hudson, Jane, 179 Hunter, Kim, 355 Huppert, Isabelle, 20, 323-43 Huston, John, 124; The Night of the Iguana, 52, 112, 124 Ibsen, Henrik, 29, 38, 136, 138, 264, 268, 281, 289; A Doll’s House, 357; Peer Gynt, 138 Ikebana, 48-49, 51 Índice de artes y letras (Spanish magazine), 220, 222 Information Control Division, 266 Inge, William, 130, 219, 230, 281; Come Back, Little Sheba, 219 Inteatre Polveriggi-Festival (Jesi, Italy), 316 International Eucharistic Congress, 196 Ionesco, Eugene, 265 Isherwood, Christopher, 9, 257 Italy, 1, 6, 7, 11, 12, 16, 28, 33, 46, 59-60, 169-85, 189, 221, 345: Capri, 56;

Index Florence, 177; Jesi, 316; Naples, 56; Prato, 177; Rome, 1, 5-6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 27, 28, 50, 56, 93, 172, 178, 183, 189, 190-91, 239; San Remo, 46; Sicily, 5253, 56, 175, 299; Spoleto, 11; Taormina, 14, 52-53; Venice, 315; Ventimiglia, 133 Japan, 10, 48, 51, 58, 73, 122, 257, 263, 274-76 Jekyll, Gertrude, 47 Jett, Renate, 326, 338-39, 343 Jewel Box (St Louis), 53-54 Joffre, Marshal Joseph, 30-32, 33 John XXIII, Pope, 120 Johns, Jasper, 315 Johnston, Charles H.L., 31-32 Jouvet, Louis, 34 Joyce, James, 119; Ulysses, 119 Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) (Wiene), 91 Kabiwanska, Raina, 183 Kabuki theatre, 59, 99, 274-76 (see also Japan) Karpf, Anne, 169, 175-76 Kavli, Karin, 16, 139, 143, 145-47, 149, 152-53, 162 Kazan, Elia, 21, 76, 79, 83, 8485, 116-18, 120, 124-29, 182, 198, 222, 275, 288, 302, 303, 306, 313, 316,

385 318-19, 336, 338, 341, 34851, 353, 355-57, 358-59, 363; Baby Doll (film),112, 115, 118, 129; A Life, 76, 85; A Streetcar Named Desire (film), 21, 83, 11618, 120, 124-29, 182, 222, 275, 303, 318-19, 341, 34851, 353, 355-57, 358-59, 363; A Streetcar Named Desire (play), 76, 79, 8485, 302, 303, 306, 313, 336, 338 Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa De, 305 Keith, Thomas, 13, 260 Kemp, Robert, 265 Khruschev, Nikita, 235 King, C. Richard, 199 Kingman, Dong, 244 Kirchner, Ernest Ludwig, 74 Kit, Ertah, 327, 338-39 Klee, Paul, 66 Kolin, Philip C., 136, 140, 141, 170, 193, 194, 195, 201, 239, 259-60, 266, 317, 336, 338, 357 Koltès, Bernard-Marie, 310; Combat de nègre et chiens (Black Battles with Dogs), 310 Koninklikjke Schouwburg (The Hague), 323 Kops, Bernard, 169 Koroneva, M.M., 245 Kraft Television Theatre, 125 Kramer, Hazel, 3 Kramer, Richard, 95

386

Tennessee Williams and Europe

Kullman, Colby H., 196, 201 Kushner, Tony, 334; Angels in America, 306, 334 Kuyper, Eric de, 302, 303, 319 Laborderie, Renaud de, 125129, 263 Lakmé (Delibes), 276 Lambert, Gavin, 33-34 Lambrev, Nikolai, 251 Lancaster, Burt, 175 Lärn, Hubert, 154, 155 Laughlin, James “Jay”, 4 Lauwers, Jan, 305 Lawrence, D[avid] H[erbert], 121-22; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 121-22 Legion of Decency, 83, 114-15 Leigh, Vivien, 12, 50-51, 126, 180, 181, 222, 260, 318-19, 357 Lemoine, Xavier, 20 Lenin, Vladimir, 240 Leone, Sergio, 175 Leverich, Lyle, 54, 94 Levin, Jack, 244 Lewis, Robert, 93 Libération (French newspaper), 323 Liberovici, Andrea, 174, 176 Linde, Ebbe, 146, 154, 157, 161, 162 Lo, Jacqueline, 236-37 Lombard, Carole, 179 Londré, Felicia Hardison, 13, 83 Lope de Vega Company, 226 López, Sancho, 357

