The Center Cannot Hold: Tennessee Williams’ Dark Comedy of Chaos Thomas Keith Of all Tennessee Williams’ full-length plays only five, maybe six, are considered to be comedies: The Rose Tattoo, Period of Adjustment, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A House Not Meant to Stand, and, maybe, just maybe, Kingdom of Earth. Of these, The Rose Tattoo is the only one commonly understood to be a romantic comedy, and two others the author qualified with subtitles—Period of Adjustment, or High Point Over a Cavern, A Serious Comedy, and A House Not Meant to Stand, A Gothic Comedy. When Williams put two unlikely one-acts—the disturbing The Mutilated and the equally bleak but especially hilarious, The Gna¨diges Fra¨ulein—together in 1966 for a Broadway evening titled The Slapstick Tragedy, neither the collective title, nor the plays themselves was a success with the critics or with the public. Any demarcation line within a Williams play that might define it as a comedy is rather fluid—drama and comedy emerge simultaneously from the author’s experience, imagination and subconscious. In this Williams has something in common with Chekhov and Beckett—his humor springs from the futile, lost, violent or desperate lives of the characters. And should you find them funny, well, then, perhaps a nerve has been touched. There are numerous accounts of how during performances of his plays, Williams was liable to suddenly cackle wildly at a serious moment while others in the audience sat confused, wondering what was so funny or who the madman was at the back of the house. In much of his later work, from the 1960s and 1970s, the humor becomes broad—slapstick, grotesque, the Grand Guignol—and even reads like comedy. Williams was just as prolific in the
last twenty-four years of his life as he had been in the previous twenty four: in the forty-eight years from 1935 to 1983 he completed at least thirty-three full-length plays and at least seventy one-acts. His plays from the later period are distinguished by their dark obsession with chaos, political corruption, old age, ghosts, apocalypse, moral decay, and madness. Williams had no way of knowing that his last fully-realized play, A House Not Meant to Stand, would be full-length, that in it he would return to his Mississippi roots, that it would be a comedy, that it would embody all of his later themes, or that it would premiere in Chicago nine months before his death. Tennessee Williams’ connection to Chicago is profound—The Glass Menagerie, produced there in December of 1944 and A House Not Meant to Stand produced there in May of 1982, turned out to be the bookends of his long career in the professional theater—in 1944 he was hailed as the creator of a new poetic realism, while in 1982 his dark vision of chaos was virtually ignored. When The Glass Menagerie opened in the middle of a blizzard, critics Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens, along with several other local reviewers and columnists, pushed, wrote, cajoled, and rallied the public until audiences grew large enough to sustain the production for a transfer to Broadway, where the play brought Williams success of an enormity he had not fully expected. In her first review of The Glass Menagerie, Cassidy wrote that the play ‘‘holds in its shadowed fragility the stamina of success. If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell.’’ With Menagerie, Williams opened the door to a new kind of American theater in which common
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