TV Reviews : ‘Tennessee Williams’: A Fragile Master

The tragedy of Tennessee Williams’ career isn’t fully expressed in the new documentary portrait for the “American Masters” series, “Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage,” but, then, no single television program could fully encapsulate the man’s poetic gifts and colossal self-abuse.

He was the first postwar American playwright to reach stardom, and the first to watch that star crash terribly to Earth. To this day, Williams’ extraordinary string of artistic and commercial triumphs signifies a kind of watermark for the ambitious American writer. His demolition by a hostile press and his seemingly self-indulgent drug and alcohol excesses also signify the American writer’s worst nightmare.

Indeed, the very obsession of the light and dark sides of the human being that course through his best plays extend to his own personality--and celebrity. It makes for a complex, heady brew, and this program takes a few sips of it when you want producer-director Merrill Brockway to chug it all down.

Previous documentaries on Williams, especially one made by Harry Rasky in the late 1970s, traveled much deeper into Williams’ mind--largely because Williams spoke on-camera with a directness of which few writers are capable. In the new film, we can glimpse that directness in a series of brief interview clips (from Mike Wallace in 1958 to Dick Cavett and David Frost in 1970).

But because Williams has been dead 11 years, others must speak for him. Williams is perhaps the only subject on which Gore Vidal is a softy, and he shows it here. Old pal Maureen Stapleton is far more revealing and honest, evincing love, concern and impatience for her gifted, fragile friend. Playwright Edward Albee eloquently offers the playwright’s case, and critic Robert Brustein provides the best insight: Williams’ lyricism stemmed from his ability to let his characters roam free.

While Brockway is very good at visually linking references in key plays such as “The Glass Menagerie,” “Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” to elements from the playwright’s life, the strongest impression left is how well Williams’ work is preserved on film. Long clips from even the lesser-known films, such as “The Fugitive Kind” (his adaptation of “Orpheus Descending” with a virile Marlon Brando and an incandescent Anna Magnani), keep the poetry and passion intact, played out by some of the century’s best actors.

Some of the clips may feel dated, but they testify to how Hollywood was once marginally concerned with putting literary voices on the screen, and how, when a playwright dies, he becomes a filmmaker. Drowning himself in the 1960s in drugs, booze, paranoia and self-pity, Williams couldn’t keep up with the celebrity that Broadway success made possible.

Ironically, the presence of Albee here, flush with the new success of “Three Tall Women,” is a reminder that Williams could have come back had he not risen each morning with the “chemical cocktails” his friends describe. The legacy of Williams is all the fine plays; the tragedy is all the fine plays that never were.

* “Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.