Lorca, Frederico García, 28, 202, 225; Blood Wedding, 348; Yerma, 216 Lord, Father Daniel, 114 Lubitsch, Ernst, 179; Vogliamo vivere! (To Be or Not to Be), 179 Luini, Bernardino, 315; Salomé Receives the Head of John the Baptist, 315 Luis Cano, José, 219 Luxembourg, 323 Lynch, David, 340 Maase, Kasper, 267 Macchi, Eros, 176; La tua mano (You Touched Me!), 176 McConachie, Bruce, 246 McCullers, Carson, 6, 49, 127 MacGowan, Kenneth, 90 McKenzie, Bruce, 306 McLean, Don, 277 Madame Butterfly (Puccini), 276 Maddison, Stephen, 350, 351, 354, 355, 362 Madonna, 182, 276 Madonna, the, 81, 365 Magliocca, Cosimo Mirco, 269, 275 Magnani, Anna, 12, 28, 46, 52, 59, Malmö Stadstheater (Malmö, Sweden), 135, 147, 148, 150, 153, 162 Maltz, Albert, 240 Manet, Edouard, 276

Index Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 35455, 367; All About Eve, 354-55, 367 Mann, Daniel, 124; The Rose Tattoo, 112, 115, 124, 265 Mannaert, Norbert, 308 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 316 Marchand, Claude, 202-203 Le mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais), 174 Marinis, Marco de, 236 Marker, Frederick, 135-36, 141 Marker, Lise-Lone, 135-36, 141 Marquerie, Alfredo, 204, 205206 Marshall Plan, 187, 197, 238, 259 Marsillach, Adolfo, 203 Marvel, Elizabeth, 306, 307308 Marx, Karl, 240, 243, 334 Masip, Ramona T. de, 223-24 Mastrocinque, Camillo, 177 Matisse, Henri, 276 Maurin, Frédéric, 314 Maurois, André, 264-65 Mayette, Muriel, 278 Medea (Euripides), 177 Meester, Jr, Johan de, 303-304 Melato, Mariangela, 181-84; Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away), 182 Mercurio (Italian newspaper), 174

387 Merlo, Frank, 6, 17, 28, 51-52, 59, 93, 189, 190, 202, 281 Method Acting, 310, 316, 318 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 152, 301, 304, 316, 317 Midi Première (French TV show), 9-10 Mihaylova, Elka, 242 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 276 Miller, Arthur, 71, 104, 130, 156, 170, 202, 207, 214, 220, 224, 225, 227, 230, 240, 244; Death of a Salesman, 71, 224, 225-26 Miller v. California, 120, 121 Mills (McBurney), Clark, 30 Mishima, Yukio, 292, 294, 302, 308, 334; Madame de Sade, 334 Mitkov, Zdravko, 248 Modernism, 15, 89, 91-93, 101, 107, 122, 124-25, 259, 261 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 7, 30, 34, 136, 260; Dom Juan, 34; Fourberies de Scapin, 30; Le misanthrope, 305 Moorhead, Agnes, 181 Monet, Claude, 276 La Moralidad Pública y su Evolución (Public Morality and Its Evolution), 190 Moreau, Jeanne, 265 Morelli, Rina, 171, 178-81 Morgon-Tidningen (Swedish newspaper), 149, 153, 157-

388

Tennessee Williams and Europe

58, 159-60 Morocco, 195-96: Tangier, 3334, 190, 192, 195 Moscow Art Theatre, 301 Mouawad, Wajdi, 20, 323, 325, 326-27, 331, 332, 335, 339, 340 Moulin Rouge, 3, 8 La movida, 352 Mummers, 67 Munro, Alice, 348 Murphy, Brenda, 71, 79, 316 Murrow, Edward R., 257, 280 Myrdal, Alva, 151 Myrdal, Gunnar, 151 Napoleonic Code, 364 National Catholic Office on Motion Pictures, 120 National Theatre (London), 297, 357 Neander-Nilsson, Sanfrid, 136 Neorealism (Italian), 122, 128, 341 The Netherlands, 11, 12, 30119, 323: Amsterdam, 2, 3637, 54, 303, 304, 323; Eindhoven, 304; The Hague, 46, 323; Tilburg, 304 Neuner, Franz, 195 New Normalcy, 93 New School for Social Research, 317 New Wave (British), 10, 19, 122; (French), 10, 19, 122 New York Theatre Workshop, 19, 304-305, 307 The New York Times

