The Traveling Companion & Other Plays

by Tennessee Williams

  A Cavalier for Milady was one of the Three Plays for the Lyric Theater, including Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws and The Youthfully Departed, written during the mid-1970s. A Cavalier for Milady addresses the nature of desire in its various incarnations: sexual innocence, the sublimation of sexual desire into artistic creation (which The Parade touches upon as well), the predatory and consumptive aspects of desire, and the compromises we make as we age or, in some cases, go mad. Nance, a young woman who is dressed like “a child going to a party,” is obsessed with her erotic fantasies. She is “visited” by the apparition of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, and eventually wants him to satisfy her carnal desires. She is left with a sitter as her mother and her mother’s friend, Mrs. Aid, go off to nightly encounters with expensive paid escorts, even as they also try to neutralize Nance’s sexuality by forcing her into the costume of a child. Like Williams’s sister Rose, who was punished for her “inappropriate” sexual desire, Nance is threatened with institutionalization for expressing her sexuality. From the beginning of his career, most famously in The Glass Menagerie, Williams used Rose as an inspiration in his work, and the specter of Rose haunts his late plays as well. The organist in Kirche, Küche, Kinder, for example, is named “Miss Rose.” A Cavalier for Milady (much like Suddenly Last Summer, a play which referenced both Rose’s institutional confinement and her eventual lobotomy) is about power, language, and desire: the role of money and power in deciding one’s fate and the need to “shut up” the truth of human desire. Nance’s “morbid derangement” is sexual frustration, and her mother wants to commit her for the same “depravity” in which she herself indulges. In fact, Nance is competition for her mother and Mrs. Aid (as Catherine is for Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer), and Mother insists that she did not let Nance seduce the chauffeur because she herself had “priority there till his wife made him quit.”

  In Green Eyes, desire is seen as central to one’s “life story,” as the Girl narrates for her new husband the story of her life-altering sexual experience with a man who had “enawmus green eyes.” An erotic moment that defines one’s life also comes up in Vieux Carré. Nightingale, the tubercular painter who denies that he is dying, validates the Writer’s claim that he fell in love with a paratrooper after a casual sexual encounter, insisting that “Love can happen like that. For one night only.” In Sweet Bird of Youth, the Princess asks her paid “companion,” Chance Wayne, to tell her his “life story.” And Williams’s poem “Life Story,” which begins “After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,” ends “and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.” For Williams’s characters, life often begins and ends with desire.

  Many of Williams’s later plays were clearly influenced by cultural and artistic developments such as pop art, vaudeville, camp, and a sense of the outrageous in the style, for example, of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which Charles Ludlam founded in 1969. Williams mentions the Theatre of the Ridiculous in Moise and the World of Reason, so he was certainly aware of Ludlam’s developments by the time of the novel’s publication in 1975. The Theater of the Ridiculous resists conventional, formalized notions of “art,” preferring instead to allude to icons of popular culture and current events alongside classical literary texts. In erasing the distinction between “high” and “low” art and indulging an ironic sensibility typical of postmodern aesthetics—that is, making a statement and simultaneously mocking and denying it—the performer/author “winks” at the audience members as co-conspirators in some kind of cultural joke. These plays combine serious social critique with a highly self-conscious and playful style. Similarly, in Kirche, Küche, Kinder, for example, there are numerous nods to popular culture and current events alongside self-conscious references to classics such as Medea, The Sea Gull, “Dover Beach,” and “Danny Boy.” Ludlam’s plays combine parody, pop culture, drag performance, and high camp theatricality. He describes camp as a kind of excess, or “overdoing,” in order to make a point, and also recalls Proust’s discussion of camp as “an outsider’s view of things other people take for granted,” a “reverse image” incorporating a sly sense of humor because of its inversions that speak to a particular, usually marginalized, social group. Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” writes that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” and that it is a “sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous.” Williams embraces a camp sensibility in many of these late plays, which spring from the 1970s, a time of new languages for cultural expression.

