- Sep 2, 2022
- 16 min read
I don’t know whether I’ve always championed small town papers because I value their content or whether it was because I happened to be featured in a lot of them when I was a teen. Writing theatre, I suppose, was an unusual habit for a youngster and so The Birmingham Post-Herald, sadly gone now, chronicled plays I wrote in high school. But another of the smaller papers, Birmingham Weekly, was my personal favorite. In early 2007, as I was preparing a play for a premiere in Birmingham, I contacted them to do a story on the rehearsal process of doing a “world premiere.” One day, the journalist e-mailed me and asked if he could read the play. I obliged. The show was not running long enough for a review, so if the journalist had anything to say about the content, then maybe it would give me something quotable to put on the poster.
He read the play, visited rehearsals and the story came out the next week. A pretty good story—laudatory, engaging. And then there came this sentence about the playwright: he “mixes the heady idealism of Tennessee Williams with a Sam Shepard-level of stark despair.” Any playwright would be thrilled to have his name on even the same cocktail napkin as Williams and Shepard, right? I was thrilled, wasn’t I? No, to be precise—at least, not at the time.
The play I had written was The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me. At the time, it was called And They Heard the Thunder of Angels, a pretentious title I came to loathe. The three-act play was an honest attempt to write a contemporary tragedy, but about the people I knew best—young Southerners. The concept was it was a “coming-of-age tragedy.” The play was indeed very Southern and even though it did end with the dull, hollow thud like one of Shepard’s bleaker offerings, there was little in the way akin to Williams in my mind. Then again, I had a problem. I love-hated Tennessee Williams.
Born in Mississippi, but raised in Missouri, Thomas Lanier Williams entered the world (it seemed to me) with the tongue of a short story writer, the soul of a poet, and just the right amount of family dysfunction to keep him precariously hanging off the precipice of sanity. What I have always told my students was that Tennessee Williams was a great playwright from 1944 to 1960 and a lousy one from then on. This is both true and not exactly true.
In the recent weeks, during my year of reading a play a day, I have read a great deal more of Williams’ later work than I ever have. I was particularly interested in the critical deep-freeze he entered with three full-length plays of the 1960s: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (adapted for film as Boom!), and Kingdom of Earth (presented on Broadway with the ridiculous title The Seven Descents of Myrtle and adapted on film as Last of the Mobile Hot Shots). These three plays signaled the sad decline of the man who brought us two of the greatest plays ever written on this continent: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With the absconding of (possibly) the love of his life, Williams never reached any of the heights of those first glorious years. It always seemed to me that, early on, Williams dramatized insanity with a poetic edge. In the later works, however, he drove right into that insanity and the audiences were hard-of-hearing, trying to understand the ravings of a madman. Tough, I know. But, in some ways, that’s the narrative.
Reading three of his later plays at the same time as John Lahr’s stunning Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gave me lots of room to pontificate on Williams’ sorry situation in his later life. I came to admire two of the plays—Milk Train and Kingdom of Earth deserve more “pro” productions. These two plays alone cannot truly get Williams off the hook, however. There is still curious vapidity present in plays like A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur and Clothes for a Summer Hotel and we have yet to find published some of his Gothic imaginings, like This Is (An Entertainment). But, even though he was no longer Tennessee Williams in the ‘60s-‘80s, he was still a deeply sensitive man with something to say, even if he knew he had lost some of his powers. This deep freeze of Williams’ later life always prevented me from appreciating him as one of the great playwrights.
Many years ago, I wrote a kind of textbook on playwriting—Playwriting: Aesthetic Principles—and, in that text, I had to put down on paper what playwrights mattered and why. It seemed to me if you wanted to know how to do it, you use examples from the best. Who were the best, to me? The list hasn’t changed: Sophokles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill, Beckett, and Albee. These seven writers hold all the hallmarks that make great playwriting: a) their works are primarily about exposing lies and exorcising ghosts (the hallmarks of all great drama), b) they knew well the traditions before them and could also break those rules in imaginative ways which furthered the form, and c), they wrote well throughout their career, despite critics, booze, age, or the fashion. I particularly admire the Americans—O’Neill and Albee—because both exited critical deep-freeze and enormous personal difficulties to have their second act, which American playwrights often don’t get.
