A Guide to Tennessee Williams

For kindred spirits who revere Tennessee Williams' work, Emily Kubincanek [ @emilykub_ ] has written a great piece for Film School Rejects titled A Guide to Tennessee Williams. Thanks and gratitude to my eldest son, Evan, for sending it to me. Enjoy, readers:

https://filmschoolrejects.com/a-guide-to-tennessee-williams/?utm_source=Film+School+Rejects&utm_campaign=4593a06243-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61fefd1b5f-4593a06243-335116241


The Fugitive Kind is mentioned in it, which I posted about in 2010:
http://moviereviewsbydonna.blogspot.com/2010/04/fugitive-kind.html

Also cited with a film clip is The Night of the Iguana. Though I’ve never written about it, the film is a favorite; it pulsates with sexual dynamics, both overt and repressed. Richard Burton was never better, though equally powerful in The Sandpiper with his love, Elizabeth Taylor.  Cinematography of Big Sur in The Sandpiper is exquisite, reason alone to view it.

Though not cited - she couldn't possibly cover all - my beloved of Williams’ work is the film, This Property Is Condemned, adapted from a play. I posted about it in 2013, and from number of viewings and comments, many share my passion for and identification with it:
http://moviereviewsbydonna.blogspot.com/2013/

Too seldom do we read about Williams’ work today. Thank you, Ms. Kubincanek, for appreciating and writing about it.

This Property Is Condemned

Ever been haunted by a movie?  So touched that seeing it again evokes anticipation and apprehension?

This is my movie ghost.  It occupies a special corner of mind and heart, a swirling mix of tenderness, complex personal relativity, poignancy and truth, all embedded in the Natalie Wood, Robert Redford characters.  In my mind they're forever young and beautiful, as they are here, except reality intrudes, tells me tragedy took one too soon, though the other is still productively with us.  It's the dual magic of movies - eternal fictional characters / ethereally beautiful humans.  Both actors have been in other great films, yet for me this is the best of both.  It weaves emotion, behavior and society into powerful tapestry.  It portrays truths still barely acknowledged these forty-seven years later.

Based on a 1946 one-act Tennessee Williams play, the script was co-written by someone we'd come to know well in future years, Francis Ford Coppola, together with Fred Coe and Edith Sommer.  Director Sydney Pollack's unique and complementary ability put it on the big screen.

Will watching it again be akin to returning to a childhood home where we find everything smaller and out of sync with memory?  A disappointment?  Or perhaps informed, even enriched by the prism of time and experience?

                                                     ------------ // ------------ // ------------


It's now "after," and it's a mixed bag - some new and changed perceptions, along with renewed reverence for Tennessee Williams, why I love who he was and what he wrote.

Spoiler warning:  The ending is included, something I wouldn't ordinarily do.  Two reasons: it's essential to story and theme, and the movie is probably not on most folks' viewing wish list.  It's a forgotten gem

The April 2013 print issue of Esquire magazine has Robert Redford on the cover, authentically depicting his 76-year-old face as only digital technology can.  A quote from the piece:

 [ ... Seventy-six years old, sun-baked and wind-whipped and ungorgeous at last, he's a handsome sumbitch ...]

I disagree; he's still gorgeous, just showing his age, an unforgivable trait in today's youth-obsessed culture.  Esquire's feature-length piece by Scott Raab chronicles Redford's life and career, even showcases sixteen movie scenes from 1962 through 2013.  This Property Is Condemned is never mentioned, though Redford's almost fifty-year friendship with director Sydney Pollack is.
http://www.esquire.com/features/robert-redford-interview-0413

A June 2011 GQ article does list this movie among 10 underrated [Redford] classics you need to see
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2011-06/13/gq-film-best-robert-redford-movies/viewgallery/6
                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                             

Lightbox Image

The Story:

A slim dark-haired girl wearing a long, tattered, sophisticated dress, gaudy jewellery and faux hair flower, teeters along a train rail.  She sings Wish Me A Rainbow while holding a doll.  Her age is uncertain, maybe early teens.  A boy approaches, asks if she's seen his kite.  "No," but she asks him to hold Crazy Doll so she can use both arms for balance.  He does, but within moments she loses her balance, falls against him, and together they tumble down a steep hill.

Her immediate concern is for the 'diamond' she's lost from one of her many bracelets, not her skinned leg.

She:  "Principal damage done to my bracelet I guess, knocked out one of the diamonds."