(newspaper), 34, 91, 92, 120, 205, 225, 248, 274, 297, 302, 306 Nichols, Mike, 112, 306 Nicklaus, Frederick, 52 Nietvelt, Chris, 307, 308, 311, 313, 314, 317 Nirvana, 277, 307; “Rape Me”, 307 Noh Theatre (see also Japan), 10, 292, 293, 294, 308 Nolde, Emil, 74 Norrköping Stadsteater (Norrköping, Sweden), 135, 162 Novelli, Augusto, 178; Gallina vecchia (Old Hen), 178 Nowy Teatr (Warsaw), 323 Nyberg, Arne, 140 Ny Tid (Swedish newspaper), 140, 150 Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe (Paris), 20, 323, 326, 332, 339 Odets, Clifford, 90, 92, 107, 240; Awake and Sing!, 92; “‘Democratic Vistas’ in Drama”, 92; Waiting for Lefty, 90, 92 Off the Canal Theatre (Sofia), 251 Old Vic Theatre (London), 349, 361 Olivier, Laurence, 221, 222, 239, 260 O’Neill, Eugene, 68-69, 90, 91-92, 215-16, 221, 224, 227, 305, 307, 309; Anna

Index Christie, 215-16; Before Breakfast, 216; Bound East for Cardiff, 216; Desire under the Elms, 309; The Emperor Jones, 69; The Great God Brown, 68; The Hairy Ape, 68; In the Zone, 216; The Long Voyage Home, 216; More Stately Mansions, 305; Mourning Becomes Electra, 305; A Tale of Possessors SelfDispossessed, 305 Orsini, Umberto, 177 Orwell, George, 164; 1984, 164 Osborne, John, 281 Pact of Madrid, 197, 226 Padovani, Lea, 181 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 178; Le sorelle Materassi (Sisters Materassi), 178 Paller, Michael, 8, 19 Palmer, R. Barton, 8, 9, 15, 93, 94, 114, 117, 129 Paredes, Marisa, 354 Parsons, Estelle, 308 Pascaud, Fabienne, 326, 328 Pashova, Nina, 251 Paso, Alfonso, 218 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 307, 345; Theorem, 307 Pauwels, Pol, 311-12 Pavis, Patrice, 236-37, 246 Pavlov, Grigor, 242-43 Pavlova, Tatiana, 171-74 Petrousheva, Chaika, 249

389 Phillips, Gene, 93-94 Picasso, Pablo, 12, 121, 12728 Piccoli, Fantasio, 181 Pinter, Harold, 10, 12, 19, 28197; Ashes to Ashes, 290; The Birthday Party, 28283, 285, 290; The Caretaker, 281, 282, 287, 294; Celebration, 282; The Dumb Waiter, 291; The Homecoming, 286, 290; Landscape, 292; Moonlight, 290; Mountain Language, 282, 290; The New World Order, 290; Old Times, 282, 286, 297; One for the Road, 283, 290; Other Places, 297; Party Time, 290, 297 Pirandello, Luigi, 7, 264 Piscator, Erwin, 317 Plato, 66, 327, 329, 341; Symposium, 327 Playboy (magazine), 321 Pleven Theatre (Pleven, Bulgaria), 238 Plovdiv Theatre (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), 251 Poland, 329, 334: Warsaw, 323 Polish identity, 15, 153, 156, 242, 276, 323, 329, 330-31, Pollock, Jackson, 71-72 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste (see Molière) Postmodernism, 107, 250 Powell, Dilys, 279

390

Tennessee Williams and Europe

Premios Goyas (Goya Awards), 348 Production Code, 15, 21, 11415, 123, 106, 353, 353, 356 Prokofiev, Sergei, 98, 100 Prokosch, Frederic, 6 Prosser, William, 38-39 Pulitzer Prize, 117, 118 Pulp, 338, 339; “Common People”, 338, 339 Quaderns de teatre (Spanish/ Catalan journal), 230 Queen Frederica, 257 Quigley, Austin, 290-91 Quintero, José, 112; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 112 Quinto, José María de, 229 Rauschenberg, Robert, 315 Reader’s Digest (magazine), 261 Realism, 14, 68, 71, 84, 136, 289, 309 Rebora, Roberto, 180 Reed, Lou, 277 Reinhardt, Max, 177 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 259 Renoir, Jean, 345 Rice, Elmer, 69, 221, 224; The Adding Machine, 69 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 29 Rimbaud, Arthur, 30, 33-34; Sympathique, 34 Ritchie, Guy, 182 Rodríguez de León, Antonio, 224

