# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don't you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a goddam book on it and still not cover the subject anywhere near enough!!-Think of all the lies I got to put up with!-Pretenses! Ain't that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you don't think or feel or have any idea of? (80)

Mendacity. Lies. Deceit. Untruthfulness. Regardless of how you name this concept, it is one that silently governs over all of our lives and our actions. Mendacity is the core theme of Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play entitled Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play brilliantly illustrates the extent to which humans twist, shape, destroy, or downright ignore truth to comply with socio-cultural demands and expectations. The passage above highlights one of the character's (Big Daddy) views on the concept of mendacity, going as far as to approach untruthfulness as an ordinary and part of human nature. Mendacity is not presented as a choice or even as a viable option by this character-it is presented as a phenomenon that we have "to put up with."

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof takes place in Big Daddy's plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Big Daddy is the owner of a cotton business, and he also owns thousands of acres of fertile land in this area. Most of Big Daddy's family is reunited at the estate to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, and right from the opening of the play, the reader is immersed into a web of lies that tangles and distorts truth, objectivity, and even compassion. In the first act, it is revealed that Big Daddy is dying from a case of terminal cancer-however, Big Daddy's children decide to conceal his condition by informing him that his lab results came back clean.

This crisis overlaps with the play's central tension, which focuses on the unhappy relationship between Big Daddy's son, Brick, and his wife, Maggie. After the suicide of his best friend, Skipper, Brick becomes an alcoholic, he loses all sexual interest in his wife, and he shows no interest in work or in hobbies other than drinking. Brick is at odds with his brother, Gooper, because the latter is interested in inheriting the father's estate and fortune-claiming that it would be irresponsible to bestow all that land to an alcoholic who has no children. The play concludes with Maggie announcing that she's pregnant (yet another lie) to assure that she and her husband obtain part of Big Daddy's estate after he dies.

I found it interesting that this play tethers the notions of truth and queerness quite effectively. In the section entitled "Notes for the Designer," Williams strenuously tries to convey not only how the set should look, but also the atmosphere that the set should convey. Williams describes how the room that Brick and Maggie share used to belong to a gay couple, and how the energy of their relationship continues to "haunt" and affect the dynamics of the room in strange ways. As the opening of the play states, the room

hasn't changed much since it was occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of old bachelors who shared this room all their lives together. In other words, the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon. (xiii)

Even though the relationship between Straw and Ochello wasn't openly discussed, Williams approaches their partnership as a force that continues to constitute part of the play's space and atmosphere. Similar to truth, even when queerness is suppressed or contained by the play's characters, it still finds a way to show or express itself. The queerness that haunts the room manifests in Brick's character, mostly because every other character assumes that Skipper's suicide has affected Brick so immensely because they were romantically interested (or perhaps, involved) with each other. Not only does Big Daddy inquire whether Brick and Skipper were lovers, but Brick's wife, Maggie, goes as far as to posit that the lack of tolerance for queer relationships in their society is the factor that ultimately drove Skipper to kill himself. Skipper tries to sleep with Maggie to prove his heterosexuality, but fails to do so. This failure pushes Maggie to force Skipper to confront the truth about his feelings towards Brick:

I destroyed [Skipper], by telling him the truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told? (45)

Brick desperately tries to deny that he and Skipper were romantically involved, and at first, he confesses to his father that he and Skipper had a falling-out due to the fact that Brick was unwilling to reciprocate Skipper's romantic and sexual feelings towards him. Big Daddy has an honest chat with Brick, telling him how he is the person who carries the most guilt because of mendacity-especially since Big Daddy believes that Brick has been lying to himself about his true feelings towards Skipper:

we've tracked down the lie with which you're disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.

You!-dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!-before you'd face truth with him! (92)

I find this conversation between father and son very interesting. Not only is the father trying to find out the reasons why Brick drinks, but he is also trying to help Brick identify the root of his pain and torment. By stating that Brick's mendacity led to Skipper's demise and death, the father places attention not on his son's potential homosexuality, but rather, on his son's dishonesty. Brick continues to deny the truths that his father openly discusses, claiming that the truth under question is Skipper's truth, not his own. Big Daddy, however, argues that even if Skipper's truth was the factor that led to his demise, it doesn't change the fact that Brick refused to "face [Skipper's truth] with him" (92). This accusation leads Brick to tell Big Daddy the truth about his cancer, and how his family has been lying to him to protect his feelings. After both Brick and his father are forced to face the realities of their lives, Brick proceeds to make one of the most intriguing confessions of the play:

Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful-I don't know but-anyway-we've been friends . . .

-And being friends is telling each other the truth . . .

[There is a pause.]

