TENNESSEE
WILLIAMS
"Time is the longest distance between two places" - Tennessee Williams'The Glass Menagerie
BIOGRAPHY
Early Life...
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus Mississippi. He had an older sister, Rose, and a younger brother, Dakin. Tennessee’s early life included a strong female support system [1]. His mater grandmother Rose, whom his sister was named after, had a great impact on his upbringing and was a primary source of stability to Thomas in his early life. Thomas’ mother, Edwina, was a beautiful woman who worked hard to help Tennessee achieve his goals, but unfortunately her marriage was not always constructive. From the time of Tom’s birth until he was about 7, Tom was surrounded primarily by women, and his family lived in Mississippi. His father, Cornelius, was a salesman, who constantly traveled and was rarely home except for the weekend nights. Tom was an active, bright young child who enjoyed activity and playing with Rose, however at the age of 5, he contracted what his mother decided was diphtheria, which paralyzed him for a couple of years. While he regained his mobility, this episode completely altered his personality, and he was left shy, introverted, and alone with his thoughts and imagination [2].
Around the age of 7, Tom’s family life was overturned. Cornelius received a job offer in St. Louis Missouri which would force the family to move, and would mean Cornelius would be at home full-time. While Edwina always knew Cornelius had temperament issues and exploited his intake of alcohol, she was able to avoid it until they reached St. Louis [3]. It became obvious to everyone how brutal and disruptive Cornelius was to the household and to the development of his children. His children began to fear him and were always on edge afraid of his next move. Despite this, Edwina believed in Tom’s quiet creativity, and thus bought him his first typewriter at age 11 which began to foster his career as a writer [4].
Education...
As the years went on, Tom continued to write. He attended school, spent lots of time with his siblings, and tried to stay disengaged with his father. He ended up attending University of Missouri in 1929 at Columbia. While at first, he worked hard both in school and socially, as time went on he became much more invested in writing and discovering his sexuality than with his grades, but as a result Cornelius pulled him out [5]. He was forced to work at the shoe company with his father. Tom put in long laborious hours making little money, but he spent the entirety of his night writing, and the little money he had purchasing cheap show tickets in order to get more exposure to the theatre [6]. A few years later, in 1935, he attended Washington University in St. Louis to study theater and writing, and a year later he was accepted into a playwriting program at University of Iowa, and it is from here he graduated and began his career in writing.
Career...
At first, he had trouble finding work, but after a period of instability, he found himself in the city he would quickly fall in love with: New Orleans. New Orleans brought Tom a new sense of excitement and life which inspired his writing and after some time here, he moved to New York, signed with an agent, and moved toward staging his first published play [7]. Tennessee’s first play to be brought to the large-scale stage was Battle of Angels which premiered in Boston. This run was very short lived, only 4 performances. Despite this failure, his next play The Glass Menagerie was a huge Broadway success and would be the source of his
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early fame. Tennessee wrote many plays throughout his career, most of which stemmed from his own personal experiences growing up as a homosexual man in the South. He is known as one of the most famous playwrights of his time. In his later years, in the 1960s, Williams no longer was producing many main stages shows. He was in a “rut” and could not seem to land any deals. He unfortunately turned to alcohol and drugs as a source of fulfillment [8]. He published a few pieces in the 70s, including Memoirs in 1975, but he was psychologically struggling with many mental health problems. Williams died from a presumable overdose in New York on February 25th, 1983.
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Why Tennessee?...
It was in New Orleans that Tom changed his name to Tennessee. While he does have strong familial ties to the state of Tennessee, he himself did not live there very long during his lifetime. However, His grandfather and namesake, Thomas Lanier Williams III, spent most of his money attempting to be the governor of Tennessee, but he failed [9]. This is why the family ran into so many financial problems. In a way, this could be why he named himself Tennessee as a way of defiance against Cornelius by remind his father of mistakes his grandfather made and how this ruined them financially.
Society of the Times
And how it impacted Williams' writing...
Most of Tennessee Williams’ profound years of writing in his early career occurred during the Great Depression. The Great Depression, the economic depression which began with a recession in 1929, caused unemployment, a decline in higher education, and lots of instability across the world. Williams was very lucky he had the ability to get a degree in times like these. It is evident that society at this time great impacted Tennessee Williams’ writing, and can be seen as the backdrop for many of his plays, including his first hit, The Glass Menagerie [10].
Williams grew up in Missouri and Mississippi. During this time in America many Southern states were extremely racist, leading to lots of racial tension and migration toward the north. For Williams, he loved the South and always returned to the South despite his time in New York and other norther cities. He was aware of the America’s flaws, especially in the south, and he wove this into many of his plays both when it regarded race, but also regarding the cultural norms of class status among whites in the South [11]. Almost all of Williams’ writing pulls from his own personal experience, both highlighting specific current events and the larger conventions of the time. Although Williams in the late 30s and 40s, had the opportunity to “live like a king” he did not like this life, and although he was “…fascinated by theater, yes – but he wanted to get away. He was and always would be his own man. He had no intention of imitating anyone” (80) [12]. He loved the vibrancy of the South and the artist culture that existed there, and always ended up returning.
