CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Director’s Note
Following His Kind
"Invitations have been issued by The Mummers of St Louis for a reception late Saturday evening, Dec 4 1937 to meet Thomas Lanier Williams, author of Fugitive Kind which will be presented that evening at the Wednesday Club...
The news item from a local St Louis paper went on to say that "Fugitive Kind is the second play of the St Louisan -- son of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Williams -- to be given its premiere by The Mummers."
Almost twenty years after he had stepped off the train a frightened young boy of 7 at Union Station, and just over two years before he would first sign his name to a play as Tennessee Williams, Thomas L. Williams was recognized by the hometown he'd inherited after his father's promotion to the World's Largest Shoe Company had compelled his family's exodus from rural Mississippi, as "a playwright to watch" and "a poet of exceptional merit."
During the two decades Williams lived in St Louis -- the longest he ever lived in any place during his 71 years of living -- Williams was shuttled with his sister Rose (and later also his brother Dakin) from one address to one more desirable, usually further West within a higher zip code. The Williams' string of homes began with a boardinghouse on Lindell Boulevard, followed by the dark upstairs (Glass Menagerie) apartment at 4633 Westminster Place, then to a larger downstairs apartment at 5 Taylor Street at the corner of Laclede, followed by a smaller top floor apartment of a two-family at 5938 Cates Street (where Tom's mother Edwina gave him a secondhand typewriter at age 12), then to an over-crowded University City apartment at 6554 Enright Avenue, and finally to a handsome two-story house at 6634 Pershing Avenue.
Though the location of his family's home changed on average every three years, its dark tenor remained the same, defined by the painful sorrow of his parents' bitter recriminations. Tom's sister Rose survived the sad and sometimes violent nature of their home life by withdrawing further and further from reality, while Tom endured by writing constantly, often feverishly poems, short stories and plays. After failing ROTC his junior year at the University of Missouri in Columbus, Tom was not allowed to return for a senior year and graduate but instead was gifted by his father a job at International Shoe Co where he dusted shoes, typed out factory orders and hauled around packing cases of sample shoes. As Lyle Leverich writes in his richly detailed biography TOM: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, Tom was now confined to the same prison (International Shoe Co) as was his father C.C. Williams, who was now also his jailer.
His "sentence of hard labor" -- as Tennessee referred to his three years working alongside his father at International Shoe in his 1960 autobiographical essay The Man in the Overstuffed Chair -- came to an abrupt end not when he was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox as Tom reveals at the end of The Glass Menagerie) but after being admitted to Saint Luke's Episcopal Hospital convinced that he was having a heart attack. Within two years, Tom was enrolled in the famed Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was enacted -- because of his southern accent -- to play the role of a black chairman of a church convention in a play written by Thomas Pawley, his one black classmate. Pawley described the town of Iowa City and the University as segregated: "I could not eat in the restaurants or the Student Union or stay in the dormitory." But Tom, he said, was always cordial to me. "I was genuinely surprised at his apparent sympathy for" Black Americans (sic).
Misfits, strange-fragile, brutalized, marginalized, people are the heroes of Tennessee Williams' plays, from Miss Alma to Blanche to Brick, Maggie & Big Daddy. As Harry Alexander Kinney writes in his 1983 dissertation, "Through his own profound compassion, Tennessee Williams was able to lead audiences little by little, to tolerate his 'fugitive kind'. (also) He left behind an unforgettable lesson-- the misfit hardest to accept is one's self."
At the end of Orpheus Descending, Carol Cutrere clutches the snakeskin jacket of the protagonist Val Xavier who has just been visicously killed by a mob of townspeople. Her speech ends the searing tragedy about Lady Torrance, whose 'wop' father was burned alive in his Mississppi winegarden because he had dared serve alcohol to blacks: "Wild things leave skins behind them. They leave clean skins and teeth and white bones. And these are tokens, passed from one to another. So that the fugitive kind can follow their kind."
What a thrill it has been these last several weeks to walk the same streets Tennessee walked in St Louis over 100 years ago. Following him, as he follows his kind.
Michael Wilson
August 01 2024
Michael Wilson (Director) returns to TWSTL where he directed Bryan Batt in Dear Mr Williams during Festival 4. Considered one of the foremost interpreters of Tennessee Williams, Wilson has directed many of his major plays as well as several premieres, including Williams' musical Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws (with music by Michael Friedman) and his last play, The One Exception with Amanda Plummer. Off-Broadway, he directed the New York premiere of The Red Devil Battery Sign with Elizabeth Ashley; ; the acclaimed Roundabout revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore with Olympia Dukakis; and the Acting Company's premiere one acts by Marcus Gardley, Rebecca Gilman, David Grimm, John Guare, and Beth Henley all drawn from Williams' short stories collectively entitled Desire. During his 13-year tenure as Artistic Director of Hartford Stage he created the Tennessee Williams Marathon, the first multi-year exploration of the playwright's expansive canon, directing lauded revivals of Camino Real with Betty Buckley, Novella Nelson & Rip Torn; Summer and Smoke (which subsequently toured to Papermill Playhouse) with Ms. Plummer and Marc Kudisch; The Glass Menagerie (which subsequently toured to Houston's Alley Theatre & Harvard's A.R.T.) with Ms. Ashley, Anne Dudek and Andrew McCarthy; The Gnadiges Fraulein with Ms Ashley & Ms Plummer; and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ms Ashley & Biff McGuire. He directed the Alley's revival of Orpheus Descending with Gordana Rashovich. Most recently, he directed the A.R.T. revival of The Night of the Iguana with Ms Plummer, Dana Delaney, Bill Heck, and James Earl Jones. A Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Princess Grace Statue Award winner and a Morehead Scholar graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of Dramatic Art, Wilson will direct Death of Salesman in February 2025 for PlayMakers Repertory Company.