You told me! I told you! (94-95)

Brick's passionate confession points out two very important points. First, reiterating Big Daddy's ideas of the nature of mendacity (pointed out in the first block quote of this blog post), Brick also seems to believe that lying is an part of living, and that the two phenomena cannot exist without each other-lying is living, living is lying. Secondly, this passage highlights the possibility that truth is only accessible to those who reside beyond the parameters of the living. Brick barely has a life because he is an alcoholic, and Big Daddy's life has a definite expiration date due to his cancer. Thus, both of these characters are situated in liminal positions, where they inhabit the space between living and dying. I find it interesting that a queering of the divide between life and death is approached, in the play, as the only way of accessing truth-especially when taking into consideration that Brick and Big Daddy are the only characters who confront and embrace veracity.

I would consider this play very postmodern in terms of its exploration of the impossibility of truth and constructions of selfhood based on untruthfulness. These characters have the opportunity to embrace truth, but they deny doing so to comply with socio-cultural demands and expectations. What I find particularly interesting, though, is that this play presents an instance in which non-normative, liminal characters are presented as the only individuals capable of invoking truth and honesty in other people, even though they are incapable of dealing with their own truths and realities. Is queerness (non-normativity, anti-binaristic thinking) thus the solution to mendacity? This is definitely an idea that is worth exploring.

You can purchase a copy of Williams' play by clicking here.

Work Cited

Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Chicago: Signet Books, 1955. Print.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Truth and Mendacity in Tennessee Williams' [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don't you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Use our free chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It helps middle and high school students understand Tennessee Williams's literary masterpiece.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Tennessee Williams Annual Review | 2011 Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "Notes" also draws a specific if tentative connection between the plantation set and Robert Louis Stevenson's verandah on Samoa, evoking "the quality of tender light on weathered wood . . . exposed to tropical suns and tropical rains . . . the grace and comfort of light, the reassurance it gives .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Given that it is Tennessee Williams's best play, it is surprising how rarely we see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Since its British premiere in 1958, it has had only three major London revivals. Although many people know it through the disastrously diluted Elizabeth Taylor-Paul Newman movie, it is not that often seen on regional stages, either: I can trace four Scottish revivals in the last 15 years, but few in England. So Sarah Esdaile's new production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which opens later this week, should give us a chance to re-assess a play that, in the near 60 years since Williams started writing it, has been the source of endless controversy, confusion and debate.

First, it's worth reminding ourselves what it's actually about. At its most basic, it confronts the issue that runs through all great American drama, from Eugene O'Neill onwards: the conflict between truth and illusion. Set on a rich Mississippi plantation, Williams's play shows the conflict from many angles. Brick, an alcoholic ex-athlete, refuses to sleep with his vivacious wife, Maggie, supposedly out of guilt over the suicide of his old friend, Skipper: what Brick is unable to confront is his own, and Skipper's, latent homosexuality. Brick's father, a towering patriarch known as Big Daddy over whose inheritance the family squabbles, is equally unable to face up to the fact he is dying of cancer. The two illusions meet head-on in the great father-son confrontation in the second act. But, although the play offers a social critique and rich southern humour, it finally asks whether it is better to live by lies or truth.

This may be vintage Williams but right from the start this particular Cat has been dogged, so to speak, by argument. The original 1955 Broadway production ran for nearly 700 performances, won Williams his second Pulitzer prize and restored a reputation badly dented by the failure of Camino Real. But, even though it was a big commercial success, Cat raised a fundamental issue. Whose text was it - the author's or the director's? The nub of the matter is that the director, Elia Kazan (all-conquering after his 1954 movie, On the Waterfront), persuaded Williams to exchange his original third act for one the director approved of. Specifically, Kazan asked for a last act in which Maggie was shown more sympathetically, the dying Big Daddy reappeared, and Brick underwent some form of moral awakening. Williams eventually published both versions, inviting readers to make their choice. It's a measure of Kazan's awesome power and Williams's desperation for a Broadway hit ("He wanted it passionately," said Kazan) that the author gave way to the director.

Does it matter? I think it does. Williams's original version is leaner and sparer. Kenneth Tynan, writing about the text played on Broadway, picked up on a small, symbolic difference between the two. Williams's original has Maggie, uttering her big lie to win Big Daddy's inheritance, say: "Brick and I are going to have a child." In the Kazan-approved version, this portentously becomes "A child is coming, sired by Brick out of Maggie the Cat." Director Sarah Esdaile, after researching all Williams's variations, has gone back to a 1974 script that combines the best of both the original and the Broadway texts. I'll be fascinated to see how this revised version plays in Leeds.

Textual variations are one issue. A far bigger one, in the 1950s, was Williams's handling of homosexuality. Some people thought the play went too far, others that it didn't go nearly far enough. The critic Eric Bentley, writing in the New Republic, thought Williams ducked the issue by not exploring further Brick's real nature. Having been told in advance that this was the play in which homosexuality would finally be presented without evasion, Bentley wanly concluded: "The miracle still has not happened."

But in Britain the whole subject was too much for the Lord Chamberlain, who then had the right to forbid plays a licence for public performance. It is blush-making to think that in 1958, when Peter Hall staged the British premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, audiences had to go through the ludicrous fiction of paying to join a private members' club, the New Watergate, in order to see the play staged at the Comedy theatre. It is equally shaming to think that Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, in which one man kisses another on stage, had to be presented under the same hypocritical banner. Only in Britain would it be assumed that payment of a small fee somehow insulated one from moral corruption; but such was the idiotic law until censorship's demise in 1968.

