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Popular Culture Review
Hansberry Through Tennessee Williams.” For Cho, the plays of Williams and
Hansberry “share many affinities that have yet to be adequately examined” in
criticism (68). She goes on to categorize them as ‘“ social playwrights’—both
deeply in tune with midcentury America and sharply critical of its values” (76).
In fact, their “work contests boundaries of class, race, gender, sexuality, and
nation, and they stage not the uniformity but the contradictions embedded in
mid-century American culture” (76). Editor Kolin then directs attention to the
African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy {Funnyhouse o f a Negro and A
Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White) in relation to Williams in “The
Fission of Tennessee Williams’s Plays into Adrienne Kennedy’s.” Though
exceedingly dissimilar in terms of their writing, Kolin points out that “Williams
was, inescapably, the dominant voice that any aspiring playwright had to listen
to in the 1950s and 1960s, the decades when Kennedy struggled to become a
writer and when she eventually won Off Broadway success” (80). One way or
another, Kolin adds, “a young playwright like Kennedy would have formed a
relationship with Williams. Indeed, she herself frequently] affirms that he was
both her catalyst and provocateur” (80). Kennedy “was fascinated by the
expressionistic representations of self, family, and society in Williams. But, as
she developed her unique voice, she renegotiated Williams’s scripts and
colliding with them, radically resisted and disrupted his characters and symbols.
Through a fission-like process she split his canon apart, exploding the psychic
traumas and contradictions submerged and/or surfacing” in his dramas (93).
Doing so, she “entered her own undiscovered country, a world that grew more
painful, treacherous, and absurd in the racial and psychic spaces her characters
were condemned to inhabit in the 1960s and beyond” (93).
Thomas Mitchell presents a study of Williams and John Guare {The House
o f Blue Leaves, Lydie Breeze, and Six Degrees o f Separation) in “Warriors
Against the Kitchen Sink: Tennessee Williams and John Guare.” According to
Mitchell, Williams and Guare (compatriots fighting against what is termed
“kitchen sink” realism in drama versus “magic”), “both created extreme
characters with large appetites and heavy emotional baggage. They used
intentionally contrived plot elements to provoke major revelations and reversals.
They both employed direct address and other heightened theatrical moments” in
their works (95). In addition, given “his restlessness with naturalism and his
fascination with theatrical possibilities, Guare exhibits the influence of
Tennessee Williams, whose characters and situations regularly transcended the
ordinary” (95). For Guare, carrying the torch Williams first lighted, whether
“playwrights continue to create kitchen sink realism that placates audiences with
comfortably recognizable surface reality, or instead dismantles the kitchen sink
to take audiences into a realm of the imagination and psyche will be the measure
of what the theatre is becoming” in the 21st century (104).
In “Image, Myth, and Movement in the Plays of Sam Shepard and
Tennessee Williams,” Annette J. Saddik claims that in the entirety of Shepard’s
{Buried Child, True West, and Fool For Love) career, “Williams’s melodramatic