Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:
Next on the script shelf:
Next Tennessee Williams play on the shelf is In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, included in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 7: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, and Other Plays
So. Now we’re moving into Williams’ work from the mid to late 1960s… During this time, he broke away almost completely from realistic forms, and his plays get weirder and weirder, and more abstract. The language loses its accessibility, although it still has moments of sheer poetry. He is now going inward … He also was drinking and drugging heavily in the 60s. He lost his sharpness. Full-length works of the kind of complexity he was capable of at the beginning of the 1960s (Iguana) were no longer in his reach in the mid to late 60s. He also stopped creating memorable characters. He started describing directly his own personal experience (with aging, with art, with sex) – He had ALWAYS been a very personal playwright – but he had dressed up his personal concerns and fears and hopes with 3-dimensional vivid characters. They were STORIES. He wrote PLAYS. Not tone-poems on aging and art and gay sex. The plays in the 1960s are tone poems. They’re almost never performed nowadays.
Still some lovely stuff in here, though.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel premiered off-Broadway in 1969. Clive Barnes, reviewer for the New York Times, had this to say:
Some psychiatrists have, I think, a treatment known as an abreaction, where the patient is encouraged to reenact his deepest fears. Some novelists have been known to write a novel about a novelist unable to write a novel. Yet such devices, while doubtless salutary in the case of the patient and at least useful in the case of the novelist, can be justified as art only by their human insights. And the actual human insights in this new play are regrettably obvious and shallow.
Beyond the actual anecdote of a death in Tokyo, Mr. Williams seems to be hinting — and usually very broadly hinting, almost nudging in fact — at the nature of an artist. The nature indeed of himself, for the message here is surely nothing if not personal. The man and his wife are apparently the two sides of the artist. The man is the spiritual, and the woman, feckless creature, is the carnal. One is always betraying the other, until — and this is the final fear flapping its wings at the window pane — the spirit dies.
Luckily the spirit has not died. Mr. Williams can take heart. There are more flashes of genius here than in any of his later plays. Mixed with the feeble jokes — such as a Japanese who comically confuses “public conveyance” with “public convenience” — and all the hesitations of style the play is heir to, there is gold, gossamer and fire here, and there are bursting sharp exchanges of dialogue that recall “The Glass Menagerie” in their suddenly poignant pertinence.
Mark, a painter, has gone off the deep end. He is with his wife Miriam in Tokyo. He is already on the edge, from alcohol, and inner suffering. While in Tokyo, he basically feels like he discovers color. It is a painful discovery and he goes mad. He goes mad from being THE FIRST to ever TRULY discover color. He locks himself in his hotel room, spreads canvas on the floor, sprays paint at the canvases with a spray gun, and rolls around in it. He is a mess.
Miriam is a hot number, although no longer young. She sits in the bar of the Tokyo hotel, and she wants OUT. She wants out of her marriage to nutso Color Boy upstairs. She is sick of his dependence on her. She cables Leonard in New York – Leonard, who is Mark’s art-dealer – to tell him that Mark has lost it – and “please come to Tokyo immediately to deal with your client, because I no longer can.”
The whole thing takes place in the bar. Miriam and Mark have various scenes. She tries to tell him she’s leaving him. He can’t accept that. He arrives in the bar covered in paint. She is mortified. He has the shakes because of his nervous breakdown. They no longer make love. They have long conversations (arguments) about art, and painting and color …
Then Leonard arrives. Leonard understands. Leonard understands that Mark has lost it. He tries to convince Miriam to stay with her husband … chastising her for her abandonment. Miriam is firm. No. She is DONE.
The play ends with Mark dying.
I am going to excerpt the small last scene between Leonard and Miriam – the one that closes the play – because it has my favorite writing in the play. Barnes is right, there are sudden flashes of transcendence in Williams’ writing in this play – most of the writing is hesitations, stop-starting – no finished sentences … but then suddenly: whoosh. You hear that Williams voice.
Anyway. Here’s the scene! Mark has just died. Staggered out of the hotel bar, and died.
