The Books: “Sweet Bird of Youth” (Tennessee Williams)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

The next play on the script shelf is:

Next Tennessee Williams play on the shelf is Sweet Bird of Youth, included in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 4: Sweet Bird of Youth / Period of Adjustment / The Night of the Iguana.

The original Broadway production was in 1959.

Paul Newman plays Chance Wayne – the young stud. “Stud” is quite literal here. He’s a guy who makes a “living” off of his looks. He’s not a gigolo, at least he doesn’t SAY that he is one, but that’s pretty much the deal. I mean, Paul Newman played him – so you can get a sense of the level of beauty Williams was going after here. And who would Paul Newman, looking like he does, have been if he hadn’t had talent, drive, ambition, smarts? What happens to those who only offer beauty and youth? Chance Wayne is, ultimately, a tragic character. He’s the kind of character who is usually female. Williams’ plays are full of these on-the-verge-of-aging pretty boys who have corrupted their minds, who latch on to rich lonely people, who sell their bodies for money, but who have also sold their soul somewhere along the line. Chance has (had) big dreams. He wants to be an actor. He has latched on to one of Tennessee Williams’ greatest creations: an aging flamboyant actress who goes by the name of The Princess Kosmonopolis (played by Geraldine Page). She likes to have him around because she likes having sex with him and he makes her feel young. She is desperate. Losing her youth is no joke to her. She cannot accept growing old gracefully. Bit by bit, she is losing her power, not just over men, but over her own career. It’s a great portrait of what women go through in show business: how they “disappear” after a certain date. Chance has latched on to her with the hopes that she can help him along in his career. He hates himself for who he has become. He is actually in love with someone else. But his ambition, his dying hope that he will have a meaningful life, that he will be famous, overrides his purer emotions. He’s an animal. Both of them are. They are desperate clawing animals – who need each other – but who also DESPISE each other – because of all they are reminded of. The Princess looks at Chance and sees that she is no longer young. And yet … she cannot let him go, because at the same time he is the only thing that makes her feel young. Also, it can’t hurt to have someone who looks like Paul Newman on your arm! It gives you power. Chance despises her, despises who he is with her, despises being around someone who is so desperate – he refuses to believe that it is the end of the line for him.

Another thing about Chance, and this is his main secret: his main reason for his intense self-loathing is that he was in love with a girl named Heavenly, a beautiful pure Southern belle. And they slept together (she was a virgin, and only 15 years old) and he gave her a venereal disease. It went on for too long, and got so bad that she was given a full hysterectomy. (Her father refers to it as “a whore’s operation”.) Chance ruined her life. He was run out of town by her powerful family.

In this play, he has returned to the town, full of big talk about his non-existent Hollywood career, but he is with the Princess … and they hole themselves up in the hotel in the town, and he tries to get back in good with Heavenly (her family does not make this easy). He struggles, every single second, with his shame and self-hatred. Being back in the town makes him realize how far he has fallen, and just how low he is.

The Princess is a pot-smoking neurotic frenzied head-case – who has lost her short-term memory. At any moment, she is bound to look around her and have no idea where she is, who she is with, and how she got there.

Chance and the Princess have scene after scene after scene where they fight and make love and bitch at each other and hurt each other …

This is not a realistic play. It is almost presentational. Characters have long explanatory monologues, done almost directly to the audience. Williams knew what he was doing. This is a theatrical piece in its form. The town operates as a chattering judgmental Greek chorus as the lead characters, Princess, Chance, and Heavenly, try to come to terms with their individual destinies. Everyone is on the run. Time is running out.

I know Williams was shy around actors. He never quite knew what to say to them, he was a bit afraid of them, and he was also intimidated by what they did – acting remained, essentially, mysterious to him. He never get over it. He didn’t understand the craft of actors – and so to watch actors transform themselves, and put themselves out there, and expose themselves so brutally – was, to him, nothing less than a miracle. All of that being said, it is obvious, through his writing, how much he loved actors. How much he knew what they would need. How much he gave them to latch onto. He never leaves actors hanging. He never leaves things vague. It is amazing, going back to re-read these plays, how clear he is, how unafraid he is to state, in open language, his theme. He is rarely obscure. He can be brutal and blunt in his presentation of his topics. He creates vivid characters, with high-stakes objectives (usually life or death) and then just throws obstacle after obstacle in their paths. And through that comes great drama. I had a great acting teacher once who described good acting as: “trying to achieve your objective despite the obstacles”. You may not succeed in reaching your objective – but you have to TRY. This is true of the silliest movie and of the deepest drama. Hamlet must avenge his father’s death. And yet, of course, the universe doesn’t make that easy for him. He has to deal with one obstacle after another. Without obstacles, there is no drama. An objective is NOTHING without the obstacle. A lot of times, if the playwriting is weak, then the actor has to make shit up. Like: “Okay, what is my objective in this scene? Uhm … okay, I will choose that I want to fuck her. That is my objective.” And then, if the playright is weak, the actor also has to make up the obstacle: “Okay, I want to fuck her – that is all I want – but … because of my messed-up past, I can’t ever make a move on her. I am afraid. I am paralyzed.” Now all that is fine and an actor who knows how to take care of himself will always give himself tasks like that. If it’s not in the script then you MUST make something up so that it seems real, and you can latch onto the situation.

