The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, by Tennessee Williams
New Directions, 2011

2011 marked the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth in Columbus, Mississippi, and before letting last year shrink further in the rearview mirror, we’d do well to remember this most poetic of American playwrights. The theater world celebrated his anniversary in style, with a variety of festivals dotting stages nationwide and readers indulging in the Library of America’s republished two-volume Williams set. For fans already well-versed in his work, New Directions Publishing offered up a particular treat: the release of The Magic Tower and Other One Act Plays, a collection of fifteen short plays that includes seven previously unpublished texts. Culled from various archives, these new “fantasies” (as Williams called his one-acts) span the arc of his long career, affording readers a real-time view of his transformation from young neophyte finding his voice to master craftsman at the height of his powers. With minor exceptions, they serve renewed helpings of what devotees have always relished in him: linguistic lyricism, beautifully desperate characters, and the life-and-death struggle between reality and imagination.

The germ of this last theme — which obsessed Williams — embeds itself in Curtains for the Gentleman, the earliest of the new baker’s half-dozen plays. More a scene than a true one-act, it was written in early 1936 and reflects the influence that Hollywood’s plethora of mobster movies had on the youthful Williams (as Thomas Keith observes in the collection’s helpful notes). Even in its short duration, it displays several conventions of the gangster genre: a gritty urban setting (in this case a street outside a restaurant on a bitterly cold winter’s night); a tough, arrogant hero; his seductive girl; and the threat of violence. The gentleman of the title is George, and he wears that aristocratic moniker in name only: he’s really a professional hurter of people. The euphemistic curtains are for him, and their impending threat drives the scene’s action. George’s boss, the Patch, has arranged a meeting on the corner, but as time wears on and the Patch doesn’t show, the air tastes of danger.

Unwitting but increasingly nervous, George ignores the pleas of his girl, Flossie, to save his neck and skip town with her. But as the Patch’s delay grows more and more suspect, suddenly he entertains the idea. He pitches Florida to her, and the pair imagines the excursion, their dialogue pitter-pattering about the boardwalk, the ocean, and dancing under the stars. “The sun warm as summer,” he tantalizes her. “We’ll lie on the beach, Honey and feel the sun on our backs warm as summer. We’ll rent the bridal suite, that’s what will do.” At this, the dame softens in delight, and he struts with bravado: “I’m a gentleman, see. A real gent. I was born that way. I can’t help it. I was born to be a gentleman.” Such moments — of threatened people carving out a beautiful space in a harsh world — became Williams’ hallmark.

That capacity for human freedom animates The Magic Tower, which of all the new plays contains the fullest expression of Williams’s poetic realism. It’s a real gem. Also penned in 1936, it concerns one night in the life of Jim, a wet behind the ears painter, and Linda, his older lover, who’s left her career in vaudeville to shack up with him in a dilapidated Greenwich loft. In true Bohemian form, these artists are starving — they’ve nothing but a half-loaf of stale bread for dinner, a regular occurrence, it seems. Jim resorts to pilfering food from their crone of a landlady downstairs, which, along with their overdue rent, leaves old Mrs. O’Fallon nonplussed. “How ghastly poor we are!” Jim exclaims. “It should be very easy for us to get into the Kingdom of Heaven!” Linda plays on the biblical allusion: “I think we’re already there.” Comforting as that metaphysical fact may be, it yields them little in the way of daily bread, and Jim looks for some concrete salvation. A European art dealer has just decamped to the city, and Jim stakes all hope on the man liking his pieces.

But to secure such patronage, Jim must leave the flat, a fact that Williams uses to problematize the action. Linda lives for him, investing her soul in the man. His presence in the apartment turns it, for her, into a “magic tower,” an emotional bulwark against the brittle reality around them. “In this little room,” she confesses, “I’ve been completely happy for the first and only time in my life!” Wounded by the seedy, frenetic backstage scene, she is alienated from their urban landscape, a gesture on Williams’s part to the great existentialist motif. Jim’s artistic sensibilities — he paints beautiful pictures, after all — allows her escape, and she catches him up in her fantastical reimagining of their dingy surroundings. “I like to think of our—our magic tower as being surrounded by wonderful green forests,” she muses. “There is something magical about it,” he wonders. “It’s like living in a state of enchantment, isn’t it Linda?” When they’re together, life’s a fairy tale, with he the knight and she the lady.

