A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

The Theatrical Genius of Tennessee Williams

Plastic Theatre
‘To express his universal truths Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive
new style of drama. He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects—all
the elements of staging—must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters,
and language.’(Alice Griffin)

Williams criticised those who show ‘a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or non-literary
elements of the theatre, the various plastic elements, the purely visual things such as light and
movement and color and design, which play, for example, such a tremendously important
part in theatre… and which are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas are.’

Music in A Streetcar Named Desire

The Varsouviana Polka
This polka music is played throughout the play with varying degrees of intensity – it is used
as a device in order to emphasise and highlight Blanche’s thoughts and add to her memories
of her dead lover. When Blanche had danced with Allan (just before he committed suicide)
they danced to this music.

Whenever Blanche is asked about her relations, she remembers Allan and thus Williams has
implemented this device in order to highlight to the audience that she is reminded of the time
she danced with him before he died – it is even explicitly shown that her memory of the song
being stuck in her head is only stopped after she hears a gunshot (which is played to the
audience too).

The polka tune is in the background for a lot of the scenes to do with Blanche too, as if to
subtly state to the audience that the memory of Allan is with her everywhere, always in the
back of her mind. When she is specifically recalling him or something about that time, the
music becomes slowly louder and then either fades away or ends with a gunshot sound – this
is all played to the audience to give them the effect of being inside Blanche’s mind, as if they
can hear what she is feeling.

An example of this music implementation is in Scene 9 (P84), when Blanche mentions the
Varsouviana, saying that it was “the polka tune that they were playing” before shortly being
interrupted by the stage direction of [A distant revolver shot is heard, Blanche seems
relieved] and then [The polka music dies out again] – this indicates how the gunshot is the
end to the music, as it was when Allan ran away from the dancing and polka music to kill
himself.
Blue Piano
Blue Piano is generally used as the ‘upbeat’ music for the play – it is first used by Williams
as the introductory music when painting the scene for Elysian Fields, allowing the audience
to get a feel for the “spirit of the life”. This music is also present in the reunion of Stella and
Stanley in Scene 3, indicating that overall it is happy and should be played in the upbeat
scenes of the play. The blue piano, blue hue of the stage lighting and overall feeling that the
audience is subjected to on these initial introductory senses is all in harmony together –
Williams has created the image of a ‘paradise’ in the audience’s imagination.

This contrasts drastically with Scene 9, where Mitch and Blanche are having a dramatic and
potentially violent scene – the “distant piano” is “slow and blue” as stated by stage directions
and is thus used as a contrast between the normally happy implementation and one of the
more violent and action-based scenes.

Other Music
Music is sung by Blanche a lot in order to emphasise her bitter-sweet situation; She is often
shown to sing while in the bath, being completely oblivious of all that is outside. The usage
of happy and upbeat songs, such as “Paper Moon” being sung by Blanche are particularly
important as they are used to highlight the contrast between Blanche’s bitter-sweet (although
mostly fake) upbeat attitude and Stanley’s vehement anger (such as him waiting to get into
the bathroom while she sings – “get OUT of the BATHROOM!”).

Other Sound Effects

Sound effects are used to supply realism in theatre but also to allow the audience to
understand the setting of a play.

1. Locomotive

 “a locomotive is heard approaching outside. She (Blanche) claps her hands to her ears
and crouches over.”
 Covering her ears with her hands can be linked to when Blache covers her ears when she
talks about Allen, bringing back unpleasant memories which leads her to the deterioration
of her fragile state of mind.
 It approaches ‘outside’ which shows Stanley and Stella’s apartment is built next to a
railway in the poorer area of New Orleans, contrasting greatly to the Dubois aristocratic
family home – Belle Reve. Also, the reader can infer the setting of New Orleans is
industrialized and busy.
 In scene 10, the locomotive is repeated. “the sound of it turns into a roar of an
approaching locomotive.” This builds up tension and foreshadows that something
malicious is about to happen between Stanley and Blanche. Furthermore, the sound effect
hides the noise of Stanley moving progressively closer to Blanche.
 The sound of a locomotive is present when there’s a discovery of Blanche’s surprising and
shameful past, the discovery being made by Stanley. It demonstrates Stanley’s desire to
bring Blanche to her fall.
 The locomotive is significant when Blanche tragically narrates her marriage with Allen as
the thunder-like noise is loud and symbolizes an unstoppable metallic monster chasing
Blanche and restricting her. This painful memory of her past devastates her.
 ‘outside a train approaches’ ‘another train passes outside’ p.46,47
2. Domestic violence

 ‘sound of a blow’ Stanley trying to assert dominance, and this foreshadows his sexual
abuse of Blanche later when he rapes her.
 ‘he enters the kitchen, slamming the door’ p.90 scene 10. Brutality and force of Stanley, as
well as his masculinity. The slamming of the door may foreshadow shuttling Blanche out
of the Kowalski home and family.
 ‘a disturbance is heard upstairs’ (from Eunice’s place.) This explores their economic
status as demonstrates that the properties are in proximity and are extremely small as
sounds are heard amongst their apartments.
 ‘she smashes a bottle on the table and faces him’ p.96
 ‘a clatter of aluminum string a wall is heard, followed by a man’s angry roar, shout, and
overturned furniture. There is a crash, then a relative hush.’ p.50
 ‘something is overturned with a crash’ p.36
 Women had few rights in 1950s Southern America meaning the audience would be more
accepting of the mistreatment and misogyny towards women. A modern feminist audience
member would challenge this behavior towards women in the play.
 US Suffragette movement – women could own property themselves only in the 1940s.
3. Motif of the cat screeching

 ‘A cat screeches’ p.5 scene one

 This happens when Blanche arrives at Stanley and Stella’s, but her reaction is what makes
this motif significant.
 She ‘springs up’ in shock which emphasizes she feels worried, anxious and scared about
seeing Stella and meeting Stanley. She is unfamiliar with the surroundings and the way
she reacts shows she is constantly on edge. Furthermore, Blanche is in a weak, fragile and
vulnerable state.
 The audience may evoke a sense of pathos for Blanche as she’s so far away from her
normal surroundings.
4. Red hots in Scene Two

