Tennessee Williams' Unsweet and Unsoaring Bird of Youth
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Tennessee Williams' Unsweet And Unsoaring Bird of Youth Sweet Bird of Youth. By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Elia Kazan. Presented by Cheryl Crawford. At the...
...In between it is unsparing...
...The setting by Jo Mielziner, with a hotel bedroom wall that resembles the endless sky, touched with featherclouds and stars, tries vainly to help the author toward his implications...
...Chance Wayne, the handsome lover, has long been living, as he boasts, by making love...
...R. L. Stevenson long ago declared that when he found something in a book that was impossible, it was probably an actual transcript from life...
...They, and their fellows, speak frank but bloodless, undistinguished dialogue...
...Her "success" has been thrown in by the author, without justification, to sharpen the contrast with her lover's failure...
...There is nothing to make likely the news which at the end surprises even the star: that her new picture, her "comeback," has broken box-office records...
...The marsh-fire of melodrama flares, but art is stifled...
...He presses this point farther in Sweet Bird of Youth...
...In spite of the universal implications the author seeks, the characters are not individuals, but puppets manipulated to fit the theme...
...One woman took him for frequent rides on her yacht, from which he returned to give a venereal disease to his hometown sweetheart...
...For one whiff of common humanity, one breath of exaltation, we hope in vain...
...They simmer with sex, but the guts are all in the diction...
...To say that these distasteful and preposterous things could actually happen is beside the point...
...Williams believes that the basic dramatic themes, the basic fears in life, are a woman afraid of losing her feminine appeal and a man worried about the loss of his male power...
...As it is, despite his own popular success, we can have little other feeling for the author...
...Great plays have a character that sets a norm (as Horatio in Hamlet) against which the excesses of the others can be weighed...
...He puts a tape recorder under the bed and tries to trick her into admitting she has smuggled dope—which he prepares for her smoking—so that he can blackmail her...
...Williams' figures are all excessful...
...Sweet Bird of Youth hops in with a woman taking drugs to mask her terror at aging, and limps off toward a castrated young man...
...He went on to explain that he could not write about anything he had not felt, so that anything in his plays must also have been in him...
...The gigolo and the dimmed star jounce about with the familiar Williams theatricality, but they are superficially and obviously drawn...
...His present support is the ex-movie-star, who seeks to renew her youth at his fountain...
...If Wayne were a person, we should pity him...
...He tries to withhold his favors until she signs her travelers checks for his cashing...
...With Elia Kazan's vibrant directing and the first-act resourcefulness of Geraldine Page's performance, there is, one must admit, considerable power in the presentation of the faded, doomed and degenerate motion picture star...
...But what is dominant in him exists, if at all, in most men only as fantasy, as infantile daydream...
...The critics say she has matured, but after word of her success she is the same self-centered, spoiled child as before...
...He fortifies his conscience with the claim that he still loves his childhood sweetheart, and he comes back to take her with him for the Hollywood triumph he will force the ex-star to arrange for him...
...Her father, Boss Finley, political big shot of a southern town which emasculated a random Negro "as a warning," decides that Wayne deserves a similar treatment...
...As' the play ends, the boss' son and his "Youth for Finley" henchmen close in upon Wayne to make the castration complete...
...Art demands much more: the events must be consistent, the characters congruous...
...But her variety lessens and the theatricality palls as the evening wears on...
...At the Martin Beck Theater...
...On several occasions in this play a character steps forward for a long confessional monologue...
...To admit fellowship with Wayne would be, to draw an image on the drama's plane, to look through the hole in the outhouse and say "That's me...
...The last speech—almost a plea of the author—takes the ultimate step, as it asks "not even for understanding, just for recognition . . . of me . . . in you...
...Wayne pleads: "Recognize me in you...
...In the meantime, the girl's disease, after an operation, has left her a sterile hysteriac...
...IN A BRIEF CONFESSION in the New York Times, Tennessee Williams denied that he feels hatred, but admitted to envy and portrayal of violence...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
