INTRODUCTION TO
ORPHEUS DESCENDING

When Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending opened on Broadway in March 1957, the esteemed critic of The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, called it “one of Mr. Williams’s pleasantest plays.” The pleasantries in Orpheus Descending include murder, death by blowtorch, convicts eaten alive by dogs, religious fanaticism, hysterical blindness, promiscuity, abortion, lynchings, substance abuse, cancer, prostitution, and arson. In fairness, Atkinson had been watching a tepid production, which he praised, misdirected and miscast, with the blazing exception of a febrile, wraith-like Carol Cutrere played by America’s most unheralded great actress, Lois Smith.

Perhaps Atkinson was referring to its themes of love and redemption. For in Orpheus Descending there is a genuine merging of souls; two lonely and spiritually intense people find physical and emotional solace in each other, which, except in The Rose Tattoo, is an unusual destination in a Williams play. But in The Rose Tattoo they have a future; here, in Orpheus, a true descent into hell, they are done for. It’s as if Williams is saying: If you are sensitive and lucky, you might find someone else sensitive to understand you, but no matter, the world will destroy you anyway. Like most great artists, his was a constant battle between hope and despair. Atkinson found Williams in “a more humane state of mind than he has been in several years.” Which of course begs the question, when wasn’t Tennessee Williams in a humane state of mind? What other playwright has found so much beauty in the most unlikely places?

The unlikely place in Orpheus Descending is one of the most venal and corrupt Southern towns ever created, except, of course, it wasn’t created: it was an accurate reflection of its time and period. (Atkinson called it “an attractive locale.”) I always find it interesting that it is Arthur Miller and not Williams who is labeled the social realist. I doubt that the American theater has ever had a more acute social realist than Tennessee Williams. The confusion is that he was writing realistically about poetic people. When I was very young I spent some time in Louisiana and discovered to my shock that it was all true. Williams hadn’t made anything up. People talked and behaved the way his characters did. He was virtually reporting. In those days I came upon a burgeoning Blanche DuBois, a Maggie-the-Cat in waiting, Carol Cutrere minus the white makeup, Val Xaviers by the dozen, and innumerable Sister Women and Brother Men, together with hordes of no-neck monsters. I knew, too, a former Southern belle, married to a dentist in New York, who was Amanda Wingfield incarnate. These people all used language in the most gloriously imaginative way.

It is interesting to note that Lady Torrance, a full and vividly created character, is not the person who speaks poetically in Orpheus. The great lines in the play, the ones that are often quoted—“we’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life,” “there’s something wild in the country that only the night people know,” “what on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your hands, until your fingers are broken”—are said by Val and Carol, both Southerners and thus both speaking as they would. Lady is European; her language is more pragmatic—“the show is over, the monkey is dead.” Williams was meticulous about the way his characters spoke; often they are Southern and thus often they soar.

My newfound Southern friends were, of course, all outcasts, even poor Phoebe (the Amanda) stuck in the Bronx. Some were from small towns in Mississippi, and once I accompanied a friend back to her former home where the prevailing attitudes were frighteningly similar to the ones in Orpheus Descending.

The motivating force in Orpheus’s town (curiously unnamed) is racism. Racism is the one word I left out in my list of subject matter above and yet it is probably the most important. Racism drives the play and ultimately destroys all its decent characters. Papa Romano, Lady Torrance’s father, is burned to death by the Ku Klux Klan because “he sold liquor to niggers” twenty years before the play begins. That’s it. The town fathers are basically not concerned that he sells illegal bootleg whisky or that his little arbor-restaurant features alcoves where unmarried couples can make love. His crime is pure and simple—he treated black men as if they were equals. So they kill him. At the end of the play Lady discovers that her husband, Jabe, led the Klan that fateful night; this discovery leads to her own death (bullet) and that of Val, the guitar-playing itinerant she has taken in (blowtorch). (Atkinson: “a sense of small-town realities.”) A single act of racial tolerance and the hatred it sets off have caused the central tragedies of the play.