But with Williams (and all the great playwrights) – you don’t EVER have to make stuff up. It’s there. Just say the words and play the scene. Just GO. Play the damn scene like a bat out of hell. He gives BOTH sides equally strong objectives – (I’m thinking of Summer and Smokeright now – but it’s true with all his major plays) – and he gives both sides equally strong obstacles. So we get tension, drama, clashing needs … It’s fantastic.

That same acting teacher I mentioned earlier said once that there are really only two objectives to choose from, when you boil all the choices down: Fight or Fuck. Every scene is either a fight scene or a fuck scene – and you have to figure out which one it is. And if you’re not sure – because sometimes it’s not clear – (there are “fuck” scenes that feel like “fight” scenes, etc.) – anyway, if you’re not sure – then just choose one and play that objective (in a rehearsal, please, not a performance) and see what happens. See if it works. If it doesn’t, then try the other one. Usually, with a good playwright it’s obvious – and it helps to keep things simple. An objective should never be intellectual. Because that makes for boring acting. And it usually should be life or death. The stakes need to be huge. Again, with weak playwrights you have to turn up the heat under the stakes yourself … but with someone like Williams, or Shakespeare, or Chekhov – you don’t have to. Just figure out your objective – and I have found my teacher’s advice to be true: Do you want to fight the other person in the scene or do you want to fuck them? And then go for your objective wiht all your might. The obstacles will keep coming – but keep going for that objective. Exciting stuff.

You can relax when you’re in a Williams play. I mean, you better have some talent and all that … but you don’t have to turn yourself inside out, making up for the lacks in the writing. Just relax, say his words, and take the leap.

I’ll post an excerpt from Scene Two – when Chance tells Princess about what happened with Heavenly. Notice how in the first beat, the Princess prompts him: “Tell me your life story.”

He doesn’t try to weave it in naturally, or make a monologue seem un-prompted. Here, he puts it right out there. One character says to another, “Tell me your life story.”

It takes courage to write like that.

EXCERPT FROM Sweet Bird of Youth, included in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 4: Sweet Bird of Youth / Period of Adjustment / The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams

CHANCE. — I was born in this town. I was born in St. Cloud.

PRINCESS. That’s a good way to begin to tell your life story. Tell me your life story. I’m interested in it, I really would like to know it. Let’s make it your audition, a sort of screen test for you. I can watch you in the mirror while I put my face on. And tell me your life story, and if you hold my attention with your life story, I’ll know you have talent, I’ll wire my studio on the Coast that I’m still alive and I’m on my way to the Coast with a young man named Chance Wayne that I think is cut out to be a great young star.

CHANCE. Here is the town I was born in, and lived in till ten years ago, in St. Cloud. I was a twelve-pound baby, normal and healthy, but with some kind of quantity “X” in my blood, a wish or a need to be different … The kids that I grew up with are mostly still here and what they call “settled down,” gone into business, married and bringing up children, the little crowd I was in with, that I used to be the star of, was the snobset, the ones with the big names and money. I didn’t have either … [The Princess utters a soft laugh in her dimmed-out area] What I had was … [The Princess half turns, brush poised in a faint, dusty beam of light]

PRINCESS. BEAUTY! Say it! Say it! What you had was beauty! I had it! I say it, with pride, no matter how sad, being gone, now.

CHANCE. Yes, well … the others … [The Princess resumes brushing her hair and the sudden cold beam of light on her goes out again] … are all now members of the young social set here. The girls are young matrons, bridge-players, and the boys belong to the Junior Chamber of Commerce and some of them, clubs in New Orleans such as Rex and Comus and ride on the Mardi Gras floats. Wonderful? No boring … I wanted, expected, intended to get, something better … Yes, and I did, I got it. I did things that fat-headed gang never dreamed of. Hell when they were still freshmen at Tulane or LSU or Ole Miss, I sang in the chorus of the biggest show in New York, in “Oklahoma”, and had pictures in LIFE in a cowboy outfit, tossin’ a ten-gallon hat in the air! YIP … EEEEEEE! Ha-ha … And at the same time pursued my other vocation … Maybe the only one I was truly meant for, love-making … slept in the social register of New York! Millionaires’ widows and wives and debutante daughters of such famous names as Vanderbrook and Masters and Halloway and Connaught, names mentioned daily in columns, whose credit cards are their faces … And …

PRINCESS. What did they pay you?