But this Valhalla’s under siege, from both external demands and internal conflicts. For while the disillusioned Linda finds it a refuge, to the sheltered Jim it feels increasingly like a prison. “Do you know, I’ve never been out of the city?” he asks. “I’d give anything to have been the places you’ve been.” Wiser to the world’s ways, she attempts to disabuse him of any illusions wider reality promises. For her, the only illusions are the ones they make in their minds. This exercise of aesthetic impulse isn’t a flight of fancy to Linda; the fantasy they create isn’t “make-believe,” she insists, but “absolutely real.” But Jim’s essential to that reality, and the prospect of his departure — however momentarily — unnerves her. “When you go out — when you go out of this room for just a moment — something happens,” she confides in him. “The spell is broken.” Thus in Linda we see a forerunner of the classic Williams woman: emotional delicacy, refined culture, and checkered past.

It’s that past she fears, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. But try as she might to avoid it, the situation is wired for its calamitous return — she and Jim have no money. Moreover, they stand at different places in life. The precise quality she desires in him — his youthful possibility — puts them at odds. If he were older, the practical aspects of their relationship might work out. As it stands now, they are moving in opposite directions, for all their emotional compatability. The fates seem against her. A tragic flaw exists, not in her or any character, but in the circumstances themselves (anyone who’s fallen in love across an age gap gets this idea). And her awareness of it, a kind of pre-emptive anagnorisis, heightens the play’s poignancy. Williams excels at creating characters with a foreboding intuition of coming suffering. Unlike in Greek tragedy, they sense its approach just as much as the audience, which endears them to us all the more.

Here, the intuition arrives soon after Jim steps out, in the form of Mitch and Babe, a vaudeville hoofer and chorus girl, respectively. Old pals of Linda’s from her old life, they’ve come to corral her back into show business and work every angle to do it. When they plant the idea that she could stifle Jim’s career and turn him against her, they play on her worst fear. “He’ll look at you,” Babe tosses out, “and he’ll say to himself, ‘There she is! My ball and chain!” This prospect — of stark actuality pulling the dream world into a nightmare — plays itself out in all Williams’s masterpieces. Whether it destroys Linda (like Blanche), ennobles her (like Hannah Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana), or brings her to some middle position (like Alma in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale), is the question that drives The Magic Tower on its engrossing trajectory.

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Unfortunately, there is little engrossing about Me, Vashya nor Honor the Living, two political plays of 1937. Williams entered the former in a contest at Washington University, according to Keith, and he rued its fourth-place finish for years. You can sympathize with the judges upon reading it, however. Dramatists rarely do well propping up bogeymen onstage, having them spout overblown rhetoric, and asking the audience to hate them for it. Williams isn’t an exception in this case. Here the villain is Vashya, a former peasant from an unnamed Slavic country who now heads the world’s largest munitions corporation. As he plots his machinations for global war behind a large desk in his study, his wife, Lady Shontine, suffers a nervous breakdown. Vashya’s brought in a doctor to treat her, and Williams uses their interchange to showcase the military-industrial complex’s callous indifference toward human life. Dr. Frelich blasts him in cold anger. Because of Vashya, death has become the nation’s “chief preoccupation these days,” the doctor lectures. “We live with it so constantly that it naturally tends to become either a matter of complete indifference to us or else — an obsession!” The didacticism crescendos into bombast by the play’s end, when the Prime Minister arrives to confront Vashya. It falls flat, though, because it doesn’t arise from the play’s action — these characters just mouth ideological perspectives. Vashya is really a mill into which the playwright grinds his personal anxieties.