 ‘a tamale vendor calls out as he rounds the corner’ Suggests people living in New
Orleans are full of energy as he ‘calls out.’
 ‘red hots! Red hots!’
 The colour red symbolizes the passion and desire which is demonstrated by Blanche as
she desires to be loved and has a passion for men.
 The red may also be a warning as the ‘red hots’ is in anticipation of the poker night scene
in which men violence dominates.
 ‘red hots’ is a typical southern food served in a city which adds realism to the play.
‘outside is the sound of men’s voices’
‘more laughter and shouts of partying come from the men’
‘the voices of people on the street can be heard overlapping’
 Creates a sense of realism by using everyday colloquial sounds such as outside voices. It
reminds the audience that the play is about ordinary people living an everyday life.
‘low animal moans’ p.38
‘low-tone clarinet moans’ p.38
 Lust is the strongest bond between Stanley and Stella’s relationship
 Insane side of animalistic love as Stella goes back to Stanley after the horrific violent act
of hitting a pregnant wife.
‘Steve bounds after her with goat-like screeches’ p.55
‘Blanche utters a sharp, frightened cry and shrinks away’
‘the music is in her mind’ p.83
‘an electric fan is turning back and forth across her’
‘flores para los muertos’ ‘she is calling barely audibly’ p.88
‘policeman’s whistle breaks it up’ p.95
‘the night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in a jungle.’ p.95 plastic theatre. Violence
and bestial nature of Blanche’s aggressor – Stanley and the matron of the institution which
suggests cruelty and inhumanity of the whole society leads Blanche to her downfall.
Alongside her chaotic state of mind and physical offence.
‘sound of water can be heard running in the bathroom’ p.98
‘her voice is bold and toneless as a fire-bell‘ p.104
‘the greeting is echoed and reechoed by other mysterious voices behind the walls.’ scene 11
‘the echoes sound in threatening whispers’ scene 11
‘she cries out as if the lantern was herself’ scene 11
‘she sobs with inhuman abandon’ scene 11
Lighting
In the first scene, the ‘peculiarly tender blue’ sky adds ‘lyricism’ and accentuates the
‘atmosphere of decay’. From the beginning, tragedy is foreshadowed. The decaying of
Blanche’s mind, and the fact the colour is slightly unplaceable shows the theme of deceit that
will become evident.
Scene 3: Blanche keeps ‘accidentally’ stepping into ‘the streak of light’. She knows she is in
viewpoint of the men and uses this to assert her femininity and be provocative. Blanche likes
male attention and even though she is fading she still, although obviously, lies about her age
and wants to be young and beautiful. Furthermore, the men are gathered under ‘an electric
bulb with a vivid green glass shade’. This bright and intense colouring of the light shows the
masculinity and the assertive strength of the men. They are under a powerful light with a bold
colour, alike their bold outgoing personalities.
Scene 4: Stella is ‘serene’ in ‘early morning sunshine’. Her life is unlike Blanche’s and this
could symbolize the new beginning she is expecting from Stanley and her optimistic mood
because of it. This contrasts heavily with the previous, dramatic poker night scene. At the end
of the scene Blanche is described as stopping ‘before the dark entrance’ of Stella’s flat. This
is reflective of Blanche’s mood on the situation. How she believes a grave thing has occurred
that is uncommon. It also symbolizes how Stella keeps blanche in the dark, and this happens
to her a lot and she always reconciles with Stanley in the end. Furthermore, if we use the
lighting in the sky for a metaphor in a sense or pathetic fallacy of blanches mental state and
mood, at the end of scene 3 she ‘looks up at the sky’ and then thanks Mitch for ‘being so
kind’. This could be symbolic of the hope Mitch initially brought, and the fact the next
lighting stage in the day will be dawn (as it is night) so symbolic of new beginnings.
Scene 6: it is around ‘2am.’ This scene reveals Blanche’s past, and Allan’s suicide. This time
of day would be very dark which is symbolic of how dark her past has been. The lack of light
in the scene could also show the foreshadowing of the lack of light Mitch ends up bringing to
Blanche as they do not work out in the end.
Scene 7: it is ‘late afternoon’. This scene is when Stanley reveals to Stella all he knows about
Blanche. It is symbolic of the darkening of the day with the darkening of the plot and of
Blanche’s mental state.
Scene 8: the lighting is ‘a still golden dusk’. The tragedy of the play is not fully realized at
this point, but the fading mental state of Blanche is symbolic as being in its dusk stage,
towards the end of the day/ her mental sanity. Furthermore ‘golden’ implies what once was
and what has been lost.
Blanche attempts to hide in the shade. She brings the bulb cover with her to add to her
illusions and desire to escape reality. Mitch literally ‘tears’ it off when saying he’s never seen
her in daylight. It is symbolic of the unravelling of her lies. Ties up all the elements of light,
symbolism with hiding/lies and deceit Williams has been setting up. This is different from in
Scene 3 when he ‘adjusts the lantern’ and places the paper shade Blanche has purchased on it
for her. He had understanding and was happy to fulfil her wishes. It shows Mitch’s changed
attitude to Blanche since his beginning affection and kindness.
Use of the Stage
Scene 1:

Elysian Fields – ‘Elysian’ means heaven, so the ironic imagery of heaven contrasts with the
crumbling exterior of New Orleans.

Blanche: ‘Her appearance is incongruous to this setting. She is daintily dressed in a white
suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as
though she was arriving at a summer tea in the garden district…There is something about
her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.’
Here Williams uses staging to establish an obvious visual contrast between Blanche and the
industrial browns of 1950s New Orleans to immediately illustrate how out-of-place and she
is, whilst also allowing room for showing how this projected image of luxury is far from
authentic and how she becomes reluctantly more submissive to her setting as the play
proceeds.

Scene 2:

In this scene the imagery of Stanley’s ‘fistful of costume jewellery’ and an ‘armful of dresses’
on the floor establishes a beautiful visual contrast between the fluffy, white delicacy of
Blanche’s supposedly luxurious clothing against the yellow and brown of the dingy,
impoverished flat – lending the audience the idea of her illustrated luxury being a façade.
Scene 3:

‘There is a picture of Van Gogh’s a billiard-parlour at night’; the men are described as being
as ‘powerful as their primary colours’ of the shirts they are wearing. ‘There are vivid slices
of watermelon on the table, whiskey bottles and glasses.’ This illustrates how the men have
assumed their dominance over the space and how they also assume it is within their right for
the women to clear up their mess.
Scene 4:

In scene four, Williams uses the plastic possibilities of theatre to establish a dramatic irony as
he overhears Stella and Blanche’s conversation in which Blanche rants feverishly about what
she truly thinks of him, meanwhile Stanley is standing in the kitchen next door. The flimsy
divide of a curtain perhaps between the two rooms here creates an obvious visual effect in
which the audience notices Stanley’s presence but the women fail to.

