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Tennessee
Williams spent the last few years of his life writing, revising,
rewriting, and reworking a play that would become his final
frustrated howl at the world. He considered the play a comedy.
In fact, Williams subtitled A House Not Meant to Stand
"a gothic comedy."
But instead
of creepy, stately old castles or Victorian mansions, the
gothic environment Williams creates is a Faulknerian, dilapidated-glory-of-the-South
sadness embodied by a ramshackle house that leaks throughout
the entire play.
"The
dilapidation of this house is a metaphor for society," Williams
writes in his opening stage description, pointing subtly to
the storm that rages outside the house. "It is as if the panicky
disarray and imminent collapse of society were translated
into this stage setting…."
Worse
yet, in Williams's opinion, the audience is complicit in society's
demise. "[W]e, that participate in it and are an audience
to it, are rightly appalled by this 'see-through,'" he says.
Having
made his intentions clear at the outset, Williams then constructs
a ferocious but flawed play that creates levels of engagement
for the audience/reader. The play itself becomes easier and
less easy to see. Parts of the set are obscured then revealed
through scrims, a type of fabric curtain that can be lit in
different ways to make the fabric transparent or opaque. The
storm raging outside causes power outages that plunge the
action into darkness. Key scenes take place outdoors, putting
the action offstage and out of the audience's sight.
But in
the most obvious attempt at underscoring the audience's complicity
in society's disintegration, Williams frequently has his characters
directly address the audience. In The Glass Menagerie,
for instance, Williams uses the technique as a crucial conceit
for character revelation. In House, the technique is far less
successful, coming across as polemic ranting in the cheap
guise of Brechtian disengagement.
The deteriorating
house mirrors the family that lives in it, just as the storm
outside mirrors the storm inside. Cornelius and Bella McCorkle
have just returned from the funeral of their eldest son, a
gay man Cornelius had driven from the home years earlier.
The parallels between Williams and his own father, also named
Cornelius, are unmistakable to those who know Williams's personal
story.
Cornelius
tries to wrangle from his wife the location of a secret money
stash she'd inherited from her dying grandfather decades earlier.
Bella, who experiences mild dementia but who's also disarmingly
crazy like a fox, resists. Cornelius threatens to have Bella
"put away." The couple's youngest son Charlie, a ne'er-do-well
who can't keep a job and who has brought his pregnant, holy-rolling
girlfriend home with him, tries to defend his mother.
The play's
main themes—sanity and dementia, sexuality, family, and
time—wash through the story like waves: Just as one crests,
the next one washes up, then the next. Williams's subtle craftsmanship
in that regard creates an excellent internal rhythm to the
play, which starts soft and slow and builds momentum as it
goes. When the play works, it almost achieves the strength
of Williams's most enduring writing.
But then
one of the characters will start ranting to the audience—even
just a line or two—and the spell snaps. Not only do the
rants seem like heavy-handed attempts by Williams to say that
we should all be worried about the particular social travesty,
they rob from the play its sense of timelessness. For a play
that's very much about time, such a shortfall is particularly
noteworthy.
Fortunately,
even with its flaws, A House Not Meant to Stand does
still stand after all these years though it has never before
been available in print. Editor Thomas Keith has painstakingly
assembled an excellent edition for New Directions, and the
play is now finally available, 26 years after it was produced
in its final form. Keith's introduction provides excellent
analysis of the work and sets it in its proper context within
the Williams canon.
This
edition includes a forward by Gregory Mosher, the director
who originally helped Williams develop the play from a one-act
into its final, full-length form, which provides a fascinating
glimpse into Williams's creative process. By the time House
was written, Williams's fame had long-since peaked and the
playwright was struggling to prove that he was still relevant.
Williams had no way to know House would be his last chance
to illustrate his relevancy to the world. Nine months after
the play premiered, Williams died in a New York hotel room.
While
A House Not Meant to Stand might not be a comedy in
the traditional sense, the play has a sense of gentility and
Bella has a sense of sympathy that make the script a worthwhile
read (and there are some legitimately funny lines, too). It
might not stand among his greatest literary achievements,
but House certainly makes for a thoughtful curtain
call.
(June,
2008)
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