He:   "Well, it wasn't a genuine diamond."

She:  "How do you know?"

He:   "Cause if it was, you wouldn't be out walking railroad tracks, not with a banged-up doll and a piece of a rotten banana."

Her name is Willie (because a boy was expected) and his is Tom.  She's not in school because she doesn't like it - school's not necessary - to be important and succeed in life she must be like Alva.  She remembers and reminisces about Alva; then, pointing to a ramshackle, boarded-up building in the distance bearing a sign reading   This Property Is Condemned   she begins her story.

Willie: Alva was beautiful, charming, magical.  She changed things so they were special; she attracted people and knew what's important in life.  I'm practicing to be just like her.

Alva (Natalie Wood) was her older sister, beautiful, flirtatious, possibly promiscuous, though that's unclear, the elder daughter of Mama Hazel who ran the now-derelict boarding house.  Filled with workers from the town's main employer, a railroad repair depot during the '30s, it was awash in male testosterone and social activity.  Alva was the main attraction, ensuring male income and interest, even romance that occasionally accrued to Mama.  All Mama's attention was focused on Alva - tutoring, exploiting, pimping Alva's femininity.

Willie:  Mama wanted Alva to be nicer to a much older man who really liked Alva and was paying Mama extra to get Alva to spend time with him.  He paid for a big 43rd birthday party for Mama, too.  But it was too much for Alva; she wiggled out of any dates and got away from him every time.  Mama's boyfriend, J.J., liked Alva, too.  A little too much. 

Ahead of his time, Williams was unafraid to depict what we now know is prevalent, inappropriate peripheral sexual interest and interaction within familial / romantic relationships.  Figures in a 2012 More Canada magazine article state:

More than 12% of girls report unwanted sexual acts before their 17th birthday, and the vast majority of victims still, despite public education, do not report their abuse.  Furthermore, among substantiated cases, apparently biological fathers are perpetrators in 9% of cases, stepfathers in another 13%.

Willie:  A good-looking, well dressed man arrived in town and rented a room from us.  He wouldn't say why he was here or how long he'd be staying.  He was different from the locals and seemed to like me.  He talked to me a bit, but seemed to dislike Alva.  She liked him though, as soon as she saw him.

Fictionally acknowledging Dorothy Nolte's Children Learn What They Live, Alva turns her charm and Mama-nurtured guile on this new man in town.  Owen Legate (Robert Redford) takes pleasure in rebuffing and subtly ridiculing her attempts to impress him.  He observes the interaction between Alva, boarders and Mama, and rebukes Alva:

Alva:   "Just because some people might think I'm beautiful, that doesn't mean I'm everybody's property."

Owen: "If you really thought you were beautiful, you wouldn't be anybody's property.  You'd be your own girl."

 

In spiteful response to a particularly painful interaction with Owen, Alva invites boarding house groupies to a communal moonlight swim where Mama's boyfriend makes a second, more determined, again-rebuffed pass at Alva.

Willie:  Dodson was a railroad town.  Our boarders had jobs at the train repair depot.  The town grew around it, and we all depended on it.  Wasn't long before we learned Owen was a hated "spotter" - someone sent by the railroad to lay off workers.  By this time Alva and Owen were friends, though she downplayed it to me.  Once Owen told workers their jobs were over, people didn't like her being with him, and they hated him - beat him up badly once.  The layoffs meant big trouble for Mama.  Without jobs there'd be no money and the boarders would move on.  Mama decided Alva should reconsider that older man she'd already refused to date, that he could provide a secure future for us.  You see, Daddy left long ago.  We were on our own.

In a signature scene, the one indelibly etched on my mind, beautiful Alva, wearing an exquisitely feminine, revealing white dress, meets Owen at the depot and walks with him toward an adjacent rail yard.  Intense, hate-filled stares follow them.  Owen questions why she came, noting the men don't like it.  She tells him she simply wanted to see and show him something.  At that moment Owen spots an abandoned passenger car with Miss Alva on its side.  Taking Owen's hand, she happily pulls him toward it.  They've become close, yet Owen is wary.

