Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth and William Inge's Bus Riley's Back in Town: Coincidences from a Friendship

American Drama, Winter 2006 by Voss, Ralph F

When Tennessee Williams retreated to St. Louis in late 1944 to escape some of his pre-production anxiety before the Chicago opening of his play of destiny, The Glass Menagerie, he expected only to visit his mother. He did not expect to meet a shy new friend who was also to become a playwright of destiny: William Inge. Working as a critic for the local daily, the St. Louis StarTimes, Inge called Williams to do an interview. It proved a fortuitous call for the history of American theater, resulting in a long and significant friendship that several Williams and Inge scholars have detailed.1 Through these scholars' efforts we know that Inge traveled to Chicago to see the road opening of Menagerie; convinced he had seen a brilliant autobiographical play, he confessed his own play-writing ambitions to Williams, whose encouragement led directly to Inge's own autobiographical play Farther Off from Heaven (later to become The Dark at the Top of the Stairs). Williams also introduced Inge to the other two most important people in Inge's early career: the theater director Margo Jones, who first produced Farther Off from Heaven at her pioneering regional theater in Dallas in 1947, and Audrey Wood, the agent who brilliantly guided both Williams's and Inge's early careers. One Williams biographer, Donald Spoto, wrote that when Inge went to Chicago "the two men had an impromptu and intense sexual affair, never resumed in their later friendship" (The Kindness of Strangers 112).2 We know that after both men achieved fame, their friendship endured, though it was at times strained. In these and several other ways, these talented playwrights' lives were intertwined during a golden era in American drama.

The Glass Menagerie, of course, launched Williams on his way to becoming arguably America's greatest playwright. Within the next decade or so he would enjoy such successes as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), and Cat on a hot Tin Roof (1955). Only his daring experiment with the surrealistic Camino Real (1953) and Orpheus Descending (1957) would fail to spark audience or critical approval. Inge notched comparable success with Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) without experiencing adverse audience or critical reaction-a fact that became the cause of considerable uneasiness in their friendship. Both men won Pulitzer Prizes: Williams for Streetcar and Cat, Inge for Picnic. Both had successful Hollywood films made from their Broadway plays, films that put their names and plays before a much wider American public. This widespread recognition via films was also to produce fruitful screen collaborations with the famed director EHa Kazan, who had directed some of the two men's stage play successes. Having already directed Williams's screenplay for Streetcar, Kazan later directed his screenplay for Baby Doll. Kazan also directed Inge's Academy Award-winning Splendor in the Grass screenplay. During the fifties many critics hailed the two friends, along with Arthur Miller, as America's most important postwar dramatists.

Of course, with such conspicuous success can come strains, not least of which was the pressure of being a homosexual writer at a time when homosexuality was anathema in American culture. The pressures of being a celebrity while also being gay wore hard on both men but much more so on the profoundly closeted Inge, who could never find acceptance of his sexuality as openly as Williams eventually did. As Michael Palier and others have shown, homosexuality was an enormous liability for creative artists in the fifties, a liability that, in fact, affected the detail and often the substance of their art.5 More overtly damaging was the malignant critical expectation that each writer's new play must "top" or at least be the equal of its predecessors.

Critical and popular success in America has always been a blessing and a curse. "Stand high a long enough time," playwright William Gibson wrote in memory of Inge after the playwright's death, "and your lightning will come" (Gibson 35). For Williams, the blessing of his success with plays like Menagerie and Streetcar brought on the curse of being held to his own standard; critics and audiences (not to mention producers, ever with one eye cocked toward the bottom line) expected more of the same. When he took the brave step of offering, with Kazan directing, Camino Real in 1953, "lightning" struck when critics' disappointment was proportionately greater because Camino Real wasn't more of what they'd come to expect from Williams. Of course, two years later Cat on a hot Tin Roof proved a splendid antidote to the poison of critical and box-office rejection. But Williams, whose willingness to push the popular envelope was always greater than Inge's, failed again with Orpheus Descending, an updated and revised version of the first play he ever aimed at Broadway, the 1940 failure Battle of Angels. Once again, critics stung Williams, and at that time they had yet to strike Inge.