The evening tribute to Tennessee Williams besides being filled with noted performers also featured Thomas Keith, the Tennessee Williams editor at New Directions, and two contemporary American playwrights John Guare and John Patrick Shanley.
John Guare, known for his plays Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves, and Landscape of the Body, read an untitled Tennessee Williams’ poem which begins, “As I stood in my room tonight…” In the poem Williams witnesses from his seventeenth floor window the spirit of Hart Crane striding across the Brooklyn Bridge followed by Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe — the “Unholy Trinity.” Williams dances with his muses and is “filled with running warmth.”
Thomas Keith followed with a reading of Tennessee Williams poem, “Life Story.” Keith reads the poem most matter-of-factly about what one does and talks about “After you’ve been to bed together for the first time…” Naturally you talk about yourselves and light a cigarette. Keith continues with the audience entranced by the predictability of the moment, and then Keith delivers the unpredictable but perfectly logical last line of the poem which ignites the room with laughter.
A very animated John Patrick Shanley presented next. Shanley, a playwright, a screenwriter and a movie director, conjured Tennessee Williams from his personal recollections and influence on his work. Shanley reminded us that Tennessee Williams was not perfect in life or in his writings. Shanley was brilliant, and I hope one day soon he shares his presentation in an essay.
