In The Seagull Chekhov's Trepliov insists that “We need new art forms . . . and if they aren't available, we might just as well have nothing at all.” The statement is not without its irony given Trepliov's own incapacity, but it carried the force of a playwright who was himself dedicated to such innovation. Fifty-five years later, and in a world as much in transition as Chekhov's, Tennessee Williams was conscious of trying to create just such a new form, a “plastic” theatre which owed something, indeed, to the Russian writer for whom a detailed realism was never really a primary objective. As Stanislavsky had remarked of Chekhov's work, “At times he is an impressionist, at times a symbolist; he is a 'realist' where it is necessary.” A tracery of the real was an essential scaffold for his exploration of character and subtle recreation of mood, but his characters inhabit more than a tangible world and reach for something more than the merely material.

During the fifties Williams's plays were eclectic. His two great box-office successes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which grapples with greed, mendacity, and homosexuality, and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), an indictment of Southern bigotry, demonstrated his facility with naturalism. On the other hand, he wrote several non-naturalistic plays: The Rose Tattoo (1950), inspired by his relationship with Frank Merlo, a carnivalesque comedy celebrating the Dionysian; Camino Real (1953), an allegory about being trapped in a fascist state; Orpheus Descending (1957), a tragic love story set in a racist, brutally materialistic, dying South, Williams's version of the myth of Sisyphus; and Suddenly Last Summer (1958), in which Williams depicts the destructive nature of the writer and of homosexuality. Of the latter plays, Camino Real seemed the most egregiously misunderstood.

Williams's idea for Camino Real first came to him when he was sick in a desolate corner of Mexico. III, friendless, penniless, he felt as though he would never escape. He also thought that he would never be able to write a great play again:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a great critical and financial success for Tennessee Williams. The play opened on Broadway on March 24, 1955, ran for nearly 700 performances, and won all the major awards, including Williams's second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The MGM film adaptation in 1958, although deplored by Williams, was lucrative and made the playwright financially secure for the rest of his life. Major New York revivals in 1974 and 1990 confirmed the appeal of Cat to successive generations of theatregoers. To give the dimension of a Broadway career to these bare facts of success is my intention in the pages that follow. The inner story of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof begins with Williams's need to reverse a pattern of failure that became alarming with the early closing of Camino Real in 1953. But writing in this “place of stone,” to quote the original epigraph of Cat, occasioned the practice of a deceptive realism that satisfied both the economic law of Broadway and the artistic prompting of Tennessee Williams's endangered career. In this work of mediation, the realistic conventions of the Southern literary plantation were used to obscure Williams's skepticism for the theatre of “de-monstration.”

In a makeshift theatre of perhaps fifty seats, on a stage shrouded by swathes of coarse white cloth, a Williams two-hander plays - The Chalky White Substance. To a faint sad sound, lights come up on two monk-like figures in diagonal corners of the small stage. When lights are full up, but before a word is uttered, the upstage figure moves diagonally downstage and places his hands over the eyes of the other actor: “Whoooo?” And the reply: “Youuuuuuu! - You can disguise your voice but not your hands.” By the end of the play those hands grasp the vulnerable figure, not in a lover's embrace but a captor's hold. The love affair of two men cannot outlast the competitive struggle for survival in a chalky white world that is hostile to human habitation, “a century or two after our time.” On stage The Chalky White Substance was so cumulatively harrowing that I was surprised when the performance was over in half an hour. The name of Tennessee Williams had drawn me to the production, where I was transfixed by the spare performances of two unknown but capable actors in an unfamiliar piece.

Tennessee Williams's Val Xavier, the itinerant sexual magnet of Orpheus Descending (1957), is immolated with a blowtorch on the night before Easter. Chance Wayne, the hustler hero of Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), is castrated on Easter Sunday. In between these two plays and acting as a queer gloss on them is the grotesque parody of the Eucharist in Sebastian Venable's crucifixion and consumption by the street urchins he has tasted in Suddenly Last Summer (1958). These three martyrs, Sebastian Venable, Val Xavier, and Chance Wayne, are sacrificed for violating their proscribed roles in the patriarchal sex/gender system. The possibility of a new sex/gender system is seen through the two central female characters in each play, one mutilated, the other healed. These plays, then, make a kind of trilogy, developing themes and characters seen in earlier plays and resolving in Williams's next dyad of quasi-religious acceptance, The Night of the Iguana (1961) and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963-64). I want to focus here on the beautiful male as sexual martyr in these three plays, on the dynamics and erotics of the martyrdoms, and on the ways in which his relationship to the fugitive woman suggests a liberating possibility. To discuss Williams's depictions of the sexlgender system, one must also examine the relationship of homosexuality and heterosexuality in Williams's work.

How did Thomas Lanier Williams III become Tennessee Williams the playwright? What in his apprentice years predicts the masterworks which became classics of the American stage? While we cannot explain his genius, we can trace elements in his nature, nurture, and circumstance which fostered its expression. Even as a small child Tom showed a gift for drama, entertaining the grown-ups in the family with stories which grew increasingly exciting as he told them. He would also act out the cartoons from the newspaper. Reared in the rectory of his grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, he felt both the prestige and burden of being called “the preacher's boy.” His parents were virtually separated, his traveling-salesman father appearing only often enough to upset the tranquil household and frighten his children. His mother, Edwina, had the beauty and social inclinations of a Southern belle and, if not the wealth, the status that the Episcopalian ministry held in the small cotton center of Clarksdale, Mississippi. She often performed as a singer and, since Tom's grandmother was a music teacher, music early became a component of his life. Tom and his sister Rose, only sixteen months apart, were as inseparable as twins and were called “The Couple.”