What do you think?
Rate this book
Costly Performances: Tennessee Williams : The Last Stage
Chronicles the final years of the playwright's life, revealing his eccentricities, his efforts to pull his life together after years of decline, and his feelings toward fellow writers
262 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
8 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 6, 2014
Costly Performances, Bruce Smith’s remembrance of Tennessee Williams, is brilliant, insightful, witty, and deeply human. Mr. Smith was a friend of the playwright during the final months of the artist’s tragic melodrama when the critics and hangers-on ganged up on him. Mr. Smith stood close as an ally in support to the terrible end, becoming as close to the artist’s paranoid heart as any non-lover could be. In fact, he was finally accepted almost as a true brother by Mr. Williams, especially after the great playwright felt betrayed by his actual sibling, Dakin.
Costly Performances tells the story of those final, difficult days when Mr. Williams was trying to revise a career ravaged by substance abuse, failed love affairs, phony pals, and critics, who claimed that no good would be found in the final play, “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” in which the playwright had invested so much hope. He based it on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the critics were harsh. Three years later, Mr. Williams would die in a New York City hotel. It was in this degrading but often ironically funny desperation, which Mr. Smith witnessed and has so honestly written about, that we find two great and honest artists, Tennessee Williams and Bruce Smith.
Mr. Smith stood by the great playwright through the thick and thin of it all. He gracefully reports the story here complete with all the characters who would play parts in the final tragedy, from Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando to Maureen Stapleton, the Lady Maria St. Just, who Mr. Williams said was neither a lady nor a saint nor just, Geraldine Page, and many more celebrities, some who bravely delivered the goods and others who behaved miserably.
Of all the pleasing passages in Costly Performances, I especially value this comment made by Mr. Williams as well as Mr. Smith’s brilliant analysis of it: "'... only in his work can an artist find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.' Tennessee's recourse to disorder was now the order of the day, as his search for the substantiality of life could only now be found in his personal life. The violence was of an emotional cast, rather than physical. It became apparent that he was enacting the drama of his life through the casting of actual persons who could be instantly motivated, spurred on, and then destroyed with all the dispatch of a truly effective avenging angel ... persons entered into his circle of their own accord and thereby participated in their own undoing. 'Security is a kind of death,' Tennessee would assure his obliging victims. 'The struggle is all.'"
Throughout, Bruce Smith shows his deep understanding of the Tennessee Williams œuvre. For example, consider his take on the great playwright's search for a way to dramatize the irony of tragedy: "... your humor has always been cast as irony, which is an acceptable manner for handling humor in the context of a tragedy. Are you planning to make a laughing matter out of the psychic trauma familiar to most of your characters?" On Mr. Williams's tendency to cruelly punish the very people who were trying to make the most of his last awkward plays, Mr. Smith writes, "... if the sense of drama didn't work in the play, it could still be effected in real life."
Thomas Mann wrote, "Art is combat, an exhausting struggle. An endless war over taste." And Duke Ellington said, "When art ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it." These two artists would have been an audience who could truly appreciate the playwright's work and "wounded life." Always the generous friend, Mr. Smith makes it clear that he, perhaps he alone, provided the solace and understanding the culture could not provide to Tennessee Williams. Perhaps it came too late. How could it not? Freud claimed we are formed by nature and nurture by the age of two. If this is so, the life ahead can only grow out of that foundation. Those plays could only be produced by a tortured soul employing his art to survive a monster mother, a weak father, and a mad sister, i.e., a terrible dominatrix, a fool, and a lobotomy.
All Americans are driven to find the happiness falsely promised to them by a clever ideology designed to mask the nation's power politics. An artist knows that happiness comes from two basic sources - the guilty pleasure of wasting time with drink or drug, or perhaps a ridiculous TV show indulgence (if discovered enjoying either, the artist would be humiliated) and the exhilaration that is experienced by creating something good and true, whether it produces money for guilty pleasures or not. Both have their rewards, but together they return true though never lasting happiness. America's culture can tolerate the guilty pleasures because, if the artist becomes a celebrity, there's big money in exposing the indulgences. But America envies and fears its artists and is thus motivated to destroy them, usually by turning their guilty pleasures against them, presenting them in clown or villain costumes. It's an ironic tragedy that few artists escape unless, like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol, they have fun presenting themselves to the culture as clowns from the very beginning.
Mr. Williams’s incredibly brave work endures. “A Streetcar Named Desire” was given a theatrical makeover in London’s Young Vic in 2014 by Benedict Andrews. It was given great reviews. So did the production’s Blanche, Gillian Anderson. The Guardian critic, Susannah Clapp, wrote. “Anderson is utterly compelling.” As for the play that Mr. Williams first debuted back on December 3, 1947, the Guardian review states, “… this is still a powerful production that reminds us, thanks to the sterling performances that Williams deals with incomplete people. In the end Blanche's woozy lyricism is as insufficient as Stanley's base materialism; and, in the performances of Anderson and Foster, this sense of two needy people colliding comes strongly across.” Tennessee Williams would surely be celebrating.