All of the other candidates—Williams, Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, August and Lanford Wilson and others—what they are missing is a body of work, an oeuvre, through which we really see the extent of their craft. Williams and Miller both crapped out in the 1960s—Williams over booze and pills and Miller over Marilyn. Norman's output is mostly musical. August Wilson “popped” late and, as his cycle widened out to the beginning and end of the twentieth century, he lost some of the bite. Lanford Wilson never, in his later work, reached the heights of The Mound Builders and The Rimers of Eldritch. Have they all written plays worth reading and performing? Indubitably. But there are no works of aching wisdom in their later catalogues like Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken or Shakespeare’s The Tempest or works of sardonic, caustic intelligence like the late works of Albee. There is not nothing. But they are not the best.
Even with the enormous legacy of The Glass Menagerie or the heroines we all know by heart—Alma, Blanche, Maggie, Lady Torrance—Williams dropped the ball and left a mess behind him. When you think about what he could have done with all those years left, the mind boggles. Instead, we have really only two uncanny plays from his later years—Small Craft Warnings (a pithy expansion of his one-act Confessional) and The Red Devil Battery Sign, a play that remains misunderstood, but is a visionary, forward-looking play—a few others of character, but not substance.
Tennessee Williams, overall, was not a failure, but it was all he saw for the last twenty-two years of his life. A great playwright he may be, but I did not want to go the way of failure. As Lahr got to the 1970s in Williams’ biography, I wanted the roller coaster ride of misery to stop. I can’t imagine how Tennessee felt, especially with his motto: En avant! Why would I want those highs just to experience those lows? But what highs and lows had I experienced? And were Williams and I more simpatico than I thought?
Back to Bobby(ie) Lee. In May of 2005, I sat up in my bed with a vision for a stage picture. It’s difficult to tell how a play begins. It can be imperceptible. The question gets asked, “What do you start with? A character? A story? Line of dialogue?” With me, generally, it’s an image. Which is odd because I don’t think of myself as visual. It is, in the end, unimportant to me if I can picture most of the action on the stage. I am no director and have no desire to direct. With The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me, it started with an image. Of a young man in his early 20s on a lake bank burying a baby. As horrible as the image was, it led to an interesting premise for a play.
The question I asked myself, oddly enough, was, “Who is he burying?” The answer came almost immediately: it’s him; it’s him as a baby. He is burying his younger self. The next question was why, of course. I had to begin the work to find out. I did not, however, have to write it to find out. I had learned, for myself at least, not to start writing until I knew the play: the characters, the story, where the story goes, and the ending. I am not saying I know what’s on every page before I start. There is still discovery when one begins to write. You don’t know how you’re going to get to that particular ending. You may even change that ending if you discover something else, but to have a goal makes the whole process more challenging and exciting. Playwriting is both creativity and craft. It cannot be just one or the other or it will suffer.
My next intimation was the play had to be a tragedy—not a drama, but a tragedy. Few playwrights write tragedies anymore—David Mamet may be the lone wolf and, even then, his are disguised. The word has connotations of pretension, heightened melodrama, and (of course) sad, even debilitating endings. But with a stage image like the one I had in my head, it had to be a tragedy, didn’t it? What other sort of play could emerge from an image like that? It seemed almost Greek. But what does a young man in his twenties have to do with tragedy? His world is just starting.
That was the next connection that needed to be made. Playwriting is mostly about making connections. So, what sort of tragedy would this be? A coming-of-age tragedy. The through-line for the main character became clear. Just at the start of his life, he would inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) ruin it.
Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I already knew the plot. Regardless of the stage picture that entered my head that morning, which I didn’t fully understand, I had just undergone an intense break-up, leaving one person for another, and I felt in a precarious state. Nearing the end of college, the future loomed large and my confidence was dwindling, a fire that had once seemed un-snuffable. I realized the character’s tragedy was mine: ignorance and youth led him to switch courses at sea and drown. But, what about that baby? If he was killing his younger version, he was surely killing himself, right? Or is he simply burying his innoncence? The tragedy was coming into focus and so were the characters that would populate the story.
Since, inevitably, a play will examine various sides of the main character, it made sense to have his first relationship a sort of unnaturally happy one. A symbiosis. That’s when the idea came to name his love Bobbie Lee. I knew it would be confusing on the page, but I loved the idea of one psyche being rent in two—a reverse Aristophanes. There was also the woman he would leave her for, who I named Malia (meaning bitter), a sultry newcomer who remains misunderstood at the end of the play. Then there was his friend who would show him the error of his ways.
Looking now for a wistful title which would conjure up images of young love, I chose The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Touched Me. Again, I was young and had no idea how funny this title would strike people. I, of course, meant the verb as emotional touching, but the first time I handed the manuscript to Lee Eric Shackleford, my first playwriting mentor and a professor at UAB, he laughed and my heart sank. I had written a tragedy, after all, hadn’t I?
Of course, a play is meant to be seen, not read. In early 2006, I had a draft. At the same time, a former colleague from the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) had moved back to Birmingham and had interest in starting a theatre company partially dedicated to new plays. To my knowledge, there had not been such a thing in Birmingham theatre since Southern PlayWorks in 2000. I had two one-acts produced by them that year.
The first production for The Next Stage was to be an adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. The Chronicles of Narnia was in theaters and Lewis was going through one of his periodic rediscoveries. So, the director’s first production choice was sure to be a financial success. The agreement was he would direct Bobby(ie) Lee if I would star in Screwtape. He had me over a barrel. I had not acted in four years and had planned on college being the last of it. But that was the only way to get the play done.
In the months leading up to beginning rehearsals, lots of things occurred. Screwtape was a hit and we had some cast members interested in Bobby(ie) Lee. I had intended my friend R. Daniel Walker to play Bobby Lee although he was physically wrong for the part. I had written Bobby Lee to have fair hair and paler complexion (to match his female doppelganger), but Daniel knew the world I was building at that time and the chance to work together was strong. One actor from Screwtape had proven himself and we put him in the friend role. He wanted to play Bobby Lee and besides being too tall for that, I wrote more and more meaty material for him to play instead. We also had a lead female for Bobbie Lee from Screwtape.
Then, the director started to read my play more. A director and playwright must both be on the same page if they are to collaborate. So excited at getting the piece produced, I never bothered to ask him to tell me the story of the play. That is one way to know you have the right director, if his “play” is your “play.” But the tragic aspect of the play was starting to depress the director, who was in love and planning to marry. Eventually, he did not want to direct a tragic vision and agreed only to produce. The belated hunt for a director began.
Anyone but me. That was the rule. Anyone but me. I had almost no talent or tact for dealing with actors’ emotions, egoisms, their sensibilities. I wasn’t the greatest actor in the world, but I had never bought into the mysticism surrounding acting. It was work to me. I liked being quiet in rehearsal, changing things from behind the scenes. Oh, well. Such was not to be.
On the other hand, there is a tradition of playwrights directing their own work that goes back to antiquity. Sophokles would have trained his choruses himself and Shakespeare would have been his own actor-manager. But I almost had a violent reaction against directing. I did a dramaturgy project in high school to avoid directing a one-act, I took no directing courses at Bennington—I only directed readings—when I had to. I liked having someone else smarter than me in the room to help me mount the play lovingly.
No one wanted to do it. We had chosen to do the play in March of 2007 in the middle of the second half of the Virginia Samford’s theatre season. We were too late to get in the early mailers, so audiences would have to come by word-of-mouth. The more people you have working on the community theatre play means more audience members. But, the inevitability of me directing washed over. Most of the casting was already done, but we only had one part to go and it was crucial.
