by William Stanley DeVito (’23)
Abstract
This dramaturgical study serves as a prerequisite to directing an autobiographical work of Tennessee Williams, The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer, regarding his unguarded sexuality by engaging in research that extended beyond the scope of traditional biographical criticism. As this play conveys a real heartbreak experienced by Williams in Provincetown in a fictional matter to serve as a therapeutic process for Williams, it was integral to examine how this play was written and subsequently evolved. Through applying queer theory, examining cultural and intellectual history, and by acquiring letters written by Williams during the real-world events and the writing of the play, it has been found that Williams’ original play depicting his summer of heartbreak devolved tremendously upon writing his full-length edition in order to shield his sexuality from audiences. This original draft serves as an antithesis to popular beliefs held by scholars about Williams’ supposed internalized homophobia and shame.
Key words: queer theory, Tennessee Williams, The Parade, queer theater, gay theater
Introduction
Tennessee Williams is a playwright that requires no introduction to anyone vaguely familiar with American theater and film. Tennessee Williams is accredited to writing and producing a variety of groundbreaking plays throughout the twentieth century that continue to dominate the stages of theaters across America, with film adaptations of works such as A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof considered as classic staples of American cinema. While many of these plays have been deemed through a 21st-century lens as having homosexual themes, their scripts were notably vague enough to shroud these themes from the majority of American audiences during their productions. This has led many prominent theater and film scholars to conclude that Tennessee Williams suffered from internalized homophobia and held a generally shameful view of his sexual orientation, as he was unwilling to let himself explore his identity to a full extent in his plays.
While the latter half of Williams’ career is viewed as being plagued with poorly received plays that did not live up to Williams’ golden age, it was thought that he was becoming increasingly open about his sexual realities in his plays. This is largely accredited to Something Cloudy, Something Clear, a play that explored this theme further in-depth than most of his work. Something Cloudy was written to be Williams’ most autobiographical play to date, as it focuses on Williams’ first true heartbreak in the summer of 1940. This play first opened in 1981, though it was met with poor reviews from critics and thus is not largely recognized or revered by theater enthusiasts. However, as with most of Williams’ full-length plays, there was an original one-act version of this play titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer, which was written and consistently revised between 1940 and 1962.
The contents of this play portray a Williams that differentiates completely from the idol we believe we know. This one-act, which was never meant to be seen or read by audiences, reveals the unguarded and unashamed Williams that exists beneath the surface: a gay man who suffered immense heartbreak due to circumstances out of his control, bearing an unapologetic attitude towards his sexual orientation. As a Tennessee Williams enthusiast and theater director, I believe the great differences between Parade and Something Cloudy require further research into Williams’ life and work. If I were to direct an authentic production of The Parade in an academic setting, this additional research would be a necessity. Thus, I have produced an in-depth dramaturgical analysis of The Parade to allow us to understand the legendary Tennessee Williams on a much deeper level.
Williams Biographical Information
Tennessee Williams is one of the most prominent and influential American playwrights and theater practitioners of the twentieth century. Despite Williams being as admired and researched as he is, his fame has surprisingly not allowed for his biography as a gay man to be studied, and this primary aspect of Williams has been seriously neglected by scholars until relatively recently. Certain biographical information regarding his complicated relationship with his homosexual identity and how this strongly intersects with the summer he spent in Provincetown goes against popular beliefs of Williams as a self-loathing gay man wrestling with homophobia.[1] It is important to begin with the real-life circumstances, which Williams documented in letters to Donald Windham surrounding the events in the play. Tennessee Williams was 29 when he spent the summer of 1940 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His roommate was aspiring professional dancer Kip Kiernan, with whom he fell in love and had a passionate intimate relationship for six weeks. When Kiernan’s girlfriend discovered the affair, she demanded Kiernan put an end to it. When Kiernan did, Williams was heartbroken and humiliated; Williams left Provincetown shortly thereafter.
