Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, The

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Brantley, Will

The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 223 pp.

In "Vieux Carre: Transferring 'A Story of Mood,'" Robert Bray cites a remark that Tennessee Williams made in a 1975 interview: "I'm quite through with the kind of play that established my early and popular reputation. I am doing a different thing, which is altogether my own, not influenced at all by other playwrights at home or abroad, or by other schools of theatre" (qtd. in Kolin 142). Many of the contributors to Philip Kolin's volume of essays on Williams's later plays call attention to this self-reflective comment. All agree that Williams was aiming for something new, although several of the essayists go on to show that Williams was more indebted to other playwrights and schools of theatre than he may have realized.

As a whole, Kolin's volume explores the complexity of an often vexing body of work. None of Williams's plays after The Night of the Iguana, which premiered in 1961, was greeted with anything more than a mixed critical reception and some were met with outright hostility. As Bray remarks, if Williams "broke the mold with boldly experimental works such as Out Cry or with the postmodern structure of a play such as Something Cloudy, Something Clear . . . he was vilified for abandoning his roots of poetic realism. But when he obligingly returned to those same roots, his work was immediately (and always unfavorably) compared with Menagerie, Streetcar, and Cat. Although in reality these comparisons were as apples to oranges, in the eyes of the critics, Williams's filet mignon had degenerated into grade 'D' hamburger" (150).

Of the late plays, perhaps none is more peculiar-more bizarre-than The Gnadiges Fraulein, a short work which ran for only seven performances when it was initially staged in 1966 and the only work to command the attention of three full essays in Kolin's volume. Allean Hale renders the background and central action of this play that is set in the "big dormitory"-one of Williams's many boarding houses-and which works to defy any easy definition:

The Gnadiges Fraulein, which Williams translates as "gracious young lady," is a once-renowned vaudeville performer, former member of a famous artistic trio: the trainer, his trained seal, and herself. She would toe dance between the two while fetching the paraphernalia for the seal's balancing act, which climaxed with him catching a fish in his jaws. Once the Fraulein, overambitious, upstaged the seal and caught the flying fish in her own mouth. The surprise intervention brought down the house, and the successful gimmick was kept in the show until at a final performance the seal turned on her and dealt her a blow that ended her career. Eventually she drifted down to the southernmost Key. Now she is reduced to bringing in her catch each day to earn her place in this boardinghouse. The landlady, Molly, and gossip columnist, Polly, a sadistic duo, lay bets on whether the Fraulein will survive one more trip. The cocaloonies have already plucked out one of her eyes, which is covered by a large bandage. She appears in bedraggled tutu, the remnant of her theatrical wardrobe; her hair is a fuzz of pink-orange curls. Like a puppet, she performs on command, delivering her outmoded numbers in a quavering voice. She is pathetically anxious to please, offering her dilaptidated scrapbook to any who will look. . . . The two bring the Fraulein out for exhibition, discuss her past famous career in front of her as if she were a dumb object, taunt her into one last attempt to put on her act, then mock her when it fails. Her situation is critical, as lately she has not brought in many fish. Like timekeepers, they clock her final race from the docks. As she returns, fish in bucket, she is attacked by the swooping birds who shred her garments, pull out her hair and pluck out her other eye. (41-43)

Clearly the viewer (or reader) is no longer on board the streetcar with Blanche DuBois.

The three critics who confront this play-Hale, Annettee Saddik, and Una Chaudhuri-acknowledge the autobiographical dimension (the Fraulein is an unmistakable stand-in for Williams, the artist who had tired of repeating himself), but each provides a new lens with which to view this elusive and multilayered text. Hale sees the play-Williams's "clown show"-as an expression of the pop art sensibility that marked the 1960s. Saddik acknowledges the artistic license of the sixties, but argues for an earlier point of reference-Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty. "Like other late plays (notably the one-acts Now the Cats withjewelled Claws ana This is the Peaceable Kingdom), The Gnadiges Fraulein succeeds "in liberating the spectator from a reliance on plot and its linguistic constructs, creating through sound, gesture, and spectacle the cruelty of the real which remains linguistically 'untranslatable.'" Williams evokes Artaud precisely because his late anti-realistic plays present "the metaphysical cruelty that lies beyond logical representation, marginalizing language and instead taking advantage of the physical!ty of the theater" (6). Saddik's argument is taken one step further by Chauduri who, after surveying the many animal images in Williams's theatre, contends that The Gnadiges Fraulein clears "a rare dramatic space within which to explore and express the human experience of animality in and of itself, not as a metaphor for something else but as an extreme condition of humanity" (63).