This Day in Theater History (Tennessee Williams, Poet of “The Wild at Heart,” Born)

March 26, 1911—His first and middle names were “Thomas” and “Lanier,” and he was born in the 11th year of the 20th century. But playwright Tennessee Williams was, like many of his protagonists, a misfit who from the beginning “found life unsatisfactory,” and perhaps for that reason was not above playing with what he didn't like.

That instinct has found its way into otherwise reputable reference sites. Even the estimable “American Masters” Website lists his year of birth, erroneously, as 1914. Gore Vidal, who made the acquaintance in 1948 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other plays of greatly varying worth, chuckled, in the essay “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” that Williams, instead of copping to being 37, “claimed to be thirty-three on the sensible ground that the four years he spent working for a shoe company didn’t count.”

Williams’ centennial has not gone unnoticed. In contrast to Eugene O’Neill, whose centennial in 1988 did not inspire rummaging through his artistic attic, theater troupes all over the country are scouring through even Williams’ lesser work, as noted in this Newsweek essay by Jeremy McCarter. (I myself saw one of these several weeks ago: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, mounted by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co., with Olympia Dukakis in the lead.)

McCarter’s explanation for the Williams revival—that he’s a “poet of liberation” who pioneered frank treatment of human sexuality, especially gay themes—only goes so far to account for this rebirth of interest. After all, no such artistic resurrection has come for William Inge, another gay man who once occupied a rarefied place atop the American theater with Williams, only to be beaten down by critical arrows and his own substance abuse before dying a lonely death.

Now, Vidal’s pose as a provocateur is so reflexive that I find myself discounting, oh, at least 15% of whatever he writes, on any subject, from the get-go. But his amusing and affectionate retrospective of starting out in the Forties with Williams puts his finger unerringly on why “The Glorious Bird” endures: “Most beautifully, the plays speak for themselves. Not only does Tennessee have a marvelous comedic sense but his gloriously dramatic effects can be enormously entertaining. He makes poetic (without quotes) the speech of those half-educated would-be genteel folk who still maintain their babble in his head.”

After The Night of the Iguana, Williams never had another Broadway hit for the last two decades of his life. Critics noted that, even as these works became more lurid, they also became more heavily symbolic. Many tied the change in atmosphere to Williams’ growing pill and alcohol abuse.

But Vidal also might have been onto something in noting of Williams, “Constantly he plays and replays the same small but brilliant set of cards.” In other words, even while his dramaturgy changed, his underlying themes remained the same.

That remained overwhelmingly, in the playwright’s own words, his preoccupation with offering “a prayer for the wild of heart that are kept in cages.”