To understand this event in Williams’ life on a deeper level, I examined the letters that he wrote to longtime friend and confidant Donald Windham during the summer of 1940. From June to September of that year, it is apparent that Williams had an intense love and sexual passion for Kip that surpassed any previous love he has had. He writes to Windham that he intended to stay in Provincetown for Kip, stating in a letter dated July 4, 1940, that “love has made me young again!” and “[Kip] loves me! And nobody ever loved me before so completely!”
Williams’ heartbreak and subsequent psychological breakdown after Kip called off the affair is described in detail: in a letter to Windham in September of 1940, Williams writes that he was “going through the most difficult period of my life thus far” and that “Breaking up with Kip was only an incident in a long accumulation of tensions and difficulties, actual and psychic, and the result was a sort of temporary obliteration of everything solid in me and all I thought of was my own immediate preservation through change, escape, travel, new scenes, new people. You don’t realize what an awful state I was in.” Williams conveys his despair further by stating that he had hoped his cough was tuberculosis so he would no longer have to endure the agony of being alive. This primary account of the events surrounding The Parade is an essential asset and explains the reasoning behind why Williams chooses the name “Don” for his character due to his love, appreciation, and respect for Donald Windham.
Directorial / Dramaturgical Concept
In approaching this project as a director and dramaturg, I am pursuing a biographical throughline that examines Tennessee Williams through a queer lens and offers the most truthful depictions of the events possible. Four our purposes, dramaturgy is defined as research utilized for theatrical production to allow for authenticity in the created world of the play. While biographical criticism is commonly labeled as an outdated practice that has lost its importance and relevance, a glance at The New York Times Book Review reveals that memoir and autobiographical works of art are incredibly popular across genres due to the fascination with self-reflection rooted in candor. This holds true for The Parade, a complex piece of Tennessee Williams’ unspoken memoir that deserves to be heard. I intend to approach this play and experiment with it as such a piece, with constant attention being paid toward the poetic realism and the subjective reformation of time and history embedded within the script and story.
Time Period and Setting
The Parade by Tennessee Williams takes place in August of 1940 on the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts.[2] All the action present in this play takes place on these dunes next to the ocean.
Genre / Style
According to Concord Theatricals,[3] The Parade, subtitled Approaching the End of a Summer, is an unguarded autobiographical drama focusing on Tennessee Williams’ first love and subsequent heartbreak in Provincetown during the Summer of 1940. It can also be considered a memory play, a common stylistic genre for Williams’ work, in which the events portrayed in the play come directly from the character’s memory. In this case this would be Williams himself as Don, who is stylistically identical to the character Tom in The Glass Menagerie portraying memories of Williams.
Characters and Real-World Counterparts
The Parade has four characters, two men and two women. If the director’s intention is to produce an autobiographical piece that depicts Williams’ story, the gender of the roles must be respected in the interest of realism and accuracy.
The protagonist is Don, a twenty-nine-year-old amateur playwright who is in love with the aspiring dancer and Provincetown native, Dick. Don is in constant turmoil over these seemingly unrequited feelings, and he is in despair over how he is missing out on the beauties of life (the metaphorical “parade”) due to his sexual identity. These emotions are exemplified in numerous lines and monologues throughout the play. Don is the representation of Tennessee Williams in this play.
Dick is a twenty-two-year-old dancer preparing his routine for an upcoming audition in New York to join a prominent dance company. While he has genuine romantic feelings towards Don, he is conflicted over his “queer” feelings and refuses to acknowledge them, constantly stating that he is not homosexual but “normal” numerous times in vain to Miriam. His internalized homophobia causes him to be in a loveless relationship with Wanda. Dick is the representation of Kip Kiernan in this play.[4]
Miriam is a twenty-six-year-old Jewish woman from New York who followed Don to Provincetown in order to spend more time with him throughout the summer. Miriam is infatuated with Don’s character and world perspective. She is aware of his homosexual identity, and despite her sadness surrounding her unrequited love for Don, she wants him to be happy. Miriam is the representation of Williams’ New York friend, Ethel Ekovsky.
