Word: birdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH...
Oscar Wilde said it was impossible for a sensitive person to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. Tennes see Williams provokes the same irreverence with his cloying presentation of little Heavenly's fate in Sweet Bird of Youth. Heavenly has had her "youth" cut out, leaving her "to rattle like a dried-up vine where the gulf wind blows." Bluntly put, she underwent a hysterectomy at age 15 after getting the clap from her lover, Superstud Chance Wayne, just before he skipped town to pursue a gigolo's career. Now, years later, Chance returns...
...succeeds in evoking the supreme negativity of West's vision, Teichmann's occasional soppiness notwithstanding. Because of the peculiar balance of this production, however, we don't even need to wait for the final curtain to experience the onset of despair. When Shrike, shrill as the song of the bird he's named for, tells Miss Lonelyhearts to "Get off this milk of human kindness bit," we wish the misguided kid would take his advice...
...stability and the actual flux of human relationships is brought out in small ways: the young father in the title story who wants to show his children the balance in nature, and to believe in it himself, but who can't find a really satisfactory explanation for a baby bird's death; the pastor who has waited years to get a curate of his own, but who is so intimidated by the young man when he arrives that he can't manage to discover the curate's last name...
...life span, Williams' characters, scenes and lines have become part of the civilized world's fabric. But Williams is a lyric playwright. and these prose memoirs, no matter how candid, cannot quite resolve the mystery of his artistic gifts Since he writes as naturally as birds fly (one of his nicknames is "Bird"), the book is immensely readable as well as valuable. It radiates good humor, randiness, poignancy and a gallant resilience of spirit. If Williams' sensibility could be compressed to a single line, it would be Terence's "Nothing human is alien...