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(More customer reviews)Tennessee Williams is so well-known for other plays like "The Glass Menagerie" and "Streetcar Named Desire" that one like me not terribly familiar with him, except via his reputation for overwrought Southern Gothic drama, approaches this collection of Williams' lesser-known plays from his major period with trepidation.
"Four Plays" is pretty Gothic, and sometimes overwrought, but it makes for a pretty immersive read, not to mention a tough-love rollercoaster for the human condition.
Up first is "Summer And Smoke" (1948), a tale of a raucous young medical student and the girl next door who has pined for him since childhood. Right away you get that you are in the hands of an unusual playwright in Williams, who gives very detailed instructions on dressing the set, including which constellations should be projected on the overhead cyclorama during evening scenes and what colors the actors should wear.
Williams is just as controlling with his characterizations. Alma is a sincere, spiritually-inclined woman who tries to bring order to her household, hostage to a crazy mama who spitefully embarrasses Alma and her minister father. John also teases Alma, with talk of sex, yet a curious qualm holds him back from the ravishment he knows could be his at his pleasure: "Many's the time I've looked across at the Rectory and wondered if it would be worth trying, you and me..." That yard's worth of distance is the substance and the tragedy of this curious, arresting play.
The other three plays develop similar dialogues between intimacy and loss. Nowhere in this book does that come out more hot and heavy than "Orpheus Descending" (1957), a play which Williams in an introduction explains was a decades-long labor of love which he never gave up on. In a small southern town, gossip travels quickly, especially when a mysterious man takes a job at a general store owned by a dying man and his wife, who suspects her husband had something to do with the long-ago murder of her father. It all boils up rather quickly and unconvincingly, even for Williams where a certain suspension of disbelief is helpful. Still, you keep reading.
"Suddenly Last Summer" (1958) is the most recognized title, though more for me from the Motels' hit song in 1983. It's a more subtle but just as ripping dramatic piece as "Orpheus". A batty rich widow tries to have her niece lobotomized to destroy her memory of how the widow's son died in Mexico. "My son, Sebastian, was chaste," she declares. "I was the only one in his life who satisfied the demands he made of people."
Sebastian wasn't exactly Ivory Snow-pure, of course, and in the widow's many daiquiri-fueled discursions there's both poignancy and hilarity. Definitely surreal, "Suddenly Last Summer" probably plays better on the page than the stage, as the major plot comes entirely in eyewitness narrative.
"Period Of Adjustment" (1960), the final and last-written of these plays, is my favorite in the crowd, a Christmas tale of domestic dysfunction that plays out as a subdued comedy of manners. A newlywed couple shows up at the door of the groom's Air Force buddy. The honeymoon, it turns out, was over before it started.
Williams sets up a rich satire of middle-class life. The groom fantasizes about raising Texas longhorn cattle, not for beef, but for herding on television. His pal is on the outs with his own wife for a variety of reasons, including the fact he fears she is raising their son to be a sissy by buying him dolls. Williams plays against his M.O. by showcasing a talent for lower-register exposition, realistic dialogue instead of soliloquy, and gentle, effective comedy throughout.
There may not really be a Williams M.O. Sure, there's neurotic women and beefy satyr-like men on display here, but reading these four plays reveals a master of multiple facets, too virtuosic for easy stereotyping. Flawed as they may be, "Four Plays" presents a pretty strong argument for people like me to take Tennessee more seriously.
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Four Plays: Summer and Smoke; Orpheus Descending; Suddenly Last Summer; Period of Adjustment (Signet classics)
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