Rodriguez y Gonzales, Amado “Pancho”, 4, 11 Rogers, Ginger, 179 Roja, Huma, 354, 358, 362 Romanticism, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 167 Rose, Billy, 313 Rossellini, Roberto, 345 Rousse Theatre (Rousse, Bulgaria), 248 Roy, Claude, 327, 325; Bestiaire du coquillage, 327, 325 Royal Dramatic Theatre (Stockholm), 163 Rubicam’s Business School, 54 Ruhrtriennale (Ruhr, Germany), 307 Ruiz, González, 357 Russia (including the Soviet Union), 12, 14, 18, 28, 31, 34, 35, 91, 104, 163, 17172, 173, 235, 236-39, 240, 241-42, 243, 245-48, 250, 259, 262, 278, 302: Moscow, 171; St Petersburg, 301 Salle Richelieu (Paris) (see Comédie-Française) Saint Laurent, Yves, 326 Sandrich, Mark, 179; Shall We Dance, 179 Santayana, George, 12 Saroyan, William, 220, 224 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 202, 269, 271

Index Sastre, Alfonso, 219 Saul, Oscar, 116, 302 Savran, David, 8, 18-19, 156 Sayons, Alfonso de, 222 Schauspielhaus (Hamburg), 305; Die Bakchen, 305 Schnabel, Julian, 315-16 Schrader, Paul, 124 Schvey, Henry I., 14 Scofield, Paul, 299 Scott, Lizabeth, 181 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 350 Sergeant, Winthrop, 266, 267 Serrador, Pepita, 227, 229 Serralles, Jeanine, 305 Shakespeare, William, 177, 259, 334; Macbeth, 334; Sogno di una notte di mezza estate (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), 177 Shahn, Ben, 244 Sherwood, Robert E., 224 Shostakovich, Dimitri, 34 Shurlock, Geoffrey, 118-20 Siegertsz, Camilla, 314 Simon, Neil, 130 Simoneschi, Lydia, 180, 181 Singal, Daniel Joseph, 107 Sjarov, Pjortr, 301 Sjöman, Vilgot, 146, 147, 154 Sjöstrand, Maria, 141 Sklar, Robert, 94 Slavova, Kornelia, 8, 17-18 Smith, Cecil N., 46 Smith, Paul Julian, 350 Social Darwinism, 16, 149-50, 160

391 Social Democracy, 159 Social Realism, 122, 240, 245 Söderberg, Hjalmar, 135 Sofia Army Theatre, 239, 242, 251, 252 Sofia Youth Theatre, 239 Sola, Isidro, 203 Sollors, Werner, 90 Sophocles, 341 Sordo, Enrique, 225 Soto, Cristián, 326 Southwark Playhouse (London), 357 Soviet theatre, 235-36, 238, 239, 240, 241-42, 246, 24748 Soviet Union (see Russia) Soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), 262 Spain, 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16-17, 18, 34, 189-209, 213-31, 260, 273, 347-67: Barcelona, 6, 17, 27, 189, 190-93, 195-96, 197, 198, 200, 202-203, 204-206, 207, 208, 215-16, 217-18, 219, 220, 223, 227, 230, 349, 354; Cáceres, 352; Calzada de la Calatrava, 252; Gibraltar, 257; Granada, 192; Guernica, 193, 230; Madrid, 19, 190, 192, 193, 197, 202, 208, 215-16, 218-19, 220, 224, 225, 226, 227-29, 230, 349, 352, 354, 355, 357, 358; Murcia, 218; Salamanca, 218; San Sebastián, 218;

  

392

Tennessee Williams and Europe

Santiago de Compostela, 218; Valencia, 192; Zaragoza, 218 Spanish Civil War, 7, 190, 193, 214, 217 Spasov, Krassimir, 249 Spears, Britney, 277 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 118 Spry, Constance, 47-48 Stalin, Joseph, 19, 246 St Just, Lady Maria, 11, 17, 28, 190, 202, 297, 299, 321 St Matthew, 327 St Paul’s Episcopal Church (Columbus), 1, 45, 47 Staiger, Janet, 106 Stallybrass, Peter, 199 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 152, 301, 304, 313, 316 Stanwyck, Barbara, 180, 181 Stenström, Urban, 153, 162 Stevens, Wallace, 89 Stewart, Martha, 47 Stichting Brabants Toneel (Tilburg, The Netherlands), 304, 310 Strasberg, Lee, 310 Strehler, Giorgio, 177 Strindberg, August, 16, 29, 68, 82, 90, 135, 136, 147-48, 149-50, 265, 289; A Dream Play, 68; Miss Julie, 16, 82, 135, 147-48, 149-50 Ström, Carl-Johan, 139, 142, 144 Suárez-Galbán, Eugenio, 194 Surrealism, 124, 250 Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish

