The Haunted Stage of "Summer and Smoke:" Tennessee Williams's Silent Film Sequences

Recent re-evaluation of Tennessee Williams’s late plays has brought to light another side of the playwright, an avant-garde impulse ignored by his contemporaries because it did not match his image as a poetic realist. Of course, this new Williams did not appear out of the blue; he was there from the beginning, if less conspicuous, but the weight of prejudice drove him underground. Thus, the avant-garde is most visible in the early plays, in deviations from artistic norms that did not always make it to the published versions. Summer and Smoke (1948) is a case in point. Examination of the unpublished drafts of the play reveals an ambitious project that never saw the light of day. Inspired by Erwin Piscator’s Epic Theatre, Williams intended to put a screen on the stage, inviting the spectator to see differently, in a manner reminiscent of Brecht’s “exercise in complex seeing.” The drafts, therefore, unveil the avant-garde ideas of a playwright who never ceased experimenting with form, finally to find his true voice, a voice that resonates most loudly in the late plays

SUZAN-LORI PARKS AND NAOMI WALLACE IN RELATION: PLAYING THE AMERICAN GAME FOR REAL AND BEYOND.

International audiencewo American women whose writings for the theatre have been both nationally and internationally recognized, Suzan-Lori Parks and Naomi Wallace have drawn on the notion of game-playing to explore and undermine the inextricability of the power relations that govern their vision of America. Because theatre is about playing, games occupy a central position around which meaning revolves and multiplies on stage, infinitely magnified by Parks’s and Wallace’s poetic imagination. As far apart and unique as they are, their voices deeply resonate with the American landscape and beyond, echoing each other in ways that call for an examination of the correspondences that make their plays related, in the sense Edouard Glissant gave to the term, of a totality that does not exclude differences, of a meeting of pluralities, which is the stable/unstable ground of games, and of a place from where infinite beauty can spring. Parks’s The America Play and Wallace’s The War Boys, both written in the early 90s, evolved through a creative process that feeds on itself into the widely acclaimed Topdog/Underdog that earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and The Breach, which was produced at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2019, expanding Wallace’s popularity in France. Through a comparative analysis of the poetics at work in these four plays, the aim of this article is to bring these two women’s voices together, placing them in relation without erasing their particularities to delineate the contours of a “relational poetics,” to again use Glissant’s terminology, one that evokes rather than explains, one that resurrects the past to reinvent our present and divine the future: an art of divination