Download - Goodman Theatre

LEFT: Peg Murray and
Scott Jaeck in Goodman
Theatre’s 1982 production
of Tennessee
Williams’ A House Not
Meant to Stand. Photo
by Lisa Ebright. BELOW:
Tennessee Williams
and Goodman Theatre
Executive Director Roche
Schulfer outside the
Goodman Studio.
Tennessee and Chicago
By Steve Scott
Although the city most often associated
with Tennessee Williams’ work was New
Orleans (his adopted home and the setting
of some of his most famous works), it was
Chicago that gave him his first real success
in the theater and that would provide
artistic haven to him late in his career.
Williams’ love affair with the Windy City
began in 1944 with the landmark success
of The Glass Menagerie, produced
at the Civic Theatre prior to its arrival on
Broadway. Claudia Cassidy, the venerated
critic for the Chicago Tribune, became a
passionate advocate for the play, writing
in her initial review that, “it reaches out
its tentacles, first tentative, then gripping,
and you are caught in its spell.” Cassidy’s
praise, and her continued exhortations
to local audiences to support the play,
brought national attention to the work
before it had even moved to New York,
and helped establish Williams as the preeminent
dramatist of his generation.
Thereafter, Williams considered Chicago
to be one of the best theater towns in
the world; in a 1951 letter to Cassidy,
he urged her to stump for the establishment
of a strong locally based theater
community here, exclaiming, “No better
place on Earth!” Touring productions
of his Broadway hits were a staple in
Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and,
as local producing companies began to
sprout, Williams’ plays were an important
part of their repertoire. Director
George Keathley’s first major hit at the
old Ivanhoe Theatre was a much-lauded
revival of The Rose Tattoo which swept
the first annual Joseph Jefferson Awards
in 1969. Two years later, Keathley produced
the world premiere of Williams’
Out Cry, an experience unfortunately
marred by the playwright’s erratic behavior—although
Williams later admitted,
after the failure of a subsequent New
York production with a different director,
that the play “was better in Chicago.”
Problems also plagued the 1980 premiere
of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which
starred Goodman School of Drama alumna
Geraldine Page as the ill-fated Zelda
Fitzgerald; although Williams himself was
in better emotional shape, his play was
greeted with critical disappointment.
Later that year, the playwright embarked
on an alliance with Goodman Theatre
that would result in in his final major
work for the stage. Some Problems for
the Moose Lodge, which was produced
first in the Goodman Studio as one of
three short plays collectively billed as
Tennessee Laughs
(a title Williams
apparently loathed),
was a darkly savage
comedy detailing
the travails of
Cornelius and Bella
McCorkle, an elderly
couple dealing with
the disintegration
of their family and
their marriage. The
reception of Moose
Lodge was positive
enough to encourage
Williams to expand the play into a longer
one-act, now entitled A House Not Meant
to Stand, produced in 1981, again in the
Goodman Studio. Despite some critical
misgivings, Williams kept working on the
play, encouraged by then-Artistic Director
Gregory Mosher; the result was a fulllength
version of House, which premiered
on the Goodman mainstage in the spring
of 1982. Now subtitled by the author
“A Gothic Comedy,” the new version
expanded the expressionistic absurdities
of its earlier drafts, revealing even more
passionately the playwright’s own frustrations
with the challenges of aging; as
Richard Christiansen noted in his Chicago
Tribune review, “it is a loud, harsh, bitter
pain-filled shriek at the degenerative process
of life…a tantalizing and frustrating
creation.” A House Not Meant to Stand
would be the last production with which
Williams himself would be associated;
tragically, he died nine months later.
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