Inside the long-abandoned relic, Alva tries to envelop Owen in her imaginary world, a world of lilac-talcum-powdered train seats instead of dust, a sky of her preferred color, real snow in a snow globe, and an idealized concept of his job and travel.  She holds out a necklace she never removes, a gift from her father who made many promises and kept only one - writing Miss Alva on the exterior of the car and decorating the interior before leaving her a gift card that read  Hail my heart's delight, and farewell.                                                             

                                                                             
Alva asks Owen if he feels bad about laying off the men.  "No," he says grimly, he can't, he does it in every city he goes into, it's his job.  Alva senses he does and tells him so, then quickly reverts to fantasy, tells him he must smile on The Honeydew Express or the wheels won't turn.

With rising frustration, Owen thrusts reality at her, attempts to pierce her illusions - her "poetic nature," Alva calls it.

Owen:  "Why do you do that?  Why are you so fanciful?  Why do you make everything seem so special?"
Alva:     "Because it is."
Alva:     "What's your dream?"
Owen:   "I have no dream."
Alva:      "How terrible for you!"  

Owen is leaving for New Orleans next morning and wants Alva to acknowledge it.  Though she knows it's reality, she resists.  Her dream has always been to go to New Orleans on The Hummingbird Express, her name for the train that passes through. Owen's departure signifies both dream and love unrealized.

The scene crystallizes Williams' ability to reveal the lengths we humans go to survive confining, ugly lives, to make life tolerable, perhaps even beautiful, delusions that keep us sane and ward off the lonliness of being different.

It also depicts an aspect of arrogant cruelty and control, Owen's insistence that Alva adapt and adopt his matter-of-fact response to life and reality.  (Didn't see this as clearly years ago.)

Alva had two competing spirits - one that conformed and played out her expected/dictated role, a second that escaped into soul-comforting fantasy where the world existed more gently, beautifully.  But she knew and didn't disappear into the difference, unlike Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Laura Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie). 

Mama finds Alva in Owen's bed next morning, sneers that Alva "didn't even lock the door," and dictates a newly-hatched plan.  They are going to Memphis where the persistent old and married gentleman-suitor will advance a loan to "set them up."  Implicit is Alva's attention and companionship.  Seeing Alva's shock and disgust, Mama responds scathingly, "If there's one thing I loathe, it's that innocent virgin look you put on your face!"  Encountering intransigent defiance, Mama first uses guilt - appeals on behalf of Willie, desperate finances, her maternal role - then, ultimately, emotionally-weighted character assassination, accusing Alma of being selfish, "just as your father predicted."

Meanwhile, Owen buys a one-way ticket to New Orleans, and while writing: 

"For Alva, to be used ... whenever"

on an envelope in the boarding house hallway, he overhears Mama on the phone giving details about their move to Memphis, emphasizing "Alva's just wild to go."  She hangs up and looks smugly, knowingly at Owen.  He bolts upstairs and confronts Alva in the shower.
            

Alva:    "Owen, don't say what can't be fixed."

Owen:  "You wonder about other things, other ways to live?  You wonder and you dream but you go on doing what you do.  That railroad carriage is enough for you.  That snowstorm, fake.  But it's enough for you because you're a fake, Alva.  You're a gyp.  You're not unique.  You're not even special.  You're just ...peculiar.  What in hell did I think was so magical or fanciful about a little whore who is just a little bit peculiar?"

 
Alva begs him not to believe Mama, but he has and does.  Unlike Alva who found ways to cope with her societal prison, Owen has completely surrendered to his. He and Mama have trapped Alva between two sides of the same moral coin.

We next see Alva at a club with the prospective old sugar daddy, Mama, and boyfriend, J.J.  Alva is drunk, hurt and bitter.  She thrusts ugly truth in Mama's face - that she's been the male attraction that benefited Mama financially and romantically, that even Mama's boyfriend lusts after her, stays with Mama just to be near her.

Mama responds with the jealousy and resentment she's always borne Alva, her beauty and youth.  Alva uses her currency, the one Mama created and nurtured, and offers J.J. intimacy in exchange for marriage.  He readily accepts.  Emerging from their first-night marriage bed, Alva takes J.J.'s money and leaves in darkness for New Orleans.

Alva wanders New Orleans, exploring, noticing, learning, absorbing -- gloriously free for the first time ever.  She finds herself, and heals her soul and spirit.   Owen finds her in a beautiful park one day.

Owen:  "I missed you, Alva.  Didn't know I would.  And New Orleans is not a place where a person needs to feel the pain of separation for long."

                              
They reunite and are blissfully happy with the kind of tender, considerate, passionate relationship every romantic imagines.  Together she and Owen explore the city, even the above-ground cemeteries that long intrigued her.