Scene 5:

‘Blanche is seated in the bedroom fanning herself with a palm leaf.’ The palm leaf here is
again an example of her idiosyncratic necessity to illustrate a façade of luxury. It contrasts
itself to the electric fan in scene nine.
Scene 6:‘Blanche precedes him into the kitchen. The outer wall of the building disappears
and the interiors of the two rooms can be dimly seen.’ The dim visibility of the two rooms
and overall darkness compliments the sexual tension in the scene as both the audience and
Blanche and Mitch are aware of the bedroom looming next door to them.

‘“We are going to pretend we are sitting in a little artists’ café in Paris!” She lights a candle
stud and puts it in a bottle’ The contrast between the extravagant luxury of the language in
her proclamation in comparison with her futile action is another example of how she
‘pretends’.
Scene 7:‘The portières are open and the table is set for a birthday supper with cake and
flowers.’ In contrast with Stanley’s anger at Blanche in this scene, the cake and flowers seem
futile and ineffectual. The audience sees this as another one of Stella’s hopeless attempts to
try and cover-up paint the atmosphere as one with a happy, functioning dynamic, that Stanley
soon stamps on.

Scene 8:‘A torch of sunlight blazes on the side of a big water-tank or oil-drum across the
empty lot towards the business district which is now pierced with pin-points of lighted
windows or windows reflecting the sunset.’ The warm glow of the sunset here contrasts
almost ironically with the violence and anger of the scene to come. Meanwhile, the ‘pin-
points of lighted windows or windows reflecting the sunset’, draws the audience out of the
scene slightly the scene is contextualised as occurring in this city rather than only in this
room; attenuating its intensity slightly.

‘The three people are sitting at a dismal birthday supper…There is a fourth place which is
left vacant.’ The vacancy of the unused place at the dining table invests the scene with an
underlying emptiness and creates a more tense atmosphere between Blanche, Stella and
Stanley because of this dismal, awkward quality.
Scene 9:‘A while later Blanche is seated in a tense hunched position in a bedroom chair that
she has recovered with diagonal green and white stripes. She has on her scarlet satin robe…
An electric fan is turning back and forth across her.’ – The description of the chair with
‘diagonal green and white stripes’ that she now sits on confirms how she has now
surrendered herself to the conditions of Stella and Stanley’s flat, especially that she has
‘recovered’ it. However, the not-so-aesthetic chair contrasts with her scarlet satin robe; a
contrast in the staging in comparison to her costume, that is her flimsy façade of wealth,
similar to that the audience have been observing. The ‘electric fan turning back and forth
across her’ here is yet another example of her futile attempts at some form of luxury that now
seem pathetic to the audience. It compares itself to her ‘fanning herself with a palm leaf’ in
scene five, and how her character has developed in this way.

Scene 10:‘Lurid reflections appear on the walls around Blanche. The shadows are of a
grotesque and menacing form.’ The shadows serve to symbolise Blanche’s fear and helpless
inferiority at this moment and exaggerate the effect of it for the audience. The way the
shadows surround her allows the impression of her being trapped by Stanley and inescapably
submissive to his dominance and power over her, both physically and emotionally.

Scene 11:‘Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes.’ Again, here in the
bedroom, the audience sees a visual representation of Blanche’s hysteria and her persistent
trauma that remains after Stanley’s rape.

With thanks to students Amelie, Georgia, Torin and Xanthe

The Tennessee Williams Annual Review

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“The Sculptural Drama”: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic

Theatre
Richard E. Kramer

Permissions: ©2002 by The University of the South. Previously unpublished material by

Tennessee Williams printed by permission of the University of the South, Sewanee,
Tennessee. All rights whatsoever are strictly reserved and all inquiries should be made to
Casarotto Ramsay & Associates Ltd., National House, 60-66 Wardour Street, London
W1V4ND. Grateful acknowledgment is also given to the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin.

In his production notes to The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams introduces a concept
that describes the theatre for which he was writing:

Being a “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of
convention. Because of its considerable delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and
subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all other
unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to
truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be,
trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is
actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid
expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and
authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to
the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should
know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an
organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through
transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in
appearance.
These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a
conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of
realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture. (xix-xxii) 1

Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his
ideal theatre make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience greater than
mere Realism. Though Williams never publicly discussed plastic theatre again, from Glass
Menagerie on, his playsare very theatrical: his language is lyrical and poetic; his
settings,“painterly” and “sculptural”; and his dramaturgy, cinematic (see Boxill 23-24; Falk
162; Jackson 96-97; Brandt 163-87).2 His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the
world of art and painting, and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just
realisticin its effects. In Camino Real and many later plays, for example, Williams
consciously exploits non-realistic styles like expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism, which
he explicitly calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth. Indeed, Williams’s stage
directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements,
including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and dissolving and fading
lighting (none of which made it to the stage under Eddie Dowling’s direction).

¶2

The scholarship that has focused on Williams’s plastic theatre principally examines its
practical implications. Roger Boxill simply states, for instance, “The ‘new plastic theatre’
must make full use of all the resources of the contemporary stage—language, action, scenery,
music, costume, sound, lighting—and bind them into an artistic unity conceived by the
playwright” and describes the cinematic aspects of Williams’s scripts (with referenceto
George Brandt’s “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams”). Esther Merle
Jackson is even less detailed: “[T]he plastic theatre of Williams is not confined to visual
structures. Its sensuous symbol also embraces sound patterns: words, music, and aural
effects” (Boxill 23-34; Jackson 99-100). A more extensive discussion of plastic theatre in the
critical literature is from Alice Griffin, but even she does not go beyond explaining,

To express his universal truths Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive
new style of drama. He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects—all
the elements of staging—must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters,
and language. (22)3

Others who mention plastic theatre in a similar vein, giving the concept import as the key to
the poetic nature of Williams’s drama, are Matthew C. Roudané and Allean Hale, both of
whom include it in more general discussions (Roudané 10; Hale 24).