America, however, had its own censorship problems. In the cinema, the outdated Hays' Code was used to limit freedom of expression. The irony is that one of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's great virtues is that it shows Big Daddy's tolerant understanding of Brick's sexuality. Richard Brooks's ridiculous 1958 Hollywood film was obliged to water down Williams's message for public consumption. It may have had Elizabeth Taylor smouldering in a satin slip, but it offered no more than dark hints as to the reasons for Paul Newman's refusal to sleep with her and, as I recall, even denied that Maggie's attempted seduction of Skipper got as far as the bedroom. This was a badly neutered Cat that inspired Williams on one occasion to tell a queue waiting in line for tickets: "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!"

The author wasn't much more thrilled with a 1976 Granada TV production, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Here, according to Williams, Laurence Olivier mistakenly conceived Big Daddy as "a southern planter gentleman instead of a former overseer who struck it rich through hard work". In fact, you have to leap forward to 1988 to find a British production that finally did full justice to Williams's symphonic play. This was Howard Davies's superlative revival at the National theatre, starring Lindsay Duncan as Maggie, Ian Charleson as Brick and Eric Porter as Big Daddy. Everything one hoped for was there: the social satire in the shape of Brick's elder brother, Gooper, moving in for the kill as his father's cancer is confirmed; the comedy in the form of the "no-neck monsters", who constitute Gooper and Mae's family, putting on a tackily choreographed display for Big Daddy; and the defiance of Duncan's Maggie, announcing her pregnancy with tilted chin as if challenging anyone to dispute it.

Since that breakthrough production, London has seen two other major revivals. In 2001, Anthony Page staged the play with three American actors in the lead roles: Brendan Fraser as Brick, Frances O'Connor as Maggie and Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. I said at the time it caught well "the passion and power of the state of Tennessee", but it has left few indelible memories. Far more impressive was the 2009 import of Debbie Allen's Broadway production, with a distinguished all-black cast. Ethnicity mattered here less than the production's emotional firepower: Sanaa Lathan's Maggie was so sizzlingly sensual she almost burned a hole in the satin bedsheets. The confrontation between Adrian Lester's Brick and James Earl Jones's Big Daddy was equally overwhelming: I've never forgotten the latter's shift from crude vulgarian, doing obscene pelvic thrusts as a sign of his sexual power, to anxious therapist as he sought to analyse and articulate his son's problem.

It is probably easier now than it was in the 1950s to get a handle on Williams's play. A work considered salacious and sensationalist by some, and overly cautious by others, can now be seen in its true colours. What Williams does is expose the twin illusions, especially prevalent in the America in which he wrote, that sexuality is some kind of rigidly predetermined absolute, and that possessions can protect you against death. Above all, the play is an attack on a world in which we lie to ourselves and others; and it's a sign of Williams's subversive and still under-rated humour that, in finally supporting Maggie's lie, Brick adds to the mendacity he has hitherto assailed. It's an astonishing, multi-faceted play that, in Britain, has taken us decades to appreciate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams's southern discomfort

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Given that it is Tennessee Williams's best play, it is surprising how rarely we see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Since its British premiere in 1958, it has had only three major London revivals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who is Britain's favourite American dramatist? One year it seems to be Arthur Miller, the next it's David Mamet. Right now, Tennessee Williams is having a moment. Rachel Weisz opens in A Streetcar Named Desire tonight, at the Donmar in London. In December, a Broadway African-American Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, starring James Earl Jones and Adrian Lester, comes to the West End. And, in between, there is the European premiere of a forgotten 1937 play, Spring Storm, at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton. But, for all our enthusiasm for Williams, I think we still get him subtly wrong. He is most often dubbed a "psychological" dramatist, but this ignores his social and political radicalism - as well as his rich talent for comedy.

Of course, perceptions of Williams have evolved over the years. When Streetcar was first seen in London in 1949, in a production directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh, Williams was viewed as a kind of filthy American sleaze-merchant. The confrontation of Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski sent the British press into a tizzy: Logan Gourlay in the Sunday Express spoke for many when he condemned the play as "the progress of a prostitute, the flight of a nymphomaniac, the ravings of a sexual neurotic". The play was attacked in Parliament as "low and repugnant", and by the Public Morality Council as "salacious and pornographic". When Cat On a Hot Tin Roof had its British premiere in 1958, it had to be presented under the polite fiction of a "club performance" - lest the broader public be corrupted by the discreet suggestion that its hero, Brick, is gay.

