The Night Hank Williams Died: A Play in Two Acts With Incidental Music by Larry L. King

Abstract

Reviews 183 the most often anthologized and discussed short poems come from this same decade. A number of these poems have been long out of print. For example, Jeffers chose to reprint only four poems from the Dear Judas book in his 1938 Selected Poetry. In fact, Hunt has included here thirty-four poems omitted from that volume. Similarly, only about a fifth of the poems collected in the slim Selected Poems paperback are drawn from the individual books collected here. And they are arranged chronologically not by the dates of their writing but by the publication dates of the books in which they appeared, thus separating poems that actually belong together. The arrangement and publication of Volume Two of T h e Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, much more so than Volume One, promises to provide the opportunity for analysis of previously neglected poems and reconsideration of Jeffers’s poetic development. PATRICK D. MURPHY Indiana University of Pennsylvania T he N ight H ank Williams D ied: A Play in T w o A cts W ith Incidental Music. By Larry L. King. (Dallas: SMU Press, 1989. 120 pages, $14.75/$7.95.) There comes a time in the career of many popular writers when anything they write can be published. In the case of this play, the question is whether the script was worth a hardbound book; in the final analysis, I’m not sure it was. To a large degree, this text seems to exist more to allow Larry King to have his say about the hard row even proven contemporary playwrights must hoe, which he does in a fifteen-page preface. He outlines the unfair attitudes of New York theater-moguls toward scripts written and first produced outside Manhattan, and he gets in a couple of swipes at other elements of the U.S. professional theater establishment and its treatment of his earlier plays—par­ ticularly The Kingfish—and of Hollywood’s ruination of T he Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Even so, the story of the evolution of H ank Williams is instructive and interesting; regardless of the quality of the play as a reading script, the preface essay may well be worth the book. As for the play itself, astute readers will immediately recognize the melan­ choly and comedy of Whorehouse, although this script lacks the depth and development of both these humors. They will also acknowledge something King does not: the play’s debt to Preston Jones’s “Texas Trilogy,” particularly L u A nn H am pton L averty Oberlander. It would not be too much to say that much of it—setting, character types, even comic interludes—are derivative of Jones’s masterful scripts. The story involves old high school sweethearts, Thurmond and Nellie Bess—he’s a loser, a failure before he started, a man with no vision beyond nostalgic recollections of past glories; she’s also a loser, has made a bad marriage, and is hoping to transform Thurmond and herself into permament teenagers. Both are pretty much what one would expect to come out of a 184 Western American Literature small West Texas town in the late ’40s; they are groping for something mean­ ingful in life and in the meantime, they’re groping each other and calling it love. The best character, Gus, owns the beer joint where most of the action takes place. He has an uncommon interest in the fate of these older young people, largely because he is Nellie’s real father. The sheriff is the villain, and comedy and color are provided by the town character, Moon, and Nellie’s mother, Vida, a Bible-thumping, guilt-burdened bigot. The action is quick, one-liners abound, and the ending is predictable. The script lacks the spontaneity of Jones’s plays, the freshness of other Texas dramatists’ work, and returns to the old habit of playwrights finding humor and pathos in Texans being rustic rubes and bumbling bumpkins in the dry climate of West Texas. Perhaps it plays better than it reads, but I somehow don’t think it works as well as it should given King’s talent and abilities. I tend to think...