Set to visit great theatrical artists as diverse as the man himself Federico Garcia Lorca o Inclán Valley, I stop today at a film evocation playwright on the other side of the Atlantic, Mr. Tennessee Williams. Because the scenography proposed by this giant of American letters ended up on more than one occasion by storming the big screen with the most famous actors.
From his particular hells, Williams reflected in his plays all those border concerns with the madness of the everyday, about the inexorable passage of time, about lost paradises, about the familiar and its edges, about loneliness and maladjustment. Except that the usual sensual disguise of characters driven between the most untimely drives, on the most common contradictions and between the most problematic intricacies of human relationships gave him that halo of an intense and unforgettable playwright. And their triumphs were repeated with each new poster.
In the shadow of Tennessee's creativity was always found his sister Rose, curiously outliving her entire family, like a stranded ghost since her madness and drastic medical treatment that left her chair-bound. Rose Williams died in 1996, more than a decade after her brother emerged from her own most tragic scene, in a lonely hotel room, among barbiturates that made it impossible for him to have the natural gag reflex that would have prevented her from choking. .
Top 3 Recommended Books by Tennesse Williams
The cat on the hot tin roof
Curious to me is the analogy in terms of the title of this work with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey. And the truth is that the similarity in the fabulous points to the surreal, to the oneiric, to the deforming consciousness of madness and destruction that can come to inhabit human beings as a differential trait compared to animals.
Two emblematic titles for two creators who were well acquainted with that dark side of the mind that can lead to the destruction of one's own, either oneself or one's family. In the case of "the cat", the work is located in that American South (from Tennessee to New Orleans) that even in the mid-twentieth century seemed to be governed by its own moral guidelines more retrograde than the rest of the North American East, more open to the world. .
Drawing on a typical setting around a cotton plantation, we discover a wealthy family in business that explodes over its own reality buried for years by morality around secrets and guilt that turn into monsters in the midst of coexistence .
A Streetcar Named Desire
Desire as a sexual drive must certainly be something masked in a Tennessee trapped by its emotional limitations.
But literature or rather theater in this case, can always sublimate, redefine who we are and transform us completely. The work abounds in the most exotic passions, making its way between customs restrictions. Blanche Dubois (who everyone says is the portrait of Rose, Tennessee's sister), confronts with intensity in this fiction destinations that the author would have wanted for his own sister.
A story in which Tennesse emptied his frustrations in the form of passionate staging, without being able to ignore the darkest part of all passion in the imaginary of a creator crossed by guilt, unhappy childhood and irreconcilability with life.
If Rose could have been Blanche, she would probably have ended up equally dominated by her demons, but it would be another madness, which is unleashed when one has been able to face her demons, although in the end she is equally defeated.
The glass zoo
Once again a woman, Amanda Wingfield. Again a projection of Rose, the sister in whom Tennessee found childish shelter and attunement until her sister's mind began to detune from the world.
Amanda's past lives on with her in the form of memories that are even more glorious today in the gray of her everyday life. Laura, Amanda's daughter cannot bear the weight of the destiny of a mother who would like to see in her, at least, an overcoming of her circumstances.
Between Amanda's melancholy and Laura's physical and emotional limitations, thinking about composing a new family from Laura to posterity appears as an impossible ratified in the most unexpected way as soon as Laura meets the man who should be in her life.
The dreams of Amanda and Laura are deep down the same, longings for the impossible, for a past that is gone or for a person who never becomes.
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