Mutilated: Tennessee Williams's Apocalyptic Christmas Carol, The

American Drama, Summer 2004 by Kolin, Philip C

Like so many of his post-Iguana works, Tennessee Williams's Slapstick Comedy (1966) incurred the critics' calumny. In fact, the two plays that comprise the Comedy-The Mutilated and Gnadiges Fraulein-experienced an even worse fate than some of Williams's other later, disesteemed works. Despite the expert directions of Alan Schneider, scenography by Ming Cho Lee, and score by Lee Holby, the double bill opened on 22 February and closed after only seven performances on Broadway on 26 February. The ultimate casualty, though, was the playwright. John McClain lamented that "The real tragedy is that he {Williams} can write so well, so humorously and compellingly and can create characters of deep dimensions, that he should dissipate this gift in a series of irritatingly vague and formless vignettes" ("The Out and Abstract"). Richard Watts, Jr. dismissed the plays as a pair of "oddities that opened otherwise dissapointingly" ("Flight of the Cacaloony Bird"). Also finding these works less than satisfying, Hobe insisted that "a play should have a comprehensible theme or at least story and neither 'The Mutilated' nor 'Gnadiges Fraulein' quite comes to the point" (56).

The actual source of the critics' angst, though, was their discomfiture about exactly what type of play Williams had written. Stanley Kauffmann complained that "The trouble is not just that Mr. Williams has found little to say...He has no fresh views of enrichments of his old material . . . In 'Mutilated' he reworks some of his earlier themes, with diminished success" ("'Slapstick Tragedy' at the Longacre") while Richard Watts, Jr. remarked, "I would say that the first and more conventional play ('Mutilated') was better..." Referring to the songs in the play, Walter Kerr believed that all they provided has an "underscoring {that} is blatant and interferes with what is good" ("Two by Tennessee"). Felicia Hardison Londre fell into a similar trap of imposing pre-existing criteria on The Mutilated, expecting the play to be something it was not. Mutilated "itself is too loosely constructed to win the traditional kind of audience involvement. At the same time...it is not experimental enough in comparison with the Gnadiges Fraulein..."(162). Paradoxically, critics wanted Williams to return to a realistic (conventional) theatre he never espoused, yet they lampooned him when they spied vestigia of that theatre in his later works. As Annette Saddik observes in her study of the later plays, the ideological prejudices of the critic prevented them from seeing the significance of Williams's new theatre of nondiegetic devices, a theatre that "fits people and societies going a bit mad" (109).

Certainly, The Mutilated is packed with familiar Williams's plots, characters, and settings. Two old women-Celeste Delacroix Griffin and her longtime friend Trinket Dugan-find themselves bitter enemies on Christmas Eve in the French Quarter circa 1938 because Celeste has dared to reveal Trinket's mutilation, a mastectomy. Trinket refuses to allow Celeste, a notorious wino and shoplifter, to come to her room in the Silver Dollar hotel and even calls the police to apprehend her for thievery. The play ends with a reconciliation, though, in large measure sanctified through Celeste's recognition of the Virgin's "invisible presence" in Trinket's room. These two doyens are vintage Williams denizens of desire. They are part of his cadre of the "the wounded...and the fugitive" (Mutilated 102). Like other forlorn women in Williams-Lucretia Collins in Portrait of a Madonna, the spinster in Lord Byron's Love Letter, and Bertha in Hello from Bertha, Blanche in Streetcar-they are waiting for a lover, deliverance in Williams's mythology. Sexual desire is their (and Williams's) life force. Trinket takes up with two predatory sailors who look back to Williams's own experience in the rough trade and forward to Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1982). Celeste, too, searches for love several times by propositioning faux beaux for a "quickie." In numerous ways, Celeste and Trinket form a bifurcated Blanche DuBois. Like the illusion-ridden Blanche, the homeless Celeste fantasizes that "Tonight I'll be at my brother's for eggnog and fruitcake. Huey P. Long will be there. He loves the Kingfish and he seems to find me amusing" (98). Shep Huntleigh has been transformed into the Kingfish. And when the vulgar sailor Bruno "makes another effort to put his hand under {Trinket's} cape, she cries out in panic," as does Blanche when a drunken Mitch tries to rape her. Like Blanche, Trinket prides herself on her affluent, genteel background.

The quest for love, always in the wrong places for Williams, is accompanied by an obsession with freaks, the grotesque, "the way-ward and the deformed" (119) in The Mutilated. An incantatory Trinket, outraged by Celeste's provocation, claims: "She can't prove mutilation unless I expose it to someone. Oh, but not daring to expose the mutilation has made me go without love for three years now, and it's the lack of what I need most that makes me speak to myself..." (101). Celeste proclaims that "Hell, I'd say, we all have our mutilations, some from birth, some from long before birth, and some from later in life, and some stay with us forever" (87). Yet such an admission does not deter Celeste from "chanting" a cruel ditty about Sarah Bernhardt's "wooden peg...clumping on a STUMP of WOOD!" (115-16) before an outraged Trinket whom she mocks through her comparison.