"The best way to have new days is to travel or be sexually promiscuous or work with intensity on a long creation."As I continue you to mourn the loss of Elizabeth Taylor, I am lightened by the turn around in the critical eye of her acting talent. She was indeed, a truly great screen actor, one of the best & possibly no more so than in her work in pieces by
Tennessee Williams. Maggie the Cat in the film version of
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof? Suddenly Last Summer?In my fairly large collection of favorite gay writers, there is my holy trio: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, & Tennessee Williams. Today marks the 100th birthday of Mr. Williams. I wish he could be here today to celebrate at
Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. He would have liked being here with me. It looks quite like New Orleans & I am a big ol’ enabler.
I have never performed any of the works of Tennessee Williams. I have been lucky in life & theatre, but not that lucky I guess. Perhaps I am right for Big Daddy (a name often pinned on me) or even Amanda Wingfield.
Tennessee Williams was passionate, profound & prolific, breathing life into characters like Blanche DuBois & Stanley Kowalski in what I consider to be the best American play-
A Streetcar Named Desire. Like his best characters, he was troubled & self-destructive, an abuser of drink & drugs.
He won 4 Drama Critic Circle Awards, a Tony, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, & the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by the critics & blacklisted by the Roman Catholic Church, condemning his work as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, & offensive to Christian standards of decency”.
Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, the son of a shoe company executive & a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy & carefree. His sense of belonging & comfort were lost when his family moved to urban St. Louis, Missouri. It was there he began to look inward, & he began to write
“because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams attended 3 different universities, & briefly worked at his father’s shoe company. He moved to New Orleans, where he began his lifelong love of that city.
His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when
The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago & moved to Broadway. It won a Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The film version won the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s & 1950s, Williams worked with the great artists of the time, including Elia Kazan, the director for stage & screen productions of
A Streetcar Named Desire, & the stage productions of Ca
mino Real,
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, &
Sweet Bird Of Youth. Kazan also directed Williams’ shocking screenplay
Baby Doll.In 1961, his longtime lover-Frank Merlo died of cancer. Merlo's death left Williams with a deep depression that lasted more than decade. He became quite insecure about his work, much of which was taking a critical beating. Williams began to depend on alcohol & drugs & though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories & another play, he had begun a downward spiral.
In the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories & a novel. In 1975 he published one of my favorite book-
Memoirs, which detailed his life & discussed his addiction to drugs & drink, & his homosexuality. I still have my first edition copy.
In the winter of 1983 Tennessee Williams died alone in a NYC hotel room filled with bottles of booze & pills. It was in this sort of desperation that Williams would so honestly write about & show his genius.
I find his 25 full length plays to be hauntingly lonely, lyrical, potent & hypnotic, even the difficult & experimental works of his later years. I started reading him in my late teens & he continues to fascinate me. I love Mamet, Shepard, August Wilson & Albee, less so Miller & O’Neill… but Williams is my sure vote for Greatest American Playwright.