  In Kirche, Küche, Kinder, directed by Eve Adamson in 1979, the ninety-nine-year-old woman known as “Hotsy,” who is hypersexed and pregnant, was played by a man in drag. The history of the play’s title is significant in terms of its camp reversal. The title of an earlier version of the play is Kitche, Kutchen, und Kinder, which Williams later revised to Kitche, Kutche, Kinder. He finally settled on Kirche, Kutchen, und Kinder for the play’s performance at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre during their 1979-80 season. “Kitche,” presumably an invented word that refers to “kitchen,” was eventually replaced with “Kirche,” the German word for “church,” and “Kutchen,” the German word for “cook,” was restored in lieu of the earlier “Kutche,” a misspelling of “Küche,” the German word for “kitchen.” Williams is consistent with “Kinder,” the German word for “children.” Of the three variations on the title, this last one, Kirche, Kutchen, und Kinder, is closest to the old German expression that designates the proper role of women, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”— “Children, Kitchen, and Church”—functionally equivalent to “barefoot and pregnant.” Not fluent in German, Williams probably confused “kitchen” (küche) with “cook” (kutchen) in wanting to reference the original expression, but initially wasn’t sure if an “and” was included. I corrected his German spelling, adding the umlaut mark, and removed the “und” to conform more closely to the German saying. Significantly, Williams’s reworking of the title and the reversal of the word order (from “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” to “Kirche, Küche, Kinder”) corresponds to the play’s scenes: we are first introduced to the action in the Kirche, then the Küche, and finally the Kinder appear. Symbolically, the reversal of the expression—reading it backwards—is highly relevant for this particular play, as Kirche, Küche, Kinder is a comic reversal, turning everything upside-down. Like Camino Real—which the Gypsy in the play insists is “a funny paper read backward!”—Kirche, Küche, Kinder is, in scholar Linda Dorff’s estimation, a “theatricalist cartoon,” complete with invisible canaries that sing as the Wife “turns slowly and dizzily about” after getting hit over the head with the Minister’s umbrella. In fact, Germans often appear as darkly comic figures in Williams’s work, from his portrayal of the sinister Nazi tourists at the Costa Verde Hotel in The Night of the Iguana—whom Shannon describes as a “little animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch” when they emerge “trooping up from the beach like an animated canvas by Rubens,” always cackling with “Rabelaisian laughter”—to similar portrayals of Germans in The Gnädiges Fräulein and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur. Read as “camp,” Kirche, Küche, Kinder fits in perfectly with Ludlam’s assertion that camp “turns values upside down.”

  During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Williams traveled to the outskirts with his plays—both literally and figuratively. His anti-realistic, “outrageous” plays often take place in the outer boroughs of New York City, or in the more marginal neighborhoods: Kirche, Küche, Kinder is set in SoHo—now a fashionable neighborhood, but during the 1970s a seedy warehouse district of bohemian creativity and free behavioral license—and the play’s Lutheran Minister lives and works on Staten Island. Williams’s 1980 play This is the Peaceable Kingdom (or Good Luck God) is set “in a nursing home in one of the drearier sections of Queens during the ‘nursing home strike’ in New York City in the spring of 1978.” And in The One Exception, Viola refers to her apartment on Ludlow Stre
et in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, another bohemian enclave that served as a refuge for artists. In Kirche, Küche, Kinder, the play’s protagonist is a retired gay hustler who is writing his Memoirs, and the artist in the theater is seen as a prostitute vying for prizes and “patrons” such as Professor Emeritus “Hotlicker,” so that he can “endure . . . and survive.”

  Williams’s later plays in this volume often employ highly theatrical, or stylized, forms and use exaggeration and distortion of reality, humor, and satire as social critique, going even beyond theatrical absurdism. Even though Williams once said that he “could never make a joke out of human existence,” many of these late plays do face life’s tragic elements and laugh at them, which can certainly be very liberating. These highly irreverent plays employ humor for the purpose of social commentary, highlighting the tragicomic elements of life’s struggles. In a 1978 letter to Truman Capote, Williams identified with what he called Capote’s “period of disequilibrium” during a very difficult personal and professional time, and ended his letter with the advice not to despair, and to “never, never stop laughing.” The later plays in this volume often present an ironic world view that is simultaneously comic and bleak, embracing a lack of romanticism, blurring high and low culture, and playing indulgently with exaggeration. In his 1996 essay, “The War Against the Kitchen Sink,” John Guare mentions Williams’s double-bill of The Gnädiges Fräulein and The Mutilated that was performed under the title Slapstick Tragedy, pointing out that Williams “showed one way to that part of our brain or our souls. The part of theater that’s vaudeville.” Indeed, Williams’s later plays embrace the spirit of vaudeville, as well as the liberating transgressions of what Mikhail Bakhtin, discussing the work of François Rabelais, termed “the carnivalesque”—the spirit of carnival as social resistance that included comic violence, bawdy language, exaggeration, inversion, and an irreverent mockery of what is held by society to be sacrosanct. In his own Memoirs (1975), Williams insisted that his place was always “in Bohemia,” and in these later plays he is rejecting the bourgeois and the conventional, and indulging the taboo, the outrageous, and the unacceptable in order to write more “honestly about life” through a new lens.

  Annette J. Saddik

  January 2008

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, this collection of later plays would not have been possible without the inspired initiative of New Directions, particularly president, Peggy L. Fox, and my editor, Thomas Keith, and I thank them for the honor of entrusting me with this volume. Thomas Keith worked tirelessly alongside me at every stage to bring these plays to light, offering his insight and expertise—he was a driving force in the completion of this project, and it could not have been done without him. Special thanks also to the staff at New Directions for their invaluable suggestions and support, particularly Barbara Epler, Laurie Callahan, and Michael Barron.