newspaper), 149, 153, 162 Sveriges Radio (Swedish radio station), 163 Sweden, 12, 16, 135-65: Gothenburg, 137-38, 139, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 153, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 239; Malmö, 135, 147, 148, 150, 153, 162; Norrköping, 135, 162; Stockholm, 27, 135, 140, 147, 149, 162, 163; Uppsala, 151 Switzerland: Geneva, 323 Szczesniak, Malgorzata, 336 Tamayo, José, 226 Tandy, Jessica, 56-57, 222, 318 Tasso, Torquato, 327, 329; Jerusalem Delivered, 327 Teatro (Spanish journal), 173, 223 teatros de cámara, 8, 17, 21617, 220-21, 227, 229, 230, 357 Teatro de Cámara (Barcelona), 191, 203, 206, 217-18, 219; de Cámara (Madrid), 202, 203, 218; de Hoy (Madrid), 221; Eliseo (Rome), 172, 179, 183; Eslava (Madrid), 227-228; Fontalba (Madrid), 216; Goldoni (Venice), 315; María Guerrero (Madrid), 217, 219; Reina Victoria (Madrid), 257, 357; Stabile (Trieste), 181

Index Teatro norteamericano contemporáneo (Spanish journal), 230 Thalia Theatre (New York), 97 Theatre 199 (Sofia), 247 Theatre Arts, 91, 225 Théâtre de l’Atelier (Paris), 324 ; de la Tempête (Paris), 324 ; Édouard VI (Paris), 324 ; Théâtre MC93 (Paris), 324 Theatre Guild, 63 Theatre of the Absurd, 245 Theatre of Cruelty, 244-45 Thomassin, Florence, 326 Thompson, Judith, 303, 307, 314 Thompson, Kristen, 104, 106 Thornton, Margaret Bradham, 1, 27, 97, 172, 189 Tidblad, Inga, 147 De Tijd (Antwerp), 304 Tischler, Nancy M., 2, 4, 28, 49, 65, 76, 92, 93, 160, 189, 288 Tolstoy, Leo, 35-36; Notes of a Madman, 36 Toneelgroep Comedia (Amsterdam), 301, 304 Toro, Fernando de, 236 Torres-Zúñiga, Laura, 4, 1617, 260, 352 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 276 Treadwell, Sophie, 69; Machinal, 69 Tretow, Annika, 143, 147, 148 Trevelyan, John, 121

393 Trudov Front Theatre (Sofia), 238 Truffaut, François, 345 Turgenev, Ivan, 301; A Month in the Country, 301 Turkey, 12: Istanbul, 27 Twain, Mark, 8; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 8 Twist, Basil, 274 Tynan, Kenneth, 202 U. City Pep (St Louis school newspaper), 2, 32 United States, 12, 13, 15, 18, 30, 31, 32, 48, 49, 89, 91, 96, 121, 129, 130, 161, 163, 181, 194, 197-98, 205, 214, 222, 225, 226, 236, 239, 241, 259-60, 261-64, 266-74, 277-78, 318, 333, 340: Chicago (IL), 30-31, 48, 223, 305; Clarksdale (MS), 1; Columbus (MS), 14, 45, 47, 172; Columbia (MO), 4; Dallas (TX), 80, 318; Iowa City (IA), 4; Key West (FL), 11, 184; New Orleans (LA), 4, 11, 57-58, 139-41, 149, 151, 157-58, 159, 202, 223, 249, 263, 275, 307, 310, 311, 328, 334-35, 336-37, 338, 340, 355; New York (NY), 19, 27, 28, 31, 39, 50, 94, 97, 119, 169, 189, 205, 208, 252, 304, 305, 306, 307308, 314; Provincetown

