Theater Abroad: This Rotted World

Many serious, liberal-minded intellectuals worry profoundly about the unattractive impression the U.S. often makes abroad, blaming everyone from unimaginative ambassadors to loud tourists with star-spangled sports shirts. But few would ever admit that some of their own heroes —for example, Playwright Tennessee Williams—can be the worst ambassadors of all. Last week two Williams plays, presented by a freelance theatrical troupe called the New York Repertory Company (which claimed association with Manhattan’s Actors’ Studio) had left a fairly indelible stain in Rio de Janeiro.

The trouble centered in the group’s choice of plays when it planned a five-city Latin American swing earlier this summer. As the idol of the Method-acting school, Williams automatically had to become the focal point of the repertory. But which plays? Helen Hayes and her Government-sponsored ANTA company were soon to tour Latin America with The Glass Menagerie. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was just “too dirty,” and A Streetcar Named Desire called for too large a cast. So the group ended up doing Suddenly, Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth, the one a swift history of a young girl whose mind shattered when her cousin was eaten alive by street urchins, the other a dreary shockfest about a young actor who is emasculated by angry citizens when he returns with his aging Hollywood mistress to the town where he once “ruined” an innocent young girl (Williams condensed and somewhat defeathered his Sweet Bird for Latin American audiences). After a generally tepid reception in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the group (which was headed by Rita Gam, Ben Piazza, Viveca Lindfors and Betty Field—all competent performers) moved on up to Rio and discovered to a fare-thee-well that there is no good will in bad Williams.

The most telling indictment was written by Diário de Noticias Critic Henrique Oscar, who brushed aside the Method and the visiting production to go after Tennessee Williams himself and the psycheburger school of playwriting. “People bearing vices can be presented provided they suffer from them,” wrote Oscar. “Their suffering may redeem them and arouse our understanding if not sympathy. The morbid world of Tennessee Williams has nothing of this. With him, aberration is presented complacently, with all the author’s tenderness, as if it were the best thing in the world. It is sad to think that Williams represents a country which is Western and ‘Christian,’ whose style of life they want to convince us should be defended against the Communist threat. Positively this rotted world does not seem worthy of defending and, on the contrary, needs to be reformed or extinguished so that something may survive to preserve man’s intrinsic dignity.”