The Crack-Up

By T.E.K.

OUT CRY by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

--T.S. Eliot

It is because Tennessee Williams once was just such an artist that the appearance of Out Cry is immensely saddening. Here, the man who suffers and the mind which creates are no more separate than a drunk and his crying jag In the plays that earned Williams his reputation as America's finest dramatist, he showed that he could impose the order of art on his darkling terrors and forge passion and compassion out of pain. Out Cry is devoid of those gifts.

Insofar as this play has a psycho logical terrain, it is limbo. Symbolically, a spiral staircase on the stage ends in midair, leading nowhere. Two actors a brother (Michael York) and a sister (Cara Duff-MacCormick) have been deserted by the rest of their company on a tour of some unnamed country. In panic they improvise "The Two Character Play," a misty memory of a long-past family life in a southern U.S. city that culminated in the murder of their mother by their father and his suicide.

Most of this is rendered in maun dering monologues and non-sequiturish asides. A Williams groping for words, parched for images, fumbling in dramatic craft-- all this seems incredible, but alas, it is true.

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