Dinner with Tennessee Williams by Troy Gilbert & Chef Greg Picolo

Author:Troy Gilbert & Chef Greg Picolo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2011-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Food and Rituals

The rituals of dining and drinking function to reveal aspects of society and regionalism throughout a number of the plays. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella has made a birthday cake for Blanche, who is in her early thirties but professes to be younger, and Mitch is scheduled to “come for cake and ice cream.” Blanche, a stickler for her own private rituals, insists that “A hot bath and a long cold drink always give one a brand new outlook on life!” The ritual of meal time with the family, once a staple in most regions, sadly out of fashion in our time, is central to The Glass Menagerie, in which Amanda Wingfield insists that everyone must be assembled at the table before grace can be said. Ever the stickler for religious niceties, Amanda, when she discovers that the gentleman caller who will be coming to dinner has an Irish name, concludes, “That, of course means fish—tomorrow is Friday! I’ll have that salmon loaf—with Durkees dressing!” (Those of us of a certain age know that when Amanda talks of salmon, she means the canned variety.)

Gayden Metcalf and Charlotte Hays have brilliantly evoked for us in Being Dead Is No Excuse, the Southern tradition of bringing food to the home of a bereaved family, and a variation on that ritual occurs in Battle of Angels and its later revised version, Orpheus Descending. When Myra (in Battle of Angels ) is bringing her husband Jabe home from the hospital following unsuccessful cancer surgery, relatives and townspeople gather with food (in Orpheus Descending her name is Lady): Beulah Binnings brings floating island and a pie (“the meringue turned out real good”) and Vee Talbot brings sherbet–“something light and digestible”–which unfortunately melted as she brought it through the Delta heat. There are also olive nut sandwiches, which Sister, a cousin of Jabe’s, takes with her when she leaves, to serve at the “Bishop’s tea,” to which “the Bishop Adjutant is coming”—yet another Southern Episcopal ritual. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche makes custard, a tried and true Southern comfort food, for Mitch’s ailing mother. And there are rituals involving liquor: for example, in Battle of Angels, Cassandra says that she pours whiskey on her great-aunt’s grave, because she had “loved to drink” so much that she finally stayed in bed all the time doing nothing else. I’m sure that Noel Polk can tell us about the same ceremony performed at William Faulkner’s grave in Oxford by students and their professor.

Birthdays and other holidays are symbolically significant in many of the dramas. The most bizarre birthday extravaganza in all the plays occurs in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which yet another man has come home following cancer surgery, this time Big Daddy, surely the greatest male character Tennessee ever created, and the family, including his doting wife, two sons—Brick, a former college football jock, and Gooper, a corporate attorney—and their ambitious wives, Maggie and Mae, aka Sister Woman, and a passel

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