Torpid Tennessee

Tennessee Williams is lying on the sickbed of his formidable talent. Ever since The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, his work has become increasingly infirm -- so gravely so that In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel seems more deserving of a coroner's report than a review. Nonetheless, trust in the eventual recovery of America's greatest living dramatist must be retained, even if it resembles St. Paul's definition of faith: "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

To realize the particular plight that Williams is in now, one must understand the inner tension of his finest plays. Williams has been overwhelmingly a man of feeling rather than thought, a disciple of the heart's reasons rather than the mind's reasonings. The emotional proposition at the core of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is undeviating: life is an undeclared war. As Williams has dramatized it, that war is conducted on two fronts. The lacerating confrontations between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, between Big Daddy and his son Brick and Maggie the Cat, are blistering barrages of domestic car nage. They are also metaphors for a more profound and transcendent struggle, the war against the gods, the irrational, immutable duel with destiny, disaster and death -- all that is meant when one speaks of man's fate. This is the war that no man wins, and that is why it is called tragic.

In that great war, Williams argues, the only cease-fires are the truces of love, in which two people give each other to each other in an affinity of body and spirit. For a brief moment, they are immune to the world's malice, corruption and despair. In a transport of ecstasy, they defy the cruel and inexorable laws of the universe. Inevitably, the war is resumed.

Planned Hibernation. Though Williams' first professionally produced play was titled Battle of Angels, he and his heroes have more frequently and more valiantly battled with the devils of dread, insecurity and panic. In the past, Williams could cast out those demons with the daemon of his art. He could control his craft with poetic precision, and the battle erupted in blazingly memorable scenes and plays. With In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel he has been invaded by his fears, and the battle of existence has become a forlorn lost cause.

The play is an open letter announcing esthetic impotence, and its dramatic distress signal is that of the faint bleep of an SOS sent from an enemy-occupied country. Staggering about the hotel bar, the painter hero (Donald Madden) spends all of his stage time in an unrelieved agony of mental and physical disintegration that ends in death. His bitchy, sex-starved wife (Anne Meacham) is addicted to plaintive monologues and a frustrated effort to seduce the Japanese barman. The barman (Jon Lee) is a model of stoic restraint and may represent serenity. He also represents something Williams does not admire: a planned hibernation of the spirit in which one evades any commitment to love, hate or passion. Instead of eloquence, the play offers truncated, disjointed sentences. Inertia usurps the role of action; the prevailing mood is torpor. All that Williams seems able to contribute is a little banal philosophizing about how the creation of art saps a man's life. Still, there is an axiom of the race track that a thoroughbred will eventually revert to form. One must never forget that, despite his present esthetic humiliation, Tennessee Williams is a thoroughbred.

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