¶3

The only critical work which specifically uses plastic theatre as an analytical tool, Claus-
Peter Neumann’s “Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre: Camino Real,” ultimately says no
more about the concept than, “The purpose of this ‘plastic theatre,’ of which lighting, music,
set, and props are essential elements, is to provide ‘a more penetrating and vivid expression
of things as they are’ than mere realism can accomplish”—little more than a restatement of
Williams’s own declaration in the Glass Menagerie note (Neumann 94). In fact, the most
extensive discussion of the concept appears in Robert Bray’s “Introduction” to the edition of
Glass Menagerie, which he edited. Bray cites Williams’s own journal, in which the writer
had described minimalist balletic movement for the actors (Bray ix; see also Leverich 446).
In its simplest terms, then, a plastic theatre is a theatrical theatre as opposed to a literary (or
literal) one.4

¶4

There is nothing amiss with any of these descriptions of what Williams meant by plastic
theatre as he laid it out in his Menagerie note. Boxill, Jackson, Griffin, Roudané, Hale,
Neumann, and Bray are all precisely correct—and in absolute agreement, as we can plainly
see—in all their interpretations and the illustrations they invoke to show Williams’s
application of his own notion. Although Williams never again discussed plastic theatre in a
public forum, he did reinforce his ideas, and essentially reify the analysts’ understanding, in
private communications. In a letter to Eric Bentley, for instance, Williams chastises the critic
for

a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre, the various
plastic elements, the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design,
which play, for example, such a tremendously important part in theatre . . . and which are as
much a native part of drama as words and ideas are.5

He further admonishes,

I have read criticism in which the use of transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects,
which are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue, were dismissed as “cheap tricks and
devices.” Actually all of these plastic things are as valid instruments of expression in the
theatre as words . . . .

Earlier, as Robert Bray noted, Williams expounds at some length on what he calls the
“sculptural drama” in an entry in his journal.6 Although he never uses the word “plastic” in
the entry, he spells out quite explicitly the same basic notion that he expresses in the Glass
Menagerie note.

¶5

The Bentley letter was written in 1948, three years after the publication of Menagerie, and
thus can be seen as a kind of restatement of an idea about which Williams has already
written. The journal entry, however, dates from between January and April 1942 (which we
shall see is just after he was a student in Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop and while he
was assisting Piscator on a production), so we may regard it as a step in Williams’s
development of the idea—presumably before he conceived the term “plastic theatre.” Even
without the name, itself, however, it is clear that “sculptural drama” invokes the same
theatricality that “plastic theatre” does in the Menagerie note. Williams speaks in the journal
entry of the lack of realism in the innovative form and asserts that it would not serve the
traditional Broadway play. He describes stylized, dance-like movement and stresses
simplicity and restraint in acting and design and all the elements of the staging. In fact,
though he does not use the word, he describes a theatre that is, by definition, expressionistic
—where the emotions of the play are rendered visually or aurally on the stage—an artistic
style he specifically names in the Glass Menagerie note.
 ¶6

In all the analyses, however, there has been little speculation about where Williams got the
ideas that coalesced into the concept or how he came to coin the term itself. There seems,
however, to be a connection between the dramatist’s plastic theatre and the notion of
“plasticity” as defined by painter Hans Hofmann. Williams had a pervasive interest in
painting, even turning his hand to it himself,7 and he knew Hofmann from Provincetown,
Massachusetts, in the early 1940s when Hofmann ran a summer art school there and Williams
vacationed there with his circle of friends and lovers; they had many acquaintances in
common, and later Williams even wrote an appreciation of the artist.8 Hofmann wrote
extensively about plasticity, already publishing in English as early as 1930, and defined space
in terms identical to what Williams calls “plastic space” in Act 2, scene 2 of Will Mr.
Merriwether Return from Memphis?:

LOUISE: Did you set something on the table?

NORA: I just set down the upside-down cake on a vacant spot on the table.

LOUISE: There is no such thing as a vacant spot on the table.

NORA: —Ow, but there was a space with nothing on it, I didn’t move anything, not a thing,
not an inch!

LOUISE: The spaces on the table are just as important as the articles on the table. Is that over
your head?

NORA: I’ve seen your pitcher of ice tea on the table and glasses for it.

LOUISE: The pitcher of ice tea and the glasses for it are part of the composition.

NORA: —The what of the what did you say?

LOUISE: In painting there’s such a things as plastic space.

..........................................

LOUISE: If you’ve ever looked at a painting in your life you must have observed some
spaces in the painting that seem to be vacant.

NORA: I’ve looked at paintings in the museum, dear, and I’ve seen vacant spaces between
the objects painted.

LOUISE: The vacant spaces are called plastic space.

NORA: Ow.

LOUISE: The spaces between the objects, as you call them, are important parts of the total
composition.

NORA: —OW ?
LOUISE: What would a painting be without spaces between the objects being painted?
. . . . Nothing. And so the spaces are what a painter calls plastic.

NORA: Plastic, y’mean, like a plastic bottle or—

LOUISE: No. Plastic like the spaces between the objects in a painting. They give to the
painting its composition like the vacant spaces on my table give to the articles on the table its
arrangement. . . . .

..........................................

LOUISE: The articles on the table, including the spaces between them, make up a
composition . . . . (“Found Text” 121-22)

In the novella Moise and the World of Reason, Williams specifically credits Hofmann with
the idea of plastic space, though the painter never actually used the phrase (136).9 What both
men said was that space is not inert but alive, and that unoccupied space is not just empty but
as significant to the work as the occupied space: “Space must be vital and active . . . with a
life of its own” (Hofmann, Search for the Real 49). Note how nearly identical their language
is. In his early essay “Plastic Creation,” Hofmann writes: “[S]pace is not only a static, inert
thing, space is alive; space is dynamic” (21). In Moise, Williams’s painter character explains:
“Space is alive, not empty and dead, not at all just a background” (136).

¶7

Hofmann defines plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the

two-dimensional medium of a painting (Search for the Real 78). His contention is that
plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he calls
“push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting (Search for the Real 49). (The
juxtaposition of empty space and filled space, for instance, creates this kind of tension.) The
tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move
(Search for the Real 73). Hofmann also believed that an artist must not simply copy nature,
but must create an artistically imagined reality that requires the careful and deliberate
manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork (Search for the Real 25, 40).
We may posit, then, that Williams married ideas he was already formulating with the
language of Hofmann to create the term “plastic theatre,” perhaps on the model of the term
“plastic stage” of the 1920s.