Alva worries about Willie and her whereabouts.  Owen encourages Alva's search, offering to take Willie with them to Chicago.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Mama arrives.  She's waiting as they arrive home together, scolds Alva for leaving the door unlocked.  She learned their address from Alva's cards to Willie.  She wants and expects Alva to leave with her, says the old sugar daddy is no longer in the picture, but she has other schemes and plans.  Owen wastes no time in telling her Alva stays with him; she's to get out.

Facing defeat, Mama responds, "Heard you're getting married."  Then, with cold, calculating, merciless cruelty, Mama chooses scorched earth.

                                 "Didn't she tell you?   That little girl's all wrapped up."
    
                                  "She and J.J. got married and the next morning, she went through his
                                   pockets and rolled him."

                                   "Tell him, Alva."


With hand to mouth, face contorted in horror and pain, Alva cries, "Oh, my God!"

Owen is dumbstruck, shocked, then with a look of disgust, says only, "What?!!"

Alva runs hysterically into teeming rain, having known, feared, and now experienced Owen's reaction.

Willie:  Mama ran off with a man named Sam and they're somewhere in Arkansas, I think.  Papa never did come back.  You know where Alva is now?  The bone orchard ... cemetery ... graveyard.  Her lungs got affected.  She died of the same thing as a heroine in a movie here recently.  It was beautiful, violins playing, old lovers come back.  I'm gonna live a long time like Alva, then die with all my jewellery, and someone else will inherit all my beaux.

                                                            

 

 aberdeennjlife

A fan named BadZKarma99 has compiled actual film clips into a perfect micro narrative at

                                                             http://youtu.be/iwXI14h3NqI

Wish me a rainbow

Wish me a star

All this you can give me

Wherever you are

And dreams for my pillow

And stars for my eyes

      And a masquerade ball where our love wins first prize

Wish me red roses and yellow balloons

 And black sequins whirling to gay dancing tunes

I want all these treasures, most you can give

So wish me a rainbow as long as I live

                                                             

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My words can't possibly  reconstruct or reflect the elements of poignancy, beauty, tension, youth, parental tyranny, dictatorial, unforgiving morality, love, loss and sorrow contained in the film.  There's darkness, and as I read the account above, I wonder that anyone would choose to watch it.  However, its genius is that all themes are submerged beneath an engaging story.  They require reflection.  On the surface it's compelling drama with exquisite cinematography and music.

Ultimately, it's a complex morality tale.  It depicts survival of the fittest, though it was never a fair fight.  It offers insight into the power of family dynamics, their enduring influence on all members, and the power of cultural morality to control and destroy lives.  It illustrates the power of the human spirit to adapt and cope, as well as the reality that love, even maternal love, can be twisted, manipulative, jealous and destructive. It depicts predatory lust that abuses proximity and trust.

Above all, it portrays truth - ugly, hidden, painful, and too-briefly, beautiful.  Like the boarding house itself, the characters were ultimately condemned property, compromised by life and circumstance.  Like the sign on the boarding house, the movie alerts and warns.

For some who personally relate, Williams says, "I see, I understand, and I will tell."

Dysfunctional motherhood and familial sexual misconduct were taboo in polite society forty-seven years ago, secret in all but  professional and  religious circles, and probably unimagined in the 1930s when the story is set. Motherhood was sanctified, still is unless crime or adultery are involved.  And still largely unacknowledged is a jealous resentment often borne by mothers toward daughters, a competition of sorts that simmers, bubbles up and is expressed/repressed in a vicious, recurring cycle.  Some mothers deny it exists, and perhaps for some it doesn't, others don't.  It's emerged occasionally in popular literature the past decade, and it's one of the last taboos. 

Williams served society best, in my opinion, and was again far ahead of his time, in not only depicting J.J's. lust for Alva, but his attempts to act on it, to embrace, paw and accost her in secret.  Though the movie was released in the sixties, heyday of free love and hippies, conventional society was still just that -- rigid, hidebound, disbelieving of much that was surreptitiously happening to young women like Alva.

A family friend suddenly appeared in my own dark teenage bedroom during those years, yet my mother didn't believe me twelve years ago (40 years later) when she demanded to know why I refused to talk with him when he called about a death in our family.  I was careful to never again get behind my first boss's desk after he ran his hand up my leg as I stood beside him, waiting for him to sign letters.  We young women were too often considered property, sometimes even by our parents. We weren't believed, even when we (rarely) dared tell.  "Mr. X wouldn't do that!"  Or, as is still shamefully the case today, "You must have led him on."  "What were you wearing?" We still haven't come as far as we'd like to believe.

