![]() ![]() Eventually he would grant Blanche DuBois a vanished home named Belle Rêve, but all his plays concern beautiful dreams. His idiom is defiantly symbolic: “symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama”, he insisted. When he was 30, Thomas Lanier Williams III changed his name to Tennessee, promising to write plays that were “a picture of my own heart”. A Streetcar Named Desire, as Miller himself observed, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”. ![]() It took Williams to return romantic melodrama to the stage, embracing emotional excess while elevating it through sheer lyrical force. Miller, speaking for America’s political conscience, similarly eschewed romanticism. It was O’Neill who wrested American drama, kicking and screaming, into the world of realism: so repelled was he by Victorian sentimental romanticism that he ruthlessly eliminated all poetry from his plays. Over a remarkable 15 years, Williams wrote 10 plays that transformed US theatre, securing his place in the pantheon with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. Like any good cannibal, Williams understood the symbolic power that consuming your enemy confers. As John Lahr notes in his mammoth new biography, Williams was “the most autobiographical of American playwrights”, using the raw material of his troubled youth to fuel his art. W hen Tennessee Williams declared “Life is cannibalistic” he was also speaking of art: he had a tendency to equate the two. ![]()
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