Rich and spoiled, Malia lives in an apartment her father rents on a lakefront. She begins vying for Bobby Lee and is the scapegoat when he destroys his own world. The part has to be played by someone who has exquisite beauty or is desirable in her confidence. I had to think hard and make some calls.
There was one person who fit at least the desirability factor. A former classmate at ASFA, she had arrived there halfway through my tenure. She was, in the best sense of the word, a regular person who seemed out of place at drama school. She did have creative ambition but was never taken seriously by ASFA teachers. I can’t recall her landing any parts before she left except a play for children. Devastatingly beautiful, she fit the bill except that her hair was light. Malia was meant to be a brunette. But I had already given up the ghost on the hair.
This would be a good time to mention another reason I shouldn’t be a director. I cannot tell from a reading if I can work with an actor. I learned that auditioning for Malia. So excited at having a prospect for casting, I settled. As nice as the actress was, she could not master the dialogue or seem naturalistic on the stage and the play demanded that, at least until the final scenes.
The cast and I met for a reading at a friend’s home. It was a congenial enough reading, but something was already wrong. Prior to going into rehearsals, I renamed the play. During the Screwtape rehearsals, I had brought the director a page full of suggestions: The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Met Me, Put Out a Fire, Caught an Ocelot, etc. It was getting ridiculous. Finally, I combed through the text during rewrites and took a leitmotif line that appeared in the Prologue and Epilogue and called the play And They Heard the Thunder of Angels. A simple fix could have unraveled it in people’s mouths: all we had to do was call it The Thunder of Angels or Thunder of Angels, but I thought the And They would indicate right at the outset, in the title, that it was about washed-away dreams or lives, etc. Well, it was intellectually correct, but it didn’t tell you anything about the story and a book had been written with a similar title about Freedom Riders in Alabama.
But the text was different too. I was already cutting too assiduously. It wouldn’t stop there. I don’t mean to suggest my original lines were brilliant, but I lost track of the play very fast. We rehearsed in an old building on the north side of the city we were calling The Playhouse—a kind of magical dustbin of an old garment shop. It was fairly clear, the iceberg we were headed toward: the person playing the “villain” couldn’t act. So, that was not good as a prospect.
The only way to make scenes tolerable was by cutting what Malia said to the bare bones. Which we did. Up until a week before. The text was emaciated, though, not just because of that. Almost every line suggestion was greeted with approval. In a way, it was an experiment. I had been through play rehearsals of mine where I have allowed no changes. Stuck to my guns. But, when you do that, you play the part of the all-knowing and that’s not a humble place from which to move. So, the experiment was to cut, cut, and cut. The play that people saw was draft number 7. Seven is usually the number that I point to and say, “If you’re on draft seven, you may not know what you’re writing.” But the bare bones were there. It’s just it was only bones.
We finally moved into the studio theatre space to load in the set and go into tech rehearsals. Given the tiny playing area, any sense of the expanse of the character’s mindset was lost. A small plinth served as our lake bank. A necessary stage light shone through the window on the set (which I jokingly said was the moon’s reflection and not a mistake). Nothing was quite working right and, despite the poster artwork being displayed by the adjacent park, no one was buying tickets at the theater.
Reading the final draft (draft 8, renamed The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me—why didn’t I think of that earlier?), the play is exceedingly earnest, has heights and lows of pretension in its attempt to be a tragedy. But I never saw what it could have been. Daniel’s performance by opening night was quite good. I had hurt his feelings during rehearsal and knew it (again: no tact). I described one night’s run-through as “led by a farmer with a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth” referring to a particularly thick Southern accent he tried. But there were the usual discrepancies: an insult of mine about the set ended up in the designer’s ear, the other actors turned against me because I did not have the talent to direct nor the tact to listen to their every egoism or, alternatively, deal with their very genuine concerns.