CHANCE. I gave people more than I took. Middle-aged people I gave back a feeling of youth. Lonely girls? Understanding, appreciation! An absolutely convincing show of affection. Sad people, lost people? Something light and uplifting! Eccentrics? Tolerance, even odd things they long for … But always just at the point when I might get something back that would solve my own need, which was great, to rise to their level, the memory of my girl would pull me back home to her … and when I came home for those visits, man oh man how that town buzzed with excitement. I’m telling you, it would blaze with it, and then that thing in Korea came along. I was about to be sucked into the Army so I went into the Navy, because a sailor’s uniform suited me better, the uniform was all that suited me, though …

PRINCESS. Ah-ha!

CHANCE. [mocking her] Ah-ha. I wasn’t able to stand the goddam routine, discipline … I kept thinking, this stops everything. I was twenty-three, that was the peak of my youth and I knew my youth wouldn’t last long. By the time I got out, Christ knows, I might be nearly thirty! Who would remember Chance Wayne? In a life like mine, you just can’t stop, you know, can’t take time out between steps, you’ve got to keep going right on up from one thing to the other, once you drop out, it leaves you and goes on without you and you’re washed up.

PRINCESS. I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.

CHANCE. I’m talking about the parade. THE parade! The parade! the boys that go places that’s the parade I’m talking about, not a parade of swabbies on a wet deck. And so I ran my comb through my hair one morning and noticed that eight or ten hairs had come out, a warning signal of future baldness. My hair was still thick. But would it be five years from now, or even three? When the war would be over, that scared me, that speculation. I started to have bad dreams. Nightmares and cold sweats at night, and I had palpitations, and on my leaves I got drunk and woke up in strange places with faces on the next pillow I had never seen before. My eyes had a wild look in them in the mirror … I got the idea I wouldn’t live through the war, that I wouldn’t come back, that all the excitement and glory of being Chance Wayne would go up in smoke at the moment of contact between my brain and a bit of hot steel tha thappened to be in the air at the same time and place that my head was … that thought didn’t comfort me any. Imagine a whole lifetime of dreams and ambitions and hopes dissolving away in one instant, being blacked out like some arithmetic problem washed off a blackboard by a wet sponge, just by some little accident like a bullet, not even aimed at you but just shot off in space, and so I cracked up, my nerves did. I got a medical discharge out of the service and I came home in civvies, then it was when I noticed how different it was, the town and the peopl ein it. Polite? Yes, but not cordial. No headlines in the papers, just an item that measured one inch at the bottom of page five saying that Chance Wayne, the son of Mrs. Emily Wayne of North Front Street had received an honorable discharge from the Navy as the result of illness and was home to recover … that was when Heavenly became more important to me than anything else …

PRINCESS. Is Heavenly a girl’s name?

CHANCE. Heavenly is the name of my girl in St. Cloud.

PRINCESS. Is Heavenly why we stopped here?

CHANCE. What other reason for stopping here can you think of?

PRINCESS. So … I’m being used. Why not? Even a dead race horse is used to make glue. Is she pretty?

CHANCE. [handing Princess a snapshot] This is a flashlight photo I took of her, nude, one night on Diamond Key, which is a little sandbar about half a mile off shore which is under water at high tide. This was taken with the tide coming in. The water is just beginning to lap over her body like it desired her like I did and still do and will always, always. [Chance takes back the snapshot] Heavenly was her name. You can see that it fits her. This was her at fifteen.

PRINCESS. Did you have her that early?

CHANCE. I was just two years older, we had each other that early.

PRINCESS. Sheer luck!

CHANCE. Princess, the great difference between in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don’t mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure, and nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives …

PRINCESS. No question, go on with your story.

CHANCE. Each time I came back to St. Cloud I had her love to come back to …

PRINCESS. Something permanent in a world of change?

CHANCE. Yes, after each disappointment, eacah failure at something, I’d come back to her like going to a hospital …

PRINCESS. She put cool bandages on your wounds? Why didn’t you marry this Heavenly little physician?

CHANCE. Didn’t I tell you that Heavenly is the daughter of Boss Finley, the biggest political wheel in this part of the country? Well, if I didn’t I made a serious omission.

PRINCESS. He disapproved?

CHANCE. He figured his daughter rated someone a hundred, a thousand percent better than me, Chance Wayne … The last time I came back here, she phoned me from the drugstore and told me to swim out to Diamond Key, that she would meet me there. I waited a long time, till almost sunset, and the tide started coming in before I heard the put-put of an outboard motor boat coming out to the sandbar. The sun was behind her, I squinted. She had on a silky wet tank suit and fans of water and mist made rainbows about her … she stood up in the boat as if she was water-skiing, shouting things at me an’ circling around the sandbar, around and around it!