Thankfully, we have got over the idea that Williams is a sexual sensationalist. Now, we tend to emphasise his lyric, compassionate side. He has been described as "the poet of lost souls", and we tend to dwell on his empathy with the spiritually wounded. In this reading, the keynote line is that of the itinerant Val in Williams's Orpheus Descending, who says: "We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"

I'd be the last to deny Williams's poignant poetry and echoing loneliness, but we overlook the more robust side of his talent. His plays offer a devastating portrait of the ugly prejudices of the American south; they acknowledge economic realities; and, in the spirit of his admired Chekhov, are as comic as they are tragic. For evidence of Williams's strong social conscience - the product of his Episcopalian upbringing - you have to look at the life and letters, as well as the work. Travelling through the American south-west in 1939, he listened attentively to the stories of impoverished, workless families, and shared his meagre rations with their children. He also loathed racism. Appalled that he was unable to prevent The Glass Menagerie playing to all-white audiences in the capital, in 1947 Williams wrote to the New York Times that "any future contract I make will contain a clause to keep the show out of Washington while this undemocratic practice continues". He was influenced by the theories of Brecht's collaborator Erwin Piscator, a German emigre who ran the Drama Workshop in New York and was instrumental in staging an early Williams one-acter, The Long Goodbye, in 1940. Williams's early plays, in particular, often reveal a strong social purpose - a point proved by Trevor Nunn's National theatre revival of Not About Nightingales. Written in 1938, this play vividly dramatised a group of prisoners challenging the Mussolini-like power of a brutal warden. This anti-fascist instinct was one of Williams's guiding principles.

In this sense, A Streetcar Named Desire is a test case. For some, the play is a vindication of Stanley Kowalski, who finally gets his revenge on his sister-in-law, Blanche, who has intruded on his happy New Orleans home with her fancy airs (no surprise to find John Osborne among the fervent Stanleyites, writing that "the female must come toppling down to where she should be - on her back"). But there is another way of looking at the play, brilliantly articulated by the American director-critic Harold Clurman in 1948. For Clurman, Blanche represents "the martyred poetic instinct and aristocracy of feeling", while Stanley is all muscle, lumpish sensuality and crude energy: his "mentality provides the soil for fascism, viewed not as a political movement but as a state of being". I think the play is not quite as black-and-white as that, and requires a more delicate balance of sympathy; but he was spot-on in seeing Streetcar as "wholly a product of our life today". It was a direct response to late-1940s America, in which a macho materialism prevailed over spiritual and artistic values.

Before Williams entered what he himself called his "stoned age" of the 1960s, when drink and drugs stifled his talent, his subject was America in the biggest, most political sense. Even Camino Real, first performed in 1953 and apparently showing Williams at his most woozily symbolic, is a vivid metaphor for 1950s America. Set in a crumbling plaza, the play brings together a group of doomed romantic idealists, including Don Quixote, Lord Byron, Casanova and Marguerite Gautier. Far from being a hazy phantasmagoria, the play was a direct and passionate response to an America where, as Williams said, "the spring of humanity had gone dry"; the fascist demagoguery of Senator McCarthy was all-pervasive. Intriguingly, Camino Real appeared in the same year as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and was just as opposed to the ethos of the times; Williams was among the first to protest at the withdrawal of Miller's passport by the US state department. Williams remained an implicitly political writer up to and including Orpheus Descending, first performed in 1957. Here, the heroine discovers that her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan for his failure to practise racial discrimination. Williams is known as an explorer of interior landscapes; what we miss is his capacity to record, and to fight against, any form of prejudice, intolerance or oppression.

At his best, Williams pinned down America at its worst. But for all his empathy, he saw the human condition - and his own especially - as faintly absurd. I have some evidence for this, in my only encounter with him, on Radio 4's Start the Week in 1978. I had been asked to interview Williams about his nakedly autobiographical play, Vieux Carré, which had just opened in London. I had been briefed to begin with a summary of the plot, and as I described the struggles of the play's writer-hero, living in a New Orleans apartment-block surrounded by starving gentlefolk, alcoholics and deadbeats, I heard a steadily growing rumble of laughter from across the table. At first, I thought it was a comment on my inept synopsis. Gradually, I realised it was the sound of a writer who saw his own remembered tribulations as hilarious. I recalled that a year earlier he had been asked by the management to leave a performance of The Glass Menagerie at the Shaw theatre in London, because his incessant hilarity at this memory of his own youth was disturbing the rest of the audience.

Williams's gift for comedy is partly temperamental, and partly a product of a southern inheritance that extends from Mark Twain to Carson McCullers. It pervades much of his work. You can see Cat On a Hot Tin Roof as a tragedy about self-delusion, in which the hero, Brick, can no more admit to his homosexuality than his father, Big Daddy, can to his cancer. But, as Howard Davies's superb production at the National in 1988 reminded us, the play is also very funny. It opens with a hilarious monologue by Maggie the Cat, in which she protests against the "no-neck monsters" bred by her endlessly fecund sister-in-law. Williams could also be ribald and Dionysiac. In The Rose Tattoo, a devout American-Sicilian widow, Serafina, is aroused from a three-year period of mourning by the arrival of a sexy, muscular buffoon. The sight of Zoë Wanamaker, in the most recent revival, struggling to get out of her panty-girdle in time to keep an appointment with her lover was hilarious. At a deeper level, of course, the play is about the force for renewal in human life and the need to break with the past.