Wanda is Dick’s twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. She is the representation of Kip Kiernan’s real-life girlfriend at the time of the play’s events who made Kiernan call off his affair with Williams.
Plot Summary
The Parade opens with Dick leading Don to the beach and finding a platform that would be suitable to rehearse the choreography required for his upcoming dance audition. Don and Dick then have a flirtatious conversation regarding their career aspirations, as well as Don’s desire to be with Dick romantically. Upon hearing that Dick will soon be heading to New York, Don abruptly leaves while Miriam confronts Dick to allege that Dick is “a homosexual like Don”. Dick nervously dismisses Don as “queer” and claims that he is “normal,” not homosexual. Dick then leaves the conversation to search for Wanda, and Miriam calls Don back.
When Don returns, Miriam pleads with him to find a different person than Dick to be affectionate towards, and she asks him to leave with her for Boston. Don refuses and subsequently pours his heart out to her regarding his romantic and sexual feelings toward Dick. Upon acknowledging that a romantic future with Dick is not possible, Don compares love to a parade that is impossible for him to view or be part of, since there is always something blocking his path to enter. Miriam is disappointed in Don’s philosophy and discusses her conflict regarding how, as a Jewish woman, she is expected to marry a Jewish man despite not being in love with any.
Don then delivers a monologue addressed to Miriam regarding how beautiful Miriam is, and how she ought to wait to be truly loved rather than throw her love away immediately for a man who doesn’t deserve it. Miriam interprets this as flirtatious and asks Don to go to the docks with her to be intimate and fulfill her fantasy before she leaves. When Don refuses, she accuses him of making fun of her by playing with her obvious desires. After Don refuses to accompany Miriam to Boston one final time, he notices Wanda and Dick returning to the platform to rehearse. Wanda then talks to Don about how she believes his attitude has changed for the worse since she met him, which Don blames on increasing frustration and bitterness. Don then receives mail from his New York agent regarding how his latest play is too dark and sad to produce, and thus has been rejected by every potential director and producer who have read it. The play ends with Don sitting on the platform alone watching the sunset.
The Process of Writing and Revising The Parade
To better understand and accurately direct this biographical play, it is essential that I research the relevant information specifically connected to this play and the circumstances surrounding it. After Williams suffered the heartbreak of Kiernan calling off his affair, he began writing numerous poems and sonnets that allowed him to express his emotions since he perceived that very few people could resonate with him. These were largely abstract and melodramatic works. He then began to transform these poems into a one-act play, and thus drafted the first version of The Parade in one of his personal notebooks in 1940 which was discarded until Williams’ former roommate Joe Hazan found the notebook 22 years later and sent it back to Williams. Williams then heavily revised the play’s writing style to allow for a more coherent structure and less melodrama. The final revised edition of The Parade was completed in 1962.[5]
In 1981, Williams wrote a full-length play entitled Something Cloudy, Something Clear about the summer of heartbreak that occurred in Provincetown. Williams utilized the information presented in The Parade to do this but changed the character names as well as various other aspects of the play. This play was met with poor reception. Williams’ writing abilities had notably dwindled in his later years, and the play lacked the ferocious honesty that was present in its one-act counterpart. The Parade was then subsequently discovered by David Kaplan, who was able to distinguish the 1962 final draft from previous drafts and was first produced by Shakespeare on the Cape theater company in 2006 for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.
Production History
After the final revised draft of The Parade was discovered, the theater company Shakespeare on the Cape staged the world premiere of this play at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in 2006. David Kaplan, director and founder of this festival, wanted to convey that the view that Williams was a self-loathing gay man who disguised his homosexual characters is inaccurate, and that this play’s depictions of gay characters is honest and sympathetic. Kaplan states that “There is a lot of nonsense that says Williams was conflicted about his homosexuality in this period of his life, and that is not true. The tone of ‘Parade’ is beautifully unequivocal. It is not whining. It is not apologetic. He demands his audience to take seriously gay people onstage.”[6]
Subsequently, the Peregrine Theatre Ensemble produced the play again for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in 2015, this time in the form of an immersive and environmental production placed directly on the dunes of Provincetown, where the play is set. Since then, the play has been produced by a few college theater companies and students but remains detrimentally overshadowed by Williams’ more canonical works.
