Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams an American playwright (1911-1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams, one of the foremost dramatists of the twentieth century, whose poetic and compassionate plays about memory, desire and family conflict transformed the American stage. A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won him Pulitzer Prizes and remain among the most performed of all modern plays.

Early Life and Family

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in March 1911, the son of a travelling shoe salesman and a daughter of an Episcopal clergyman, and his childhood was divided between the frailty of his mother's genteel world and the rough household of his father. He was a delicate, shy boy, and the conflicts of his family, above all the tensions between his parents, became the emotional foundation of his mature work.

His beloved sister Rose suffered from mental illness and was eventually institutionalised and given a lobotomy, an event that haunted Williams for the rest of his life and whose memory shadows many of his plays, above all The Glass Menagerie. The family moved to St. Louis when he was young, and the contrast between the grace of the old South and the grey industrial city helped form the nostalgia that pervades his writing.

He studied at the University of Missouri and later at Washington University and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated, and he worked for a period in a shoe warehouse, an experience he detested and drew upon in his fiction. He began to write plays in the late 1930s, and his early work won prizes that encouraged him to continue.

The Glass Menagerie and First Success

His breakthrough came with The Glass Menagerie (1944), first performed in Chicago and then in New York, a memory play narrated by the son who looks back on his mother and sister in a shabby St. Louis apartment. Its fragile heroine, the crippled Laura, and the illusions that sustain the family gave American drama a new emotional register, and the play's poetic use of music, light and narration made it a landmark.

The Glass Menagerie established the essential method of Williams's theatre: the transformation of private and often painful memory into a lyrical and formally free dramatic poetry. It also introduced the character of the faded Southern gentlewoman, a figure that would recur throughout his work. The play brought him fame and the first of many major awards.

He followed it with a series of one-act plays and short works, and with A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 he achieved the greatest success of his career. Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans, it dramatises the collision between the refined and unstable Blanche DuBois and her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Major Plays

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) won Williams a second Pulitzer Prize and is among his finest achievements. On a Mississippi plantation, the family gathers for the birthday of the dying patriarch, and beneath the celebration lie mendacity, greed and the failure of love between the husband and wife. The play's treatment of hidden desire and self-deception was unusually frank for its time.

Among his other important works are Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer. In The Night of the Iguana, perhaps the finest of his later plays, a defrocked minister and a spinster artist confront their failure and their need of one another in a Mexican hotel. These plays extended and deepened the themes of his early masterpieces.

His work was repeatedly censored and adapted, sometimes against his wishes, and the film versions of his plays brought him a wider audience than the theatre alone could have done. He worked with directors and actors of the first rank, and his scripts were revised many times in rehearsal, so that the published versions of his plays often differ from what was first performed.

Themes and Poetic Method

The abiding subjects of Williams's drama are the conflict between illusion and reality, the fugitive nature of desire, the cruelty of the world toward the sensitive, and the decaying gentility of the American South. His central figures are outsiders, the fragile and the passionate, who are bruised by the ordinary and often destroyed for their difference. His sympathy is almost always with those who suffer.

His method is poetic rather than naturalistic. He used light, music and symbol as expressive instruments, and he called his plays works of memory in which the truth is presented in the guise of illusion. His dialogue can rise from the plainness of domestic speech into a lyricism that is unmistakably his own, and it was this verbal music that made him the heir of O'Neill and the teacher of a later generation of American writers.

He wrote openly about desire and about the body at a time when the American stage preferred to keep silent, and his treatment of human sexuality, in all its tenderness and violence, was one of the ways in which he enlarged what serious drama might address. His characters long for a connection that the world of the plays rarely allows, and the longing itself becomes the dramatic subject.

Influence and Legacy

Williams, with Arthur Miller, dominated the American theatre of the decades after the Second World War and gave it a psychological and poetic depth that it had not previously possessed. His example encouraged a drama of feeling and of memory, and his willingness to write about the marginal and the disreputable prepared the ground for later playwrights.

His plays are constantly revived, and great actors have been drawn to the roles he created, from Blanche DuBois to Amanda Wingfield and Big Daddy. A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are staples of the world repertoire and are studied as classics of modern drama. His film versions belong to the history of the cinema as well as of the stage.

He died in New York in February 1983. His reputation rests on a small number of plays of extraordinary power that transformed the possibilities of American drama, and on a body of work that continued to explore, with courage and lyricism, the pain and the beauty of human longing. He is remembered as the poet of the American theatre.

See also

• American drama
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Southern literature
• Memory play