{"id":8859,"date":"2021-02-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8859"},"modified":"2021-06-23T08:18:46","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T12:18:46","slug":"tennessee-williams-the-actors-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8859","title":{"rendered":"Tennessee Williams: The Actor’s Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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So many of the insights of this five-session course on Tennessee Williams I\u2019ve been Zooming from The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey are directly applicable to fiction writing. The course is led by STNJ artistic director Bonnie J. Monte. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The next Book Club<\/a>, scheduled for spring, will focus on Shakespeare\u2019s Henry IV<\/em>, both parts, and Henry V<\/em>, with its powerful \u201cwe happy few, we band of brothers\u201d sentiments.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actor Laila Robins, who played Blanche DuBois in STNJ\u2019s 2008 production of A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em>, talked about the similar power of Williams\u2019s language. \u201cThe language acts you,\u201d she said. She deliberately didn\u2019t play the heartbreak of Blanche\u2019s situation, aiming instead to encourage the audience to keep hoping beyond hope, as Blanche does, that somehow everything will work out. It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019ve seen the play before and remember how it ends. You keep hoping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do too. Every time I\u2019ve seen West Side Story<\/em>, I\u2019m silently praying Chino won\u2019t show up with that gun . . . even though I know better. Reading Hillary Mantel\u2019s The Mirror and the Light<\/em>, I read slower and slower in the last fifty pages, knowing how it would end and hoping for a miracle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robins and Monte pointed to the \u201cpractical core\u201d of many of Williams\u2019s characters that lets them be survivors despite their evident frailties and failures. Even at the end of The Glass Menagerie<\/em>, Laura (pictured)\u2014who is as fragile as one of her glass animals\u2014seems capable of resilience. Monte believes a good Tennessee Williams actress must possess a great deal of courage because the roles demand so much vulnerability. Think of Alma in Summer and Smoke<\/em> or Jane in Vieux Carre<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as he did with Summer and Smoke<\/em> and its later incarnation, Eccentricities of a Nightingale <\/em>(with critics still debating which is the better version), Williams returned to Laura\u2019s story repeatedly, including in his short story, \u201cPortrait of a Girl in Glass,\u201d which ends with Laura picking up one of her precious LPs, blowing on its surface a little as if it were dusty, then setting it softly back down. Then she says something enigmatic about her encounter with Jim, the family\u2019s dinner guest who, unexpectedly, is soon to be married and therefore no boyfriend candidate: \u201cPeople in love,\u201d she says, \u201ctake everything for granted.\u201d Where did that come from?  It\u2019s so much more worldly-wise than we might expect from Laura and more generous toward the situation than her angry mother is capable of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This gets to another aspect of Williams\u2019s plays that Monte has emphasized throughout this course, which is kindness. Yes, his characters may be in bizarre and uncomfortable, even brutal situations, but they display unexpected flashes of kindness toward each other. She views Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo<\/em> as a kinder version of Stanley Kowalski from Streetcar<\/em>. What she terms \u201cextraordinary gestures of kindness\u201d are demonstrated by many characters in Night of the Iguana<\/em> too. \u201cWilliams finds the life-saving power of compassion in some very dark places.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ability to be both rough and kind, whether embodied in one character or distributed among them, not only requires great actors, but also a director who establishes the right balance between these poles. It\u2019s something all good writers strive for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous posts in this series<\/em>:
The Deep Dive<\/a>
How To See<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So many of the insights of this five-session course on Tennessee Williams I\u2019ve been Zooming from The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey are directly applicable to fiction writing. The course is led by STNJ artistic director Bonnie J. Monte. (The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Tennessee Williams: The Actor's Challenge - what makes drama work on stage works for authors on the page as well.\n","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[269,61,366,74,104,147,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-character","category-drama","category-emotions","category-the-morgue","category-theater","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2iT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8859"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8863,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8859\/revisions\/8863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}