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give up in plays such as Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest and The
Debutante Ball, in comparison to Williams’s The Mutilated and A Lovely
Sunday fo r Creve Coeur.
Marital relationships are the subject of John M. Clum’s piece, “‘Period of
Adjustment’: Marriage in Williams and Christopher Durang.” Durang once
claimed Williams as a favorite playwright, and Clum finds in Durang’s The
Marriage o f Bette and Boo and Williams’s Period o f Adjustment “a critique of
marriage and a satire on the values of suburban Americans” that links both of
these plays together (162). Clum later states that both Williams and Durang
“present marriage as a difficult, almost impossible process. They both wonder
whether one can really break through the walls of selfhood and treat one other
human being with love, understanding and compassion” (172). Meanwhile,
Williams seems to have faith in the ability of sex to approach the mystical,
Durang is far more skeptical about any kind of mysticism being attributed to
sex. And, in the end, the “critique of marriage we see in the work of both writers
stems in part from the experience of their parents and from their own positions
outside of the conventional system of compulsory heterosexuality” (173).
According to Kirk Woodward in “‘All Truth Is a Scandal’: How Tennessee
Williams Shaped Tony Kushner’s Plays,” like Christopher Durang, Kushner
{Angels in America) claims Williams as an influence on his work (175).
Williams and Kushner, Woodward writes, “s hare a sense of the outrageous both
in their personal writings and in their plays, resulting in a profound
radicalization of outlook, a refusal to accept society in its current form combined
with a determination to expose the scandal that results from attitudes that
condemn homosexuality as such” (181). Woodward later claims that Williams
gives Kushner “and his generation the gift to be able to understand characters of
any sexuality as individuals, not just as members of groups, but as shaped by
similar powerful forces” (185). Williams “opened the way for Kushner’s drama
as a Southern and a gay writer and as a theatrical innovator, and his effect on the
younger playwright accordingly has been a profound act of liberation” (185).
In the piece “Twilight in Tennessee: The Similar Styles of Anna Deavere
Smith and Tennessee Williams,” Harvey Young seeks to “accept Smith’s style
as distinctively her own, and consider those moments when Williams behaves
and sounds like Smith,” thus allowing for a reading of Williams “through a
contemporary, critical lens . . . with the aim of locating those moments when his
poststructuralist and social activist voice appears” (188). Young acknowledges
that Smith {Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, Los Angeles 1992) and Williams
are a strange combination, but “both embrace a poststructuralist formula to
create a space and presence for the minoritized within their narratives. Within
their fabricated, theatrical worlds, they situate characters who are based upon
real-life individuals, whom the playwrights actually met and, in some cases,
came to know, and, in so doing, blur the lines between artifice and the
everyday” (197).