TENNESSEE SUITE : The Traveling Companion & The Chalky White Substance Tennessee Suite begins with The Traveling Companion, a late self-portrait by Tennessee Williams in which a famous author (Vieux) checks into a Manhattan hotel room with only one bed accompanied by a much younger man (Beau) who may or may not be hustling. The Chalky White Substance follows: Williams' fantasia of trust and betrayal in which an older man (Mark) and younger (Luke), both hooded, scheme for survival in a landscape devastated by nuclear war.
1980, the year the plays were written, began for Tennessee Williams in Key West. On New Year's Eve he went out for a pizza with a group of friends, including the actor Paul Lynde. His agent, Mitch Douglass, led the group in singing Auld Lang Syne. Later that month the short play Will Mr. Merriwhether Return from Memphis ? premiered at the opening of the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center in Key West. The text, written in 1969, presents a séance where the heroes of art – Vincent Van Gogh, Hart Crane – return from death to people who don't know who they are -- a metaphor for Williams' own condition. It had been eighteen years since he'd had a hit. As the months passed, Williams flew off so frequently from Key West to New York, New Orleans, Chicago, London , Sicily, and British Columbia that he seemed to have turned into that fantastical thing he once described in Orpheus Descending: a bird who sleeps on the wing. He worked on and completed two full-length plays: Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a meditation on the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and The Notebooks of Trigorin, an interpretation of Chekhov's The Seagull. At the same time he drafted several short plays, finishing at least four of them by year's end: the grotesquely funny This Is Peaceable Kingdom/ Good Luck God, which is set during a strike of hospital workers in New York City; Steps Must be Gentle, an elegiac homage to the poet Hart Crane; The Travelling Companion, a perceptive self-analysis; and The Chalky White Substance, an apocalyptic fantasy set in the distant future, perhaps partly inspired by the eruption of Mount Saint Helen's on May 18, 1980. |
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 The Traveling Companion in rehearsal in ProvincetownZachary Clause (Beau), Jeremy Lawrence (Vieux), photo by Nancy Shwartz |
On March 27, 1980 , the day after Williams' sixty-ninth birthday, Clothes for a Summer Hotel opened on Broadway. Walter Kerr, who in 1952, had called Camino Real, “the worst play by the best playwright” once again missed the familiar Williams and wrote: "the most dismaying thing about Tennessee Williams's pursuit of the poor, and ghosts of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 'Clothes for a Summer Hotel,' is the fact that Mr. Williams's personal voice is nowhere to be heard in it." The production closed soon after: Williams' last Broadway play during his lifetime. During rehearsals Williams would run downtown to watch rehearsals on the Bowery for an anarchic work-in-progress at the Cocteau Rep, the farcical Kirche, Kuchen, und Kinder, subtitled: an outrage for the stage. Jun 1st , Williams' mother died, at the age of 95. The playwright was in Long Island, New York the night the call came to tell him so. He waited until morning to respond. A week later, Williams was in Washington, D.C. receiving the Medal of Freedom |
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| By mid-June he was in London, en route to Sicily with the painter Henry Faulkner, a friend from Key West. In Sicily the friends had a falling out, and Williams returned to the States. By August 1980, Williams was back in Key West, completing Traveling Companion and Chalky White Substance enough to offer them as part of a trilogy to the Goodman Theater, which turned them down in favor of two earlier, more comic plays written by Williams to be produced with another new play, Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, under the title Tennessee Laughs. In October 1980, he was invited to Vancouver as writer-in-residence while a production of The Red Devil Battery Sign, written in 1975, was rehearsed and performed. Its success was a vindication of the text, scorned for its “incoherence.” On November 8th Williams was in Chicago for the Goodman Theater's opening of Tennessee Laughs. The Goodman invited him to expand Some Problems for the Moose Lodge to full-length. Eight new plays in one year. Two successful revivals. A Broadway failure, but even so, his future, despite visions of apocalyptic doom, was promising. In the next year, 1981, Williams' hopes were dashed again and again. The major auto-biographical play, Something Cloudy, Something Clear opened New York at the Cocteau Rep, but was met with incomprehension. The extension of Moose Lodge , now titled A House Not Meant to Stand , opened in Chicago to disappointing notices. His former agent Audrey Wood fell into an irreversible coma. He had a falling out with his current agent. Two old friends, Henry Faulkner and Oliver Evans, passed away that fall. In December, Lincoln Center in New York cancelled a gala to celebrate his 70th birthday: not enough tickets had been sold. |
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Performs May 10 through 15