Suddenly That Summer,
Out of the Closet
By RANDY GENER,
NYTimes on the Web, September 24, 2006
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Courtesy of Joe Hazan
Tennessee
Williams in Provincetown in the 1940’s, not long after his affair
with a draft dodger |
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THE conventional wisdom about
Tennessee Williams, especially among politically correct detractors and
gay-liberation activists, is that he was a self-loathing gay man. His
homosexual characters are cloaked in heterosexual disguise, the argument goes,
and so their humanity is distorted.
Now a premiere of a once-lost work, “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a
Summer,” provides more evidence that Williams wrote freely about his sexual
desires. Completed when he was 29, the play details his own emotional
crisis after being dumped (for a woman) by the first great male love of his
life, a young Canadian draft dodger named Kip Kiernan. The play, staged by
the Minneapolis company Shakespeare on the Cape, will make its debut as part of
a new Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown, Mass., where Williams wrote
early drafts of the plays that made him famous: “The Glass Menagerie,” “A
Streetcar Named Desire,” “Summer and Smoke” and “The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale.”
One reason Provincetown decided to stage a Tennessee Williams festival after all
these years was to wrest the playwright out of the ghetto of Southern writers by
focusing on his life in Cape Cod. “There is a lot of nonsense that says
Williams was conflicted about his homosexuality in this period of his life,”
said David Kaplan, a theater director and founder of the four-day festival that
begins Thursday. “That’s not true.” He added: “The tone of ‘Parade’
is beautifully unequivocal. It is not whining. It is not apologetic.
He demands his audience to take seriously gay people onstage.”
Thomas Keith, an editor at New Directions, which publishes Williams’s works,
agrees. “Williams was writing about his own life in a less disguised way
at a time when he probably didn’t expect that he would show his work to his
agent,” Mr. Keith said. “It was a story that he wanted to tell, and he
came back to it in the 1960’s.”
The 45-minute version of “The Parade” produced in Provincetown is William’s
final draft, completed in 1962. In 1940 Williams was mending the wounds of
his broken heart when he handwrote in his notebooks a hastily unfinished draft.
Composed in July and August of that year, “The Parade” is a document of what he
later called that “pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing
up,” a chronicle of how he “had finally come thoroughly out of the closet.”
Perhaps for the only time in his life Williams unguardedly fell in love.
For less than six weeks that summer he and the 22-year-old Mr. Kiernan, whom the
playwright thought resembled the Russian dancer Vasla Nijinsky, shared a
two-story shack on Captain Jack’s Wharf. As Williams writes in his
“Memoirs’’: “We slept together each night on the double bed up there, and
so incontinent was my desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during
the night for more love-making. You see, I had no sense in those days —
and nights — of how passion can wear out even a passive partner.”
One day Mr. Kiernan’s girlfriend entered the picture. Mr. Kiernan told
Williams that their affair was over. “I was in a state of shock,” he
wrote. Distraught, Williams packed his bags for Mexico. Mr. Kiernan
later married but at 26 died of a brain tumor in a New York City hospital.
In “The Parade” Williams’s alter ego, Don, pines hopelessly after a muscular
young dancer, Dick, who is blithely in love with a woman named Wanda.
Meanwhile Don himself is pursued by a woman, Miriam (who was based on a New
Yorker named Ethel Elkovsky who loved Williams). Turning down Miriam, Don
says love is like a circus parade that “has never come.” He adds:
“My neck’s getting stiff from straining forward. I’m beginning to think
the parade isn’t going to stop by. It must have been halted somewhere.
The elephants turned hugely, impassively aside at the wrong intersection.”
Mr. Kaplan said, “Williams has compassion for Miriam,” comparing the predicament
of the play’s lovelorn characters to those in “The Seagull” by Chekhov.
“Don understands that her love for him is just as sad and funny as his love for
this straight guy. He shows his pride and unequivocal humanity about being
gay.”
When the affair with Mr. Kiernan ended badly in 1940, Williams felt angry and
vulnerable. He ripped out the handwritten pages of “Parade” from his lined
notebook and set them aside. Those notes would later turn up 22 years
later. Andreas Brown, today the owner of Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan,
was working in 1962 with Williams’s agent Audrey Wood, tracking down his
unpublished works for a bibliography. It was then that Joe Hazan,
Williams’s Provincetown friend and confidant, revealed that he had rescued the
missing pages. Mr. Brown typed them and showed them to Williams, who
fine-tuned the script and completed it.