394

Tennessee Williams and Europe

(MA), 4; St Louis (MO), 34, 12, 30-31, 54, 60, 67, 242, 297, 352, University City High School (St Louis), 2, 32 Vaca Flaca, La, 218 Vadim, Roger, 181 Valli, Alida, 181-82 Vande Velde, Anton, 303; Tijl (Till), 303 La Vanguardia Española (Spanish newspaper), 201202, 204-206, 207, 208, 209, 219, 227 Vedani, Silvia, 183 Verlaine, Paul, 34 Versweyveld, Jan, 304, 313-14 Vertikaal (Gent), 304 Via col vento (Gone With the Wind) (Fleming), 180 Victor, Pascal, 330, 335, 337, 339, 342 Vigorelli, Giancarlo, 173 Visconti, Luchino, 12, 28, 171-72, 174-75, 176-77, 179-80, 181, 182, 221, 239, 260, 345; Il Gattopardo (The Leopard),175; Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers), 175; Senso, 181; La terra trema (The Earth Will Tremble), 172; Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire), 16, 179, 180-81, 183 Viviani, René, 30-31,

Vlaamse Volkstoneel (Flemish Popular Theatre), 303 Volksbühne (Berlin), 317 Vowles, Richard, 148, 149 Warlikowski, Krysztof, 32343; (A)pollonia, 324; Le Dibbouk (The Dybbuk), 334; Un Tramway (The Streetcar), 323-43 Warner Brothers, 83, 128 Washington University (St Louis), 29, 30, 31 Watermeulen, Steven van, 308, 317-18 Waters, John, 352; Hairspray, 352 Wertmüller, Lina, 182; Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away), 182 White, Allon, 199 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Nichols), 112 Whyte, Andrew, 244 Wilde, Oscar, 47, 327, 329; Salomé, 327 Wilder, Thornton, 69, 215, 221, 230, 266; Our Town, 69, 215; The Skin of Our Teeth, 266-67 Williams, Cornelius Coffin, 11, 45 Williams, Edwina, 3, 4, 45-46 Williams, Rose, 45, 54, 194, 284 Williams, Thomas Lanier III “Tennessee”, avant-

Index gardism, 55, 94, 122, 127, 263, 276; bullfights, 192, 202; Calvary Cemetery (St Louis), 60, 297; Cannes Film Festival (1976), 345; car accident, 190; censorship, 10, 114-23, 229, 239, 246, 249, 345; Communism, 7, 17-18, 167, 182, 197, 235-42, 247, 250-53, 261-62, 334; creative process, 11, 36, 39, 65-66, 105; critical failure, 68, 194, 281, 323; drug use, 52, 271-72; “En avant!”, 13, 27-33, 40; European theatre, 3, 7-8, 49; filmic qualities in his writing, 347; flowers, 13-14, 45-46, 49-61, 133; Dutch critics, 314-15; French critics,124129, 262-66, 268, 269-73, 274-76, 323, 325-29, 336; German critics, 266-68, 269-71, 276-78; Hollywood, 9, 15, 21, 47, 89-107, 111-130, 222, 260, 266, 302, 326, 347-48, 35253; Holocaust, 87, 141; Mount Vesuvius, 43; music, 102-103, 106-107; Noh theatre, 10, 292, 293, 294, 308; Ozzie (Williams’ nurse), 45; painters, 14, 7274; plastic theatre, 14, 6971, 89-107, 347; politics, 235-36; pop culture, 261; Production Code, 15, 21,

395 114-15, 123, 106, 353, 353, 356; Pulitzer Prize, 117, 118; race, 150-160, 198; religion, 50, 70, 113, 194, 198, 214, 239, 262; Spanish critics, 172-73, 179-87, 199-203, 205-208; Swedish critics, 137-38, 140-43, 146-55, 157-60, 162-64; “stoned age”, 51-53; swimming, 191-92; trip to Europe (1928), 1-3, 25, 32, 35-37, 46; trip to Europe (1948), 3-4, 49; U. City Pep, 2; Works – Dramas: Battle of Angels, 285; Camino Real, 7, 28, 60, 6768, 92, 105, 193, 194, 197, 206-207, 213, 219, 223, 230, 247, 248, 251, 267-68, 285, 294, 352; Candles to the Sun, 79; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 7, 17, 27, 69, 71, 79, 112, 115, 136, 170, 181, 195-96, 198, 201, 203, 208, 213, 219, 230, 247, 251, 265, 268, 287, 352, 353; The Fugitive Kind, 285; The Glass Menagerie, 4, 5, 14, 51, 68, 69-71, 9495, 98, 101, 106, 107, 141, 170-71, 184, 191, 193, 194, 196-97, 201, 213, 217, 22223, 224, 227, 229, 230, 238, 239, 241, 242, 248, 249, 251, 264, 266, 268, 270, 281, 283-84, 288, 318, 324, 347, 354; In the Bar of