¶8

This may be how Williams conceived the term “plastic theatre,” but it is not an assertion that
the playwright took the idea of plastic theatre from Hofmann—he surely put the concept
together from several sources over his early years, including the University of Iowa, Erwin
Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and other influences.
At Iowa, where Williams studied in 1937-38, the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts
required every student to gain practical experience in all aspects of production from acting to
stagecraft. While the 26-year-old playwright was a poor scenic art student—he failed the
stagecraft course, delaying his graduation until he made up the F—he dutifully fulfilled the
requirements (Calmer 17). Piscator had the same policy at the New School, where Williams
took the Playwrights’ Seminar in the Spring 1940 term. The Seminar was chaired by Theresa
Helburn, a producer at the Theatre Guild, and John Gassner, a teacher, critic, drama
anthologist, and writer who was a playreader at the Guild.10 Gassner was a champion of
disquieting, new theatre writers and introduced innovative dramaturgical ideas in the
Seminar. While Williams took only the Playwrights’ Seminar and was therefore not obligated
to take courses in the other stage arts, all students of the Dramatic Workshop, whether
enrolled in one course or more, were required to attend the “informal talks” of Barrett H.
Clark’s “The American Drama in Our Times,” which included presentations on “various
aspects of [. . .] theatre as an art, a profession and a social phenomenon” by artists and
professionals in fields as varied as playwriting (Maxwell Anderson, George S. Kaufman,
Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman, Howard Lindsay), design (Robert Edmond Jones),
directing (Harold Clurman, Eddie Dowling), music (Hanns Eisler, Erich Leinsdorf),
producing (Lawrence Langner), dance (Maria Ley), acting (Monty Woolley), and theatre
education (E. C. Mabie) (New School 31-32).11 Another required course was “The March of
the Drama,” a survey of world theatre history taught by Gassner and Italian scholar Paolo
Milano. In this course, the students read plays from not only the standard periods of Western
theatre, but from the classical Asian cannon, the Soviet drama, and the European avant-garde
(New School 32-33).

¶9

The German director also emphatically promulgated his own innovative theories and his
“Epic Theatre” philosophy, with which Williams got first-hand experience when he assisted
Piscator in the production of War and Peace in 1942.12 This production contained several
aspects which may have foreshadowed some of Williams’s later practices, but most
provocatively, it used the character of Pierre Besuchov as a commentator, much the way
Williams used Tom Wingfield in Glass Menagerie. Techniques Piscator used in War and
Peace, whose script, as adapted by Piscator and Alfred Neumann, was kaleidoscopic and
panoramic, included a set designed so that scene changes did not interrupt the action,
providing the production a cinematic sweep as one scene flowed into the next—not unlike
Williams’s triptych setting for Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Enhanced by Impressionistic lighting effects and the film and projections Piscator employed
on stage, the performance unfolded on a two-level Constructivist set with screens and panels,
and with action that took place in the wings as well as on the stage. Williams would surely
have called this “plastic theatre.”

¶10

Furthermore, following the 1941 commercial failure of Battle of Angels, Piscator considered
presenting it at the Dramatic Workshop’s Studio Theatre and in 1942 he had several meetings
with Williams to discuss adapting the script for the director’s Epic Theatre. The German
director did not have much regard for playwrights, treating them as just one of the many
theatre artists who contributed their talents to a production, and Williams rejected Piscator’s
way of working, but he admired the director’s staging techniques (Leverich 346). Ultimately,
Williams’s play did not meet Piscator’s requirements, but it is certain that during the process,
the young dramatist got a private course in Epic Theatre techniques (Leverich 435, 439, 440;
Devlin and Tischler 371). There was further contact, too: although Williams had vainly
approached Piscator for a job reading plays for the Studio Theatre, he did end up working in
close proximity to the director when he took a job for the New School in 1942 doing
publicity for the theatre (Devlin and Tischler 281-82).

¶11

Piscator’s theatrical approach and Williams’s own experience working at the MGM film
studio in 1943 certainly affected his own work, which has often been described as
“cinematic” and shaped by film techniques.13 Another source for Williams’s non-Realistic
ideas, however, was Eugene O’Neill, with whose writing and techniques the younger
playwright was very conversant, having immersed himself in the reading of, attendance at,
and study of O’Neill’s plays from as early as 1928. In that year, a touring production of
Strange Interlude came to St. Louis, and the 16-year-old Williams wrote his grandfather,
describing some of the unusual aspects of the play—which, ironically, he had not seen
(Devlin and Tischler 25-26). Later, at both the University of Missouri (1929-32) and
Washington University (1936-37), Williams was surrounded by O’Neill. Course readings at
Missouri included heavy doses of O’Neill’s one-acts and the student theatre, the Missouri
Workshop, presented O’Neill’s decidedly expressionistic play The Hairy Ape in 1930. When
Mourning Becomes Electra opened in New York in October 1931, the Columbia, Missouri,
campus buzzed with discussion of the startling new work, spurred by unprecedented press
attention, including a Time cover (Leverich 113, 122). During Williams’s time at Washington
University, he wrote a term paper, “Some Representative Plays of O’Neill and a Discussion
of His Art,” which focused on some of the unconventional elements of the plays. It is also
certain that Williams was among the many in his class who were rapt when O’Neill’s Nobel
Prize, the first for an American dramatist, was announced in 1936 (Leverich 183, 188).
Exposed as he was to O’Neill’s works and techniques at this early stage in his theatrical
education, it is unimaginable that Williams would not absorb many of the older writer’s ideas
about non-realistic theatre.