Some of Williams's later work borders on self-parody, but the best of his plays will endure the ravages of time, for a number of reasons: there is his capacity to write great parts for actors, for one thing; his instinctive love of the marginalised and defeated; and his fervent opposition to any form of tyranny, whether domestic or political. As Williams once wrote (significantly, he used capital letters): "to be an Artist is to be a Revolutionary", whose words are always feared and misunderstood. It's time to acknowledge that, inside the complex state of Tennessee, existed a natural rebel.
'As flamboyant as an orchid' - Williams on his leading ladies On Vivien Leigh
Leigh is not only the officially appointed first lady of the London theatre, but several other things of equal or greater importance: an actress of great talent which has steadily grown through meeting the challenge of many classic roles, while still appearing so masterfully in such American films as Gone With the Wind and Streetcar. At present she is appearing in a film based on my novel The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, a part she accepted despite its being an ageing actress, infatuated with a young adventurer.

Vivien's beauty is as delicately flamboyant as an orchid. When she takes the stage, she commands it as if she first arrived there suspended from the bill of a stork. Vivien is incomparably graceful, she moves like a marvellous dancer, on or off stage, and has an instinct for doing and saying the right thing to put you at ease even when you know you are making a fool of yourself. All of these wonderful gifts she has given with no apparent regard for her personal vulnerability: in other words she is not only a stunning actress but a lady with the most important part of that intricate composition, which is kindness of heart.
On Elizabeth Taylor
Taylor is one of the great phenomena and symptoms of our time in America. Everything she has done has been startling and sometimes implausible. It's hard to guess what Liz wants out of life: the million-dollar contracts and diamond necklaces or the exercise of what is probably the finest raw talent on the Hollywood screen. She has a deeply moving response to fellow artists in trouble, and so I'm inclined to believe she is more interested in the creative work than the loot.

She thoroughly understands the system she is caught in, and she is not to be bossed or intimidated by it. Hollywood moguls have met their match. I've heard her phone conversations with them: mutual understanding and respect. Naturally I hope that this girl, this cross between a flower and the rock it sprang from, will discover that her greater satisfaction will come from the disciplining of her talent in the stricter conditions of our theatre.

As for Liz's performance in Suddenly, Last Summer, it demonstrated her ability to rise above miscasting. She was well cast as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and should have got her Oscar. But it stretched my credulity to believe Liz wouldn't know [in Suddenly, Last Summer] that she was "being used for something evil". Liz would have dragged Sebastian home by his ears, and so saved them both from considerable embarrassment.

Extracted from Five Fiery Ladies, 1961, now collected in New Selected Essays: Where I Live (New Directions)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tennessee Williams: the quiet revolutionary | Michael Billington

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire opens in the West End, let's celebrate a writer with a strong social conscience who saw the human condition - especially his own - as faintly absurd, writes Michael Billington

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tennessee Williams's career began and ended very badly. The boffo finish of his first Broadway-bound play, "Battle of Angels" (1940), was a big onstage fire - a special effect that generated so much smoke a number of theatergoers fainted while others bolted for the exits. "If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco," John Lahr writes in his new biography of Williams, piquantly subtitled "Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh," "history does not record it." Five years and a lot of crummy jobs later, Williams clawed his way back with a play that would make him famous, "The Glass Menagerie," whose premiere almost proved an even bigger disaster. Laurette Taylor, plucked from a long alcoholic oblivion to play Amanda Wingfield, was found an hour and a half before opening curtain in an alley outside the stage door, soaking wet in the rain and all but dead drunk. Occasionally pausing to vomit in a bucket offstage, she gave the performance of her life and thus saved our greatest postwar playwright from almost certain ruin.

"Well, Mrs. Williams," the raffish actress remarked to the author's mother, Edwina, after the Chicago premiere, "how did you like yourself?" Whether Edwina had sufficient self-awareness to recognize her own maundering about (say) "seventeen! - gentleman callers!" is doubtful, but she was indeed Amanda in the flesh: a doughty chatterbox from Ohio who adopted the manner of a Southern belle and eschewed both drink and sex to the greatest extent possible. Her husband, Cornelius, was inordinately fond of both, and theirs was not a happy union. Drunk and embittered, Cornelius took to calling his effeminate older son Miss Nancy - until, many years later, as Tennessee Williams, this son would have the ineffable pleasure of sitting on the family tombstone while signing autographs at Cornelius's funeral.

