Tennessee Williams is somehow at once one of the inevitable figures of American theater, and yet also critically neglected. It may be that this perceived inevitability – is someone nearby staging The Glass Menagerie, again? – means that the work that criticism can continue to do, when it comes to Williams’ large corpus, now appears to be inevitable, and in a bad way. Certainly a scan of the archive of talks given at MLA conventions, to cite one relevant measure of critical engagement, shows that since 2004 there has been no session devoted to his work and that his name has appeared in only five titles of papers since that date. This session will make the case for looking closely at Williams’ work by concentrating on the uncannily telling links between media history and Williams’ writing. Remarkable as a playwright whose work had success both on stage and on screen, Williams did not simply provide “content” which then traveled, remediated across media. His work also registers the pressures and affective intensities of the media environment in which he worked. This session will look at once at some his best-known work, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), while also including a short story also from the 1940s, “One Arm,” and also the later play, Orpheus Descending (1957).

The three speakers share an interest in looking closely at the media of Williams’ work. Williams worked in various genres, and this panel will pay some attention to that variety. But the speakers will also be interested in the intersection of media history with theater studies and literary studies, and in thinking about the various ways that Williams’ work performs a set of meditations on media. Collectively the papers will suggest not only that Williams’ work provides a fascinating nexus at the meeting-point of theater studies and theater history but also that Williams may be read as a kind of media theorist.

In the first paper, “Mediating the Method: Brando, Strasberg, and the Streetcar Scandal, “ Jacob Gallagher-Ross will pursue connections between the stylistic trademarks of Method acting and recorded sound. Method acting, the mid-twentieth century performance style developed at the Actors Studio in New York City, was both renowned and reviled for its monomaniacal pursuit of emotional authenticity in performance: sacrificing textual integrity, and sometimes even intelligibility, to feeling. Because of Marlon Brando’s infamous mumbling performance as Stanley in Elia Kazan’s stage and film productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, method acting was associated with Williams in the popular imagination. Brando’s performance quickly became the avatar of the Method, and scandalized critics saw it as the harbinger of a wholescale rejection of eloquence, diction—even of sense itself. Gallagher-Ross will consider the media behind the Method: recording undergirded the exercises and thought of Lee Strasberg, the Method’s Svengali. And Brando’s mumbling, upon closer scrutiny, reveals itself as a canny sound experiment—embracing the possibilities of recorded sound, rebutting the more conventionally theatrical performances of his classically trained co-stars.

The following paper, by Shonni Enelow, belongs to the same period as that of Gallagher-Ross, but Enelow will focus on a work on a different genre. Williams’ short story “One Arm,” written in the early 1940s, concurrently with his best-known early plays, tells the story of a one-armed hustler who undergoes an emotional awakening while in prison after receiving dozens of love letters from former clients. He ultimately decides to repay what he considers a debt of feeling by attempting to seduce the priest who visits his cell. This paper, “Media Circulation and Erotic Economy in Tennessee Williams’ ‘One Arm’” reads the story as a theory of media circulation that juxtaposes the kinds of affective exchange enabled by writing and by performance. It also considers Williams’ thinking about the erotic economy of media as a dialogue with Jean Genet, whose novel Our Lady of the Flowers almost certainly inspired “One Arm,” and perhaps also Williams’ more famous plays of the period.

The final paper, Martin Harries’ “Lead Belly's Guitar and Tennessee Williams' Publics,” continues the session’s investigation of Williams’ immersion in and meditation on media. Focusing on Williams’ Orpheus Descending, the paper considers the entwinement of ancient myth and mass culture suggested by the play’s title. Two departures from the underworld underwrite the play: the title names the Greek hero, but his modern analogue, Lead Belly, who was said to have sung his way out of southern prisons, also figures in the play. The protagonist’s guitar features the signatures of a range of musicians, and this range varies across published editions of the play: not only Lead Belly but also King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Woody Guthrie, and so on. This talk will argue that close attention to the play’s engagement with Lead Belly and with African American and other popular or “folk” music illuminates Williams’ complex negotiation of the various publics his plays addressed and responded to. Questions will include “myth” and mass culture, conflicts around cultural appropriation, and mass culture’s structuring of desire through interpellation. Williams, the paper will argue, used the theater to think about mass culture’s structuring of desire.

The session will suggest that grounds for a renewed engagement with Tennessee Williams lie in the complexities of his engagement with the circulation of media inside, outside, and through his work.