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images continued to filter through his [Shepard’s] writing, as the hysterical
excesses of Williams’s plays were transformed into the textual eruptions that
characterize Shepard’s works” (106). Furthermore, many of the characters in
Williams and Shepard’s works exhibit a shared concern, sometimes profound,
with the concepts of history, memory, and identity; yet, in the end, “know they
must keep moving, keep changing, to maintain freedom” (119).
In “Sons of the South: An Examination of the Interstices in the Works of
August Wilson and Tennessee Williams,” Sandra G. Shannon writes that,
despite his assertions to the contrary, Wilson (,Joe Turner's Come and Gone and
The Piano Lesson), was influenced by a host of other playwrights—past and
present—including Williams in particular. It is, in fact, Williams “whose
fiercely nontraditional and experimental playwriting style [that] typifies the
common ground shared between” the two (124). Shannon proceeds to detail
strong and unmistakable resonances between the two authors that includes their
“challenge to traditional notions of realism onstage; their tendencies as poets
toward lyrical expression, cadenced rhythms, and use of metaphor; their lovehate relationship with the South as central metaphor and site of memory; and a
parade of restless and tortured men and women choosing between primal needs
and individual quests to find meaning in their existence” (124).
Brenda Murphy, in “Williams, Mamet, and the Artist In Extremis,”
comments that even though “Williams clearly looms large on David Mamet’s
cultural landscape, his influence on Mamet’s work seems less clear” (136). She
locates that influence in Williams’s representations of “artists in extremis, at the
end of their careers, misunderstood and rejected by an unfeeling public or by
those close to them, suffering in ‘desperate circumstances,’ as Blanche DuBois
would put it, but tenacious and determined to pursue their art, no matter what
environment may surround them” (137). Murphy discusses this trope as it
manifests in Williams’s In the Bar o f a Tokyo Hotel and Clothes for a Summer
Hotel and Mamet’s Squirrels and A Life in the Theatre.
Verna A. Foster looks at Beth Henley’s (Crimes o f the Heart and The Miss
Firecracker Contest) work in relation to Williams’s in the essay “The Symbiosis
of Desire and Death: Beth Henley Rewrites Tennessee Williams.” Foster notes
that Henley’s plays seem “to be influenced by Williams’s earlier, better known
plays such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof But it is actually his later, less realistic, more grotesque and
absurdist plays written in the 1960s and 1970s that share greater dramaturgical
similarities with Henley’s work” (148). Both playwrights, Foster explains, focus
“on what is absurd and, therefore, comic in human existence in all its
dimensions: the grotesque, the ugly, the disturbing, the sadly funny, the
ridiculous, even the mean,” with the result being “that the plays in which their
styles converge are not tragicomedies but dark comedies. The grotesque
elements in the plays prevent the tragic experience of life that may lie just below
the surface from making itself felt” (159). Thus their dramatic worlds seem
more bearable and their characters more likely to go forward rather than simply