Not Just About Nightingales
In a quartet of early plays, the young Williams played at politics and found a style
By Lonnie Firestone
"If only I could always love my work—then I would be a great artist." So said Tennessee Williams in 1936, the year he wrote his first full-length play. More than a decade before he gave the world Blanche DuBois, before he thought to sign his plays with the pseudonym "Tennessee," Tom Williams was a young man living in St. Louis, Mo., trying to get his work produced. It was there that he first attracted the attention of Willard Holland, the respected director of a theatre company known as the Mummers. Though Williams didn't know it at the time, the Mummers would produce some of his earliest plays and set his career in motion.
After three years of poor grades at the University of Missouri, Williams was pulled out of school by his father and given a job at the International Shoe Company. But he kept up his studies with classes at St. Louis's Washington University—financed by his grandparents—and kept looking for opportunities to showcase his plays and short stories. Williams was by turns hopeful and despondent, with no assurance that his writing would amount to anything.
It was the mid-1930s, and political subjects dominated the theatre in America. In the uneasy interim between the Great Depression and World War II, influential companies like the Group Theatre tackled political content, from the pangs of the working class to the corruption of government. This wasn't Williams's predisposition, as his plays would demonstrate in time, which may account in part for his uncertainty about his writing future.
The Mummers first approached Williams after his short play The Magic Tower won a local playwriting competition. Holland was looking for an anti-militaristic play to precede an upcoming performance of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead, and he presented Williams with his first commission. That Williams had failed his Reserve Officers' Training Corps courses at the University of Missouri was enough to convince Holland that the young writer's sympathies were properly aligned (though, in fact, Williams failed more out of disinterest than principle). Still, he clearly recognized an opportunity and seized it, turning in the short curtain-raiser Headlines.
The Williams-Holland collaboration would prove formative. While the two were not close friends, there was a great amount of mutual admiration. Williams once wrote, "Everything [Willard] touched, he charged with electricity."
And Holland in turn gave Williams creative freedom with his next piece, Candles to the Sun, a play about coal miners in Alabama. A politically invested work based on real events, Candles portrays a group of miners who go on strike to protest unfair labor conditions. The managers of the mines are cast as adversaries: greedy individuals whose appetite for wealth outweighs concern for the safety of their workers. One assertive miner, not coincidentally named Red, emerges as their leader, and the miners move forward with the strike, demanding better working conditions.
The premiere production, in March of 1937, was highly acclaimed. Colvin McPherson, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, raved about a "writer of unusual promise," adding that the play "dramatizes the yearning of the laboring population for something better."
Reading Candles with the knowledge of Williams's later work, it's clear how unpolished it is. The characters are roughly sketched, and the play's portrayal of good versus evil allows the narrative to slip into melodrama; it may be the only one of Williams's plays that contains a call for a specific program of political action.
The experience of creating the miners' world on stage gave Williams an education that would come in handy on many of his later plays. A Streetcar Named Desire, for example, couldn't strictly be called a political play, but the story of Stanley, Stella, Blanche and Mitch is deeply colored by an awareness of New Orleans society and the economic situations of his characters.
Encouraged by the positive reviews for Candles to the Sun, Williams soon completed another play for the Mummers, Fugitive Kind, which the company produced in December. Though less overtly political, this play continued his focus on society's downtrodden—in this case, the denizens of a riverfront flophouse in Mississippi. This motley collection of misfits living in close quarters anticipates the dramatic set-up of Streetcar and Vieux Carré, among other works. In Fugitive Kind, an unlikely romance develops between the flophouse keeper's daughter and a gangster residing there. And while the gangster is portrayed as a dangerous man, Williams maintains empathy for him and a disdain for the police who are after him.
And Fugitive Kind shows the first glimmers of Williams's poetic writing style. The flophouse keeper's son, a Tom Wingfield sort of fellow, envisions a world on the brink of something new and remarks:
Look, Glory. The snow's still falling. I guess that God's still asleep. But in the morning maybe he'll wake up and see disaster!...or if he never wakes up—then we can play God, too, and face them out with courage and our own knowledge of right.
The language is quintessentially Williams, with an infusion of Steinbeck. (This play, incidentally, has no discernible connection to the 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, whose screenplay Williams co-wrote as an adaptation of his 1957 play Orpheus Descending—itself a reworking of an earlier play called Battle of Angels.)
Also in 1937, Williams enrolled in the University of Iowa to complete college, where he wrote Spring Storm for a playwriting course. This play about youthful relationships was also his most sexually explicit work to date, and that seems to be one reason it wasn't staged at the time; even his playwriting professor at the time was wary of its onstage nudity. It has been produced fitfully since (London's National Theatre put it on to some acclaim in the spring of 2010).
But Spring Storm occupies a pivotal place in Williams's work, as it marked the beginning of Williams's work about sexuality, particularly the ways that it complicates relationships and self-perception. Throughout these years—and indeed throughout most of his life—Williams grappled with depression tied to family hardships, such as his sister's schizophrenia, and personal struggles with his own homosexuality. Spring Storm is the first play of his to dramatize sexual ambiguity, the kind he would later most memorably explore in the tormented character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
If Williams was upset that Spring Storm didn't make it to the stage, he didn't show it. He was already on to his next work, in which he returned to overtly sociopolitical subject matter, on an even grander scale and for the last time. Williams was motivated to write the searing drama Not About Nightingales after learning about a prison atrocity in Pennsylvania in which four inmates were killed in a steaming hot cell known as "Klondike." The play harnesses Williams's outrage to a brutal portrayal of America's prison system that is arguably the most political piece he would ever write.
About the script, Williams confessed that he had "never written anything to compare with this in terms of violence and horror." What makes it work is that it's the first play in which he combined the poetic and the vulgar in a signature way that would recur throughout his career. In coming years, Williams would continually set his plays in seedy environments while giving his characters lyrical dialogue. It's a style that would lend multi-dimensionality to his plays, grounding and elevating them simultaneously.
When the Mummers proved unable to produce Nightingales, Williams turned his focus to New York and submitted the play, along with four one-acts, to the Group Theatre's writing contest. He was in fact too old to be eligible, so he disguised himself by entering a false birth date and signing his work "Tennessee Williams," a reference to his Southern drawl. He got a $100 prize (from no other than Elia Kazan, who would later prove a crucial collaborator) but not a production. (The play's Broadway production wouldn't come, in fact, until Trevor Nunn's celebrated revival 60 years later, an import from the National Theatre by way of Houston's Alley Theatre.) Still, Williams's prize drew the attention of Audrey Wood, an important theatre agent, who would smooth Williams's path to Broadway and help land him an even larger prize en route: a Rockefeller grant totaling $1,000.
By 1939, political theatre was declining even as the political climate around the world intensified. Williams's work took a turn as well, as his focus began to shift inward toward more personal subjects. He continued to write about individuals in desperate circumstances, though now from a viewpoint more psychological than sociological. Indeed, in that year he declared that his next play would be "a picture of my own heart...wild as I am wild, tender as I am tender, mad as I am mad, passionate as I am passionate."
Five years later he would write The Glass Menagerie.
Lonnie Firestone is a writer based in Brooklyn. She blogs about theatre at www.everybodyrise.net.
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