¶12

These multifarious experiences, surely enhanced by Williams’s private contacts with artists,
performers, and writers of many different disciplines and styles—among his friends in New
York and Provincetown were painters, sculptors, composers, dancers, and actors, as well as
writers in forms other than drama—impressed on him how integral to theatre all the arts were
and how effective the non-realistic forms of theatre and art could be. While painters like
Hofmann, who was an abstract expressionist (as was his friend and Williams’s, Jackson
Pollock), were restricted to space, color, form, line, and the other elements of two-
dimensional art, dramatists and theatre artists had, in addition to the painters’ techniques, a
broader palette from which to draw: sound, light, language, movement, and so on. The New
Stagecraft’s “plastic stage,” as described in Kenneth Macgowan’s The Theatre of Tomorrow
and practiced by designers Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Lee Simonson, and Robert
Edmond Jones, among others, focused on a self-consciously three-dimensional stage:
constructed scenery instead of painted flats (Macgowan 102-09).14 This movement, of course,
added the elements of sculpture and architecture to those of painting as techniques available
to stage artists—and we have already noted that Williams had explored the notion of
“sculptural drama” before, perhaps, he settled on the term “plastic theatre.” On this analogy,
Williams, already working with a three-dimensional stage, wanted a truly multi-dimensional
theatre, integrating all the arts of the stage to create its effects. He did not want language to be
the principal medium of his theatre, merely supported by a picture-frame set and enhanced by
music and lighting effects. While there seems to be a connection here with Richard Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] concept, Wagner was talking about the director and
production, but Williams pushes the idea back to the playwright and the creation of the text.
Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and
designers to be co-equal aspects of the play and part of the playwright’s creative process.
Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his
team of theatre artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical
experience, Williams envisioned a theatre which begins with the playwrights who create the
theatrical experience in the script because they are not just composing words, but theatrical
images.

¶13

In a sense, Williams was harking back to the original etymological meaning of playwright.
The word, we note, is not playwrite—it is more than a mere writer of plays. The Oxford
English Dictionary provides one definition of wright as “a constructive workman” and we
still have the obsolete noun in words like wheelwright, shipwright, millwright, and cartwright
—craftsmen who construct wheels, ships, mills, or carts. The obsolete verb wright, in fact,
means “to build” or “to construct” as we can deduce from the past participle, the only form of
the verb that we still use. Wrought, according to the OED, means “that is made or constructed
by means of labour or art; fashioned, formed”; before that, it meant simply “created; shaped,
moulded.” (Interestingly, the word dramaturg—or dramaturge, if you are Francophile—
which was another word for playwright before it designated a separate theatrical professional,
has a similar etymology from a Greek, as opposed to Old English, origin.)15 In other words,
Williams was envisioning dramatists who, rather than just writing scripts, wrought them from
all the materials that were available in the theatrical lumberyard. Then the tension-the “push-
pull”—among these disparate arts would create the plasticity of the theatrical experience and,
just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-
dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theatre work has a theatrical experience
beyond the mere image of actual life.

¶14

Today, plastic theatre is not a particularly rare application. It is what Meyerhold, Eisenstein,
and Brecht were after, and directors like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Peter Brook, and
Yuri Lyubimov, and groups such as Théâtre du Soleil, Théâtre de Complicité, Ex Machina,
Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, and Théâtre de la Jeune Lune do it all the time. Now, these
artists are not strictly playwrights, though they function as auteurs, and the companies work
as collaborative ensembles in creating their works, but that may be closer to what Williams
had in mind than a conventional dramatist-director symbiosis. Certainly the plastic
playwright would have to have more control over the production than Williams managed to
get in 1944 with Dowling. Even on Broadway today, however, there could not have been M
Butterfly, say, or The Invention of Love without plastic theatre. What makes Williams’s 1945
expression remarkable is that, first, he is often not regarded in such terms even though he
wanted to be and, second, he was writing at a time when straightforward realism was the
dominant style on American stages, and the Actors Studio—the creation, in part, of Elia
Kazan and the nurturer of Marlon Brando, both part of Williams’s early, defining success—
was the paradigm for American acting and production.16
Notes

1
The same note appears in every published edition of the play, including the first: The Glass
Menagerie: A Play (New York: Random, 1945) ix-xii.

