27 Wagons Full of Cotton

I've been lax about my survey of the works of Tennessee Williams during this centennial year of his birth. I was slowed down by reading, here and there, the one-act plays collected in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. But now I've caught up.

Each of these one-acts, except for one, is set in the usual Williams locale--New Orleans and environs or Mississippi (the other is set in Manhattan). Most were written in the 40s, but a few in the 50s, including one written for community theater. Although some of them are comic in tone, they all pinpoint the loneliness and despair that is essential to Williams. A few of them were made into movies.

The title play, about a Sicilian cotton gin owner who gets his revenge on a man who burns him out, was made into the very controversial film Baby Doll. The play is less interested in the Lolita-like innocence of its heroine, and more on the economics and crime of the situation, as the bumptious southerner is seen with sloshing gas cans just before the Sicilian's place catches on fire. The film, quite successfully, dragged out the dance of amour between the Sicilian and Flora (called Baby Doll in the film).

My favorite of the collection is The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, about a woman, plying her trade in a boardinghouse, and the landlady who has had enough and is trying to kick her out. What elevates the play to a comic sophistication is the character called "The Writer," who is clearly Williams himself. He has a tour de force monologue near the end of the play which includes: "Suppose that I live in this world of pitiful fiction! What satisfaction can it give you, good woman, to tear it to pieces, to crush it--to call it a lie? I tell you this--now listen! There are no lies but the lies that are stuffed in the mouth by the hard-knuckled hand of need, the cold iron fist of necessity, Mrs. Wire! So I am a liar, yes! But your world is built on a lie, your world is a hideous fabrications of lies!"

The Last of My Solid Gold Watches is something of a precursor of Death of a Salesman, concerning a shoe salesman (based on Williams' father) who is near the end of line, mocked and ridiculed by a younger salesman. Portrait of a Madonna is an early version of the character of Blanche Dubois, a fading belle with delusions of a molester in next room of her rented flat. In fact, Williams saw Jessica Tandy perform this role and decided she would play Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.

Auto-Da-Fe is a creepy play about a mother and son. Williams includes in his stage directions: "Mother and son are both fanatics and their speech has something of the quality of poetic or religious incantation." The son, who works in the post office, has confiscated an obscene photograph in the mail, but he has not turned it in. Instead it seems to have triggered something in him.

Lord Byron's Love Letter is set in New Orleans. A woman and her grandmother have, in their possession, a letter from the great poet to a woman he met in Greece. A couple of bourgeoisie tourists come to see it, and the old woman hides from them, but can't help but shout out things to her granddaughter. It becomes apparent that the letter was written to the old lady. This Property is Condemned is only a few pages long, but was expanded into a feature-length film, an early effort from Sidney Pollack, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. Neither of the characters they played are in the one-act, which is instead about a young girl walking along railroad tracks, telling a boy about her deceased sister.

The plays from the 50s are Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, and is set in Manhattan. It is in a dingy room and the only two characters are a man and a woman, who seem to be locked in some cycle of despair. A better is Something Unspoken, with two female characters. One is a spinster of about sixty, who is waiting to hear if she has been elected to the highest position in the Daughters of the Confederacy. The catch is, she will only accept the position if she is elected unanimously. The other character is her secretary, a widow, who has been with her for 15 years and has put up with a lot. There is a delicious dark comic quality to it.

In an essay titled "Something Wild..." Williams has visited a community theater, and seeing distinguished men and woman in their business finery, longs for his days in the community theater of his youth, the Mummers in St. Louis. As he says, quite correctly: "In my opinion art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province of art...Now, there is no virtue, per se, in not going to the barber. And I don't suppose there is any particular virtue in girls having runs in their stockings. Yet one feels a kind of nostalgia for that sort of disorderliness now and then."