Word: playwrighting
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...more durable shadow than the man who wrote them. So it will prove with Thomas Lanier Williams, a.k.a. Tennessee, who choked to death in Manhattan last week (after swallowing the cap of a medicine bottle). With the debatable exception of Eugene O'Neill, he was the greatest playwright in U.S. dramatic history...
...shocking surface was never the substance in Williams. He was and will remain the laureate of the outcast, what he called "the fugitive kind"-the odd, the lonely, the emotionally violated. The sense of loss and vulnerability that one finds in his characters was imprinted on the playwright at an early age. Williams was born in his Episcopalian clergyman grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. His forebears included a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier (1842-81), some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier...
...combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion - any passion-just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable...
...playwright, Williams had the minor defects of his major virtues. He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have dammed. Occasionally, his characters were too busy striking attitudes to hit honest veins of emotion. His symbols sometimes multiplied like fruit flies and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger was the unhealthy narcissism of most modern art, whose tendency has been to gaze inward and contemplate the artist's ego, as well as his navel, to the point of myopia and hallucination. Almost inevitably, he suffered the attrition of dramatic power that afflicts most...
Glover and Kashka Bonjoko gave one performance of "The Island," by the anti-apartheid South African playwright. Athol Fugard, at Paine Hall last night, and will give another tonight...