  

396

Tennessee Williams and Europe

a Tokyo Hotel, 292-93; A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, 46, 247; The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, 308; The Night of the Iguana, 2, 38, 52, 112, 251, 260, 281, 286; Not About Nightingales, 285; The Notebook of Trigorin, 29, 302; Orpheus Descending, 184, 199, 213, 238-39, 241, 265, 270-71, 285, 296, 310; Out Cry (see The Two-Character Play); The Rose Tattoo, 10, 46, 49-50, 59, 93, 105, 106, 112, 115, 135, 136, 213, 219, 222-23, 225, 247, 248, 265, 267, 285, 324, 365; Small Craft Warnings, 14; Something Cloudy, Something Clear, 283, 289; “The Spinning Song”, 9598; Spring Storm, 285; A Streetcar Named Desire (“The Poker Night”, 72, 75, 76, 81, 83, 101-102), 1819, 20-21, 56-57, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75-84, 95, 101-102, 112, 115-17, 118, 119-20, 123, 125-29, 135-65, 169, 170, 179, 182, 189, 193, 202, 213, 217, 219, 220-21, 222, 227, 230, 235, 239, 242-45, 247; 249, 252-53, 259-78, 285, 288-89, 301319, 323-43, 347-67; Suddenly Last Summer, 2, 7, 17, 151, 170, 181, 184,

195, 198-201, 208-209, 265, 285, 324; Summer and Smoke, 69, 112, 170, 176, 193, 213, 218, 219, 222, 223, 248, 251, 267, 270, 285; Sweet Bird of Youth, 104-105, 112, 208, 230, 251, 285, 297; This Is (An Entertainment), 283, 294; The Two-Character Play (Out Cry), 11, 13, 14, 3738, 39, 54-55; Vieux Carré, 324; You Touched Me!, 176, 222; one-Act plays: Auto-Da-Fé, 218; Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, 89-90; The Chalky White Substance, 283, 289; The Day on Which a Man Dies, 292, 294; The Demolition Downtown, 283; The Enemy: Time, 104-105 (see also Sweet Bird of Youth); The Gnädiges Fräulein, 283, 289, 294; I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, 289, 292-93; Kirche, Küche, Kinder, 289, 294; The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, 218, 302; The Last of My Solid Gold Watches, 125; Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, 125; Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, 283, 293; Portrait of a Madonna, 135; The Purification, 28; The Remarkable RoomingHouse of Mme. Le Monde, 283, 289; Talk to Me Like

Index

397 La ménagerie de verre (The Glass Menagerie), 324; La nuit de l’iguane (The Night of the Iguana), 324; Le paradis sur terre, (Kingdom of Earth), 1, 324; La rose tatouée (The Rose Tattoo), 324; Soudain l’été dernier (Suddenly Last Summer), 324; Un tramway nommé Désir (A Streetcar Named Desire), 260, 26366, 269-70, 274-76, 314, 324, 325; Vieux Carré, 324; Germany: Endstation Amerika or Endstation Sehnsucht (A Streetcar Named Desire), 18, 267-68, 274, 276-78; Italy: Estate e fumo (Summer and Smoke), 176, 181; La gatta sul tetto che scotta (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), 181; Improvvisamente l’estate scorsa (Suddenly Last Summer), 16, 181; “Succede qualcosa alla vedova Holly” (“The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”), 176; Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire), 16, 178, 179-81, 183; La tua mano (You Touched Me!), 176; Lo zoo di vetro (The Glass Menagerie), 1, 16, 171-74, 176-79, 181, 182, 184; The Netherlands: De tramlijn

the Rain and Let Me Listen …, 289, 295-96; This Property Is Condemned, 125; The Traveling Companion, 283, 289-90; 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, 218; foreign productions – Bulgaria: Chudesna nedelya za Krev kyor (A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur), 247; Kotka vurhu goresht tenekien pokriv (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), 247; Kamino real (Camino Real), 247; Kostyum za leten hotel (Clothes for a Summer Hotel), 251; Lyato i dim (Summer and Smoke), 251; Noshta na iguanata (The Night of the Iguana), 251; Orfei sliza v ada (Orpheus Descending), 2, 238; Period na adaptatsiya (Period of Adjustment), 247; Sladkata ptitza na mladostta (Sweet Bird of Youth), 251; Stuklenata menazheriya or Стъклената менажерия (The Glass Menagerie), 239, 247; Tatuiranata roza (The Rose Tattoo), 247; Tramvai Zhelanie or Трамвай „Желание” (A Streetcar Named Desire), 239, 247; Zemno Tzarstvo (Kingdom of Earth), 251; France: Baby Doll, 324:   

