Storytelling Dramatists

...But exile does not extinguish his lambent spirit...

...This wonderfully grotesque humor is cut short, unfortunately, by Williams' desire to concentrate on a lyrical evocation of his romantic hero's (k)nightly adventures and unquenchable spirit...

...This prince of the Old South, this embodiment of its virtues and its decadence, proceeds to tilt his lance at the new and vulgar age and succeeds in destroying it, or at least in escaping from it to another world: "Of course, America, and particularly the Southern States, is the embodiment of an originally romantic gesture...

...It presents some of the family history that was transformed more brilliantly in The Glass Menagerie...

...Then, of course, the businessmen took over and Don Quixote was an exile at home...

...It is an attempt at a satirical romance, with an added dash of fantasy and even science-fiction...

...It was discovered and established by the eternal Don Quixote in the human flux...

...When the normal routine of the night shift is interrupted by a sudden alarm, the story turns into a drama which deals with the very nature of Tony's manhood and reveals that Arthur Miller can still write a very powerful scene...

...The Knightly Quest" tantalizes us by demonstrating that the author of Streetcar is capable of freshly comic insight into a world dominated by the Stanley Kowalskis...

...Considered in this way, as health reports, we can find much more encouragement in Miller's collection than in Williams...

...The characters are finely drawn and the evocation of the unspoken undercurrents of feeling and thought among four people seated in the living room of a country house is the work of a mature and talented dramatic writer...

...Two or three of Miller's stories —like "Glimpse of A Jockey," "Fame" or "Please Don't Kill Anything"—are indeed small and flimsy bungalows...

...It has become a commonplace in dramatic criticism to bemoan the drying up or souring of the springs that gave us plays like The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Crucible in the '40s and '50s...

...Reviewed by ISAIAH SHEFFER Speech and Drama Department, Columbia University Neither Tennessee Williams nor Arthur Miller has had a new play produced in more than two years, and for much longer than that the work of both these dramatists has been far below the level of their earlier achievements...

...Gewinner Pearce, the handsome, sensitive young Southerner who is the Don Quixote of "The Knightly Quest," returns to his home town after many years abroad to find that it has been taken over by a vast, top-secret electronic armaments enterprise known simply and ominously as The Project...

...Indeed, the variety, skill and feeling with which they are written keeps alive the faith that whatever his recent troubles in the theater, Arthur Miller is not finished yet...

...The Kingdom of the Earth" and "Mania's Old Stucco House" are Southern vignettes, the former in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell, the latter more like James Baldwin...

...Some passages are extremely funny, but the story as a whole fails to make the most of its comic premise and declines into excesses of preciousness and whimsy...

...The Prophecy" is a complex and subtle narrative of a love affair that almost happens but then doesn't...

...Above and beyond the merits of the stories they contain, however, these collections are of interest for what they indicate about the current vitality in each writer's talent...

...This, we feel, could be the source of exciting new work by Tennessee Williams...

...Yet the novella disappoints us by confirming that the author is compelled to retell again and again the already familiar tragedy of Blanche DuBois...

...But since both men are still actively at work and since neither is very old, there is always the possibility or at least the hope that Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller will come up with something new that equals or surpasses the plays that made them famous...

...Grand" is a fictionalized memoir of the author's grandmother...

...The best of Miller's stories is "Fitter's Night" (1966), whose main character, Tony Calabrese, is drawn from the same Brooklyn-Italian sources as the people in the play A View From The Bridge...

...In his Foreword Miller accepts the view that short stories, "like bungalows in the architectural world," cannot be major creations...

...Williams is at his funniest and best in describing the new age, in burlesquing the war-production mentality, the garish, neon-lit drive-in that serves coffee to The Project's employes, the social frolics of the President and his military advisers...

...And the title story, "I Don't Need You Any More," a psychological study of a five-year-old boy's emotional upheavals, is too protracted and wearisome...

...Like Hemingway's "The Killers," Miller's "The Misfits" is an excellent brief story told with terse understatement, which has suffered the misfortune of being expanded into a more elaborate, less than excellent film script...

...But at least three of these tales, including the most recent ones, show the craftsmanship and the continuing sensitive imagination of a writer from whom we may still, with some hope, expect more imposing constructions...

...In the years since Miller and Williams were first accorded the deserved or undeserved status of Major American Playwright (at least one drama anthology was published with the subtitle, "From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller"), their output has been decidedly minor...

...Man Bring This Up the Road" is an early character sketch of Flora Goforth, the rich old woman in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore...

...The Knightly Quest" itself is the most recent item in the volume...

...No such grandiose hopes are, or were meant to be, fulfilled in the two recently published volumes of stories by Williams and Miller...

...Still, the good stories are very good...

...In this version the young man who comes to stay at Flora's Italian villa has not yet been developed into the Christ-like martyr of the play...

...Monte Sant'Angelo," written in 1951, seems a forced and contrived tale of a young Jew learning about belonging to a tradition...

...This rich story takes Tony through a whole session on the night shift at the wartime Brooklyn Navy Yard and also, via the dreams that come to him while napping on government time, through the history of a life of wasted opportunity and self-inflicted pain...

...The stories that accompany the novella, "The Knightly Quest," are a Tennessee Williams miscellany written with the same vivid sensory detail found in his plays, but containing few surprises...

...The nine stories in Arthur Miller's book were written between 1951-66...