The Monsters Who Made Tennessee Great

The American playwright David Mamet says intelligent, commonsense things about theatre but sometimes he is wrong:

The greatest performances are seldom noticed. Why? Because they do not draw attention to themselves, and do not seek to—like any real heroism, they are simple and unassuming, and seem to be a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actor.

When we suddenly crash into great acting that is “simple and unassuming” the effect on the audience is startling for we know that though the performance may outwardly seem “natural and inevitable” we are also hearing a silent voice commanding us, “Look at me, look at me”—and we do.

In this year’s Helpmann Awards Hugo Weaving won the Best Male Actor for his role in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and last year the award for Best Female Actor went to Cate Blanchett for Jean Genet’s The Maids. Both plays were only one-act performances. Weaving’s face was covered in white makeup, he was seated in a wheeled chair, both legs strapped together beneath the costume. In the theatre from quite close to a long way back his face was kabuki Beckett. Blanchett’s director either hid her behind the furniture or revealed the action, when offstage having her head plunged into a handy bidet, via video camera close-ups projected onto a screen—a technological treat that sucked life out of the live performance. If any audience members were awestruck watching Weaving and Blanchett it was their celebrity, not their acting, which impressed. The Helpmanns rewarded the stars for being successful at the movies, not for what we saw onstage.

Tennessee Williams’s early plays were made famous by great actors. Before he uploaded the fatal dose of Seconal in 1983 he had been a fashionable playwright and an unfashionable one. A biographer, who unfortunately never got around to telling the whole story, described him as “a man who couldn’t handle his success”. A sprinkling of his insecurities may have come from knowing that his fame had been built on strange foundations: a drunk made him famous, an egomaniac (two if you count the director) kept him there.

The Glass Menagerie was his first popular hit when he was thirty-four. It is the story of his own family. The poor surroundings, a dominating, loving mother, lost in her dream past of southern elegance, “gentlemen callers”, and burning desires for her crippled daughter and poet son, and an absent father—“a telephone man who fell in love with long distances”. Within an impressionistic setting it was a poetic and conventional play which became extraordinary because of Laurette Taylor.

The sixty-year-old actress had not been on stage for five years:

I couldn’t find a play for a time … It was either acting old mountaineer crones who spit tobacco juice in their son’s eye—either that or Ibsen. I couldn’t chew tobacco, and I wouldn’t be found dead in A Doll’s House, so I did nothing, till all at once Eddie Dowling [the director] sent me the script … It fascinated me.

Before her long sabbatical from the theatre she had been a highly praised and popular performer. Her second husband, the British playwright J. Hartley Manners, had written the very successful Peg O’ My Heart for her and she had toured it widely. A weekend spent at home with her family in the 1920s gave Noel Coward the material for Hay Fever—when it was staged their friendship came to an abrupt end.

Jed Harris, the outstanding fedora and camelhair overcoat Broadway producer and director of the 1920s and 1930s, described being overawed by her brilliance in a play by James Barrie. Planning to visit her backstage, he first left the theatre to calm the emotions he was feeling. The house manager found him in the street and began apologising. He asked if Harris had noticed that Taylor had spent the performance sitting down. Harris said he was only aware “that tonight she was probably the greatest actress in the world”. The house manager told him Taylor had been so drunk they had considered cancelling the performance: “That’s why we had to put her in a chair.” After her husband’s death in 1928 her life had deteriorated into chronic alcoholism. At the time she was cast as Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie she had a reputation for closing plays, not opening them.

Troubles began at the first reading and Tennessee Williams went to see the director to complain of her accent: “Oh, Mr Dowling, you’ve got to get rid of that woman who’s doin’ a Negress. My mother ain’t a Negress. My mother’s a lady.” Taylor always claimed that her southern drawl was copied from Williams himself. What she did in rehearsals isn’t taught in drama schools. Sitting by the stage she would more or less say the text and indicate the actions she would take and movements she would make across the stage by waving her hands in the general direction of where these would happen, but not actually do them. Preferring her own writing to the author’s, she subtracted his words from the script and added her own. A letter from Williams to a New York friend described a day on the front line:

Taylor was ad libbing practically every speech and the show sounded like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour. We all got drunk, and this A.M. Taylor was even worse. I finally lost my temper and when she made one of her little insertions I screamed over the footlights. “My God, what corn!” She screamed back that I was a fool and all playwrights made her sick.

After the lunch break she resumed. The performance was so touchingly good that the playwright and cast burst into tears. “So I don’t know what to think or expect.” Though she had been drinking, Williams had not yet seen her drunk—or perhaps sober. When the director finally asked how she expected to play the character her answer was, “I don’t know, really. It depends on what the rest of you actors do and how the audience behaves.”

Before New York the play opened in Chicago with some problems, and good reviews. Transferring to Broadway, on opening night the leading lady was found dead drunk and collapsed in the alleyway beside the theatre. In the ninety minutes before the curtain was due to go up she was taken inside, poured into a shower and fed strong hot coffee. The play was ten minutes late starting. Because of the interest created by the Chicago reviews the audience was packed with critics and famous first-nighters; even Garbo was there. Dowling, who was also acting as the narrator, began the play. When Laurette Taylor made her first entrance the audience applauded, and kept on applauding. She was confused and to fill in the unexpected interruption broke into dialogue from the second act. On stage then, and throughout the successful season, she was extraordinary. Young actors who would later themselves be famous came to see her play, and returned again and again. Those who recalled her acting spoke of her naturalism, as if a woman off the street had simply wandered on stage and become mesmerising. That night, and on others during the season, she played and then walked to the side of the stage. Out of sight of the audience she vomited into a bucket before returning to the lights and resuming the dialogue.

