Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Saint Tennessee: An Introduction
- 1 T- shirt Modernism and Performed Masculinities: The Theatrical Refashionings of Tennessee Williams and William Inge
- 2 “Intense Honesty”: Race, Sex and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
- 3 Becoming Samuel Beckett: Tennessee Williams and Theatrical Change on the Post– World War II World Stage
- 4 Reframing Tennessee: A Short Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Reframing Tennessee: A Short Afterword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Saint Tennessee: An Introduction
- 1 T- shirt Modernism and Performed Masculinities: The Theatrical Refashionings of Tennessee Williams and William Inge
- 2 “Intense Honesty”: Race, Sex and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
- 3 Becoming Samuel Beckett: Tennessee Williams and Theatrical Change on the Post– World War II World Stage
- 4 Reframing Tennessee: A Short Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Felice: You will not, you must never look at an audience before a performance. It makes you play self- consciously, you don't get lost in the play. […]
Clare: Are you going to throw new speeches at me tonight?
Felice: Tonight there’ll have to be a lot of improvisation, but if we’re both lost in the play, the bits of improvisation won't matter at all, in fact they may make the play better.
— The Two- Character Play (10– 11)I see a multitude […] in transports […] of joy.
— Endgame“Becoming Beckett” is a designation neither of disparagement nor of belatedness. It suggests, further, neither a creative decline nor a character deficiency. It is rather an expression of one of the creative multitudes that comprised Tennessee Williams, who was several. Its emphasis is on “becoming,” to suggest, after Gilles Deleuze, an immanence, a continuous creative exploration and development, a process that Williams expected directors and actors to continue. Beckett is used here as an image of theatrical experiment and as a recognizable instance of such becoming. A revolutionary theatrical gesture like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for instance, ought not freeze its author's talents, nor condemn an artist to a career of devising sequels, although sequels can themselves break new ground, as Beckett demonstrated with his follow- up theatrical enterprise, Endgame. Beckett considered this sequel to be, on one level, the story of Vladimir and Estragon at a later stage of their existence. Terence Killeen changes the terms of Beckett's equation, observing in the Irish Times during the 2020 pandemic lockdown that “Endgame is what would now be called a ‘spin- off,’ “ and, further, “Hamm is a more reduced Pozzo: by the second act of Godot, Pozzo is already blind and barely able to walk; here in Endgame he is confined irrevocably to a chair.” One can quibble with Killeen's easy allegory and offer, instead, the position that Endgame broke sharply with Godot, as it turned theater back on itself. Beckett's theater followed his narrative art toward its famed self- reflexivity, but one might say as well that both readings (or viewings) pertain. Like Beckett’s, much of Williams's later work is theater as theater, theater as subject of theater.
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- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021