In the end, Thunder of Angels played to about 25% of the house each night. Friendships were ruined, people were embarrassed, and The Next Stage folded. I published the final text a few years later and amended to it a particularly dyspeptic afterward in which I blamed the play’s failure on, I don’t know, the world or something.
Now, what on Earth does this have to do with Tennessee Williams? I go back to that review. For a long, long while, I denied the journalist made any sense. As for Shepard’s “stark despair,” I suppose some of his plays have the smack of starkness—Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child especially (that later one I hadn’t read by the time of my buried prop, by the way)—but they are also darkly funny—sometimes explosively so. Ergo, I generally don’t think of them as despairing. And Tennessee Williams’ “heady idealism?” Where was that ever? Only one place I can think of: the Prologue to Summer and Smoke.
Summer and Smoke had the misfortune of being Williams’ Broadway follow-up to A Streetcar Named Desire. It is a beautifully written, gentle play (its legacy only slightly tarnished by its later rewrite, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale). Its Prologue (cut in most productions since the famous Off-Broadway revival) shows the two main characters as hair-pulling, flirtatious children. What happens within the play is the slow calcification of both Alma and John’s hearts. In Bobby(ie) Lee, the prologue does show the full force of Bobby Lee/Bobbie Lee’s love. It is echoed in the Epilogue where Bobby Lee tries to explain the murder of his child to her, now separated from him (The murder was only in Bobby Lee’s mind, by the way, though that remained ambiguous in our production).
As a preview of our show, we performed the Prologue for an invited audience of Birmingham theatre folks. The romantic energy onstage—the bliss, the idealism—were infectious and the audience seemed to love it. If they had come to the play and saw what happened to the Bobby(ie)s, they might have called for my decapitation. I’ll never forget a church lady who muttered to me on the way out the theatre, “That was the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.” Perhaps that should have been the Birmingham Weekly’s quote.
But is it possible that all those years ago when I saw two kids at ASFA do the Summer and Smoke Prologue, I tucked a part of it in the back of my mind to steal later? Is it possible Bobbie Lee approaches some of Williams’ heroines in the third act where she succcumbs to loneliness and betrayal? Is it possible I had allowed producers and actors to run over the material, as everyone did in William' later career? Is it possible my audience echoed the sentiments Williams’ audiences felt in the ‘60s and ‘70s as his plays became increasingly preoccupied by random violence, high anxiety, and even self-parody? Perhaps I had written a tragedy that was not redeeming. Perhaps I had not written a true tragedy at all, merely a parody of them.
Unlike Williams, though, I was free to fail. That was the first attempt outside of college to get a play on. Williams suffered in his later years because he had been so marvelous in the beginning. Why was I being so hard on Tenn? Why does one have to write a good play in their twenties and a great play in their eighties to be a great playwright? Was I not bandying about with the subjects that interested him after all? My main character spends the Epilogue in a state of psychosis, just like so many of his heroes and heroines.
Have I changed my mind about Tennessee Williams and his influence? Yes and no. On the one hand, I admire some of the later plays, but they are not in the same universe as Sweet Bird of Youth or one of the classics. I still think the playwright has to be, perhaps, the most un-inebriated of writers. Every drug is damaging to them because a play requires rapt attention to express themselves only through what characters say and do. Mr. Williams, for natural or nurtural reasons, was incapable of completing his work without synthetic highs (though he had always been a bit of a partaker). To watch any of the ghastly interviews from the 1970s on Youtube is to imagine Tenn had had the lobotomy and not Rose.
Still, has he influenced me? Because he’s Southern? No. Because he’s a playwright? No. Because playwriting is essentially the poetic call from writers to the gods to ask why we’re here. Williams never quit asking that question or trying to figure himself out. That’s worth celebrating, especially given the personal turmoil. Another reason: because his great plays make me dream and maybe part of that dream is one day I'll fly up, like Icarus, and nearly touch the very lowest rung of Williams' highest highs on some cloudy or clear morning.
