Eerie Dancing At the Abyss Confessions of a Nightingale by Charlotte Chandler and Ray Stricklyn

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Most artists would prefer to be remembered for their work, but some have such a gift for performing the role of celebrity that they make themselves equally memorable for their semiprivate lives. Tennessee Williams was once described as the most famous playwright in the world; he remarked ruefully that he would rather be known as the best. In his final years Williams' talent faded, but his persona, a blend of alcoholic misbehavior, grandiose overstatement, poetic sensitivity and terminally naughty wit, raged on. To his indignation and amusement, the notoriety transcended the art. Last year brought two scandal- tinged biographies of the playwright, who died in 1983. Last week saw the arrival of a far more affectionate event, Confessions of a Nightingale, an ingratiatingly salty impersonation of Williams the raconteur.

The off-Broadway show was assembled by Ray Stricklyn, who also enacts Williams, and Charlotte Chandler, who visited the playwright for her book of interviews The Ultimate Seduction. The result is a hybrid of the public and the private man: Stricklyn speaks in the guise of Williams addressing a reporter, so his rambling 90-min. monologue is unmistakably a performance. Even so, there are passages of naked confession. The time is Williams' declining years, and the prevailing tone is graveyard jollity, dancing at the abyss. Like authentic conversation, Nightingale veers abruptly from revelation to chitchat; at one moment Williams self-justifyingly remarks that much of life is made of trivia. The talk ranges from bitchy quips ("I just flew in from Hollywood. I was there too long: four hours") and camp badinage ("An advantage of being homosexual is that I don't have to pay all that alimony") to a tearstained, self-blaming recollection of his sister Rose's lobotomy. Eerily, even at his most private and abandoned moments, this Williams surreptitiously watches what impact he is having on his audience. However much he may mistrust fame, he hungers for it; death is discussed chiefly in terms of how much space his obituary would merit in the New York Times.

Aficionados may complain that not much is new in Nightingale. Like many people with long practice at being interviewed, Williams tended to repeat well-rehearsed witticisms. But the flavor is authentic, especially in such inverted cliches as "Symbols are just a way of saying something more directly" or "Miss Edwina (his mother) can best be described as a Prussian general -- an inefficient Prussian general." His phrase turning is ornamented $ with borrowings from other writers ("I like Dorothy Parker's line 'Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress' ") and fellow melancholics ("Tallulah said . . . 'If I had my life to live over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner' "). The evening's reverberant themes are guilt at having abandoned his troubled family, which was the nub of his first great hit, The Glass Menagerie, and passion for work, which Williams bluntly says mattered more to him than sex, more than devotion, more than other people. The worst advice critics ever offered, he says, was that he stop writing: he simply couldn't.

Unlike, say, Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, Stricklyn attempts to re-create a face, voice and manner that many of his spectators vividly remember. His Williams turns out to be less a physical reincarnation than a psychological interpretation, and on that level it engrossingly succeeds. From the start, Williams' art was personal, almost claustrophobic in its griefs and grudges; yet his chosen literary form, the drama, required the constant presence of others to act and direct and design his plays, above all to receive them. Stricklyn gives poignant life to Williams' yearning for the world to look on him, and also for it to look away.