Beauty Is the Word (1984)

SPECIAL FEATURE: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Tennessee Williams wrote these plays when he was a student at the University of Missouri—Columbia, 1929-31. He hadn't taken on the name "Tennessee" yet; he was trying out variations on his given name— Thomas Lanier, Thomas L., T. L. They are not goodplays by any literary standard. They didn 't win anyprizes in the student one-act contest for which Williams wrote them, although they did receive the kind dismissal ofhonorable mention. In Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, the characters are crude, unsympathetic; the young playwright still had to learn that there was more to making a character tormented than writing "tormented"in the stage directions. In her memoirs, Remember Me to Tom, Williams'mother Edwina quotes a campus newpaper's apt comments on Beauty Is the Word: "the handling is too didactic, and the dialogue often too moralistic. " Then of what value are they? Gore Vidal remarked of Williams in 1976, "Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues. By the time he was an adolescent he had his themes. " These very early plays support that opinion by displaying themes that reappear throughout his work. Williams had read enthusiastically a life of Shelley in 1928, and Shelleyan romantic enthusiasm permeates Beauty Is the Word, The free-thinking niece, whose dancing achieves the abstract ideal of Beauty, tames the rebellious islanders and converts her Puritanical relatives, joining them all in a joyous worship of this new God. One may smile at Williams'adolescent trust in the curingpower ofart; but at the same time, one sees here the conflicts that will recur in his later plays: sexual repression against sexual expression, artificial religion against natural religion, art against conventionality. In addition, Williams'later fondness for exotic settings is foreshadowed. Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, which was later expanded into Moony's Kid Don't Cry (another early play), has none of the naive exuberance of Beauty. A groaning naturalism replaces the Pacific pastoral; there's a strong suggestion of the early O'Neill in this story of urban frustration. Also traceable are the delineations of The Glass Menagerie a dozen years ahead: the fire escape, the falsely cheerful slogans of the home, the restless worker trapped in a city tenement and oppressed by the duties of the family. As with Glass Menagerie, the setting is drawn from Williams' adolescent years in St. Louis, although in this play he generalizes it to "some large Eastern city. " Williams was a student at Missouri for two fullyears, financedpartly by his grandmother and partly by his father. Beauty is a product of his freshman year, 1929-30; Hot Milk was entered in the play competition of his junior year, 1931-32. It was a year Williams never completed: he failed his ROTC course andhis fatherput him to work in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis. Copies of the plays were filed away with the rest of the contest entries and forgotten. They didn't emerge again until 1969, when Williams was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university. Theatre professor Donovan Rhynsburger , who as a young faculty member had taught Williams, retrieved the plays for the event; a shaky autograph "Thomas Lanier Williams"now crosses the title page of each. Subsequently the plays were placed in the special materials room of the university's Ellis Library; other copies made their way, along with most of Williams'manuscripts and memorabilia, to the University of Texas Humanities Research Center in Austin. Williams' bibliography lists no otherpublic holdings; andas far as we can determine, neitherplay was ever published. BEAUTY IS THE WORD / Tennessee Williams SCENE: The living-room of a missionary's dwelling, upon an island in the southern Pacific Ocean. The room is strongly suggestive of the parlor of a home in a small New England town, during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Its furnishings are prim, dull, old-fashioned. In the center of the room is a heavy oaken table, upon which rest a large lamp, a sewing basket, spools of thread, a number of neatly piled books. Against one wall of the room is a book-case...