Setting the Modern Stage
Tennessee Williams
Playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams was born on March 26, 1911. Having lived his early years in small towns in Mississippi, Williams moved with his family to St. Louis at the age of seven. This difficult adjustment proved just one in an unhappy upbringing which profoundly affected the creative individual that Williams became. His unstable home environment consisted of a hard-drinking, violent father, a traveling salesman who berated his child for being a “sissy;” a domineering mother who never stopped being the puritanical daughter of an Episcopal rector; and his older sister who was mentally unstable and eventually institutionalized. Tennessee Williams’s adulthood and his writing never escaped the ghosts of his childhood.
The passion to write burned in Williams from an early age. He had a short story
published at the age of sixteen and, during the mid-to-late 1930s, began writing
plays that were staged by regional theatre groups. Following his graduation from
the University of Iowa in 1938, Williams wrote a group of one-act plays which
he entitled American Blues and submitted to a play-writing contest with
the Group Theatre in 1939. He was awarded a special hundred-dollar prize that
ultimately landed him with a noted literary agent, Audrey Wood, who was instrumental
in Williams’s later successes.
Moving to New York City, having taken the professional name of Tennessee Williams,
the playwright worked on another play, Battle of Angels, which the Theatre
Guild agreed to produce in 1940. The play opened in Boston and failed after its
two-week run. It took another five years of drifting and working diverse jobs
before Williams finally achieved critical and box-office success. His memory-play
The Glass Menagerie initially appeared in Chicago in 1944, but the following
year saw the play produced at the Playhouse on Broadway. That year, it received
the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, The Donaldson Award, and the Sidney Howard
Memorial Award. It was just the beginning of Williams’s illustrious playwriting
career. A Streetcar Named Desire opened in New York in 1947 and ran for
two years, garnering Williams a Pulitzer Prize and another New York Drama Critics
Circle Award. More plays followed in succession, many of them critical and commercial
successes—Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tatoo (1951), Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird
of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Many of these
plays translated into memorable films.
Over the years, there were failures as well, and although Williams continued to
write and have plays produced, success after The Night of the Iguana became
ever more elusive. The stress surrounding the production of a Broadway show drew
Williams more and more to Off-Broadway theatre, where he felt that he could experiment
more freely. Williams’s later years were plagued by ill health and drug and
alcohol abuse. However, by the time of his death in 1983, Tennessee Williams had
left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American theatre. His remarkable characters—Amanda,
Laura, Blanche, Stanley, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy—continue to walk among
us.
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The Glass Menagerie
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A Streetcar Named Desire
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Sweet Bird of Youth
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