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Tennessee Williams
(March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983) U.S.A.

Tennessee Williams

Playwright, writer

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Williams Tennessee joung Born in Columbus, Mississippi as Thomas Lanier Williams, he was a gay playwright, short story writer, and poet. Williams acknowledged his homosexuality, but was never comfortable with the gay liberation movement. His secretary and lover for 15 years was U.S. Navy veteran Frankie Merlo (1922-1963), but had also affairs with Kip Kiernan, and... any available stud.

Tennessee met Frankie in Provincetown at Atlantic House for the first time, and they spent the night making love on the beach. After that he didn't see him for over a year (during which time A Streetcar Named Desire was first produced) then he ran into Frank by chance in a deli on Lexington Ave in New York and they became a couple; Frank was living in his native New Jersey and Tennessee was in his apartment in Manhattan. They did not meet in New Orleans as some says, in fact Tennessee was avoiding that city as it was where his former lover Pancho was living.

After Frankie died from lung cancer in 1963, Williams descended into a deep depression:

"When he died, I went to pieces. I retreated into a shell. For nine months I wouldn't speak to a living soul. I just clammed up. I wouldn't answer the telephone, and I wouldn't leave the house."
With the possible exception of Eugene O'Neill, Williams was the greatest American dramatist of this century. He was less successful as a screenwriter - in 1943, MGM turned down his screenplay Gentleman Caller; two years later, The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. His play Rose Tattoo won a Tony Award in 1951. The best known of his other plays are A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana, the first two of which won Pulitzer Prizes.

Williams received Kennedy Center Honors in 1979. On October 13, 1995, the United State Postal Service issued a stamp honoring Williams; as with Thorton Wilder, no mention was made "of course" of Williams' gayness. And, "of course", when his plays were made into movies, a lot of the gay themes were deleted by censorship.

In June of 1997, Variety reported that actress Vanessa Redgrave, while going through some of Williams' papers, discovered a "lost" gay play, entitled Not About Nightingales the most socially conscious of all his works; the Royal National Theater produced the play, which reportedly deals with the complexities of gay life in prison and pulls no punches, in the spring of 1998. However, it really tells very little about gay life in prison. The play did just introduce Williams' first openly gay character. He was notorious for not writing openly gay characters. His reasoning was that he would do so when they were essential to the plot and, usually they weren't.

Tennessee WilliamsHis best-known gay characters, Sebastian Venable ("Suddenly Last Summer") and Brick Pollitt's best friend, Skipper ("Cat On a Hot tin Roof") and Alan Grey, Blanche DuBois' young and beautiful husband, are conveniently offstage and, even more conveniently, dead.

The gay character in "Nightingales" is on stage, out of the closet (almost - the word "gay" or "queer," more likely to be used in 1938, does not appear in the play. "Refined" is used as a euphemism.)

In his much later years, Williams wrote some gay characters into his plays and did a screenplay "One Arm," based on his famous short story about a buff, blonde hustler.

Credited as being the first "openly gay" American celebrity, he wrote in his memoirs,

"I have had a remarkably fortunate life which has contained a great many moments of joy, both pure and impure."

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A new play by San Antonian Gregg Barrios explores the short-lived but intense relationship between famed playwright Tennessee Williams and Pancho Rodriguez, a Mexican American man from Crystal City, Texas. The production by the Classic Theater Company takes the stage on September 6 and 7 at the Jump-Start Theater.

Tennessee Williams & Pancho Rodriguez

Barrios' play is based on correspondence between Williams and Rodriguez. Much of the material was acquired after Rodriguez's death in 1993 at the age of 72. The title "Rancho Pancho" was Williams' name for the house he shared in Provincetown with Rodriguez and Carson McCullers in 1946, when he was writing "Summer and Smoke" and she was turning "Member of the Wedding" into a play.

Barrios points out that in Williams "Memoirs" he calls Rodriguez 'Santo'. Williams wrote that Santo was "at the center" of his life and that during that time he relieved Williams of his greatest affliction - loneliness.

Williams' relationship with Rodriguez lasted for only two years (1946 - 1947) but seems to have had an important effect on the playwright's work. In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Barrios makes the case that Rodriguez' influence can be traced to the volatile character of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and to two other major plays, "The Rose Tattoo" and "Summer and Smoke."

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Plays:
  • The Glass Menagerie (1945)
  • A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
  • The Rose Tattoo (1951)
  • Summer and Smoke
  • Camino Real (1953)
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
  • Orpheus Descending (1957)
  • Not About Nightingales (1957)
  • Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
  • Suddenly Last Summer (1959)
  • Night of the Iguana (1961)
  • The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
  • Outcry (1973)
  • Vieux Carré (1977)
  • A Lovely Summer for Creve Coeur (1979)
  • Something Cloudy Something Clear (1981)

Films from his plays:
  • A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
  • Suddenly Last Summer (1959)
  • Night of the Iguana (1964)
Tennessee Williams
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