Three Plays of Tennessee Williams

by Tennessee Williams

  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1st published in Great Britain by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd. 1956

  Published in Penguin Books 1957

  PERSON—TO—PERSON

  Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it.

  It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emoti

  ons that stir him deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself, that special world, the passions and images of it that each of us weaves about him from birth to death, a web of monstrous complexity, spun forth at a speed that is incalculable to a length beyond measure, from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.

  It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.'

  Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

  I once saw a group of little girls on a Mississippi sidewalk, all dolled up in their mothers' and sisters' cast-off finery, old raggedy ball gowns and plumed hats and high-heeled slippers, enacting a meeting of ladies in a parlour with a perfect mimicry of polite Southern gush and simper. But one child was not satisfied with the attention paid her enraptured performance by the others, they were too involved in their own performances to suit her, so she stretched out her skinny arms and threw back her skinny neck and shrieked to the deaf heavens and her equally oblivious playmates, 'Look at me, look at me, look at me!'

  And then her mother's high-heeled slippers threw her off balance and she fell to the sidewalk in a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net, and still nobody looked at her.

  I wonder if she is not, now, a Southern writer.

  Of course it is not only Southern writers, of lyrical bent, who engage in such histrionics and shout, 'Look at me!' Perhaps it is a parable of all artists. And not always do we topple over and land in a tangle of trappings that don't fit us. However, it is well to be aware of that peril, and not to content yourself with a demand for attention, to know that out of your personal lyricism, your sidewalk histrionics, something has to be created that will not only attract observers but participants in the performance.

  I try very hard to do that.

  The fact that I want you to observe what I do for your possible pleasure and to give you knowledge of things that I feel I may know better than you, because my world is different from yours, as different as every man's world is from the world of others, is not enough excuse for a personal lyricism that has not yet mastered its necessary trick of rising above the singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import. But for years and years now, which may have passed like a dream because of this obsession, I have been trying to learn how to perform this trick and make it truthful, and sometimes I feel that I am able to do it. Sometimes, when the enraptured street-corner performer in me cries out 'Look at me!', I feel that my hazardous footwear and fantastic regalia may not quite throw me off balance. Then, suddenly, you fellow-performers in the sidewalk show may turn to give me your attention and allow me to hold it, at least for the interval between 8:40 and 11 something p.m.

  Eleven years ago this month of March, when I was far closer than I knew, only nine months away from that long-delayed, but always expected, something that I lived for, the time when I would first catch and hold an audience's attention, I wrote my first preface to a long play. The final paragraph went like this:

  'There is too much to say and not enough time to say it. Nor is there power enough. I am not a good writer. Sometimes I am a very bad writer indeed. There is hardly a successful writer in the field who cannot write circles around me, but I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action. I want to work more and more with a more plastic theatre than the one I have (worked with) before. I have never for one moment doubted that there are people—millions!—to say things to. We come to each other, gradually, but with love. It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.'

  This characteristically emotional, if not rhetorical, statement of mine at that time seems to suggest that I thought of myself as having a highly personal, even intimate relationship with people who go to see plays. I did and I still do. A morbid shyness once prevented me from having much direct communication with people, and possibly that is why I began to write to them plays and stories. But even now when that tongue-locking, face-flushing, silent and crouching timidity has worn off with the passage of the troublesome youth that it sprang from, I still find it somehow easier to 'level with' crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony sections of theatres than with individuals across a table from me. Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to.

  Of course I know that I have sometimes presumed too much upon corresponding sympathies and interest in those to whom I talk boldly, and this has led to rejections that were painful and costly enough to inspire more prudence. But when I weigh one thing against another, an easy liking against a hard respect, the balance always tips the same way, and whatever the risk of being turned a cold shoulder, I still don't want to talk to people only about the surface aspects of their lives, the sort of things that acquaintances laugh and chatter about on ordinary social occasions.

  I feel that they get plenty of that, and heaven knows so do I, before and after the little interval of time in which I have their attention and say what I have to say to them. The discretion of social conversation, even among friends, is exceeded only by the discretion of 'the deep six', that grave wherein nothing is mentioned at all. Emily Dickinson, that lyrical spinster of Amherst, Massachusetts, who wore a strict and savage heart on a taffeta sleeve, commented wryly on that kind of posthumous discourse among friends in these lines:

  I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room.

  He questioned softly why I failed? ' For beauty,' I replied. 'And I for truth,—the two are one, We brethren are' be said.

  And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.

  Meanwhile!—I want to go on talking to you as freely and intimately about what we live and die for as if I knew you better than anyone else whom you know.

  - TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  EDITORIAL NOTE

  I saw this play on Broadway. It contains some passages on sexual matters which are extremely outspoken and some of the audience of which I was a member indulged in Bacchanalian laughte

  r; appropriately, these Maenads were female. This was the only source of embarrassment in the evening; the play itself caused none, for its harshness and crudities are an authentic part of its life. Tennessee Williams does for his country and generation something of what J. M. Synge did for Ireland. Here is life in the raw, the springs of vitality revealed at once in their animalism and in their poetry. To an Englishman, he opens a vision of the size of America, the huge fertility which can place apparently inexhaustible power in a man's hands... 'twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile'. Big Daddy is a patriarch: he reminds one of a character in Genesis (perhaps from the less frequently quoted chapters); he has the same warmth of the soil in him. The best poetry of the play is in his speeches, which distil the wisdom of p
rimitive human nature.