Cultural and Intellectual History
I propose strongly that we look at the cultural and intellectual history that surrounds this play. This is particularly pertinent for contemporary audiences, as discourses regarding queer theory and theater loom over the play. First, we must look at the history of gay issues and themes that are present in Tennessee Williams’ plays. Following queer theory as pioneered by Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Adrienne Rich, and David Halperin, revisionist scholars have enlightened audiences and theatrical professionals to many queer themes that were previously dismissed or distorted in Williams’s works and have now begun to explore and foreground these ideas, including, for example, that Brick is in love with his deceased friend Skipper in revivals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and how Zachary Quinto’s revolutionary portrayal of Tom as a struggling gay man in the latest Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie in 2013 has significantly changed our notion of the character.
It is also important to perform a cultural analysis of American society in the 1940s to appropriately comprehend a variety of concepts present in this play. First, studying the various conceptions that stem from the social, legal, and, perhaps most importantly, psychological positions of gay men during this period in America is essential in understanding Dick’s hesitation in pursuing a romantic relationship with Don. We can then better examine the causes for the tremendous despair Williams felt through Don since he found that he was unable to participate in the love, and thus what he deemed to be a fulfilling love and sexual life, that others were permitted. Second, researching the status of Jewish individuals, particularly Jewish women, during the forties in America is essential. This allows us to better understand Miriam’s predicament throughout the play, since her family requires her to marry a Jewish man, and she is constantly looked down upon during the WWII era for being Jewish.
Why Is This Play Important to Produce / What I Hope to Accomplish
I believe The Parade is an incredibly important and meaningful work of theater for a multitude of reasons. One is that it contributes greatly to the scholarship of understanding Williams’ relationship to his homosexual identity. Due to the guarded nature of homosexuality presented in Something Cloudy, Something Clear as well as the disguised nature of potentially homosexual characters in Williams’ more prominent works, there was a widely held consensus for decades that Williams lived in a constant struggle with his internalized homophobia and resented his identity. This became the foundation of my current research and desire to direct this play, as this full-length revision is considerably less honest and metaphorically “clouds” the issues and emotional truths embedded in The Parade. Analyzing The Parade creates a totally different picture. Williams is honest and unashamed of his identity and feelings in the earlier incarnation and wants us to understand his turmoil. This has led me to believe that as Williams aged and wrote plays from a more famous and renowned social position, he became fearful of judgment and thus became more guarded. This has made him open to accusations of internalized homophobia and shame that has shrouded his legacy, and directing this play showcases that this depiction of Williams is, as Kalan states, illegitimate.
Second, The Parade allows 21st-century audiences to witness a primary source account of what the lives of queer Americans were like in the tumultuous forties. Williams’ portrayal of personal events is rare, as his impeccable honesty regarding his situation was originally meant for his eyes only. He never thought audiences would be able to read or see this play, making the situation and dialogue accurate and truthful in comparison to other works that may have been written at the time for public consumption.
Endnotes
[1] Biographical information has been found in New York Times article regarding this play https://web.archive.org/web/20150628055538/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/theater/24gene.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[2] Description taken directly from The Parade.
[3] Concord Theatricals currently owns the rights for The Parade. Description Link- https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/8420/the-parade-or-approaching-the-end-of-a-summer
[4] Gener, Randy, “Suddenly That Summer, Out of the Closet,” The New York Times 24, Sept. 2006.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
Works Cited
Gener, Randy. “Suddenly That Summer, Out of the Closet”. The New York Times, 24. Sept. 2006.
Williams, Tennessee. “The Parade / Approaching the End of a Summer.” The Traveling Companion and Other Plays. New Directions, 2008.
“The Parade by Tennessee Williams: Environmental Theater”. Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, 2015.
Williams, Tennessee. Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965. Compiled by Donald Windham. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.