The same flaw hamstrings Honor the Living, a collection of snapshots in the life of a World War I veteran. The three brief vignettes depict his descent from happy homecoming, to life of crime, to execution — a decay Williams blames on the government’s lack of assistance to its returning soldiers. Such a screed would have high shock value even if performed today, let alone in 1937. And the fact that it would have relevance whether performed then or in 2012, serves as a reminder of America’s constant war-weariness and failed veterans’ policy. But as plays, this pair amount to leftist grandstanding. Vashya’s confrontation with his wife constitutes the one stand-out authentic moment. Her breakdown stems from hallucinations of soldiers killed by her husband’s products; they visit her and demand Vashya return with them to the grave. When she unloads this horror on him, she becomes a specter in her own right. “They come into the room and stand around the bed and they ask for HIM,” she intones. “They say it’s time for HIM to go WITH them. He SENT them there. He’s their LEADER they say, and they want him to go back there with them.” Here, Williams turns his indictment into an image that haunts — it conjures up Dylan’s “Masters of War” instantly. In the process, the dream-reality dynamic gets inverted: The dream world is a horror show, while waking life’s comfortable. It’s a deceptive, ironic comfort, though — Vashya thinks he’s the sane one, but the ghosts his wife sees speak to the true reality he denies.

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Skipping ahead several decades, the new collection includes 1973’s I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays. Keith observes that it made up part of a series of poems, stories, and one-acts that Williams eventually generated into the full-length Vieux Carré in 1977. Vieux Carré is a semi-autobiographical memory play set in a seedy 1930s New Orleans boarding house that serves as a crossroads for a small group of tenants seeking refuge from life’s battle scars. Williams injects himself into the play as the anonymous young Writer, who narrates and comments on the characters at various points, leading the audience on a tour of his memory bank. All the characters struggle — he to come of age and embrace his vocation and homosexuality, the others to walk under the baggage of later life. An older gay painter, Nightingale, is disintegrating from tuberculosis. The harpy of a landlady, Mrs. Wire, lets bittersweet memories of lost happiness suck all compassion and mercy out of her. And the once-elegant Jane — yet another vulnerable, broken Williams woman — is steeped in self-recrimination over her lover, Tye, a doped-up strip show barker with whom she’s trapped in a sexually dependent relationship.

On the face of it, these character devices are melodramatic, but Williams fills the play with such emotional tenderness that it works. He loves these fragmented people at the margins of society — as is clear from the Writer’s interactions with them — and he dignifies them with trademark lyricism. When Jane reveals to Tye that she’s dying of a blood condition, she describes the alienation she knows he now feels from her. She now “withdraws into another dimension,” she declares,

…Is less aware of you than of sky that’s visible to her from her bed under the skylight—at night, these—flimsy white clouds, they move they drift over the roofs of the Vieux Carré so close that if you have fever you feel as if you could touch them, and bits would come off on your fingers, soft as—cotton candy.

I Never Get Dressed focuses on this one, long scene between Jane and Tye, and Williams makes it pulpier than its longer version. Jane, who clings to the last trappings of her aristocratic manners in Vieux Carre, is trashier here and Williams puts in a brawl between Tye and a Brazilian who wants to pimp her out. But he also crafts the act as a play within a play, which is the most interesting part of I Never Get Dressed. Jane and Tye are two characters themselves being played by actors who rehearse the scene as the director and playwright observe. Williams uses this device to have some fun and get revenge on all the egotistical actors and clueless directors he must have suffered. His characters are famous for talking in speech patterns and diction no one in real life uses. Such heightened style is the source of aesthetic pleasure in his plays, but apparently not everyone he worked with got it. The actors in this one-act constantly break character to complain about the lines they’re to deliver, and the director empathizes with them over his colleague’s objections. When the exasperated actress playing Jane objects yet again to a piece of dialogue — “Who talks like that?” — the playwright (obviously Williams) holds fast: “Nobody I know but me. Once I said, ‘Give me your tongue in my mouth like holy bread at communion.’ Proceed from the skin bit, please.”

