A sumptuous serving of Williams’s dark hilarity that is ‘Two by Tenn’
AFTER the sell-out success of The Hotel Plays in 2016, the Vineyard Hotel and Abrahamse & Meyer Productions join forces again to bring Cape Town theatre lovers an unforgettable evening of fine wine, dining and two of the most outrageous and hilarious plays by Tennessee Williams presented under the collective title Two by Tenn.
This year one of the hotel’s historic suites will be transformed into an intimate and immersive theatre space where patrons will be transported to the most outlandish corners for Tennessee Williams’ fertile imagination between the courses of a sumptuous three-course, winepaired dinner.
The centrepiece of the evening will be one of Tennessee Williams’ most bizarre late plays, the South African premiere of The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. LeMonde.
Set in a rooftop garret above Mme LeMonde’s London Rooming House, baby-faced Mint, unable to use his legs, swings from hooks attached to the ceiling. Mint is taunted by LeMonde, who withholds his meals and he’s abused on a regular basis by one of Madame’s many male spawn. Hall, an old-school chum from Scrotum-on-Swansea, drops in for tea and shows no interest in Mint’s suffering.
Tennessee Williams had always been aware that language, images, all forms of representation are inevitably inadequate, and cannot contain emotion, impulse, desire. As early as 1945, he sought what he called “the language of vision”, which he famously described as a “plastic theatre” in the Production Notes to The Glass Menagerie.
In order to illustrate a truth about reality and “release the essential spirit of something,” he needed to distort and exaggerate our experiences of that reality. His plays honour the grotesque power of chaos, of the irrational and inexpressible, and the truth that it reveals.
While this is what his work had been doing since his earliest plays and short stories, in his later plays, generally considered to be those after The Night of the Iguana in 1961, Williams was taking us to the brink of unbearable pain and horror, where the only place to go, the only way of dealing with such intense experience, was laughter. As Ralf Remshardt writes in Staging the Savage God: “There are probably two distinct ways in which laughter can work in the grotesque, and they are dependent on the distribution of the latent and the manifest element.
“Simply put, if the horrible aspect is dominant or manifest, laughter will almost always be a mechanism for counteracting the horror. When the comical element is dominant, horror becomes a response to the callousness of one’s own laughter. Either way, the grotesque structure must assure that the distribution of the elements is adequate to guarantee that neither impulse takes over too quickly and that there is a responsive interdependence of laughter and horror.”
This “interdependence of laughter and horror”– what Frances K. Barasch has called “ludicrous-horror” – is key to understanding much of Williams’ late work.
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde is a very funny play. It was written by the man, rumour has it, who would sit in the back of the theatre during performances of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and laugh hysterically at the final scene, when Blanche is taken away to an insane asylum. Laughter is often unsettling when we don’t know why someone is laughing, especially when it appears to be inappropriate, contradictory to the situation that inspired it.
In his Memoirs, Williams explained this sort of excessive, “inappropriate” laughter as his inevitable “substitute for weeping”: “Laughter has always been my substitute for lamentation and I laugh as loudly as I would lament if I hadn’t discovered a useful substitute for weeping. Usually I laugh longer than I should, as well as more loudly than I should.” For Williams, the comic and the tragic were inseparable. Even though he said in 1965 that he “could never make a joke out of human existence,” many of Williams’ late plays do face life’s tragic elements and laugh at them, a liberating laughter that destabilises boundaries and breaks through imposed limitations. These highly irreverent plays employ humour for the purpose of social critique and resistance, highlighting the tragicomic elements and absurdities of life’s struggles. During his later period, Williams often presented an ironic world view that was simultaneously comic and bleak – rejecting romanticism, blurring high and low culture, and playing indulgently with exaggeration.
Williams’ work had never been tame – rife with forbidden desire, madness, castration, rape, cannibalism, all forms of emotional and physical violence – yet the relative innocence and outright censorship of the 1940s and ‘50s were able to keep these themes just barely under control.
The playfully dark humour of Williams’ late plays was therefore a logical and mature continuation of his earlier work, employing what he called “freer” forms that engaged the “madness” of political and social chaos during the late twentieth century. Yet with plays such as A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976), Kirche, Küche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) (1979) and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde (1982), for example, Williams succeeded in pushing the boundaries of good taste to the extreme, challenging conventional notions of what can be shown, and revealing a more primitive, primary side of human nature.
Several of these later works therefore embrace a grotesque sensibility, simultaneously repressing and exploding with dark, ambivalent humour. In keeping with such humour, they can come across as, simply, “too much”. In fact, the uncanny power of these plays emerges precisely from the fact that they are often “too much”, and deliberately defy strategies that seek to construct and control meaning, to “make sense” in traditional terms.
In this context, Williams’ late work can be seen in terms of what I call a Theatre of Excess, which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Extreme, excessive, grotesque, carnivalesque, tragicomic, campy, cartoonish, pop art, burlesque, slapstick, Grand-Guignol – these are just some terms that begin to describe his late sensibility, an aesthetic that embraces a delicate balance of laughter and horror, as well as a self-conscious, almost ironic manner of acting.
These plays reflect the freedom to finally be “too much”, to laugh at the absurdity of life and its inevitable suffering with a laughter that surpasses tears. Williams’ excesses serve to highlight the ambiguities and inconsistencies of living in and experiencing the world – the excesses that leak out of closed systems of meaning, that seep through the cracks of the rational, the stable, the complete, and point us toward the essence of the real. In his later years, Williams went beyond the struggle, hope, and tragedy of his early plays, engaging a kind of laughter that bursts forth through pain to the freedom of exaggeration and excess – the grotesque, the camp, the irreverent– always moving forward in his celebration of what he called “the strange, the crazed, the queer”.
Two by Tenn premières at the Vineyard Hotel, Colinton Road, Newlands, today at 7pm, additional performances at 7pm on July 21, 22, 29 and August 4, 5, 12, 18 and 19. To book, e-mail hotelplays@ vineyard.co.za
Saddik is Professor of English and Theatre at the City University of New York. She has authored several books and essays on Williams and other playwrights, and her new book, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: “The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer,” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015