Williams might have used that image as an insignia on his letterhead, so aptly did it capture the triumph of art over life - the alchemy whereby a miserable childhood, and the enduring alienation that followed, were made into something sublime. For her part in this process, Edwina was rewarded with half the royalties from "The Glass Menagerie"; she had supplied not only the play's most memorable character, but also a theme that Williams would never quite exhaust: the ravages of repression. Edwina used to scream (in horror) during sex, and imposed on her children such a "dread of the physical" that Tennessee did not masturbate until the age of 26 - as Lahr informs us twice, lest we be skeptical in light of Williams's later exertions. As for the playwright's unfortunate sister, Rose, she was driven to such a pitch of hysteria that she taunted her mother with tales of abusing herself with altar candles at All Saints College, until Edwina demanded that her innocence be restored by way of a lobotomy. Or so Williams claimed, with a faintly humorous rue and no little sympathy, perhaps, for both parties. Often told that he dealt only with neurotic people, Williams replied that "when you penetrate into almost anybody you either find madness or dullness," and he was considerably less interested in dullness.

One fascinating aspect of "Tennessee Williams," a finalist for the National Book Award, is its emphasis on the director Elia Kazan's role as midwife to Williams's better work. Called Gadg (for "Gadget") because he was compact, not to say handy at fixing every kind of theatrical problem, Kazan broke down the intricacies of a given character into easy-to-remember "Masks" and "Spines": Thus Williams's most memorable creation, Blanche DuBois of "A Streetcar Named Desire," fancies herself a "Damsel in Distress" (Mask) whose ultimate motivation is to "find protection" (Spine). Kazan was also adept at sifting the bric-a-brac of Williams's early drafts and finding the viable bits, the arc, whatever would keep viewers rooted to their chairs all the way to the final curtain. "PLEASE PLEASE stop and don't rush into production," Kazan wrote Williams of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." "You're letting yourself in for a lot of grief if you do." In Williams's original version, the flamboyant Big Daddy is shunted offstage for good after learning his cancer is terminal at the end of Act Two. Kazan insisted that Big Daddy return, and moreover that the troubled couple at the heart of the play, Brick and Maggie, evolve in a more sympathetic manner: a happier ending, in short. Williams acquiesced on almost every point and was rewarded with wealth and a Pulitzer, though he groused publicly about the compromise - "almost like a prostitution or a corruption," as he put it to Edward R. Murrow on national television, failing to mention that Kazan had offered to reinstate his original third act before the New York opening.

Lahr's almost microscopic attention to the niceties of each play, from rough draft to final production, is more welcome in the early part of Williams's career, when his work was at its best and his collaborators included Kazan and some of the greatest actors of the postwar era. Thus the in medias res beginning of Lahr's book - that problematic Broadway premiere of "The Glass Menagerie" - seems a salutary jolt at first, a corrective (one supposes) to the "encyclopedic chronological approach," as Lahr notes in his preface, that Lyle Leverich took in his 1995 biography, "Tom." Lahr's book was initially conceived as the second volume that Leverich didn't live to complete. But somewhere along the way, Lahr (a theater critic for The New Yorker and the author of "Prick Up Your Ears," about the playwright Joe Orton) decided to expand his own work into "a stand-alone biography." He gives relatively little attention to Williams's early life, however, and after the structural ingenuity of that opening section - which jumps from a lengthy discussion of "Menagerie" to a lengthy discussion of "Battle of Angels" five years before, then perambulates a bit through Williams's early years before jumping forward to "Menagerie" again - Lahr's book is every bit as chronological and almost as encyclopedic as Leverich's "Tom." Which is to say: Give or take a few pages of childhood exposition, the book reads quite like the sequel it purports not to be.

In any case, if Kazan had concerned himself with biographies instead of plays, I think he would have advised Lahr not to rush this one into production. A tactful egomaniac, Kazan might have pointed out the many felicities here, while warning Lahr that his exhaustive critiques of each and every play become less interesting once he, Kazan, is no longer in the picture. Hence: Winnow the plot summaries, the rambling quotations that serve no urgent purpose, and give the reader a fun interstitial anecdote, at least, between long discussions of one failed play and another. Better still: Skim altogether lightly over the wreckage of Williams's later career, and save your closest readings for maybe one or two of the more deserving oddities - "The Gnadiges Fraulein," for instance, a one-act "surrealist romp" from 1966. "In this off-kilter world," Lahr generously observes, "Williams's sense of persecution is reimagined as comic pandemonium; his public collapse is turned into the symbolic triumph of the pratfall." Above all, focus on strong, diverting characters and scenes: Bette Davis in "The Night of the Iguana" ("I'm sick of this Actors Studio [expletive]!"), yes; Williams's dreary late-life boyfriends, not so much.

Speaking of Davis and her ilk: The kernel of Lahr's book was his brilliant 1994 New Yorker exposé of Williams's " soi-disant literary executor," a minor actress named Maria St. Just (née Britneva), and Lahr's muse sings whenever he evokes this tiny virago with her "bluff, bowwow manner." "She scared people," said Gore Vidal, who didn't frighten easily, and Lahr fills many pages gleefully expatiating on this point. Williams's ghastly mother had left him with a weakness for strong, mentally unstable women, and his decision to name St. Just co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust - which owned the copyrights to his plays - put the kibosh on most Williams-related scholarship in the 11 years between his death and St. Just's. Her shenanigans are almost endearing in their childlike shamelessness. A few years before her death she published a collection of Williams's letters to her, "Five O'Clock Angel," in which (among other malfeasances) she quotes the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson raving about her performance as Blanche in a revival of "Streetcar"; naturally Lahr tracked this (bad) review down and discovered the laudatory quotation was fabricated. At one point, too, she went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, where Williams's papers are kept, and bullied librarians into leaving her alone with his letters in a private room; she then took a razor to all remarks that didn't please her - unaware that copies were preserved on microfiche.

