Sweet Bird of Youth: “Hello There, Chance Wayne. Somebody Said You Were Back In St. Cloud, But I Didn’t Believe Them.”

New Directions has come out with new trade paperback editions of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana and The Rose Tattoo. I have received some review copies, and they are gorgeous new editions with some very interesting material included.

Sweet Bird of Youth premiered on Broadway on March 10, 1959. Directed by Elia Kazan, it starred Paul Newman as Chance Wayne, the drifter-stud returning to his hometown where he is universally reviled, and Geraldine Page as The Princess Kosmonopolis, a Norma Desmond-type character, a once-famous movie star, now down on her luck and unable to find work. She has hired Chance Wayne to be her companion and lover. They are two desperate souls, running towards their destinies screaming all the way, as the clock winds down on both of them. Chance Wayne was once the golden boy of St. Cloud, his hometown, and he loved a girl, a young virginal creature named Heavenly Finley (played by Diana Hyland on Broadway, and Shirley Knight in the film of the same name). As you can see by all of the character names, Tennessee Williams was never afraid to make his themes clear. Some may even say obvious.

There is a theatricality to Tennessee Williams’ work, and it’s written INTO the plays. (The translucent screens in Glass Menagerie. That wasn’t just a set imposed upon the play. It was written into the script. The play is a memory play. Reality is porous in memory, the past impinging upon the present.) Kazan, in his directing, set that part of Williams free. He grounded the rest of it in realism and powerful acting, but he left that part of Williams alone. He let that part of Williams (which can be so problematic) express itself. This is not Paddy Chayefsky or Look Back in Anger. These are not realistic plays. Sweet Bird of Youth almost acts like an ongoing chorus, with soloists stepping forward on occasion. It’s a beautiful and heart-wrenching play, with themes held dear by Williams: the loss of youth and innocence, the desperate struggle to be oneself, to rise above the squalor of the present, the strange connections lost people make on their way through life. Chance Wayne had his chance. He is the last person to realize that he is at the end of the road. Up until the last moment in the play, he hopes that he will find a way out. He hopes that he can redeem himself. It’s no accident that the play takes place on Easter weekend. Chance suffers from a threatened ego. He has a lot to prove. But he burned his bridges in St. Cloud years ago, when he gave his virginal girlfriend Heavenly a venereal disease, which was left untreated. She had to have a hysterectomy. Boss Finley (her father) refers to it as a “whore’s operation”, and is furious that his daughter had to be “spayed like a dawg.” Chance Wayne returns to the town, Princess in tow, hoping he can hook up again with Heavenly, but also hoping to show all the people in St. Cloud how good he’s doing, and how he’s going to be a famous actor, how Hollywood may be calling the front desk at any moment. He’s in many ways a terrible person, toxic: If you get close to him, he will take you down with him. But he’s desperate. He wants to be good, better, successful. Who doesn’t?

Here’s an excerpt from the play.

In the tribute piece I wrote after Paul Newman passed away, I talked about one of the moments he has in the 1962 film of Sweet Bird of Youth.

The new edition of the play has an introduction by playwright Lanford Wilson, a total treat to read, as well as Williams’ original foreword. Also included is the one-act play The Enemy: Time, an early version of Sweet Bird of Youth, published here for the first time.

The Enemy: Time has many of the same elements that would be in the final version of the play, although some of the names are changed. Interestingly, Heavenly is named “Rose” in The Enemy: Time, an obvious nod to Tennessee’s own tragic ruined sister. There is a melodramatic and theatrical feeling to the short one-act, with an omnipresent clock ticking, and a “wordless lamentation” emanating from all around the stage. Chance here is named Phil, and he has an encounter with Rose on her porch, interrupted by Princess Pazmezoglu, a famous silent film star whose career has fallen on hard knocks because of the talkies. Rose’s brother is on the warpath for Phil, and she begs Phil to get out of town. The threat is that Phil will be castrated, literally, if he stays in town. Much of this is also in The Sweet Bird of Youth, although expanded upon in the longer form. I love to read early drafts, especially with such a prolific and consistent writer as Tennessee Williams. I love to try to imagine myself into his thought- and work-process. You can see what he’s working on, you can see him wrestling with demons/angels. All of the elements that he will need for the full-length are already there in The Enemy: Time. It is a powerful work in and of itself, a completed piece/ Williams often worked that way. He would write out ideas as one-acts or short stories, before tackling the full-length version. It was his way of going deep, of learning what it was he actually wanted to say. I am so pleased that New Directions has included The Enemy: Time in this new edition. There’s always more to learn about Williams.

Lanford Wilson’s introduction includes memories of Williams:

At his Key West home he would rise (very early I’m told – well, 6:00 a.m.), do a few laps in his pool, retire to his writing shack and sometimes not be seen again until after four or five in the evening. Seven days. I’m going on the word of his friends about the early rising, when I visited I never got to his place before noon. By 7:00 p.m. we’d watch the news – we were both Walter Cronkite fans. He would applaud the stock market report if stocks had fallen that day, “I own stock myself, but I get a kick when the market’s down.”

and also thoughts about Williams’ place in the theatrical world (Wilson theorizes that it was Williams, more than anyone else, who “paved the way” for the sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s). Wilson discusses Sweet Bird of Youth, a play he had seen in 1959 (the touring company of the Broadway production), and how he really remembered almost none of it except for “Kazan’s directions of the opening moment”. His memories of the play were that it was “turgid”, or “self-indulgent”. Wilson goes on to say:

The first time I reread it, last month – the first contact I had had with it in nearly forty years – I was surprised at how simple, straightforward, bare and frankly melodramatic it was. I hadn’t intended to read Sweet Bird again that day, I was just trying to find a particular passage, couldn’t locate it anywhere in the first act, and ended up rereading the whole play … Scenes that had seemed thin and tediously obvious were crowded with shadows, shadings with double meanings; speeches that had seemed self-indulgent, turgid even, were painfully revealing. I had thought Tennessee aimed for “tragic” and ended up hitting melodrama square between the eyes. I was blind.

I love that anecdote because it shows how a lifelong “relationship” with the works of Tennessee Williams provides constant surprises (something I myself have experienced). People come to him in different ways. They see the movies of his works. Or they see the play at a repertory company. Or they are actors, and therefore have worked on his stuff in acting classes for ages and can recite long passages by heart. Either way, Williams is a playwright of shifting power. He hides, he reveals. The works seem to change when you re-visit them after a couple of years. Or maybe it is we who have changed. My understanding of Stella in Streetcar is completely different now than what it was when I was in my mid-20s. It’s like it’s a totally different character. I re-read the play (as I did quite a bit this summer), and think, like Lanford Wilson: “Was this scene/this line ever in it before? Is this a new version or something? Why didn’t I ever notice it before?”

New Directions has a long history of publishing Tennessee Williams’ work, and I have many of their books on my shelves. But this new copy of Sweet Bird of Youth, with its new material and earlier one-act, is a totally welcome addition to any Tennessee Williams library.