Costly Performances deserves to be scripted for the stage, and Mr. Smith should be the one to make the conversion. With the right director and actors, it will be a smash hit, especially with a London debut. Please say it will happen, Mr. Smith.
Costly Performances tells the story of those final, difficult days when Mr. Williams was trying to revise a career ravaged by substance abuse, failed love affairs, phony pals, and critics, who claimed that no good would be found in the final play, “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” in which the playwright had invested so much hope. He based it on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the critics were harsh. Three years later, Mr. Williams would die in a New York City hotel. It was in this degrading but often ironically funny desperation, which Mr. Smith witnessed and has so honestly written about, that we find two great and honest artists, Tennessee Williams and Bruce Smith.
Mr. Smith stood by the great playwright through the thick and thin of it all. He gracefully reports the story here complete with all the characters who would play parts in the final tragedy, from Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando to Maureen Stapleton, the Lady Maria St. Just, who Mr. Williams said was neither a lady nor a saint nor just, Geraldine Page, and many more celebrities, some who bravely delivered the goods and others who behaved miserably.
Of all the pleasing passages in Costly Performances, I especially value this comment made by Mr. Williams as well as Mr. Smith’s brilliant analysis of it: "'... only in his work can an artist find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.' Tennessee's recourse to disorder was now the order of the day, as his search for the substantiality of life could only now be found in his personal life. The violence was of an emotional cast, rather than physical. It became apparent that he was enacting the drama of his life through the casting of actual persons who could be instantly motivated, spurred on, and then destroyed with all the dispatch of a truly effective avenging angel ... persons entered into his circle of their own accord and thereby participated in their own undoing. 'Security is a kind of death,' Tennessee would assure his obliging victims. 'The struggle is all.'"
Throughout, Bruce Smith shows his deep understanding of the Tennessee Williams œuvre. For example, consider his take on the great playwright's search for a way to dramatize the irony of tragedy: "... your humor has always been cast as irony, which is an acceptable manner for handling humor in the context of a tragedy. Are you planning to make a laughing matter out of the psychic trauma familiar to most of your characters?" On Mr. Williams's tendency to cruelly punish the very people who were trying to make the most of his last awkward plays, Mr. Smith writes, "... if the sense of drama didn't work in the play, it could still be effected in real life."
Thomas Mann wrote, "Art is combat, an exhausting struggle. An endless war over taste." And Duke Ellington said, "When art ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it." These two artists would have been an audience who could truly appreciate the playwright's work and "wounded life." Always the generous friend, Mr. Smith makes it clear that he, perhaps he alone, provided the solace and understanding the culture could not provide to Tennessee Williams. Perhaps it came too late. How could it not? Freud claimed we are formed by nature and nurture by the age of two. If this is so, the life ahead can only grow out of that foundation. Those plays could only be produced by a tortured soul employing his art to survive a monster mother, a weak father, and a mad sister, i.e., a terrible dominatrix, a fool, and a lobotomy.
All Americans are driven to find the happiness falsely promised to them by a clever ideology designed to mask the nation's power politics. An artist knows that happiness comes from two basic sources - the guilty pleasure of wasting time with drink or drug, or perhaps a ridiculous TV show indulgence (if discovered enjoying either, the artist would be humiliated) and the exhilaration that is experienced by creating something good and true, whether it produces money for guilty pleasures or not. Both have their rewards, but together they return true though never lasting happiness. America's culture can tolerate the guilty pleasures because, if the artist becomes a celebrity, there's big money in exposing the indulgences. But America envies and fears its artists and is thus motivated to destroy them, usually by turning their guilty pleasures against them, presenting them in clown or villain costumes. It's an ironic tragedy that few artists escape unless, like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol, they have fun presenting themselves to the culture as clowns from the very beginning.
Mr. Williams’s incredibly brave work endures. “A Streetcar Named Desire” was given a theatrical makeover in London’s Young Vic in 2014 by Benedict Andrews. It was given great reviews. So did the production’s Blanche, Gillian Anderson. The Guardian critic, Susannah Clapp, wrote. “Anderson is utterly compelling.” As for the play that Mr. Williams first debuted back on December 3, 1947, the Guardian review states, “… this is still a powerful production that reminds us, thanks to the sterling performances that Williams deals with incomplete people. In the end Blanche's woozy lyricism is as insufficient as Stanley's base materialism; and, in the performances of Anderson and Foster, this sense of two needy people colliding comes strongly across.” Tennessee Williams would surely be celebrating.
Costly Performances deserves to be scripted for the stage, and Mr. Smith should be the one to make the conversion. With the right director and actors, it will be a smash hit, especially with a London debut. Please say it will happen, Mr. Smith.
Displaying 1 of 1 review