The present essay is based on research conducted for an article the author has contributed to
the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, edited by Philip C. Kolin, forthcoming from
Greenwood Press.
2
To be precise, Williams did, in fact, refer to plastic theatre again in a published essay, but it
was a reference to the preface of Glass Menagerie. He quotes himself in “People-to-People,”
New York Times 20 Mar. 1955, sec. 2 (“Arts & Leisure”): 3.
3
See also pages 16, 18, and 36 for similar statements.
4
There is one other study the author discovered that employs plastic theatre as an analytic
device; it is an English-language dissertation for a German university: Michael Grawe,
“Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire: Contrasting the Play with the 1951 Movie
Production,” MA thesis, Universität Gesamthochschule Paderborn, 1999. (The paper is
available at http://hausarbeiten.de/.) Grawe devotes chapter two to “Williams’ ‘Plastic
Theater’” but he does not add anything to the scholarship concerning the concept or the term
itself—though he does cite Roudané 1997 and Jackson 1965, as well as Felicia Hardison
Londré, in Tennessee Williams, Literature and Life Series, ed. Philip Winsor (New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1979).
5
This letter, written while Williams was in Brighton, England, is in the Williams archives of
the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. It is
expected to appear in volume two of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, which is
currently being edited. Permission to quote from the letter has been graciously granted by the
Williams estate, Tom Erhardt of the theatrical department of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates
Limited, agent; and Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, editors of The Selected Letters.
6
Aside from the passage quoted by Leverich and the lines Bray cites, the remainder of this
entry is currently available only in manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center. An edition of
Williams’s journals is due to be published soon by Yale University Press.
7
See Allean Hale, “Of Prostitutes, Artists and Ears,” Southern Quarterly 29.1 (Fall 1990):
33-45; William Plumley, “Tennessee Williams: an interview,” Sunday Gazette-Mail
[Charleston, WV] 14 Sept. 1980, sec. M (Show Time & Magazine): 14-15; William Plumley,
“Tennessee Williams’s Graphic Art: ‘Two On A Party,’” Mississippi Quarterly 48.4 (Fall
1995): 789-805.
8
See Tennessee Williams, “An Appreciation: Hans Hofmann,” Women: A Collaboration of
Artists and Writers (New York: Samuel M. Kootz, 1948) n.p., and Tennessee Williams, “An
Appreciation,” Derrière le Miroir [Paris] 16 (Jan. 1949): [5]. Among the mutual
acquaintances Williams and Hofmann had were artist Fritz Bultman, who helped bring
Hofmann to the United States and who may have introduced the writer and the painter;
Jackson Pollock, whom Williams met on Cape Cod and who had attended some of
Hofmann’s early lectures at the Art Students’ League in New York; and Lee Krasner,
Pollock’s wife and a painter herself who was a student at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown.
Other friends of Williams with connections to Hofmann were his dancer friends Kip Kiernan
and Joe Hazan who both worked as models at Hofmann’s Provincetown school.
9
Hofmann, whose name Williams misspells in Moise as “Hans Hoffman,” wrote of plasticity
in terms of many aspects of painting and art, but the author has not found an example of his
use of the specific term “plastic space.” His definition of space, as we shall see, precisely
parallels Williams’s definition of “plastic space,” however. (The 1969 play In the Bar of a
Tokyo Hotel, about a painter much like Jackson Pollock, also makes direct reference to
Hofmann’s color theory. But, then, Pollock, as noted, was a friend of Hofmann’s and
attended some of Hofmann’s lectures. Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, who, also as noted, had
been a student of Hofmann’s, brought the two painters together.)
10
This association with Helburn and Gassner resulted in the Guild’s producing Williams’s
first commercial play, Battle of Angels. However abortive the endeavor, it did launch the
young playwright’s professional career. Helburn, by the way, was no stranger to cutting-edge
theatre, herself. Before she and Lawrence Langner started the Theatre Guild, they were both
among the founders of the groundbreaking Washington Square Players, a rival of the more-
famous Provincetown Players. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Washington
Square Players were devoted to the New Stagecraft of the European theatre.
11
Eddie Dowling was, of course, far more than a mere director; he was a producer, actor,
playwright, and songwriter. In 1944, he became co-director (with Margo Jones), co-producer
(with Louis J. Singer), and star of Williams’s Glass Menagerie. German Composer Hanns
Eisler was, among other collaborations, known for his work with Bertolt Brecht; his atonal
music recalls that of his teacher, Arnold Schönberg. Robert Edmond Jones, having studied
and worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe, was a strong proponent of the New Stagecraft for
the American theatre. Maria Ley, a dancer who choreographed for Reinhardt, was Piscator’s
wife. Readers will recognize the name E. C. [Edward Charles] Mabie as that of the
formidable head of the speech and drama department at Iowa when Williams was a student
there.
12
This production by the Dramatic Workshop ran from 20 to 31 May 1942 at the New
School’s Studio Theatre, 66 W. 12th Street.
13
Brandt contains is a thorough discussion of this aspect of Williams’s dramaturgy, which
does not need repeating here.
14
The author has found an essay from 1919 that speaks of plastic theatre in the same sense
that Williams uses the term, stating: “The Plastic Theater offers us the right to project onto
one plane a multiplicity of means of artistic expression and to enclose them in a unity. It
enlarges the visual horizon of the real world and leads things and objects of different species
and origin towards a single center of irradiation.” The essay, however was originally written
in Italian and, as far as the author has determined, was not translated and published in English
until 1968: Gilberto Clavel, “Gilberto Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater,” Art and the Stage in
the 20th Century: Painters and Sculptors Work for the Theater, trans. Michael Bullock, ed.
Henning Rischbieter (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968) 75. It is unlikely
that Williams ever saw this parallel use of his term. (The essay refers to a series of dances,
Balli Plastici [plastic dances], designed in 1918 by Fortunato Depero, a Futurist painter,
sculptor, and designer. The essay originally appeared in Il Mondo, a Milan monthly, in April
1919.)
15
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the association representing these
professionals, prefers the Germanic form of the word to the French (because the inventor of
the field, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, was German). Nonetheless, the etymology is the same:
“a worker of plays.”
16
Ironically, in recent years there have been some productions of Williams’s first plastic play,
Glass Menagerie, with an eye to his original staging directions. Two such productions were
in California: one at the Pasadena Playhouse (5 May-18 June 2000; directed by Andrew J.
Robinson) and the other by the American Conservatory Theater at the Geary Theater in San
Francisco (29 March-28 April 2002; directed by Laird Williamson).

Works Cited

Boxill, Roger. Tennessee Williams. Modern Dramatists Series. Ser. ed. Bruce King and Adele
King. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.

Brandt, George. “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams.” American

Theatre. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 10. Ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris.
London: Edward Arnold, 1967. 163-87.

Bray, Robert. “Introduction.” The Glass Menagerie. By Tennessee Williams. New York:
New Directions, 1999. vii-xv.

Calmer, Charles. “Tennessee’s Year at Iowa: 1937-38.” A Tennessee Williams Summer. June
Playbill [Iowa City, IA; University of Iowa Theatres.] 63.7 (June 1984): 16-19.

Devlin, Albert J., and Nancy M. Tischler, eds. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams.
Vol. 1: 1920-1945. New York: New Directions, 2000.

Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. Twayne’s United States Authors Ser. 10. 2nd ed. Vol. ed.
Sylvia E. Bowman. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1995.

Hale, Allean. “Early Williams: the making of a playwright.” The Cambridge Companion to
Tennessee Williams. Ed. Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1997. 11-
28.

Hofmann, Hans. “Plastic Creation.” Trans. Ludwig Sabder. The League [Art Students’
League of New York] 5.2 (Winter 1932-33): 11-15, 21-23.

———. The Search for the Real and Other Essays. Ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes,
Jr. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1948.
Jackson, Esther Merle. The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1965.

Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995.

Macgowan, Kenneth. “The Plastic Stage.” The Theatre of Tomorrow. Chap. 7. New York:
Boni, 1921. 102-09.

Neumann, Claus-Peter. “Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre: Camino Real.” Journal of

American Drama and Theatre 6.2-3 (Spring/Fall 1994): 93-111.

[New School for Social Research]. “Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social
Research: 1940, 1941.” [Program brochure and catalogue.] New York, 1939.

Roudané, Matthew C. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Ed.

Matthew C. Roudané. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1997. 1-10.

Williams, Tennessee. Letter to Eric Bentley. 12 July 1948. Tennessee Williams Papers. Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

———. “Production Notes.” The Glass Menagerie. 1945. New York: New Directions, 1999.
xix-xxii.

———. Moise and the World of Reason. New York: Simon, 1975.

———. “Found Text: Tennessee Williams: Will Mr. Merriwether Return From Memphis?”
Missouri Review 20.2 (1997): 79-131.

Richard E. Kramer

1
The same note appears in every published edition of the play, including the first: The Glass
Menagerie: A Play (New York: Random, 1945) ix-xii.