The quick, off-handed delivery of these lines left me in stitches. But when Williams ditches the ironic detachment of I Never Get Dressed in favor of Vieux Carré’s full, genuine embrace of Jane, Tye, and the rest, the results stick with you longer. “A play’s not stopped by a curtain,” the playwright explains as he coaches the actors in the short piece, “if it’s a true thing it continues after the curtain the way life does after sleep. It comes out of the night stop and goes into the next day. And maybe it goes on in the minds and hearts of the audience after[.]” Williams doesn’t need anyone to say this in Vieux Carré because he makes the play itself a waking dream, infusing it with jazz, blues, and stage images that turn it into a living, textured watercolor.

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The final fresh piece in the batch, Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, is another one-act prototype of a full-length play, in this case the comedy A House Not Meant to Stand. Williams wrote the short version over the course of 1980 for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Its longer sibling premiered there the following year, a biting, outrageous send-up of contemporary domestic life. Black comedy is notoriously difficult for American audiences, and Williams pulls out all the stops. The plot follows Cornelius McCorkle — an arthritic, malady-ridden crank — and his overweight wife, Bella, as they return to their disheveled suburban home from the burial of their adult son, Chips. Their arrival surprises Charlie, their other grown boy, who’s upstairs having sex with his girlfriend, Stacey, and attracts the visit of their neighbor, Emerson Sykes. The latter unwittingly enters into a family feud of uproarious proportions. With a sardonic bigotry that would make Archie Bunker proud, Cornelius spews a constant stream of self-pitying derision on his family. Charlie’s chronic unemployment, Bella’s weight and spacey behavior, the just-buried Chips’s homosexuality — it’s all fair game for him. “So you lost another job, huh?” he interrogates his son, once Charlie stumbles downstairs. Fed up with his dad’s intolerance, he pushes back: “That job was misrepresented to me completely.” Cornelius responds in kind: “You mean you found out it involved some work?” Throughout his harangue, Bella wanders in and out, scrounging up foodstuffs and lost in an imaginary conversation with the dead Chips. Cornelius confides in Charlie that he’s planning to have her committed, but before he can object, Stacey finally appears. An Evangelical Christian, she takes pity on Bella, and to Cornelius’s horror starts uncontrollably praying in tongues. The scene descends into a hilarious cacophony of wrestling, shouting, and accusation.

Williams added some darker elements to A House Not Meant to Stand — Cornelius tries to strong-arm his wife into giving him her family fortune, Emerson makes a lecherous come-on to Stacey, and Bella has full-blown hallucinations of her lost children. These make for a multi-toned work that pulls the rug out from under you just as you’re laughing at the zaniness. As a comment on society’s obsession with sex, materialism, and the ego-self, it turns the family play on its head. The American dream of family, industry, and suburban comfort has become an empty shell of pathetic, shallow consumers. The mood at the end is pretty sobering. Somehow, I like Some Problems even better without those tragicomic parts. The compressed material allows the jokes to flow faster, and by not having his characters editorialize directly to the audience about life, Williams lets their pitiable, horrifying behavior speak for itself. The ironic detachment makes the play both more fun and more disturbing.

A House Not Meant to Stand was Williams’s final play. That it ends with such a bitter view of cheapened American life suggests that in the battle between the sublime and the tawdry, Williams saw the victor’s spoils going to the latter. Too many Stanley Kowalskis in the world and too few Blanches. At the end, morbid humor was the only tonic and response he could muster. In his great plays, and the best moments of these one-acts, though, he places hope in the human potential to create beauty through impressionistic language. He peoples his plays with men and women who translate themselves into richer landscapes with nothing more than words. Their poetry paints the tapestry in their mind, bringing it to life. “When two people make their own world there is something rather magical about it,” Linda muses to Jim in The Magic Tower. Tennessee Williams made those worlds himself, and when we discover their magic — even a century after his birth — it offers deliverance and delight.

 

Nick Coccoma is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. He studied Theater at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.


 
 
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