There are two other characters with wounded souls: Carol Cutrere, a rich girl who wanders in and out of the town she has been exiled from, and Vee Talbott, the artistic wife of the sheriff. Carol’s history is fascinating. She has used up all of her inheritance trying unsuccessfully to put up free clinics for the local black population in order to stop “the gradual massacre of the colored majority in the county.” She then starts a march to the state capital to protest the death sentence of a black man accused, in a case similar to the Scottsboro Boys, of raping a white woman. Except, she only makes it six miles out of town, whereupon she’s arrested for lewd vagrancy. This sends Carol, already vulnerable, over the edge—she decides to indeed become a lewd vagrant and thus the damaged creature we meet in the play. The important fact about Carol, often overlooked, is that she was basically a civil rights worker, in a decade before they existed, and pays a terrible price for it. Vee, meanwhile has religious visions because she has been so distressed by the awful things she has witnessed as the wife of a sheriff—blacks beaten and lynched and “runaway convicts torn to pieces by hounds.”

All four of these sensitive souls are ruined by the racial hatred that exists around them. It seems to me that Orpheus Descending is in fact a play of great political bravery. More so than, for instance, The Crucible, unquestionably a brilliant play, but one which nonetheless creates a political metaphor in the distant past to suggest the present. Orpheus was written about the times in which it was written. There is no political metaphor. Williams is telling it exactly as it is—or was then—and condemning racial and social attitudes of a large area of America. Williams was often accused in the sixties of being politically silent. But he had already spoken out, years before. No one seemed to notice. Atkinson’s review, for instance, never hints that he has witnessed a play with political intent. It has been suggested, not least by Arthur Miller himself, that Williams’s work moved the individual and his inner life center stage and that social conditions were symbolized from within the personalities of the characters. That is, of course, partially true, but in Orpheus Descending, the inner poetic vision shares the stage with a crusading political conscience.

Just as Carol may seem a creature before her time, so too is Val. This role has often seemed unplayable, and it wasn’t until Stuart Townsend brilliantly embodied him in a production at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2000 that he finally made sense for me. In Battle Of Angels (1940), the first version of Orpheus Descending, Val was a writer. Townsend took his cue from the original and reimagined Val as a man with a genuine poetic soul. Like many poets, he carries within him a delicate mixture of the genders. Atkinson commended Cliff Robertson’s deeply dull performance in the original production as “manly,” which may in its day have seemed like an important corrective to Val’s gentler side, and indirectly assured us that the character really wasn’t gay. But Townsend simply showed us that Val was very much like a creature that was to emerge in America ten years later—a hippie—with an informal attitude toward sex, wandering the countryside with a guitar autographed by Woody Guthrie. How prescient of Williams to write about two young people—Carol and Val—who predicted the concerns and behavior of their counterparts a decade later.

There is another reason to love Orpheus Descending. It is a mess. It is disorderly. It wanders. It is itself a lewd vagrant. Characters command the stage, talk to the audience, set the scene, and then disappear for good parts of the play. The ending is old-fashioned melodrama. The central love story is not entirely convincing. It’s been rewritten too often. It won’t be taught in playwriting class. Well, maybe it should. For the play is the playwright. This, after all, was a disorderly man, and he nakedly puts this on stage. His mind jumps and challenges and taunts and flirts and sometimes flies way off the railway line, but it is always his mind. This is, of course, when his mind was still functioning. Some of his later plays are also a mess but not in the same way. Subtle connective tissues are by then missing in the work. What connects all the elements in Orpheus Descending is the hyperactive amusement and despair of Williams’s racing brain. The less controlled of the great Williams plays have a chaotic purity. A genius is stripping bare, hopping around on burning stones, falling down, jumping up again, but always showing us the goods. Atkinson, in his review, does concede Williams’s “magic style of writing” but laments that “he has not ordered his world as decisively as usual.” No, and from a scholastic point of view that’s a problem. But if you’re interested in the messy business of life or art, surely it’s a glory.

By the way, Brooks Atkinson has a Broadway theater named after him. Tennessee Williams does not.

Martin Sherman