398

Tennessee Williams and Europe

die verlangen heet (A Streetcar Named Desire), 302-19; Spain: 27 vagones de algodón (27 Wagons Full of Cotton), 218; Auto da fé, 218; La dama del insecticida (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion), 218; Figuretes de vidre (The Glass Menagerie in Catalan), 230; La gata sobre el tejado de zinc (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), 1, 203, 230; Un tranvía llamado Deseo (A Streetcar Named Desire), 202, 206-207, 217, 218, 220, 227, 230, 260; Verano y humo (Summer and Smoke), 218, 219, 221, 225, 230; El zoo de cristal (The Glass Menagerie), 17, 191, 193-94, 202-203, 206, 217-19, 227-30; El zoológico de cristal (The Glass Menagerie in Argentine), 230; Sweden: Spårvagn till Lustgården (A Streetcar Named Desire), 1, 136-65, 239; Fiction: Moise and the World of Reason, 99; One Arm and Other Stories, 65, 270; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 50-51, 195; “The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”, 176; “The Poet”, 65-66; “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, 71; “Three Players

of a Summer Game”, 9, 71; Films: Baby Doll (Kazan), 112, 115, 118, 129; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brooks), 112, 115, 124, 265, 353; The Night of the Iguana (Huston), 52, 112, 124; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Quintero), 112; The Rose Tattoo (Mann), 112, 115, 124, 265; A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan), 21, 83, 111-12, 115, 116-18, 120, 124-29, 182, 222, 275, 303, 318-19, 341, 348-51, 353, 355-57, 358-59, 363; Sweet Bird of Youth (Brooks), 112: Summer and Smoke (Glenville), 112; Non-fiction: Conversations with Tennessee Williams, 28, 281, 283, 287, 293, 294, 296, 302; Five O’Clock Angel: Tennessee Williams’s Letters to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, 11, 28, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 204, 297; Memoirs, 28, 3233, 34, 35-36, 65, 71-72, 190, 192, 195, 260, 327, 352; Notebooks, 1, 5, 6, 9, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 97, 172, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205; New Selected Essays: Where I Live, 2, 3, 5, 32, 67, 105, 205, 235, 284, (“The Amalfi Drive and

Index Sorrento”, 43; “The Author Tells Why it is Called The Glass Menagerie”, 284; “Afterword to Camino Real”, 105; “Foreword to Camino Real”, 105; “Tennessee, Never Talk to an Actress”, 205; “The Timeless World of a Play”, 105, 225-26; “A Tour of the Battle-fields of France”, 32; “A Trip to Monte Carlo”, 2; “We Are Dissenters Now”, 235; “A Writer’s Quest for a Parnassus”, 187); The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (Vols I and II), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 28, 29, 34, 49, 57, 65, 76, 84, 85, 92, 93, 98, 106, 189, 191, 193, 198, 202, 203, 288; Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965, 6, 34; “That Greek Island” (c. 1960), 10-11; Poems: Collected Poems, 33, 37, 38; “Arctic Light”, 40-41; “Blood on the Snow”, 35, 37 Williams, William Carlos, 89 Wilson, Robert, 311, 340 Windham, Donald, 6, 34, 176 Witte Kraai, De (Antwerp), 304

399 Wit, Harry de, 308, 310, 312, 313 Wood, Audrey, 5, 7, 92 Woolsey, John Munro, 119-20 Wooster Group, 324, 343 World War I, 30-32, 90, 92, 121 World War II, 1, 46, 104, 113, 159, 190, 197, 214, 236, 259, 261, 263, 264, 268, 352 Wright, Teresa, 179 Wyler, William, 179; Piccole volpi (The Little Foxes), 179 Xirgú, Margarita, 222 Yacowar, Maurice, 93 Yarburg, Edgar Yipsel, 313 Zasursky, Yassen N., 240, 242, 245 Zecchi, Barbara, 366 Zeffirelli, Franco, 177, 345 Zola, Emile, 270 Zuidelijk Toneel (Eindhoven, then Tilburg), 304, 306, 309 (see also Stichting Brabants Toneel) Zúñiga, Ángel, 204-209, 227; Barcelona y la Noche (Barcelona and the Night), 205; Mi futuro es ayer (My Future Is Yesterday), 205, 208