THEATER
Early to Mid 20th Century
Early Plays and Living Newspapers...
Tennessee Williams’ early plays were often found to be immature and not up to the theatre standards of the time. [13] However, once he premiered The Glass Menagerie in 1944, his reputation changed. When Williams was in school at the University of Iowa, he had his acting debut in a living newspaper. E.C. Mabie was the director of the playwriting program he attended, and she was also a part of the Federal Theatre Projects Living theater maker group. These were “essentially dramatized documentaries” (176) [14]. Williams found himself writing some Living Newspapers, however his versions went beyond the norm because he wished to engage with the audience more and not just show them what they already know.
A Note on Lighting Design...
Tennessee Williams also exploited the use of light in the theater. While technology was changing and the use of light was becoming much more important in theater, lighting typically reflected the scene as a whole. However, Williams often wanted to highlight a certain character by illuminating one person during a scene where many characters are present [15].
Social Consciousness through Poetic Language...
The early to mid-20th century was known to be a period of “social conscious” theater that dealt with the problems in society [16]. Many of the plays that were being published were realist plays. There was also a new movement toward a more expressionist approach, which is evident in the playwrights that came just before Tennessee Williams. Playwrights were beginning to push their boundaries and took a more radical approach in questioning society and politics [17]. While it was conventional at the time to have a dialogue based play similar to everyday life, Williams rejected this. While he wanted to focus on the social reality at hand, he did not believe that reality is as obvious as people make it out to be. He took a much more poetic approach in his writing, different from what we had seen in the past. Poetic theater up until this point relied on verse, and a very lyrical way of speaking, Williams challenged this creating a poetic style that was less obvious. Williams creates this sense of illusion and a dream-like world that differs from realism by using this poetic language and symbolism [18]. It can be confusing to the audience at first because the characters speak conversationally, but what they day goes beyond a real conversation in order to “communicate the inexpressible, the very essence of character, emotion, and situation in a way traditionally associated with poetry” (11) [19]. Williams creates this sense of illusion and a dream-like world that differs from realism by using this poetic language and symbolism. Language in Williams’ plays is what greatly set him apart from other playwrights. Tennessee Williams was aware of his moving away from traditional realism into a more poetic form. He did not want to stick to the preconceived conventions of what theatre was, playing with speech and language to free himself from these confines. Williams urged the theatre to face reality, but instead of allowing his characters to speak as they would in everyday life, he wanted to change these everyday forms of speaking and acting in order to ultimately get closer to the truth of American culture [20].
ATTRIBUTES
Tennessee Williams’ plays directly incorporated many of his own life experiences and challenges such as familial instability, discovering and concealing his sexual orientation, and what it was like growing up in the 1930s in the American South. While not considered a traditional realist, Williams did not make everything obvious in his plays [21]. It was often hard to tell what the characters were thinking. Oftentimes he wrote about current events of the time in order to bring attention to the problems of society. In his early writing, Williams was much more cautious of his training. He was very “aware of both the literature and the theatrical techniques of the contemporary theatre,” but once he wrote battle of angels, as the new decade came, he began to find his own voice in the world of drama [22]. He began to expose America and its flaws and social problems especially in the south.
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One of his main attributes as a theater maker was stripping down the stage to the necessities. He did not think that life should be portrayed on stage as it is in everyday life, but rather every prop, set, and character should have a purpose and be valued [23]. Not only did this cause other playwrights and directors to question the need for extra “stuff” to fill the stage, he showed everyone the importance of the individual. Not just through the characters in his plays, but also in his personal essays, Williams advocates for the individual and that each person is “a victim of a system resistant to human needs” (36) [24]. He began to take some power away from the individual because in real life the individual is what they make of it because the society around them is corrupt. It is said of Williams that “the structure of his plays reflects the resistance to a national plot which now included investigating committees and a distrust of the deviant” (43) [25]. Tennessee Williams urged people to see the value in themselves and not shy away from what is abnormal or out of line, but rather face it and accept it in order to see how this changes the individual perspective of themselves in relation to the world around them. Audience members almost always left a Williams play needing to process everything that happened. While the dialogue does not always make what is said crystal clear, he was putting forth a cry for social change, which is why much of his work centered around society and the impact on, or rather damage it inflict upon, the individual [26]. This is important for audiences to experience because oftentimes plays focus on the bigger picture, but human reaction becomes the focal point for Williams.