It must have been something like this. The family are seated at a table eating. Taylor rises and prepares to briefly exit to collect the dessert from the imaginary kitchenette. As always she is talking of her past: “I remember one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain [exits and vomits in the wings while Laura and Tom talk. Re-enters carrying the blanc mange] one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!—gentlemen callers!”

Stark Young’s review appears to have been written the same night and he tried to describe the brilliance:

This, even after just seeing the play, is almost impossible to convey with anything like the full, wonderful truth. Hers is naturalistic acting of the most profound, spontaneous, unbroken continuity and moving life … Only a trained theatre eye and ear can tell what is happening, and then only at times.

A cast member, closer to the flame of genius, recalled that “she played almost through a fog”. Cast and crew gathered in the wings to watch her onstage performance, and offstage vomiting. Jed Harris later said, “She brought The Glass Menagerie to life as no other actress has succeeded in doing.” After twenty-four curtain calls Taylor asked her director: “Eddie, I can’t remember anything. Does it look like a success?” It was. Two weeks after its New York opening The Glass Menagerie won the Drama Critics Circle Award and was voted the Best Play of 1945. That first season stretched out for 561 performances.

There is no recording of the performance though there is a very, very short radio extract of Taylor speaking lines from plays including The Glass Menagerie. This was one of the greatest performances in American theatre history. If Taylor had been sober that first night, and during the remainder of the play’s run, we might never have heard of a playwright named Tennessee Williams.

In Williams’s next successful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the two leading actors, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, played by different rules when they took to the stage. She was conventional elocutionary theatre, he was ego plus Actors Studio plus ego. We think the play is about Blanche DuBois. During that first season, the one that made it famous, audience members, including MGM boss Louis B. Mayer and Jean Cocteau, thought the play was about Brando’s character, Stanley Kowalski.

Across his playwriting many of Williams’s characters are bruised by life and slightly, or more, past their bloom. Their days of beauty are past, and they rebel against time. Stanley was written for a man about thirty years old. Brando was twenty-three. His sexuality, his masculinity, his sweat and torn white T-shirt rewrote the play. Director Elia Kazan’s production notes are typically concentrated, precise and decisive. What he hadn’t allowed for was Brando, who, even in rehearsals, was taking control. Concerned that the balance of the play had been destroyed, Kazan said, “I looked toward my authority, Tennessee. He was no help; he seemed enraptured by the boy. ‘The son of a bitch is riding a crush,’ I said to myself.” Brando gave the author an idealised handsome thug who had stepped out of his own life. Kazan saw Williams threatened and abused by one of his partners. What the director was creating onstage, Williams was living in the hotel room just across the hall: “That’s the way Williams was,” said Kazan. “He was attracted to trash—rough male homosexuals who were threatening him … Part of the sexuality that Williams wrote into the play is the menace of it.” On stage Brando was entirely alive, and completely unpredictable.

But finally, Blanche DuBois conquered Stanley Kowalski. Her victory came rapidly. When the New York production closed, the touring company that took over with Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn placed Blanche in the spotlight and there she has stayed. Productions typically headline the women who play Blanche, from Tallulah Bankhead to a twelve-year-old Nicole Kidman at the Phillip Street Theatre or recent productions with Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson. To find the name of the actor playing Stanley, look in the small print. The violence which attracts his wife Stella to him is too confronting for a modern audience to accept. Stanley made the play masculine and dangerous, Blanche encourages camp. In some ways the rape scene appears untruthful. Blanche wants Stanley, and their coupling seems so ordained that his line, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” could just as easily come from her. In a masculine performance that line is the key to the play. In the usual feminine performance, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”—said as she is being taken to the madhouse—is the cue for audience sniffles. It’s unlikely we will ever see another male production. The times are against masculinity and Brando’s performance was so distinctive that he has left little room for other actors to move in and make the part their own. Too much brawn, fire and torn T-shirt and the actor is put down as a Brando copy.

The onstage naturalness that locks our attention onto an actor is not accidental. We are seeing a selfish and egotistic performance which, strangely, can also bring to life the other actors on stage. Being forced to deal with uncertainty may produce a tension in their own acting which is communicated to the audience. Jessica Tandy wasn’t wrong when she called Brando “an impossible, psychopathic bastard”. Yet Elia Kazan said there were also days when she admired him.

David Mamet also said, “Most plays are better read than performed.” Tennessee Williams is a wonderfully readable playwright. Many of his stage directions and scene setting descriptions are as interesting as the dialogue. An attractive two-volume boxed set of his plays—The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams, published in a slipcase by the Library of America—gives a generous serving of his work from 1937 to 1980. Williams himself preferred seeing to reading: “The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed.” Laurette Taylor built The Glass Menagerie; Marlon Brando’s Stanley built A Streetcar Named Desire, but Blanche got the keys and doesn’t look like moving out.