![]() Here there was only shouting and confusion. Or did they? *Īs Tom Wingfield says at the beginning of The Glass Menagerie, In later plays, politics and social struggle receded to the background. Louis ( The Fugitive Kind), and the inmates of a Pennsylvania penitentiary ( Not About Nightingales). ![]() Like Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw (whose plays for the politically committed Group Theatre the young playwright knew), Williams in the mid-1930s found that he was best able to express his personal hopes and anxieties through the experiences of people he read about in newspapers: the coal miners of Alabama ( Candles to the Sun), the homeless and dispossessed of St. ![]() His earliest plays were born out of the political and social temper-and the political and social drama-of their time. in Conversations 292).īoth statements are true. Nine years later, in the wake of Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and-still-Vietnam, Williams said to another interviewer, “All my plays have a social conscience” (qtd. This did not mean, however, that the important political and social events of his time had no interest for him. “I am not a direct writer,” Williams replied, “I am always an oblique writer, if I can be I want to be allusive I don’t want to be one of those people who hit the nail on the head all the time” (qtd. In 1966, Tennessee Williams was asked by an interviewer if he would ever write “directly” about current political events, including the struggle of African Americans for civil rights and the Vietnam War. A version of this essay originally was published in the New Directions reissue of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, with an introduction by John Guare. A Playwright with a Social Conscience Michael PallerĬopyright ©2008 by Michael Paller.
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