When Autobiography Isn't
by Lenora Inez Brown, Production Dramaturg

Tennesee Williams, the Man and the Artist
by Jack Taburri, Reasearch Assistant

Returning to Williams' Original
by Marin Kirby Executive Assistant

Tennesee Williams, the Man and the Artist
by Jack Tamburri, Research Assistant

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, the playwright and poet whose epic, dreamlike dramas freed the American theater from the stifling grip of realism, was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 to Edwina and Cornelius Williams of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Tom’s sister Rose had been born two years earlier. In 1918 the family moved out of the Episcopalian rectory where Edwina’s father was minister and followed Cornelius to St. Louis where he had attained a managerial position in a shoe warehouse. It was in St. Louis that Tom first acquired the appellation “Tennessee,” so named by his schoolmates for his thick Southern accent.

Tom’s childhood was spent primarily in Rose’s company. The two were close friends, and would remain so into adulthood despite Rose’s declining emotional stability. Tom was a writer from an early age. His first paid work was a third place prize and five dollars for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” written for the magazine Smart Set at age 16. In 1929 he enrolled at the University of Missouri, but withdrew after his junior year and went to work in the same shoe warehouse as his father. In April 1935 he had an emotional breakdown and spent the next few months with his grandparents in Memphis. It was at this time that he first began to acknowledge his own homosexuality— Williams would become a fixture of the gay subcultures of New Orleans, New York, and the many other cities in which he lived as an adult; his work would continually confront issues of guilt, desire, and the outsider perspective gained from sexual difference.

Williams went back to college and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. In 1937, while he was at school, Rose received—at the recommendation of her doctors and with her mother’s permission—a pre-frontal lobotomy which drastically altered her personality and caused her to spend the rest of her life either inhospitals or with constant caregivers. Tom was unaware of the surgery until his mother wrote to him after the fact.

Though he had written a number of plays that had received performances in St. Louis and elsewhere prior to 1944, that year became the turning point of Tennessee’s career—it was the year The Glass Menagerie debuted in Chicago. The short story upon which it was based (called Portrait of a Girl in Glass) introduced Laura, the glass-collecting introvert whose life is spent “at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move.” The central action of Portrait, the story of Laura’s first date with a man her brother brings home from work, is intact in both the screenplay version (The Gentleman Caller) and Menagerie. But it is the tone of the short story and its emphasis on memory that, when moved to the stage, made the play more than just the tale of a sad girl. The narrator, speaking from some indeterminate future place, spins a story of regret and abandonment that must have mirrored the guilt Williams felt over his own sister’s situation.

Menagerie was full of techniques and language Tennessee had learned from the cinema. He was an avid moviegoer and his attempts to capture the experience of being transported by film translated to the stage in Menagerie’s fluid episodes. In the opening stage direction, Williams emphasizes his commitment to distancing the work from common techniques of realism: “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.” This exploration of the theater’s capacity to focus on emotional resonances rather than historical verisimilitude would find its way into most of Williams’s plays in one form or another. With Menagerie’s opening monologue, in which Tom describes himself as a poet with “a poet’s weakness for symbols,” Tennessee granted himself permission to be explicitly theatrical and to unapologetically plumb the depths of imagination for his stage pictures and devices.

Williams’s career encompassed more than 25 full-length plays, as well as many shorter ones, two novels, a book of verse, sixty short stories, and an original screenplay. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire and again in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. After the death of his longtime partner Frank Merlo in 1961, Williams entered a period of extreme depression and chemical dependence. In his memoirs he referred to the 1960s as his “stoned age.” Though none of his later plays received the acclaim granted to Menagerie or Streetcar, bold experimental visions like Camino Real continue to engage artists and audiences to this day.

In spite of his tumultuous personal life and a history of alcoholism and addiction, Tennessee maintained a strict working schedule, rising early every morning and spending at least the first half of the day writing under the influence of black coffee. In 1983, after a night of heavy drinking, Williams died in a New York City hotel room, choking on the cap from a bottle of phenobarbital. When he wrote his memoirs in 1972, Williams described his first youthful encounter with the stage: “Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it’s the only thing that’s saved my life.”

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