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Tennessee Williams:
Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
By Neena Arndt
Tennessee Williams,
circa 1955. Photo by
FPG/Archive Photos/
Getty Images.
In the foreword to his phantasmagoric
1953 allegory, Camino Real, playwright
Tennessee Williams, who by then had
made a name for himself with psychological
dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire
and The Glass Menagerie, wrote, “More
than any other work I have done, this
play has seemed to me like a construction
of another world, a separate existence.”
Casual Williams fans may remain
unfamiliar with the dreamlike Camino
Real, which differs stylistically from his
better-known works. In fact, those who
know only Williams’ “greatest hits” might
be hard-pressed to believe that Camino
Real—broad in scope and sweepingly
ambitious—flowed from the same pen
as the classics they cherish. But Camino
Real springs from the deepest recesses of
Williams’ heart and psyche, and offers a
glimpse into the staggering imagination of
this multifaceted writer.
In 1951, two years before Camino Real
premiered, Tennessee Williams became
a household name when 27-year-old
Marlon Brando swaggered and shouted
his way to immortality as Stanley
Kowalski in the film A Streetcar Named
Desire. Under the direction of Elia
Kazan, Brando portrayed Williams’ most
iconic male character as lustful and sensuous,
giving a grandiose performance
that nonetheless was grounded in the
realistic acting style of which Brando
was a master. An early “method” actor,
Brando was steeped in the theories of
visionary Russian director Konstantin
Stanislavsky, which permeated American
theater and film in the mid-twentieth
century. This style supplanted melodrama,
which saw its heyday in the nineteenth
century and took its last fluttery
breaths in the middle of the twentieth,
when writers like Tennessee Williams,
Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller transformed
the American stage with such
masterworks as Streetcar, Long Day’s
Journey into Night and Death of a
Salesman. Directly imitating real life had
never been among melodrama’s goals,
but now, both on stage and on screen,
many artists aimed to hold up a mirror
to the world around them.
Today, Tennessee Williams is most often
remembered as one of the writers who
pioneered this style in America. Indeed,
the works for which he is best known use
largely realistic plots and characters to
achieve Williams’ goal of rooting around
the human psyche. Their stories concern
SYNOPSIS
Tennessee Williams’ hauntingly poetic
allegory takes us to a surreal, deadend
town occupied by a colorful collection
of lost souls anxious to escape
but terrified of the unknown wasteland
lurking beyond the city’s walls. When
Kilroy, an American traveler and former
boxer, inadvertently lands in this
netherworld, he sets off on a fantastical
adventure through illusion and
temptation in an attempt to flee its
confines—and defy his grim destiny.
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