Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (72 page)

Molly, who is hustling up publicity for the guesthouse she runs, where the eponymous Fraulein—a Viennese
chanteuse
who can no longer properly render a song—is in precarious residence, pokes fun at another of Williams’s theatrical tropes: Southern gentility. “You’d go a long way out of your way to find a richer gold mine of material in the class category than I got here in The Big Dormitory, under the roof-tree of God,” she says. “I’ve got REAL PERSONAGES here.” When Joe, a half-naked, blond Indian “with Caribbean blue eyes,” makes a brief monosyllabic appearance, Williams even parodies his erotic ideal—the hunky primitive male object of desire.

POLLY: HOW.

INDIAN JOE: POW.

MOLLY: WOW.

The most underrated of Williams’s sixties plays,
The Gnadiges Fraulein
is a surrealist romp, which plunders the freewheeling presentational style of the newly fashionable theater of the absurd. Intended as a vaudeville on the edge of a cliff, the garish cartoon makes symbolic and linguistic nods to Ionesco and Beckett. The set, as prescribed by Williams’s stage directions, is a sort of Cubist parody of Southern Gothic. It features a stylized Key West frame cottage skewed as if “Picasso designed it,” with a zinc roof that sits “at the angle of Charlie Chaplin’s derby on the house.” In this off-kilter world, Williams’s sense of persecution is reimagined as comic pandemonium; his public collapse is turned into the symbolic triumph of the pratfall. To maintain the farcical momentum of the play, even his distinctive lyric idiom is translated into the “gunfire dialogue” of comic cross talk.

The Fraulein—with an orange fright wig, a bloody eye patch over a recently pecked-out eye (Williams at the time was blind in one eye), and an eccentric costume that “would not be out of place at the Moulin Rouge in the time of Toulouse-Lautrec”—is a fantastical battered figure, preserved in the aspic of her former glory. “Her scroll has been charged with a good deal of punishment lately,” Molly explains to Polly. “Don’t mock her,” she adds. “In spite of her present condition she’s still a personage.” “Having passed and long passed the zenith of her career in show-biz,” the Fraulein has hit rock bottom; like her creator, she has lost her status, her concentration, and her audience. When she was a star, her scene-stealing gambit was to snare in her mouth the fish tossed by a trainer to his performing seal. Now she is doomed to repeat the trick, without the applause: she must perform for her two sadistic spectators—Polly and Molly, a sort of Vladimir and Estragon to the Fraulein’s brutalized Lucky.

As the Fraulein dashes back and forth from the pier, the wacky biddies sit in rocking chairs on the guesthouse porch, smoking grass and keeping up a cruel running commentary. To earn her place at the guesthouse table and civil treatment from the society there, she must produce fish for dinner. “Three fish a day to keep eviction away and one fish more to keep the wolf from the door,” Molly explains. At the sound of an approaching fishing boat’s third whistle, the Fraulein hightails it to the docks, hoping to beat the vicious birds to the boat’s discarded catch. The question—for both the Fraulein and her creator—is whether she’ll be able to beat what Polly calls “the competish.” At the finale, the Fraulein “assumes the starting position of a competitive runner and waits for the third whistle”; as the stage dims, she starts a “wild, blind dash” for the docks.

The Gnadiges Fraulein
was a daring departure, intended to take on “the competish” and to win back the public’s flagging interest. The gigantic Cocaloony bird—part pelican, part raptor, all cartoon—makes a brief, strutting nightmarish appearance, preying on the Fraulein with the same dopey malevolence with which Williams felt the critics went after him. The play’s giddy despair plays as a metaphor both of Williams’s crumbling competitive consciousness and of the social havoc of the nation’s habitual pursuit of victory. (“The Disunited Mistakes” is how Williams jokingly refers to his country in the opening speech; he underlined the point with a reference in the Broadway program to the Vietnam War’s “incomprehensible evil.”)