  Brick and his Cat, the centers of the drama, vibrate in their desperation with the heat of the South. The family is clothed with the atmosphere of the South as with a garment. It is caged in the hot, thin-walled house, a prison amid the vast, rich lands around it. Tennessee Williams' use of repetition to create a prison of words is extraordinarily skilful: words beat like a tattoo on the heart, yet the beat is subtly changed at each hearing. This evocative quality of rhythm again reminds one of Synge. Perhaps it is no accident that in both writers the quality springs from a sad soil....

  American drama, as it comes to maturity, enlarges the horizons of the theatre.

  - E. MARTIN BROWNE

  New York, October 1956

  STAGE CAST

  The original Broadway production, which opened in 1955, was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie; Ben Gazzara as Brick; Burl Ives as Big Daddy; Mildred Dunnock a

  s Big Mama; Pat Hingle as Gooper; and Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. Bel Geddes was the only cast member nominated for a Tony Award, and Kazan was nominated for Best Director of a Play. Both Ives and Sherwood would reprise their roles in the 1958 film version. The cast also featured the southern blues duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry and had as Gazzara's understudy the young Cliff Robertson. - Wikipedia

  MOVIE CAST

  The big-screen version of the play was made in 1958 by MGM, and starred Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson. Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprised their stage r

  oles. The Hays Code limited how clearly the film could portray Brick's past sexual desire for Skipper, and thus diminished the original play's critique of homophobia and sexism. Although it was very discreet in referring to the supposed homosexual themes, and although it had a somewhat revised "third act", it was highly acclaimed and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman both received Oscar nominations for their performances, and most critics agreed that the film provided both them and Burl Ives with their finest screen roles up to that time. Curiously, Burl Ives was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that year, and won, but not for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won it for his role in the epic Western The Big Country. Reportedly, MGM executives had mistakenly put Ives' name in the wrong category during the Academy Award nominations process, although Ives could certainly be said to have played a supporting role in Cat. It is possible that Cat may have been too controversial for the Academy voters - the film won no Oscars, and the Best Picture award went to Gigi that year. - Wikipedia

  The Glass Menagerie

  By Tennessee Williams, 1944

  CONTENTS

  THE CHARACTERS

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Scene Four

  Scene Five

  Scene Six

  Scene Seven

  THE CHARACTERS

  AMANDA WINGFIELD [the mother]: A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place. Her chara

  cterization must be carefully created, not copied from type. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at. Certainly she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her slight person.

  LAURA WINGFIELD [her daughter]: Amanda, having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live vitally in her illusions, but Laura's situation is even graver. A childhood illness has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace. This defect need not be more than suggested on the stage. Stemming from this, Laura's separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.

  TOM WINGFIELD [her son, and the narrator of the play]: A poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity.

  JIM O’CONNOR [the gentleman caller]: A nice, ordinary, young man.

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  Being a ‘memory play’, The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom from convention. Because of its considerably delica

  te or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. 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 icecubes, its characters that 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 forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

  These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

  THE MUSIC

  Another extra-literary accent in this play is provided by the use of music. A single recurring time, 'The Glass Menagerie', is used to give emotional emphasis to suitable passages. This time is like circus music, not when you are on the grounds or in the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when you are at some distance and very likely thinking of something else. It seems under those circumstances to continue almost interminably and it weaves in and out of your preoccupied consciousness; then it is the lightest, most delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest. It expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune, which dips in and out of the play as if it were carried on a wind that changes. It serves as a thread of connection and allusion between the narrator with his separate point in time and space and the subject of his story. Between each episode it returns as reference to the emotion, nostalgia, which is the first condition of the play. It is primarily Laura’s music and therefore comes out most clearly when the play focuses upon her and the lovely fragility of glass which is her image.

  THE LIGHTING

  The lighting in the play is not realistic. In keeping with the atmosphere of memory, the stage is dim. Shafts of light are focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent centre. For instance, in the quarrel scene between Tom and Amanda in which Laura has no active part, the clearest pool of light is on her figure. This is also true of the supper scene, when her silent figure on the sofa should remain the visual centre. The light upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas. A certain correspondence to light in religious paintings, such as El Greco's, where the figures are radiant in atmosphere that is relatively dusky, could be effectively used throughout the play. [It will also permit a more effective use of the screen.] 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.

  - T.W.

  This play was first presented in London at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on 28 July 1948 with the following cast:

  AMANDA WINGFIELD – Helen Hayes

  LAURA, her daughter – Frances Heflin

  TOM,
her son – Phil Brown

  THE GENTLEMAN CALLER – Hugh McDermott

  The play directed by John Gerlgud.

  Setting by Jo Mielziner. Original music composed by Paul Bowles.

  Dance music arranged by Leslie Bridgewater

  Scene: An alley in St Louis

  PART 1: Preparation for a Gentleman Caller

  PART 2: The Gentleman Calls

  Time: Now and the Past

  SCENE ONE

  The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.

  The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire-escape is included in the set - that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it.