Mr. Keith credits Mr. Kaplan for identifying the final 1962 version of “The
Parade” and distinguishing it from Williams’s copious earlier drafts.
The 1962 “Parade,” Mr. Kaplan said, is a mature revision that shows off the
playwright’s mastery. Williams had, by then, become a famous writer and
had a long-term relationship. “The Night of the Iguana” was heading toward
a Broadway run of 316 performances. His picture was on the cover of Time
magazine. “Williams clearly devoted a certain amount of skill and
attention to ‘The Parade,’ ” Mr. Kaplan said. “He takes the time to polish
and finish it off. And for what end? The revised script is taken
almost page for page, word for word, from the 1940 draft. What he mostly
did in 1962 was to put a frame on it at the beginning and at the end. He
strengthened the Chekhovian nature of the script and the classical unities.”
“The rewrite,” concurred Mr. Keith, “is by somebody who knows himself better
than anyone, rather than by somebody who was just coming out in 1940.”
“The Parade” is the latest among a string of previously unknown early Williams
plays that have been rescued from the voluminous archives he left behind.
Over the last 10 years or so five full-length plays (pre-“Glass Menagerie”) and
a volume of one-acts have resurfaced, the most famous of which is “Not About
Nightingales.” This 1938 prison drama had its premiere in 1998 at the
Royal National Theater in London and was a resounding success a year later on
Broadway. The National Theater is considering a new production of
Williams’s “Candles to the Sun,” a 1937 social-protest drama about Alabama coal
miners, published for the first time in 2004. Last year New Directions
published “Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays,” a gathering of 13
previously unpublished Williams one-acts, most written in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
“ ‘Not About Nightingales’ got everyone past the assumption that you could only
find grade B or C Williams in the archives,” Mr. Keith said.
Rightly or wrongly, Williams’s early works have been labeled as “apprentice
plays.” Scholars say there might be some 142 unpublished plays, though that
number is anything but definitive. For Williams neatness did not count.
“For almost every full-length Williams,” Mr. Keith said, “you can find a shorter
version, a one-act that stands alone, a short story and sometimes even a poem.
He wrote and rewrote like crazy. He didn’t number his pages. He left
papers all over the place. The material is to there to be had if you have
the time, patience and knowledge to go through them.”
Williams’s 1981 play “Something Cloudy, Something Clear,’’ his longer and
complexly woven reminiscence about Provincetown, covers some of the same ground
as “The Parade.” But Williams, who died two years later, was an altogether
different creature by that time. “The difference is that he had been
repeatedly mocked in public — not to mention his own disruptive behavior,” Mr.
Kaplan said. “It’s not that he was bitter in his later life, but he didn’t
have that confidence of a successful playwright, which is what he was in 1962.”
For instance Williams’s 1975 “Memoirs,” which New Directions is reissuing next
month with a new foreword by the filmmaker John Waters, was initially greeted
with critical derision and caused a scandal. “If Williams,” one critic
wrote, “has not exactly opened his heart, he has opened his fly.”
Mr. Keith said: “The book needs a reconsideration. If a straight
person had been that candid about his love life, he wouldn’t have been treated
the same way.”
Mr. Kaplan, whose book, “Tennessee Williams in Provincetown,” is also coming out
next month, from Hansen Publishing Group, said he suspects “The Parade” wasn’t
produced during Williams’s lifetime because of the antigay climate. Mr.
Kaplan compares the Provincetown premiere of “The Parade” to the posthumous
publication of E. M. Forster’s novel “Maurice” and to Paul Cadmus’s openly
homoerotic paintings. “These are different people who wanted to go after
the mainstream and withheld certain aspects of themselves in the art they
created for mass production,” Mr. Kaplan said. “But they were not
embarrassed and were not conflicted about being gay. Times have changed
enough that ‘Maurice’ can be made into a movie and Cadmus’s nude male artworks
can be appreciated in galleries.”
Both Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Keith say “Parade” ranks as one of Williams’s solid
one-act creations. “I am looking forward to seeing what the actors would
do with it,” Mr. Keith said. “In a letter to Elia Kazan dated June 16,
1950, Williams wrote, ‘The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays, some
of which are like firecrackers in a rope.’ ”
Mr. Keith added, “When it comes to the number of one-acts, I think Williams is
only rivaled by G. B. Shaw.”
Randy Gener, a New York-based writer and critic, is the senior
editor of American Theater magazine.
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