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the subject of the fashionable theatre in 1921. Clandestine adultery;
how postively solid and beguiling the subject would be after several de–
cades of clandestine frigidity, clandestine impotence, clandestine homo–
sexuality.
Yet the truth is, the commercial and aesthetic truth is, that audi–
ences don't give a damn about childhood, the shock of adolescence, about
"communication." Patrons are paying for the sex, not for the dreams,
the questions, the moody resolutions. They want to know that the gay,
talkative sister in
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
isn't sleeping with
her husband, that the twangy, harness salesman
is
sleeping with an old
flame, and doing so with a good deal of self-righteousness because his
wife is too sensitive to "communicate" with him. As the curtain goes
up on our stage, on a setting plain or baroque in one of the warmer
States-near the frontier(lnge) or the plantation(Williarns)--domes–
ticity is soon seen to be neurotically pimpled with familiar complexes.
Neurotic failure rather than
la nausee
is our theme. Lies, lies, lies–
the sympathetic characters moan about life. Failures, omissions, self–
delusion-particularly among the women. "Something Unspoken" is the
title of one of the single act plays of Tennessee Williams now being done
at the York Playhouse. Ah, something unspoken, once more; neurotic,
big-framed old Southern lady-dragon still holding the usual cobweb
companion or relation in bondage. The plot turns on an election to
high position in the Daughters of the Confederacy: Madame Boling–
broke scheming for the throne.
Still on the stage something must happen and so we get, if not a
genuine happening, a sort of revelation that passes for action. An inner
light is turned on (Inge specializes in this) and the characters see they
have been mistaken, have been playing life wrong, not loving enough,
not feeling enough and so on. "Stressing false values" is a favorite revel–
ation among playwrights, even though the recognition of this condition
is
seldom seen in real life. Tennessee Williams goes in for revelation of
another sort. It is not spiritual or moral, but frankly sexual, like a sud–
den undressing. At the final curtain in a Williams play everyone is
running about with his clothes off (Blanche's affairs in
Streetcar Named
Desire,
the story of Brick's friend, Skipper, in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
one of Williams's best plays).
Suddenly Last Summer,
the second of the two rather scrubby Wil–
liams plays at the York, is for the deeply jaded, the hung-over. Williams
has
after all given us everything, and here, desperate at last, he offers
up a dish of cannibalism. This is a mistake that profoundly alienates–
the awful happening isn't sexual at all; it is a shipwreck not a boudoir