PRINCESS. She didn’t come to the sandbar?

CHANCE. No, just circled around it, shouting things at me. I’d swim toward the boat, I would just about reach it and she’d race it away, throwing up misty rainbows, disappearing in rainbows and then circling back and shouting things at me again …

PRINCESS. What things?

CHANCE. Things like, “Chance, go away.” “Don’t come back to St. Cloud.” “Chance, you’re a liar.” “Chance, I’m sick of your lies!” “My father’s right ab out you!” “Chance, you’re no good any more.” “Chance, stay away from St. Cloud.” The last time around the sandbar she shouted nothing, just waved goodby and turned the boat back to shore.

PRINCESS. Is that the end of the story?

CHANCE. Princess, the end of the story is up to you. You want to help me?

PRINCESS. I want to help you. Believe me, not everybody wants to hurt everybody. I don’t want to hurt you, can you believe me?

CHANCE. I can if you prove it to me.

PRINCESS. How can I prove it to you?

CHANCE. I have something in mind.

PRINCESS. Yes, what?

CHANCE. Okay, I’ll give you a quick outline of this project I have in mind. Soon as I’ve talked to my girl and shown her my contract, we go on, you and me. Not far, just to New Orleans, Princess. But no more hiding away, we check in at the Hotel Roosevelt there as Alexandra Del Lago and Chance Wayne. Right away the newspapers call you and give a press conference …

PRINCESS. Oh?

CHANCE. Yes! The idea briefly, a local contest of talent to find a pair of young people to star as unknowns in a picture you’re planning to make to show your faith in YOUTH, Princess. You stage this contest, you invite other judges, but your decision decides it!

PRINCESS. And you and …

CHANCE. Yes, Heavenly and I win it. We get her out of St. Cloud, we go to the West Coast together.

PRINCESS. And me?

CHANCE. You?

PRINCESS. Have you forgotten, for instance, that any public attention is what I least want in the world?

CHANCE. What better way can you think of to show the public that you’re a person with bigger than personal interest?

PRINCESS. Oh, yes, yes, but not true.

CHANCE. You could pretend it was true.

PRINCESS. If I didn’t despise pretending!

CHANCE. I understand. Time does it. Hardens people. Time and the world that you’ve lived in.

PRINCESS. Which you want for yourself. Isn’t that what you want? [She looks at him and then goes to the phone. In phone:] Cashier? Hello, Cashier? This is the Princess Kosmonopolis speaking. I’m sending down a young man to cash some travelers’ checks for me. [She hangs up]

CHANCE. And I want to borrow your Cadillac for a while …

PRINCESS. What for, Chance?

CHANCE. [posturing] I’m pretentious. I want to be seen in your car on the streets of St. Cloud. Drive all around town in it, blowing those long silver trumpets and dressed in the fine clothes you bought me … can I?

PRINCESS. Chance, you’re a lost little boy that I really would like to help find himself.

CHANCE. I passed the screen test!

PRINCESS. Come here, kiss me, I love you. [She faces the audience] Did I say that? Did I mean it? [Then to Chance, with arms outstretched] What a child you are … Come here … [He ducks under her arms, and escapes to the chair]

CHANCE. I want this big display. Big phony display in your Cadillac around town. And a wad a dough to flash in their faces and the fine clothes you’ve bought me, on me.

PRINCESS. Did I buy you fine clothes?

CHANCE. [picking up his jacket] The finest. When you stopped being lonely because of my company at the Palm Beach Hotel, you bought me the finest. That’s the deal for tonight, to toot those silver horns and drive slowly around in the Cadillac convertible so everybody that thought I was washed up will see me. And I have taken my false or true contract to flash in the faces of various people that called me washed up. All right that’s the deal. Tomorrow you’ll get the car back and what’s left of your money. Tonight’s all that counts.

PRINCESS. How do you know that as soon as you walk out of this room I won’t call the police?

CHANCE. You wouldn’t do that, Princess. [He puts on his jacket] You’ll find the car in back of the hotel parking lot, and the left-over dough will be in the glove compartment of the car.

PRINCESS. Where will you be?

CHANCE. With my girl, or nowhere.

PRINCESS. Chance Wayne! This was not necessary, all this. I’m not a phony and I wanted to be your friend.

CHANCE. Go back to sleep. As far as I know you’re not a bad person, but you just got into bad company on this occasion.

PRINCESS. I am your friend and I’m not a phony. [Chance turns and goes to the steps] When will I see you?

CHANCE. [at the top of the steps] I don’t know — maybe never.

PRINCESS. Never is a long time, Chance, I’ll wait.

[She throws him a kiss]

CHANCE. So long.

[The Princess stands looking after him as the lights dim and the curtain closes]