The 'Self-Invention' Of Tennessee Williams

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

In reading the letters of Tennessee Williams aloud for the stage, actor Richard Thomas says he's sketching "a story of self-invention" about a man who simply had to live his life at "a full-tilt boogie."

Thomas returns to the Kennedy Center to perform "Blanche and Beyond" (Sept. 24-26) as part of its season-opening Prelude festival. The show is a sequel to "A Distant Country Called Youth," which he performed in 2004 as part of the center's Tennessee Williams Explored celebration.

Each theater pieces was culled by adaptor-director Steve Lawson from one of two volumes of Williams's letters edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. In "A Distant Country," the young Thomas Lanier Williams is struggling to break into the rarefied realms of poetry and theater. It ends with the success in 1945 of "The Glass Menagerie" and intimations of "A Streetcar Named Desire."

"Blanche and Beyond" picks it up there and follows Williams to 1957 and his writing and debuts of "Streetcar," "Summer and Smoke," "The Rose Tattoo," "Camino Real" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." We learn what he thought of actors Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Anna Magnani, and we learn about his great trust for director Elia Kazan. It's an old-time showbiz-name-dropper's paradise. Williams is also in anguish over his mentally ill sister Rose, disapproving mother, alcoholic father and beloved but aging grandfather. He writes of his own growing reliance on drink and drugs.

"So many of the things that, in the first part, are cues for laughter and fun and a sense of freedom and individuation and that kind of outrageousness and adventure of life, begin to turn -- sort of go toxic," Thomas says. "So that while he's in the midst of some of his most fantastic work, creatively, he's beginning to slip as a person."

The second piece is about "the Tennessee of international fame," Lawson says, who "was arguably, with the possible exception of O'Neill, the greatest living American playwright." The judgment of critics and audiences could be harsh, he notes: "God forbid when you do something big, that you do something small" to follow it.

"A Distant Country" premiered in a one-night-only show at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2001 with Robert Sean Leonard, and several actors have performed it since. "Blanche and Beyond," which premiered in 2005, has belonged only to Thomas thus far.

The actor marvels at Williams's lack of rage as life grew tougher. "There's anger and frustration about inequities in the business, and there's sadness about his sister ... and the whole thing about living a rather coded, hidden life . . . but there's an amazing well of good humor and graciousness in [the letters]," he says, "so that the wickedness becomes fun. But it's graphic" -- Williams, who was gay, writes in vivid detail of his love life.

Audiences have reacted differently in different locales, Lawson says. In New Orleans, he remembers, "they were in hysterics at anything sexual. . . . In Ireland, they sat respectfully through the sex, then roared with laughter at anything about drinking."

Lawson, now director of the Williamstown Film Festival, used to be with the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In 1979, he organized a tribute to Williams's work, with the playwright in residence. After a performance of "Camino Real," Williams came onto the stage for a post-show talk "exactly as you would wish, with the Panama hat," Lawson remembers.

The playwright then delighted actors and audience: "He said, 'Ooooh, when mah own words scare me, ah know it's beautifully done!' "