Williams, I think, would have laughed at that, and indeed it's the kind of thing that attracted him to St. Just in the first place. But then, too, he was notoriously careless about his social life; "Most of my friendships are accidental," he admitted, quantifying the matter with a pie chart that accorded 89 percent of his existence to "work and worry over work," 10 percent to his ongoing "struggle against lunacy," and 1 percent to friends and lovers and so forth. When the work began to fail, it's easy to guess which part of the pie chart expanded. His own mother advised him to "find another occupation" after she attended the premiere of "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel" in 1969 - this capping a decade that passed, for Williams, in a drug- and drink-addled blur - but he needed writing as much as breathing, and they stopped at roughly the same time. To the end, a part of the world kept applauding the hollow ghost (as Matthew Arnold would have it), and eight months before his death in 1983, Williams received an honorary degree from Harvard. Spotting Mother Teresa at a reception beforehand, he shambled over to where she sat on a couch saying her rosary, knelt down and put his head in her lap. Clearly the good woman had no idea who this paunchy, disheveled person was, but she knew a soul in pain when she saw it, and patted his head as she gave him her blessing.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

By John Lahr

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
tennessee williams: mad pilgrimage of the flesh (book)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tennessee Williams's career began and ended very badly. The boffo finish of his first Broadway-bound play, "Battle of Angels" (1940), was a big onstage fire - a special effect that generated so much smoke a number of theatergoers fainted while others bolted for the exits.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Southern Decadence The Hudson Review Spring 2004

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Theatre Critics' Hospital is a nice place to recover from the trauma that is Rob Ashford's staging of Tennessee Williams's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (at the Richard Rodgers). In this infirmary, pundits are wheeled around by nurses in lovely white uniforms and starched caps. There are plump beds, handsome doctors, and no actors. But rehabilitation can be slow, especially if, like me, you tend to replay the catastrophe over and over in your mind, wondering how it happened.

The fifty-three-year-old Ashford made his name on Broadway as a choreographer, working on such shows as "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (2002)-for which he won a Tony Award-and "Cry-Baby" (2008). In 2009, he switched gears to direct, at London's intimate Donmar Warehouse, a celebrated production of Williams's 1947 landmark play "A Streetcar Named Desire," starring Rachel Weisz. I didn't see that staging, but I was drawn by the high-low direction that Ashford's career seemed to be taking, by his Rob Marshall-like interest in how quality rubs up against pasties and rouge. Watching his choreographic work, though, I noticed some not so entertaining tropes: Ashford had a tendency to present his female dancers as types-vamp, ditz, and so on-rather than as full-bodied characters. And that's the two-dimensional view that undermines his direction of the twenty-eight-year-old Scarlett Johansson, as Margaret, the self-described "cat on a hot tin roof" in Williams's careful and melodramatic depiction of the interior life of a woman who doesn't spend much time thinking about her interior life, because she's giving all she has to her survival.

It's late summer on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta: a season of storms. The Pollitt family has gathered for the sixty-fifth birthday of its patriarch, Big Daddy (a too robust, not vulgar enough Ciarán Hinds), who has recently had a cancer scare. Big Mama (an irritatingly depthless Debra Monk) has just got some wonderful news: her husband doesn't have cancer, after all; it's just a little ol' something called a spastic colon. But that's a lie that the doctor tells Big Mama, to ease her mind. Her sons, Gooper (Michael Park) and Brick (Benjamin Walker), and Brick's wife, Margaret, know that Big Daddy won't live out the year; it's time to name an heir to his vast property and fortune.

That's the pulpy backstory. Yellow lights slowly go up onstage. The first sign of trouble is the set, by Christopher Oram. It's a spectacle in itself, full of the kinds of detail that are meant to call attention to a designer's "dramatic" eye. In the script for what Williams called his favorite of his plays, the author describes Margaret and Brick's bed-sitting room, where the action takes place, this way:

It is along an upstairs gallery, which probably runs around the entire house; it has two pairs of very wide doors opening onto the gallery. . . . Perhaps the style of the room is not what you would expect in the home of the Delta's biggest cotton-planter. It is Victorian with a touch of the Far East.

In Oram's inflated interpretation, four sets of glass doors open onto the gallery, and those doors appear to be two or three stories high. The overwhelming architecture dwarfs the bed-which should dominate the set, given that it symbolizes the battlefield that is Margaret's need and Brick's resistance to that need.

