Футболка Стэнли Ковальского, метатеатр, интермедийность и гротеск: монографии о Теннесси Уильямсе

Abstract

Published in 2021, both monographs on Tennessee Williams — Stanley Gontarski’s Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater and Laura Michiels’ The Metatheater of Tennessee Williams: Tracing the Artistic Process Through Seven Plays perform the dual task of offering new perspectives on the playwright’s wellstudied plays and elaborating on the lesser-known material with its non-obvious cultural functions. Researchers show the complexity of Williams’ late oeuvre, demonstrating how his plays of the 1960s and early 1980s continue theatrical experiments of the second half of the 20th century. Developing the themes of his earlier period (theatricality of life and experience, the vulnerability of beauty and artistry, the fragility of memory, and the conflicts between the strong and the weak), Williams has enriched both poetic and naturalistic theater styles through absurdist aesthetics, his use of stylistic excess and an emphasis on metatheatre — spectacles about spectacles. Gontarski's book discusses Williams' influence on subsequent popular culture and its representation of the images of masculinity. Gontarski shows how Williams' success across the Atlantic depended on censorship (“The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil” being an intriguing part of Chapter 2) or greater stage freedom (Sweden). Late plays (In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Two-Character Play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel) allow the author to take a closer look at Williams’ absurdist poetics and the intriguing process of “becoming Beckett,” which the American playwright reenacts. Laura Michiels explores different types of metatheater in Williams’s work: “mythical” (Orpheus Descending), “esoteric” (Two-Character Play), “marauding” (Clothes for the Summer Hotel), “multiplying" and “negotiating” (Sweet Bird of Youth, Something Cloudy, Something Clear). Michiels shows how Williams' dramas open up to issues important for contemporary interdisciplinary studies: the audience’s emotional and affective responsiveness, the work of memory, and intermedial dialogism. Michiels’ book offers a wide range of tools for unpacking metatheatricality of the 20th-century drama.