Thank you, Tennessee Williams.  You knew, and you told.

Life has wonderful pictures and a great piece titled Tennessee Williams:  Portraits of an American Genius @  http://life.time.com/culture/tennessee-williams-portraits-of-an-american-genius/#3

                                                                                                                                                                   

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

Great expectations; great disappointment.

Released in 2009, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond wasn't screened where I live, and there was a long wait for the DVD.

Now I wonder:  Did I sabotage fair assessment with my long and eager anticipation?  Were my expectations realistic?  Is it possible to put Tennessee Williams' work on the screen authentically today, given contemporary audience and financing challenges?

Teardrop Director Jodie Markell says she developed "an affinity" for Tennessee Williams as a teenager and read everything of his ever published.  Later, a New York acting school teacher, aware of her interest, introduced her to an unproduced collection of Williams' screenplays, among them The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.  She identified with unconventional Fisher Willow, acquired rights, and shot the film in Louisiana in twenty-eight days.  Written in 1957, the story is set in 1923 Memphis.

Ms. Markell and I appear to value different aspects of Williams' work; she (from her own words) relates to his empathy for society's misfits; I to Williams' cogent exposure of society's hypocrisy, injustice, willful ignorance and cruelty.  While the latter themes are in the film, they're peripheral, muted and vastly subordinate to Fisher Willow and her personal emotional journey.

Director Markell also says she wanted to faithfully embody and convey Williams' words and story, yet the film lacks his historic essence, his fearless intent and remarkable ability to make us see and powerfully feel everyday kindness and ugliness.  

Paraphrasing a favourite line from Madam X,  
This film is not the substance of Tennessee Williams, only the shape and shadow.

The plot is available at Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss_of_a_Teardrop_Diamond

The Fugitive Kind

The Fugitive Kind is an antique masterpiece.

Adapted for the screen by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams from Williams' play, Orpheus Descending, it's an oldie from 1959.

Watching it on DVD has been a searing, consuming, unforgettable experience.  Parts were so affecting that I watched them again and again.  The brilliance of the performances can't be overstated.  Finally, I've seen Marlon Brando at the peak of his talent and can fully understand the acclaim he's accorded.  Anna Magnani was spellbinding, perfect for her difficult role.  She and Brando are this film.

A young Joanne Woodward has a showy, perhaps overplayed role of near madness, a Tennessee Williams staple.  Victor Jory is malevolently perfect, and Maureen Stapleton is memorable in her small role of then-atypical kindness and compassion.   

Anyone reading this will rightly conclude that I'm old (in body, not in mind, I hope), and I readily admit that this film probably won't interest you unless you're of a certain age, or are a film buff.  The time and morality that is its backdrop will be emotionally unknown to anyone young, but it is a perfectly crafted window into another time and societal place, one that was rigid, cruel and judgmental; one I grew up in.

The film begins with the arrival of Brando's quiet, guitar-carrying character in a small, insular town.  He finds employment, reluctantly forms or is drawn into relationships, and ultimately unleashes powerful, cataclysmic forces.

The stories - for really, there are several - evolve in undulating, entwined layers which are striking in their depiction of complex human emotion.  The abundance of interrelated themes, woven subtly into the narrative, move me still.  You see, the film depicts a time when females were "owned" - oh, not as overtly as in horrific slavery -but in effect, just the same - we were possessions.  It began for females with our parents; then, as we grew older, it became a collective communal thing until marriage when husbands took up the bonds.  Morality and social convention were absolute and vicious.  Women, blacks, natives, minorities, Jews, outsiders - we were all kept in our place and God help those who dared overstep.  Brutality, both emotional and physical, was entrenched, even celebrated.  Unimaginably cruel things were said and done then, even within families.

Tennessee Williams' brilliance has always been in his ability to see and reflect the suffocating confinement, delusion, hypocrisy and complexity of human personalities living within those times.  No one presents the myriad aspects of human emotion better or more courageously - even in their stark ugliness - than Tennessee Williams; and all were in play in this film.

The Brando we see here is a beautiful man blessed with sensual magnetism and charisma that defies description.  His character is quiet, yet commands the screen.  He is Williams' Orpheus.

