The oblique morality of Tennessee Williams

Last Friday, I saw three one act plays by Tennessee Williams. They were performed at an old mansion in the French Quarter here in New Orleans as part of the Tennessee Williams Festival. Each play, set in a hotel, was performed in a different room of the house. The rooms were small, and so there were times when the actors—never more than four and usually two—were moving about right next to you. It was an enlightening evening.

The plays are Green Eyes, The Traveling Companion and Mr. Paradise. It's not easy to find out much about them. They were published in 2005 and 2008 respectively by the estimable house, New Directions, in volumes of TW's one-acts.  It appears these plays were written much earlier, but, as I say, it's not easy, even on the Internet, to determine that.
                                                                        

In any case, Williams' themes abound in these short plays. As does the characteristic florid, pained way his characters speak, using words that often deflect the truth but that, in the end, do not deny it. You can see that most readily in Mr. Paradise, where the landlady of a rooming house in the French Quarter demands the rent from two washed-up residents. The first is an alcoholic woman who goes on about a rich man she knows who owns a rubber plantation in Brazil. The second is a seedy-looking, dirty-robe-wearing, gut-hanging older man named Anthony Paradise who, we later learn, is—or was— a poet. When the landlady starts attacking the woman, who is obviously lying about the rubber plantation and probably about everything else, Mr. Paradise rises to defend her. In a long speech, he says to the relentless landlady, suppose it's true that there is no rubber plantation, and suppose I don't have any novel I'm working on as I claim I am—suppose all of it's a lie—why must you crush this fabrication? What difference does it make what kind of subterfuge we choose to hide ourselves behind?

One of the things I admire most about Tennessee Williams and for what I'm most grateful, is his understanding of the obliqueness of morality. Yes, there is black and white sometimes. The greatest sin is deliberate cruelty, he said, and at times, there is a plain line between yes and no. But there is also the kind of lie that has nothing to do with cruelty and which only serves to help that person through the day, the hour, the minute. It's a scenario that protects him or her from the glare of that harsh uncovered light bulb and which preserves that most delicate thing—dignity—that should never be stripped from us.                                                                     

In A Streetcar Named Desire, when Mitch calls out Blanche for all the lies she told him about her past, she says, "Never inside! I never lied in my heart!"

Tennessee, let me have the courage to protect those who never lie in their heart.