Tennessee Williams's reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century seems secure. Now just over a dozen years after his death, his plays are frequently revived, he continues to provoke critical inquiry, and he is one of the few American dramatists still taught in undergraduate literature surveys. Considering his prolific output, however, he is renowned for only a handful of plays, all dating from the first fifteen years of a forty-year professional career. Indeed, one might surmise that Tennessee Williams's critical reputation during his life soared, then plummeted, and that his later works were produced and tolerated only because of the early masterpieces; moreover, that his stature is entirely dependent upon a few well-wrought dramas: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana. It is no coincidence that these plays enjoyed long, successful New York runs, for critical acclaim and commercial appeal usually coexisted on the Broadway of Williams's time.

The thirty-two-cent United States postage stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams, issued in 1996, features a portrait of Williams in a white linen suit against a twilight sky and, in the background, a streetcar. The choice of the streetcar as the only element in the design that can be specifically tied to one of Williams's plays testifies to the centrality of A Streetcar Named Desire in his dramatic canon as well as in the American cultural consciousness. Whether or not A Streetcar Named Desire is Tennessee Williams's “best” play, or even his most performed play, it is probably the one most closely identified with the dramatist, and it is certainly the one that has elicited the most critical commentary.

When A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on December 3, 1947, Tennessee Williams was essentially known to the public for one other play, The Glass Menagerie, which had ended a 561-performance run at New York's Playhouse Theater just sixteen months earlier. The elegiac tone and coming-of-age crises of The Glass Menagerie did not prepare theatregoers for the searing adult drama of A Streetcar Named Desire, with its references to unspeakable aspects of sexuality. Indeed, one reviewer called it the product of an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind,” and another found it “not a play for the squeamish.” And yet, it was recognized as “an enormous advance over that minor-key and too wet-eyed work, The Glass Menagerie.” It fulfilled the promise of the earlier work and catapulted Williams to the front rank of American dramatists. A Streetcar Named Desire ran for 855 performances and became the first play ever to win all three major awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.

If such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets dominate American theatre in the first half of the twentieth century, and Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, and, among many others, David Mamet the second half, Tennessee Williams animates the middle years of the century. In a very real sense, then, Tennessee Williams inhabits a central place within the American theatre. The centrality of Williams's theatre, however, has less connection with chronology and more with the original nature of his theatrical imagination. While O'Neill was the tragic dramatist and Miller remains the theatrician of the ethical, Williams emerged as the poet of the heart. He took quite seriously Yeats's epigraph: “Be secret and exult.”

Ultimately Williams would become less secret about his life and art, and his exultations less clear of purpose, but he worked assiduously in creating poetic stage moments, moments in which social fact, psychological collapse, and eroticized encounter form a still point in which the imagination, itself, becomes the last refuge for his fated characters. In Williams's cosmology, of course, the imagination is the source of both great strength and weakness.

In 1955, Williams published his now notorious “reading version” of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which contained two versions of the third act. The one that Williams called the “Broadway Version” was developed in collaboration with director Elia Kazan and the other participants in the play's original production. Williams also included an earlier version from one of his pre-production scripts. In a “Note of Explanation” that introduced the “Broadway Version,” Williams went out of his way to explain how helpful Kazan's advice had been to him over the years. At the same time, he intimated that the changes he had felt forced to make in order to have Kazan direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had violated his sense of artistic integrity. Noting the influence that “a powerful and highly imaginative director” could have upon the development of a play, both before and during production, Williams asserted that he and Elia Kazan had “enjoyed the advantages and avoided the dangers of this highly explosive relationship because of the deepest mutual respect for each other's creative function: we have worked together three times with a phenomenal absence of friction between us and each occasion has increased the trust.”

WILLIAMS ON FILM: SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS

In the English-speaking world, the two principal performance arts, theatre and film, have developed together in the twentieth century. An important common element of the British and American commercial theatres is that each has enjoyed a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with the respective national cinema since the beginning of the sound film era. In the case of Great Britain, this relationship was eased for several decades by the proximity of the commercial film studios, most of which were once located in the Greater London area, to the West End theatrical district; such proximity made it possible, in many cases almost inevitable, for creative personnel in the theatre to work part-time on film prolects, and vice-versa. The move of the American film business to California from its New York base at the beginning of the studio period (c. 1912-20) posed difficulties for actors, writers, directors, and production artists wishing to work in both fields, and yet many have done so. Indeed, in the nineties, this trend shows no sign of abating, even with the dispersal of film production into a number of regional centers outside California.

BIOGRAPHIES

The publication of the long-awaited first volume of Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, makes 1995 a year of important contributions to Williams studies. Leverich, the biographer authorized by Williams in 1979, relies heavily on Williams's early journals to sketch a portrait of a man divided between the public “Tennessee”and the private “Tom.” The first volume ends with the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, so the student interested in Williams before fame will find much of interest here. Leverich's book offers detailed documentation for all his sources. Documentation is what is missing from Bruce Smith's account of Williams's last years, Costly Performances. Tennessee Williams: The Last Stage (1990). Smith seems more intent on proving the importance of his own friendship to Williams than on providing new information about the playwright's last years. Those interested in the first production of Clothes for a Summer Hotel might find Smith's book useful, centering as it does on the difficulties Williams encountered in staging his last full-length play.

Perhaps because he wrote verse even before he turned to short fiction and drama (his poems, in fact, began to appear in little magazines as early as 1933, prior to his first plays being given amateur productions), Tennessee Williams often used poetry - his own and that of others - as intertext in his works for the stage. Over a dozen of his full-length plays in their printed versions feature epigraphs from writers as various as Sappho, Dante, Rimbaud, Yeats and, an especial favorite of his, Hart Crane. Both Summer and Smoke (1947) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) incorporate a poem that provides a key to the drama. In the former, the Southern parson's daughter, Alma Winemiller, recites William Blake's “Love's Secret,” albeit in altered form, at her literary club gathering, not only foreshadowing the course the action will take as she loses Dr. John Buchanan to another, but also hinting at the rejection that may be visited upon a somehow forbidden '”Love that never told can be.”In the latter, the 97-year-old minor poet Jonathan Coffin (called Nonno) exuberantly declaims his final poem - only slightly revised from one the playwright himself wrote on a visit to Mexico in 1940 - about the decay that inevitably follows the ripening of all things living, pleading for the “courage” necessary to endure in the face of awareness of mortality.