We hear water running in the bathroom. Margaret enters from downstairs, where Big Daddy's birthday supper is taking place:

M ARGARET: One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t' change!

B RICK: Wha'd you say, Maggie? Water was on s' loud I couldn't hear ya . . .

M ARGARET: Well, I!-just remarked that!-one of th' no-neck monsters messed up m' lovely lace dress so I got t'-cha-a-ange. . . .

B RICK: Why d'ya call Gooper's kiddies no-neck monsters?

M ARGARET: Because they've got no necks! Isn't that a good enough reason? . . . Their fat little heads are set on their fat little bodies without a bit of connection. . . . I said to your charming sister-in-law, Mae, honey, couldn't you feed those precious little things at a separate table with an oilcloth cover? . . . She made enormous eyes at me and said, "Ohhh, nooooooo! On Big Daddy's birthday? Why, he would never forgive me!" Well, I want you to know, Big Daddy hadn't been at the table two minutes with those five no-neck monsters slobbering and drooling over their food before he threw down his fork an' shouted, "Fo' God's sake, Gooper, why don't you put them pigs at a trough in th' kitchen?"

And so begins one of the most wry speeches ever written about heterosexuality at war with itself. (Margaret and Brick have no children.) For the rest of the first act, as other family members drift into the couple's bedroom to taunt them or look for comfort, Margaret keeps returning to her ideas about what sexuality is and what it should look like. Does Brick no longer want to make love to his wife because her strength is a turn-off, or is it because she's a woman? Brick is slowly drinking himself to death out of a convenient grief: his best friend, Skipper, killed himself, and he blames Margaret, who seduced Skipper to try to get him away from Brick and save their marriage. Or was Margaret's sleeping with Skipper the only way she could find to get close to her remote husband? Is she less of a woman because she's childless? Margaret grew up poor, and depended on emotionally pinched relatives, until she married into the Pollitt family; she knows how other people respond to appearances. But she doesn't romanticize her battered past. Her genius for survival precludes her taking a sentimental view of anything or anyone, even her fucked-up husband. And Brick is fucked up because, as Margaret says so aptly, he's an "ass-aching Puritan."

To distance myself from what I don't like about "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"-there are no chinks in its hard perfection and, therefore, nothing to discover-I've always thought of the nearly three-hour-long piece as three one-act plays, linked by the themes of truth (embodied by Margaret), death (Big Daddy), and the lies that are necessary to make a life. But any ideas I had about the play's structure were drowned out in this staging by Ashford's directorial noise. Instead of exploring the layers of meaning in the script, Ashford presents a stereotype of Williams-all sorghum, chicory, and cornpone logic-while, at the same time, trying to upstage him. Both Ashford and Johansson seem convinced that the real story here is not Margaret's attempt to win her marriage back but the deprivation she suffered in the past. Inexplicably, they try to convey that impoverishment with outmoded black American diction and a Thelma Ritter-like solidity. Johansson clumps around the stage like a craven old market woman, displaying none of the sinuous wiliness-that tough cat on a hot roof-that might have caught Brick's eye in the first place.

My interest in Johansson stalled after the movie "Ghost World" (2001), where I was fascinated less by her slightly zonked quality than by her beautiful raspy voice, which reminded me of Truman Capote's description of one of his characters' "rough whispery warm voice very slightly vibrating her." When, in 2010, Johansson won a Tony for her Broadway début-as Catherine, the object of impacted lust who precipitates the tragedy in Arthur Miller's 1955 play, "A View from the Bridge"-you could have knocked me over with an Oscar. By then, Johanssson seemed to have ossified into some agent's idea of "sexiness." Her carnality isn't complicated-it's all there in her partly open mouth. She's like a character the young Angie Dickinson might have played, but without Dickinson's why-should-I-care affect and emotional danger.

Walker isn't given a real chance to do anything, either. There's nothing in his face. He doesn't so much act as undress. When Brick turns away from his wife to put on his silk pajamas, we are given a long look at the actor's rear end. I don't think that's what Williams had in mind when he described Brick as "ass-aching." But Ashford wants to pull out all the stops when it comes to titillating the audience. During the show's climactic second half-I'm not kidding-he has the household's black servants moanin' low as Brick tells his father the truth about his imminent mortality. Still, why should those supporting players be treated with any more dignity than the stars, whose asses Ashford hawks to the highest bidders-that is, to us, the audience, all those people in the dark, whom he wants, more than anything, to applaud and love him? ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Theatre Critics' Hospital is a nice place to recover from the trauma that is Rob Ashford's staging of Tennessee Williams's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (at the Richard Rodgers). In this infirmary, pundits are wheeled around by nurses in lovely white uniforms and starched caps.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Tennessee Williams Annual Review | 2011 Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "Notes" also draws a specific if tentative connection between the plantation set and Robert Louis Stevenson's verandah on Samoa, evoking "the quality of tender light on weathered wood . . . exposed to tropical suns and tropical rains . . . the grace and comfort of light, the reassurance it gives .