  For assistance with manuscripts, productions, and general Williams matters, much gratitude to: Mark Cave, Curator of Tennessee Williams Manuscripts at the Historic New Orleans Collection; Genie Guerard, Head of the Manuscripts Division at the UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections; Richard Workman, Research Librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; George Bixby of Ampersand Books; everyone at the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival, especially Paul J. Willis, Patricia Brady, Doug Brantley, Earl Perry, and David Hoover; everyone at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, especially David Kaplan, Curator, and Jef Hall-Flavin, Producing Director. Special thanks are due to John Uecker, Cameron Folmar, Arnie Burton, Jeremy Lawrence, John Waters, Craig Smith, Fred Todd, Andreas Brown, Erma Duricko, Randy Gener, Ben Greissmeyer, Judy Boals, the late Eve Adamson, and to David Kaplan for his research and insights into the text of The Day on Which a Man Dies. My heartfelt thanks also goes out to John Guare for his support and his enthusiasm for Williams’s late plays.

  Al Devlin, John S. Bak, Robert Bray, Allean Hale, Kenneth Holditch, Philip C. Kolin, Nick Moschovakis, Michael Paller, Barton Palmer, Brian Parker, David Roessel, Nancy Tischler, and the late Linda Dorff, along with others in the warm and supportive community of Williams scholars have impacted this book with their knowledge, both formally and informally, over the years. Particular thanks to Nick Moschovakis, John S. Bak, and Allean Hale for many helpful suggestions and corrections. For assistance with foreign language consultation, I owe much gratitude: for the French in A Cavalier for Milady and Will Mr. Merriwether Return From Memphis?, John S. Bak; for the Italian in Sunburst, Leila Javitch; for the Japanese in The Day on Which a Man Dies, Matthew Keith; for the German in Kirche, Küche, Kinder, Kurt Beals; for the Russian in A Cavalier for Milady, Jelena Zurilo and Svetlana Patlar.

  My work on this volume was supported by a PSC-CUNY Research Grant, and I wish to thank CUNY as well as my colleagues and students at New York City College of Technology for their support. On a more personal note, special thanks and much love to my parents, Dr. Meir Saddik and Gila G. Saddik, whose spirits continue to inspire and comfort me; my sister, Orly Saddik, who made sure I grew up with Tennessee Williams’s plays; my aunt and uncle, Aaron and Tikva Murad; and my cousins, Morry Murad, Renee Murad, and especially Eileen Murad for her thoughtful gift; much thanks to Kathleen and Michael Formosa, Shari and Harris Punyon, Peter and Julia Swales, Fitz Holloway, Mark Noonan, Charles Hirsch, Michael Page, Colin Attwood, Patti Yaghmaei, Walid Younes, Timothy Stostad, and my housemates in Kismet, especially Diana Frame and Clare McKeen.

  THE

  TRAVELING

  COMPANION

  AND OTHER

  PLAYS

  THE CHALKY WHITE SUBSTANCE

  For James Purdy

  The Chalky White Substance was first performed by the Running Sun Theatre Company on May 3, 1996 at Center Stage in New York City on a double bill with The Traveling Companion, collectively titled Williams’s Guignol. It was directed by John Uecker; the set design was by Myrna Duarie, the costume design was by Robert Guy, and the lighting design was by Zdenek Kriz. The cast, in order of appearance, was as follows:

  LUKE: Sam Trammel

  MARK: Greg Cornell

  Time and place: a century or two after our time and possibly an almost equal time after a great thermonuclear war.

  At rise: against a cyclorama of sky, which is cloudless and yet faintly blurred by tiny granules of something like old powered bones, a youth of about twenty years of age, Luke, sits upon the precipitous verge of a chasm over what is presumably a dried-up riverbed (it is called, now, Arroyo Seco) with an air of perplexed and anxious waiting. He has a pure and luminous quality in his face when the hood of his monk-like robe is thrown back. Upstage and to the left of Luke, an older man, Mark, is seated watching him with an enigmatic fixity of expression. After some moments, Mark rises and slides stealthily off his upstage perch, disappearing from sight for a minute. He reappears silently behind Luke and stoops to clasp his large, powerful hands over Luke’s eyes.

  Throughout the brief play there is a wind that rises and falls, always infinitely sad in its implication as much as in its actual sound, for this is the wind that constantly blows about an earth shrivelled and desiccated as a terminally sick being.

  MARK [in a prolonged, deep growl]: Whoooo?

  LUKE: Youuuuuuu! —You can disguise your voice but not your hands. What makes you so late?

  MARK: Boys are inquisitive, aren’t they? What, why? I wasn’t late. If you’d turned around you’d have seen me sitting back there on that boulder behind you.

  LUKE: Why?

  MARK: I thought to myself, “It could be the last time I’ll observe him, sitting here, waiting for me?”

  LUKE: You’re planning to go away? Somewhere? Without me?

  MARK: Make a departure? From you? From this precipice over the Arroyo Seco, this desolation, so beautiful through the continual screen provided by the—chalky white substance? No, I’m making no dep
arture. But how I do know that you’re not?