THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES The Day on Which a Man Dies was written by Tennessee Williams at the height of his public success (1957-59) and kept by the author in reserve. The action in the text is a lover's quarrel. The main characters are The Man, an acclaimed painter now mocked for his new technique of applying paint with spray-guns; The Woman, the painter's sharp-tongued companion for eleven years, who has lost faith in him and lost faith in his work. The man and woman argue violently, make up, make love, and betray each other. Written at the time Williams began psychoanalysis (with dubious results) the text dramatizes his fear of having lost the source of inspiration. The distraught painter clasps his hands violently to either side of his head and whistles for his lost visions as if they were runaway dogs. The Man's suicide follows soon after. The ceremony of dying has him crashing and crawling through three increasingly larger paper screens on which the Woman's body has been painted. Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author of voluptuous excess and precision, also haunts this text. It was Mishima's "modern Noh plays" and a 1959 visit by Williams to Mishima in Tokyo that lent the playwright a dramatic form with which to embody self-willed damnation. For The Day on Which a Man Dies Williams created a third role – a wry Mishima stand-in – who reflects on sex as power while explaining how Japanese and Western suicides differ, subjects that fascinated Mishima. A shape-shifting stage servant completes the cast, whose role of self-effacing enabler is taken from the conventions of Kabuki. Williams also seems to have been aware of the Japanese art movement known as Gutai. In Williams' stage directions for The Day on Which a Man Dies , as in Gutai art , paintings are created and destroyed in the course of a performance, the bodies of the performers are painted, and the setting is made of paper. Following Mishima's own suicide in 1971 Williams attempted to re-write Day to include references to Mishima and current politics . The 1959 text is more focused, and cataloged in Williams' handwriting as "finished.” The world premiere of the 1959 text of The Day on Which a Man Dies took place in Chicago in February 2008 at Links Hall, directed and designed by David Kaplan. The 1959 text was published by New Directions in late spring of 2008.Click here for more information about THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES CHICAGO PUBLIC RADIO INTERVIEW Click to hear excerpts from scenes |