The present essay is based on research conducted for an article the author has contributed to
the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, edited by Philip C. Kolin, forthcoming from
Greenwood Press.
2
To be precise, Williams did, in fact, refer to plastic theatre again in a published essay, but it
was a reference to the preface of Glass Menagerie. He quotes himself in “People-to-People,”
New York Times 20 Mar. 1955, sec. 2 (“Arts & Leisure”): 3.

3
See also pages 16, 18, and 36 for similar statements.

4
There is one other study the author discovered that employs plastic theatre as an analytic
device; it is an English-language dissertation for a German university: Michael Grawe,
“Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire: Contrasting the Play with the 1951 Movie
Production,” MA thesis, Universität Gesamthochschule Paderborn, 1999. (The paper is
available at http://hausarbeiten.de/.) Grawe devotes chapter two to “Williams’ ‘Plastic
Theater’” but he does not add anything to the scholarship concerning the concept or the term
itself—though he does cite Roudané 1997 and Jackson 1965, as well as Felicia Hardison
Londré, in Tennessee Williams, Literature and Life Series, ed. Philip Winsor (New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1979).

5
This letter, written while Williams was in Brighton, England, is in the Williams archives of
the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. It is
expected to appear in volume two of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, which is
currently being edited. Permission to quote from the letter has been graciously granted by the
Williams estate, Tom Erhardt of the theatrical department of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates
Limited, agent; and Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, editors of The Selected Letters.

6
Aside from the passage quoted by Leverich and the lines Bray cites, the remainder of this
entry is currently available only in manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center. An edition of
Williams’s journals is due to be published soon by Yale University Press.

7
See Allean Hale, “Of Prostitutes, Artists and Ears,” Southern Quarterly 29.1 (Fall 1990):
33-45; William Plumley, “Tennessee Williams: an interview,” Sunday Gazette-Mail
[Charleston, WV] 14 Sept. 1980, sec. M (Show Time & Magazine): 14-15; William Plumley,
“Tennessee Williams’s Graphic Art: ‘Two On A Party,’” Mississippi Quarterly 48.4 (Fall
1995): 789-805.

8
See Tennessee Williams, “An Appreciation: Hans Hofmann,” Women: A Collaboration of
Artists and Writers (New York: Samuel M. Kootz, 1948) n.p., and Tennessee Williams, “An
Appreciation,” Derrière le Miroir [Paris] 16 (Jan. 1949): [5]. Among the mutual
acquaintances Williams and Hofmann had were artist Fritz Bultman, who helped bring
Hofmann to the United States and who may have introduced the writer and the painter;
Jackson Pollock, whom Williams met on Cape Cod and who had attended some of
Hofmann’s early lectures at the Art Students’ League in New York; and Lee Krasner,
Pollock’s wife and a painter herself who was a student at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown.
Other friends of Williams with connections to Hofmann were his dancer friends Kip Kiernan
and Joe Hazan who both worked as models at Hofmann’s Provincetown school.

9
Hofmann, whose name Williams misspells in Moise as “Hans Hoffman,” wrote of plasticity
in terms of many aspects of painting and art, but the author has not found an example of his
use of the specific term “plastic space.” His definition of space, as we shall see, precisely
parallels Williams’s definition of “plastic space,” however. (The 1969 play In the Bar of a
Tokyo Hotel, about a painter much like Jackson Pollock, also makes direct reference to
Hofmann’s color theory. But, then, Pollock, as noted, was a friend of Hofmann’s and
attended some of Hofmann’s lectures. Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, who, also as noted, had
been a student of Hofmann’s, brought the two painters together.)

10
This association with Helburn and Gassner resulted in the Guild’s producing Williams’s
first commercial play, Battle of Angels. However abortive the endeavor, it did launch the
young playwright’s professional career. Helburn, by the way, was no stranger to cutting-edge
theatre, herself. Before she and Lawrence Langner started the Theatre Guild, they were both
among the founders of the groundbreaking Washington Square Players, a rival of the more-
famous Provincetown Players. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Washington
Square Players were devoted to the New Stagecraft of the European theatre.

11
Eddie Dowling was, of course, far more than a mere director; he was a producer, actor,
playwright, and songwriter. In 1944, he became co-director (with Margo Jones), co-producer
(with Louis J. Singer), and star of Williams’s Glass Menagerie. German Composer Hanns
Eisler was, among other collaborations, known for his work with Bertolt Brecht; his atonal
music recalls that of his teacher, Arnold Schönberg. Robert Edmond Jones, having studied
and worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe, was a strong proponent of the New Stagecraft for
the American theatre. Maria Ley, a dancer who choreographed for Reinhardt, was Piscator’s
wife. Readers will recognize the name E. C. [Edward Charles] Mabie as that of the
formidable head of the speech and drama department at Iowa when Williams was a student
there.

12
This production by the Dramatic Workshop ran from 20 to 31 May 1942 at the New
School’s Studio Theatre, 66 W. 12th Street.
13
Brandt contains is a thorough discussion of this aspect of Williams’s dramaturgy, which
does not need repeating here.

14
The author has found an essay from 1919 that speaks of plastic theatre in the same sense
that Williams uses the term, stating: “The Plastic Theater offers us the right to project onto
one plane a multiplicity of means of artistic expression and to enclose them in a unity. It
enlarges the visual horizon of the real world and leads things and objects of different species
and origin towards a single center of irradiation.” The essay, however was originally written
in Italian and, as far as the author has determined, was not translated and published in English
until 1968: Gilberto Clavel, “Gilberto Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater,” Art and the Stage in
the 20th Century: Painters and Sculptors Work for the Theater, trans. Michael Bullock, ed.
Henning Rischbieter (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968) 75. It is unlikely
that Williams ever saw this parallel use of his term. (The essay refers to a series of dances,
Balli Plastici [plastic dances], designed in 1918 by Fortunato Depero, a Futurist painter,
sculptor, and designer. The essay originally appeared in Il Mondo, a Milan monthly, in April
1919.)

15
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the association representing these
professionals, prefers the Germanic form of the word to the French (because the inventor of
the field, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, was German). Nonetheless, the etymology is the same:
“a worker of plays.”

16
Ironically, in recent years there have been some productions of Williams’s first plastic play,
Glass Menagerie, with an eye to his original staging directions. Two such productions were
in California: one at the Pasadena Playhouse (5 May-18 June 2000; directed by Andrew J.
Robinson) and the other by the American Conservatory Theater at the Geary Theater in San
Francisco (29 March-28 April 2002; directed by Laird Williamson).