BOOK REVIEWS
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influence spread from who he was, and the kinds of work he did, to touch,
direct, and challenge countless other writers of all kinds, but most especially
other playwrights.
The first of the dramatists Williams influenced to receive consideration in
Kolin’s book is William Inge, writer of Come Back, Little Sheba and other
important plays. In the chapter entitled ‘“ [Our] Little Company of the Odd and
Lonely’: Tennessee Williams’s ‘Personality’ in the Plays of William Inge,”
Michael Greenwald reveals that Inge was by far the more popular and successful
playwright than Williams (or Arthur Miller, of Death o f a Salesman and The
Crucible fame, for that matter) throughout the first two-thirds of the 1950s. As
the 50s became the 60s, however, Williams’s star began to shine brighter and
brighter while Inge’s slowly dimmed until it was completely obscured by his
suicide in 1973. Nevertheless, and despite Inge’s repeated disavowals,
Greenwald claims that “there is substantial evidence that Williams was integral
to Inge’s career. Externally, Williams was the principal promoter of Inge’s
earliest works, while internally an examination of his plays suggests that many
of Williams’s thematic concerns are present throughout Inge’s scripts” (16).
Both playwrights, Greenwald concludes, on a melancholy yet strangely
triumphant note, knew best how to dramatize “the suffering spirit” of human
beings, usually brought about because of spiteful narrowmindedness, on the
stages of America’s theatres (28).
Susan Koprince, in “Neil Simon’s Parodies of Tennessee Williams,” finds
an odd, yet oddly compelling, association between the much less successful (in
comparison) Simon, the straight New York Jew known for his lighthearted
comedies, and Williams, the enormously successful, gay, Southern writer of
elaborate gothic melodrama. In “‘Inconspicuous Osmosis and the Plasticity of
Doing’: The Influence of Tennessee Williams on the Plays of Edward Albee,”
David Crespy explores the mutual “fluid,” and nearly “inconspicuous,” impact
these playwrights had on each other and their respective works. Fatherhood,
paternalism, and family take the stage in Arvid F. Sponberg’s penetrating and
insightful essay, “‘Cracking the Shell of Literalness’: The Itinerary of Paternal
Consciousness in Williams’s Tragedy with Notes on Its Influence on Gurney’s
Comedy.” Gurney is A.R. Gurney, perhaps best known today because of the
many productions of the play Love Letters receives throughout the country.
Despite the fact that they write in different genres (tragedy and comedy,
respectively), Sponberg argues that “we can see Williams and Gurney as twin
jesters, mockers of morals, prickers of pretention and pomposity, critics of social
and artistic convention. To see this similarity, we need to see beyond differences
in subject matter, setting, and situation. They use these [elements] to hold our
attention while their plays perform their real work—angling, inverting, and
reversing audiences’ expectations” (66).
In keeping with the volume’s commitment to diversity, Nancy Cho offers a
piece on Williams and Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun) called, “‘That
gentleman with the painfully sympathetic eyes.. .’: Re-reading Lorraine