The double bill of
The Mutilated
and
The Gnadiges Fraulein
—a smorgasbord of Williams’s old and new theatrical styles—opened at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway on February 22, 1966. According to the actress Zoe Caldwell, who won a Tony Award for her performance as Polly, the director, Alan Schneider, “didn’t have a clue to what the play was about.” In fact, according to the producer, Chuck Bowden, Schneider confessed as much two weeks before the opening. Schneider imposed on Williams’s gaiety a heavy, elaborate set, by Ming Cho Lee, as well as his own heavy directorial hand. The result:
The Gnadiges Fraulein
was a clown play directed with no authentic antic touch. As Margaret Leighton, who played the embattled Fraulein, observed, in Schneider Williams had an earnest director “who followed the printed script too literally.” While Kate Reid, who played Molly, was having trouble remembering her lines, Leighton, the night before the show opened, cracked her shoulder blade and lost her voice. “I had my arm in a sling, actually, and no voice. So I had to find another voice, which was a kind of man’s voice, somewhere,” Leighton recalled. Sensing disaster, Caldwell, who had threatened to quit the show, battled her preopening sense of doom by writing doggerel:

Cocaloony Bird, Zoe Caldwell, and Kate Reid in
The Gnadiges Fraulein

William Inge, who second-acted
Slapstick Tragedy
on opening night, found the play “marvelous” and Williams’s writing “more and more personal.” “ ‘The Gnadiges Fraulein’ was just a beautiful conception and the humor in it, the personal humor that no one saw, no one—no critic really dealt with what the play was about,” he said. After its opening,
Slapstick Tragedy
lasted seven performances. “The press hit me with all the ammo in their considerable and rather ruthless possession,” Williams wrote. “A brilliant talent is sleeping. . . . Mr. Williams has neither grown nor changed,” Stanley Kauffmann sniffed in the
Times
. Walter Kerr slapped down
Gnadiges Fraulein
: “savage slapstick is not the playwright’s happiest vein,” he said. (“Walter Kerr dismissed ‘Gnadiges Fraulein’ in one line. He said, ‘Mr. Williams should not attempt black comedy.’ I’d never
heard
of black comedy, though I’d been writing it all my life,” Williams told
Playboy
in 1973.) The most seasoned of the critics, Harold Clurman, however, writing in the
Nation
, acknowledged the injustice of the play’s critical reception, as well as the folly of producing one-acts on Broadway when, Off-Broadway, “they might have gained considerable esteem.” “However we interpret this nightmare it is written in an odd but effective mixture of gallows humor and Rabelaisian zest,” Clurman wrote. “On opening night the audience laughed uproariously at the broad-stroked slapdash language, but though I was able to appreciate the style I could not bring myself to smile. I was too conscious that its author was in pain.”

IN THE NEXT two years, Williams, rather like the frantic Fraulein, brought three offerings to the public table, all of which were rejected more or less out of hand:
The Two-Character Play
failed in its London debut (1967); the film
Boom!
(1968) received derisory reviews; and
Kingdom of Earth
, retitled
The Seven Descents of Myrtle
(1968), lasted only a month on Broadway. On December 12, 1967, returning drunk to his London hotel suite after the opening night of
The Two-Character Play
at the Hampstead Theatre Club, Williams told Wood and St. Just, “I want to die. I want to die.” “Nothing but this, over and over,” Wood recalled. “He was totally submerged in his own misery.”

Although Williams later put a high-camp spin on his collapse in the late sixties—“I would fall down often, yes, but was put down only by reviewers”—at the time he retreated from the world as perversely as the world, so it seemed, was retreating from him. “I was abandoned by friends to a large extent. People ceased to think of me as an existing person. I was, you know, a sort of apparition. I was only interested in work and I had just
three
sexual experiences in four years,” he said.

