Remembering Tennessee Williams @ 100

"Success and failure are equally disastrous," Tennessee Williams once said, and the playwright -- whose 100th birthday is today --received equal amounts of both during his lifetime and after his death.

"He changed the history of American drama and, I think, drama in the English-speaking world with his first two plays because they were so different," said Kenneth Holditch, editor of The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams, to NPR on the occasion of the centennial. "He broke free of what had been going on in the 1920s and the 1930s - all those social-protest dramas - and gave us something totally new, this wonderful understanding of human nature, human suffering ... human foibles."

On the other side there are still bricks being thrown in his direction, such as this recent one from New York magazine critic Scott Brown:

"When we asked our director [at a high school production of a Williams play] what it all meant, he explained it as, 'Ah, Tenn wrote this shit when he was popping Seconals just to stay even. He'd lost it,'" Brown wrote. He later went on to label later Williams' work "paranoid" and "hysterical."

Debating his influence

The prolific Williams, whose influences can be seen today in such varied artists as David Mamet, Tony Kushner and John Waters, died in 1983 at the age 0f 71 having choked on the cap of a bottle of eye drops, though by this time he was a heavy drinker and user of barbiturates.

Williams became an overnight success when The Glass Menagerie premiered on Broadway in 1945. After that came such iconic works as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), Summer and Smoke, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth. Though after The Night of the Iguana (1961) his plays were largely dismissed by critics and audiences alike -- only an off-Broadway production of Small Crafts Warning (1973) received some success.

As the debate rages on whether his influence on American theater is long lasting or temporal, here is a peek (by no means complete) into all things Tenn Centennial:

Bouquets

Nationwide celebrations of his work include a tribute at his birthplace, "Columbus, Mississippi," where his one-act play, "The Strangest Kind of Romance," is set for March 24-27. Concurrently, in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University is sponsoring the "Tenn Cent Fest," with a number of productions of Williams' plays, "Camino Real" among them, and guest speakers, most notably out filmmaker John Waters. And in Provincetown, the 6th annual Tennessee Williams Provincetown Theatre Festival, set for September 22-25, 2011 will salute his centennial with a program being billed as "Double Exposure: Past and Present."

Additionally, Hansen Publishing Group has pumped out numerous titles about Williams' works, and is releasing a new volume of eighteen essays, Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams," edited by theater director and Ptown Festival impresario David Kaplan. The book features essays by New Yorker critic John Lahr, New Directions editor Thomas Keith, poet/dramatist Amiri Baraka, Kaplan, and others. Taken individually and reflected upon as a whole, the book reveals much that we know and a lot that we don't about the life, times, and creative output of one of America's most prolific playwrights.

In Boston, Pussy on the House, Ryan Landry's comic take on Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, was recently revived with most of its original cast. In Landry's version, Brick still has a thing for Skipper, but it's not what you think... and Big Daddy becomes Big Momma. An earlier version of the show won the coveted Elliot Norton Award for Best Fringe Production in 2004. Touching upon such issues as gay property rights, Landry made Williams' classic relevant for today's audiences.

Brickbats

New York magazine's Brown also recently panned the Off-Broadway revival of Williams' "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore," starring Olympia Dukakis, calling it a "pageant of embarrassments."

Williams provided critics with fodder by blurring the boundaries between his personal life and artistic output. Charles Isherwood made note of this on February 9th in his piece on the Tenn centennial in the New York Times:

"Sadly, the onslaught of professional failure was accompanied by equal measures of harrowing personal trauma," Isherwood wrote. "The death of his lover of many years, Frank Merlo, in 1963 seemed to mark a turning point for both Williams' writing and his life. With the safe harbor Merlo provided for an artist of a naturally fugitive spirit gone from the world, Williams became more deeply dependent on alcohol and drugs."

When Williams experienced the "professional failure" Isherwood references, it brought out the Harpies -- critics who took perverse delight in ridiculing Williams for being excessive and gay.

In Kaplan's new book, he documents several of these broadsides. The most famous was New York Times drama critic Stanley Kaufmann's Sunday Arts and Leisure essay called "Homosexual Drama and its Disguises." In it Kaufmann lambasted the three of the most successful American playwrights at that time -- Williams, Edward Albee and William Inge -- for writing gay plays in straight drag and, in the process, distorting their female characters. These playwrights, he wrote, created "a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general. He later went on to say, "All of us admirably 'normal' people are a bit irritated by it [homosexuality] and wish it could disappear."

Though Kaufmann claims he never intended it to be, his article demonized the playwrights and homosexuality in general. Kaplan observed: "...the article's effect [published in the New York Times in 1966] was to make respectable and public what we now recognize and label as homophobia: the judging of someone's work on the basis of who they are, not what they have done."

Kaplan notes that when an artist is derisively labeled, that label sticks. In Williams' case, it caused irreparable harm, Kaplan asserts. For example it would negatively influence the Swedish Academy in 1958 to vote against Williams from being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award for which he was nominated, according to evidence presented in Dirk Gindt's essay from the book. (The award that year went to Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, who was forced by the Soviet regime to decline it.)

In gauging Williams' reputation, it is necessary to acknowledge his addictions and the price he paid personally and professionally, while also noting that he was able to overcome his demons to produce plays, film scripts, short stories, poems, and essays. His works run the gamut: some were awarded Pulitzer Prizes and Academy Awards, while others failed.

But how does this differ from other artists' creative efforts? Author Truman Capote, who, like Williams, struggled with substance abuse (it ultimately contributed to his decline and early demise), once wryly observed: "When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely." But both Capote and Williams would discover, very painfully, that it is not humanly possible to use that "whip" to consistently churn out superior work.

His influence

Kaplan's book concludes with a bouquet written by playwright John Patrick Shanley, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Doubt.

"He had poetry," Shanley writes. "He had size. He had structure. He had grand themes. He was crazy. He wrote bad plays. He was rude. He was genteel. He wrote some of the greatest plays of the twentieth century or any century. He was washed up. He was regional. He was horny and stoned and soulful and fragile and on fire, a fire that could not go on and yet it did go on. Whenever I'm discouraged, I think of Tennessee Williams. He was a gorgeous unstoppable beast."

Gore Vidal, a notable person in his own right, wrote on the occasion of Williams' death that there is "no actress on earth who will not testify that Williams created the best women characters in the modern theatre... 'It is widely believed that since Tennessee Williams liked to have sex with men (true), he hated women (untrue); as a result his women characters are thought to be malicious creatures, designed to subvert and destroy godly straightness."

It was sentiment shared by Rex Reed this week at a panel discussion that featured a number of famous actresses who starred in Williams' plays (Carol Baker, Shirley Knight and Zoe Caldwell): ""Tennessee loved his women, He didn't want to sleep with them, and he exalted them in a completely different way."

You need only look at the names of the actresses (living and dead) who received accolades for playing Williams' heroines: Laurette Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Geraldine Page, Katherine Hepburn, Maureen Stapleton, Gertrude Lawrence, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Ashley, Anna Magnani, Kim Stanley, Kathleen Turner and, of course, the late Elizabeth Taylor.

At the Tenn centennial, the damage inflicted to his reputation - by himself and others -- may never heal. But it can never diminish the power of his words. Listening to those words again, either onstage or leaping up from the pages of his published scripts, one soon realizes that he was a master craftsman, a poet, a visionary, who, despite an uneven canon, enabled us to recognize our own human struggles and to transcend them. Williams, as Walt Whitman once wrote, contained the "multitudes." Ultimately, it is because he possessed these gifts that Tennessee Williams endures, and cannot be dismissed.