EXCERPT FROM In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, included in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 7: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, and Other Plays
LEONARD. Miriam, he’s.
MIRIAM. I know. — A long ten minutes.
LEONARD. The concierge is making the. Arrangements.
MIRIAM. Released!
LEONARD. — Yes, he’s released from.
MIRIAM. I meant that I am released.
LEONARD. If that’s you feeling, it’s one that shouldn’t be spoken even to me. — How do you know I won’t repeat what you said? We live in a gossipy world. I might, accidentally, but.
MIRIAM. I’m sure that you will repeat but it doesn’t concern me aat all.
LEONARD. I think we should leave this room, and.
MIRIAM. I’ve never been to a mortuary and I’m not going to visit one now.
LEONARD. Let’s get out of the bar and sit in the garden. The Barman hears and understands the savage things you’re saying. [She lights a cigarette] Miriam.
MIRIAM. Leonard. [The wind chimes are heard] — There’s an edge, a limit to the circle of light. The circle is narrow. And protective. We have to stay inside. It’s our existence and our protection. The protection of our existence. It’s our home if we have one.
LEONARD. Not to be trusted always.
MIRIAM. You know and I know it’s dangerous not to stay in it. There’s no reason to take a voluntary step outside of the. Do you understand that? [He nods] Miriam Conley is not going to step outside the circle of light. It’s dangerous, I don’t dare to or care to. This well-defined circle of light is our defense against. Outside of it there’s dimness that increases to darkness: never my territory. It’s never been at all attractive to me. When someone at a party says, “Let’s all go to the new club or something street, or even out of the country,” I say, “Wonderful. Let’s go.” With Mark? No! Mark was bored with this party before it started. But oh I go. Do I go! The circle of light stays with me. Until. Until can be held off but not forever eluded. You’ve seen how fatal it is to step out of the.
LEONARD. I’m not sure I know what you mean.
MIRIAM. Animation. Liveliness. People at a smart restaurant talking gaily together. Interested in jewelry, clothes, shopping, shows. Leonard, you know it’s imperative for us to stay inside of. As for the others. You know and I know incurably ill people, especially those with dreaded diseases such as. And people gone mad that need an acre of pacifying meadows, trees around them. [The tinkling chimes are heard] A few perfunctory visits is all that they can expect and all that they’ll receive. Ask God if you don’t believe me. It’s like they’d violated a law that’s.
LEONARD. Inviolable.
MIRIAM. Yes. Double yes. The circle of light won’t be and can’t be extended to include them. The final black needle is their visitor, Leonard.
LEONARD. Take this handkerchief and pretend to cry.
MIRIAM. I’ll pretend to do nothing.
LEONARD. Let me tell you something that. When my grandmother died, after an agony of several hours, my mother called a correct undertaker, and then said to us, “She put up a good fight. Now come downstairs and I will make us some cocoa and some cinnamon toast.” We were children, but even so I thought the suggestion was shockingly inappropriate to the agony and death of her mother. Completed a minute before.
MIRIAM. She was in the circle that attends us faithfully as long as our bodies don’t betray us and our minds don’t make excursions of a nature that’s incompatible with the.
LEONARD. Well.
MIRIAM. He was removed so quickly. If I should say that the circle of light is the approving look of God it would be romantic which I refuse to be. The program for today should not be changed except for the.
LEONARD. Absence of Mark.
MIRIAM. Mark that made the mistake of deliberately moving out of the.
LEONARD. Yes, Mark’s absence.
MIRIAM. Of the man who has made a crossing that neither of us but each of us. I will bow my head to the table as an appearance of being stricken with. Then when we go to the street, put your arm about me as if I were overcome with the expected emotion.
LEONARD. Have you got everything, dear?
MIRIAM. It would be strange but possible if later I discovered that I cared for him deeply in spite of. He thought that he could create his own circle of light.
LEONARD. Miriam, what are your actual plans?
MIRIAM. I have no plans. I have nowhere to go.
[With abrupt violence, she wrenches the bracelets from her arms and flings them to her feet. The stage darkens.]
CURTAIN
