Theatre of Tennessee Williams by Murphy Brenda; McConachie Bruce; Bak John S

Author:Murphy, Brenda; McConachie, Bruce; Bak, John S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Artist Plays

Compulsion and Fear: The Two-Character Play

The Two-Character Play uses Williams’s perception of his own condition as an artist working in the commercial theatre as an exemplum for the universal condition of the contemporary artist. Central to its thematic import was the feeling that he had been abandoned by his audience and was being targeted by increasingly hostile and vicious critics. In 1973, he described the play as “a history of what I went through in the Sixties transmuted into the predicament of a brother and a sister,” but called it “my most beautiful play since Streetcar.” He said, “I’ve never stopped working on it. I think it’s a major work. I don’t know whether or not it will be received as one. It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work, all life, in a sense, is a cri de coeur. But the critics will say I am excessively personal and I pity myself” (C: 239).

The play was begun in the mid-1960s. Williams wrote to Maria Britneva in 1966 that he had “completed” it in October of that year (Williams 1990: 194). It was first produced in London in 1967 (as The Two-Character Play), directed by James Roose-Evans, and Williams said that he had written ten versions of the script by 1974 (Philp 1974). Most important was what he called the “Bangkok version,” written during a visit to Thailand in 1970, which served as a basis for the 1971 Chicago production (as Out Cry) directed by George Keathley. He preferred this to the much-revised version for the 1973 Broadway production (as Out Cry) directed by Peter Glenville. Williams had great hopes for a major production of the play with actors he admired. He was very anxious to get Paul Scofield and Margaret Leighton or Angela Lansbury, or Geraldine Page and Rip Torn to do it. In the end, he settled for performers who did well in the play, Peter Wyngarde and Mary Ure in London, Donald Madden (his favorite) and Eileen Herlie in Chicago, and Michael York and Cara Duff-McCormick in New York. Peter Wyngarde recalled that, for the 1967 production, “Tennessee was at all the rehearsals, with his wretched companion of the time [Bill Glavin] bullying him. But Tennessee was gone [drunk or stoned], out of it, completely. He could offer nothing approaching directorial advice” (Williams 1990: 195). He was in much better shape for the 1971 and 1973 productions, even holding publicity interviews before the premieres, although he insisted he had little creative involvement with the 1973 production.

In 1970, Williams described The Two-Character Play as “‘a play within a play within a play.’ Its two characters are a brother and sister, Felice and Claire [sic], and the setting is an empty theater in a cold, distant place ‘that could be the North Pole’” (C: 164). In an interview before the Chicago production, he called the play “an allegory about human anxiety. They talk about the two of them performing a play. He insists it’s necessary; she insists it’s impossible.

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