| |
Two on a Party and Tennessee Williams
By John Fisher
Director, Two on A Party; Artistic Director, Theatre Rhinoceros, San Francisco
The author of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams is arguably America’s greatest playwright. A master of stage action and poetic language, Williams dominated the American theatre from the late 1940s to his death in the early 1980s. His characters confronted audiences with their sexuality, their relentless desires, their mendacity, cruelty and great tenderness. Williams felt he was holding a mirror up to us, showing us the seamiest sides of our nature and the absurdity of our dreams even as he embraced our unabiding and touching need for love. In a series of landmark premieres, Williams worked with all the greats of the mid-century stage: directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, actors Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Jean Stapleton, Paul Newman to name a few.
It, therefore, might come as a surprise to audiences of this evening’s presentation that Williams aspired to be a novelist. On reflection, it makes sense. Williams was always fascinated by sexual darkness. Obviously, there were limits to what he could put onstage in the 50s, his years of pre-eminence. In the era of McCarthy and the witch-hunts, when deviants of both political and sexual stripe were blacklisted, there were strict limits on subject matter. Thus mainstream writers like Williams had to be very careful. Homosexuality is alluded to in Streetcar (Mitch is described as a “woof,” Blanche’s young husband was a homosexual who killed himself) but it is never directly portrayed. Promiscuous sex is always a part of Williams’ oeuvre, but it is something that happens offstage, only referred to, not depicted. And its participants were always punished; they suffered for their deviance. Williams felt the frustrations of having something to say as a playwright, but having to say it in the form of popular entertainment. And the fifties was certainly not the time for social bombast onstage. In short stories and novels Williams could express himself directly. A weird logic underscores the government’s ignoring Williams’ prose writing: no one really reads so it doesn’t really matter.
The short story “Two on a Party” is a frank, unsentimental portrayal of cruising. It depicts a side of McCarthy Era America not often seen in fiction. In the sixties and seventies the writing of John Rechy, Larry Kramer and others would present homosexuality graphically. But in 1951, the year of “Two on a Party’s” publication, it was bold of Williams indeed. Cora and Billy are what we would now call “sex tourists.” Starting in New York, they embark on a cross-country journey of libidinal conquest. The significance of the story resides not just in its frankness but also in its normality. Williams does not judge these characters, nor does he romanticize them. They have faults and prejudices, some of which will amuse or offend contemporary audiences. They also suffer for their lifestyle, but significantly, they do not suffer for their sexual choices. Williams was interested in the complexity of life, not its moralistic consequences. He believed absolutely in the cruelty of life, not in the cruelty of a remote God. “Two on a Party” is both wonderfully and brutally down to earth.
Sadly, Williams did not thrive as a writer of prose. The totality of his prose fiction fills one volume of collected stories and two novellas. “Two on a Party” is one of his longer short stories and one of the most successful. It breathes with desire, with the kind of desire that’s only found in back rooms and glory holes. It also glows with love, a love between people who are two of a kind, if not sexually compatible. And it harkens to a manner of writing which might have been had Williams lived in a different era. Of course we should be grateful for the masterpieces of the stage that Williams did leave us: Menagerie, Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, the list could fill a page. And sometimes repression makes for great writing; the subtext in Williams’ drama makes his dialogue sizzle. Repression can make a writer work creatively through suggestion, subterfuge. In “Two on a Party” the subtext surges to the surface and then bursts forth like a geyser. For those of us raised on the glorious underwriting of Williams’ plays, this gush is a refreshing blast of overwriting, surtext freed from subtext.
- originally co-developed and co-produced with Theater Rhinoceros
|
