Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater engages the Williams we thought we knew, as he grew, developed, reconfigured himself into a playwright we didn’t, in his attempts to refashion himself amid the vortices of changing sexual mores, including the performance of masculinities and the queering of theater, the struggle for a literate, literary theater, and the place of the theatrical experience in his contemporary culture.

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater reappraises the received wisdom that Williams’s work fell into decline in the late 1960 as the Naturalism he was associated with, not always through his own choice, was replaced by European theatrical experimentalism and as culture saw a lifting of sexual restrictions. It suggests, instead, that Williams was always experimental, always more Chekhov than Ibsen, a lyrical playwright inflected with the poetry of Harte Crane, and that his late plays are as central to Williams’s reshaping of American theater as those works of the immediate post–World War II era that brought him fame and fortune. Its general aim, then, is to engage the perception that “Tennessee Williams is the greatest unknown playwright America has produced” (David Savran, City University of New York).

In many respects the work of Tennessee Williams, after a protracted period of neglect, is primed for reappraisal , reinterpretations and, subsequently, re-stagings. This work is part of that process, academically at very least, but performatively as well as academic reinterest often regenerates theatrical reinterest.