A self-proclaimed “zombie,” Williams gave himself a kind of social lobotomy, joining his sister as one of the living dead. (The deaths of two close friends—Carson McCullers and Lilla Van Saher—during this period only compounded his sense of morbidity.) In a work meeting with the director John Hancock, Williams staggered to the bar to get a drink and fell down. “I did not pick him up,” Hancock recalled. “I figured if you want to stagger over and get yourself another drink while you’re discussing something that’s important to the work of your life, and you fall doing that, you can pick yourself up, right?” For six months, Hancock didn’t hear from Williams; then he called to arrange a dinner at Elaine’s. “He confessed that he’d been furious at me for not picking him up when he fell,” Hancock recalled. “He said, ‘Now I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize you were trying to tell me that I could pick myself up. You know, my mother used to fall. I always thought maybe it was to seduce my father. Maybe I was trying to seduce you.’ ” Hancock continued, “The past was always in Tennessee’s present. He was stuck in his childhood. In that sense, he was ghostly.”

Williams haunted everyone with his sensational absence. “WRITER TENNESSEE WILLIAMS DROPS FROM SIGHT HERE” was a June 24, 1968, headline in the
New York Post
. Shortly before, Dakin Williams, fearing that his brother was “in quite imminent danger,” alerted the police. He had received a letter from Williams scribbled on stationery from New York’s L’Escargot restaurant, which said, in part, “If anything of a violent nature happens to me, ending my life abruptly, it will not be a case of suicide, as it would be made to appear.” When police found Williams four days later, he was holed up at the Hotel St. Moritz. But his sequestered, unsettling regression continued. “Please check up on my son, Tom, and let me know how he is,” Edwina wrote to Marion Vaccaro in December 1968. “He has so bravely met all the ‘arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune.’ ”

Williams could no longer pull himself together for “the life bit,” as he called it. He had taken up desperate residence in his imagination.
The Two-Character Play
was rewritten over the next three years, before its American debut in Chicago in July 1971, under the title
Out Cry
, both as a road map and as an allegory of his disintegration. “I wrote it when I was approaching a mental breakdown and rewrote it after my alleged recovery,” he said. “I was thoroughly freaked out.” “To play with fear is to play with fire.—No, worse, much worse, than playing with fire. Fire has limits”: the play’s opening lines launch Williams’s depiction of the claustrophobic, deracinated tumult that engulfed him. Set backstage, amid a clutter of unassembled scenery and props indicating an “incomplete interior,” the play suggests both the broken world of the theater and the disorder of Williams’s own hermetic mind. The play was a sketch of the kind of autistic enclave Williams had organized for himself.

Clare and Felice, like Williams, were the playwrights, performers, and audience of their own self-destruction. Here, Felice and Clare, his hysterical sister, have been deserted by their touring company, which announced its departure with a telegram calling them “insane.” To fill their awful isolation, the pair reprise a familiar two-hander about two parentless children, also called Felice and Clare, whose father has killed their mother in a murder-suicide, and who survive by lying to the outside world. (Brother and sister improvise and twist their memories of the text; in this hall of mirrors—“a play within a play within a play,” Williams called it—the playwright also clearly inserted memories of his own parents.) “So it’s a prison, this last theatre of ours?” Clare says. They are trapped in a perpetual performance, their lives and their stage roles so confused that they cannot find their way out of the crepuscular gloom and back to the guilt-ridden reality of themselves. Illumination and order lie only in play. “If we can imagine summer, we can imagine more light,” Felice says. “If we’re lost in the play?” Clare asks. “Yes, completely—in ‘The Two-Character Play,’ ” her brother replies. Their elaborate and confounding game is a sort of three-card monte with reality whose obfuscation was a simulacrum of the perverse psychological magic of Williams’s drugged existence: if you don’t know where you are, you can’t be lost.

The issue of suicide is raised in the play’s final beats. Clare finds a revolver hidden behind a sofa cushion and aims it at Felice. “
Do it while you still can!
” Felice says “harshly.” Clare cries out, “I can’t,” and drops the revolver; Felice picks it up and tries to execute Clare, but he can’t either. As the lights start to fade, “in both their faces is a tender admission of defeat.” But the ending is ambivalent. “They reach out their hands to one another, and the light lingers a moment on their hands lifting toward each other.” The embrace, when it comes, is in “total dark.” Have they reconnected in life? Or in death?