ARTICLE: Tennessee Williams Is Back for His Encore @ Newsweek

[Ryan Goble]

Nice profile on Mr. Williams in Newsweek. Some highlights:

Tennessee Williams is aging beautifully, now that he’s gone. When he died in 1983, his career had all but ground to a halt. More than two decades had passed since his last Broadway success. Stars had ceased clamoring for his roles the way they had in the glory days of Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. The circumstances of his death were undignified—he choked to death on a bottle cap in a drug-fueled haze—and the subsequent New York Times obituary poured salt in the wound, recounting how the great playwright had “lost his look of boyish innocence and became somewhat portly and seedy.

Yet this March, as we mark the centennial of Williams’s birth, he is flourishing.

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An audience watching a Tennessee Williams play in 2011 is an audience that’s probably composed of tense, overworked, stressed-out people. Williams understood better than most the corrosive powers of the ticking clock. “It is this continual rush of time, so violent that it appears to be screaming, that deprives our actual lives of so much dignity and meaning,” he wrote. Blanche’s daydreaming out loud about Belle Reve in Streetcar and Amanda’s telling worn-out stories of her cotillion days in The Glass Menagerie are both attempts to preserve some gentility in a world that moves too fast to allow it.

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Ultimately, his writing about time and his writing about sex yield the same message: there is a Dionysian streak in men and women that we ignore at our peril. Our untidy sexual urges and the uneven rhythms of our lives can’t be regimented, no matter how much society expects otherwise. Thus the goofiest part of the centennial may also be the most fitting. In New Orleans, among other commemorations, visitors will try to outdo Brando’s famous yell in the annual Stella Shouting Contest. It’s an apt tribute to a playwright who has done more than any writer since Walt Whitman to celebrate the noisy, sometimes unlovely, but always distinctive ring of the individual human voice.

You can read the full article HERE.