The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology describes Orpheus as a musician of such power and sweetness that even the wild creatures would gather to listen to him. ... He is best known for his visit to Hades, when he tried to recover his dead wife [Eurydice] from the shades. ... His music, and his grief, so touched Persephone that she pleaded with her grim consort on his behalf, and Hades agreed to let Erydice return to earth.  But he made the condition that Orpheus must believe that Eurydice followed him - and not look back.  But in his agony of uncertainty that Eurydice really was following him Orpheus did look back, and saw her slip away from him forever.


The Fugitive Kind is powerful, quiet filmmaking from a more restrained era.
An early brief sequence, non-visual, exemplifies the now-abandoned cinematic art of evoking deep emotion without graphic depiction.  The mind alone can create a powerful image.

There is raw emotional truth here, in addition to a profoundly engaging and timeless story.  It dwells in my mind and memory as no other movie ever has.


Update - May 24, 2010

Although I viewed this film on a bare-bones DVD, Criterion restored and released it as a Special Edition, Double-DVD set this April, 2010. 
http://www.criterion.com/films/17998-the-fugitive-kind

and here's a must-read essay on it by David Thomson:
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1449-the-fugitive-kind-when-sidney-went-to-tennessee


ADDENDUM - September 23, 2011

Found a 1965 book titled Tennessee Williams and Friends, An Informal Biography, at a flea market.  It was written by Gilbert Maxwell, a writer-friend who says this, among other things, in his Foreword:

With Tennessee and me, however, time and talk were to form a relationship rooted in something far deeper than the circumstance of our having mutual old friends from down home--for we were to find there was an eerie likeness in our family backgrounds, as well as in certain events of our childhood.

From the dust jacket:

This book is unique:  a series of recollections -- immediate, palpable, human -- by a writer who has known Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Tennessee Williams since the very beginning of his career.  It is a fellow author's personal and highly sensitive portrait of the most successful and controversial playwright of our time.

Following is the second-last chapter of the book.  I reproduce it here for devotees of Williams' work, and to hopefully entice the unfamiliar into exploring it.
      

Now (as I have said before) though it has not been my intention to criticize or discuss the work of Tennessee Williams in these memoirs, I feel impelled to state his message as it has come across, personally, to me.

In his plays and stories he has repeatedly used as a theme the unjust cruelty of man toward his fellows because he has been haunted, first, by nightmarish fears that his sister may have been subjected to harsh and terrible treatment in sanitoriums, and secondly because, obsessed with a fearful revulsion at the thought of deliberate cruelty (Blanche du Bois speaks of it as "the one unforgivable thing"), he has been impelled to face it unflinching as he has grown older, and consequently to cry out in the loud voice of a possessed reformer against it. In portraying scenes of abominable, outrageous beastliness, he has been fighting fire with fire; and surely with such a motive, he has been justified in shocking the prudish, the hypocritical, the stubbornly blind or misunderstanding members of his audiences--at least for a space of three hours--out of their habitual apathy, their acceptance of intolerable things as they are in the world today.

It will probably be true, of course, that the majority to whom he cries out will be disturbed for no more than a matter of hours, but there is also, always, the hope that some few may have heard and heeded what he has had to say. He has tried to drive home his basic message, as in "Orpheus Descending", by such devices as posses of bigoted men mobbing an innocent victim with blowtorches and blood hounds, and with gossiping, ignorant women destroying a man or a woman's character; with a wretched neurotic (Blanche du Bois) paying all her life for having, with one awful accusation, driven her young husband to suicide; with the police in "Camino Real" attacking homosexuals and the street cleaners trundling them out in ash cans; with self-righteous, corrupt, powerful, small-town citizens castrating a simple, mixed-up boy in "Sweet Bird of Youth"; with the naked, starving children devouring the corrupt poet Sebastian in "Suddenly Last Summer".


He has done all this--and more--and he has never done it to be sensational, to shock the good citizen or, through flamboyance, to become notorious, famous, or rich. He has done it because he was impelled to shout (and let the damned chips fall where they may) to a selfish, self-centered, materialistic audience of millions everywhere, "This is your world, and here is what happens within it each hour that you live, going deaf, dumb, and blind about your personal affairs, self imprisoned in your own thick skins. This is your world, which you made, so now, if not for the sake of that kind, omniscient God you no longer believe in, at least for your own sake, try to do something about it.