'Orpheus Descending' Among a Smoking Summer of Tennessee William's Works

As the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the monumental 1954 "Brown Vs. Board of Education" this month, it serves to remind us that during the height of the reactionary era of the McCarthy witch hunts and "Ozzie and Harriett"-style suburban indifference – during that popularly-perceived social blight known as the 1950s – there were many influences at play that were indispensable for and sewed the seeds of the radical 1960s and beyond.

Among those seminal influences was playwright Tennessee Williams.

After the Civil War, the United States' victory over domination domestically by agrarian slave-driven plantation economics opened the flood gates for the Industrial Revolution. Within less than a decade, the great Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876 displayed the harbingers of cultural and technological change so radical that it made the still-fresh events of the Civil War seem like ancient history.

As America boomed forward with railroads and steel factories, her preoccupation with flexing the full potential of her economic strength, and then the necessary, if costly, challenges it necessarily presented on a global stage through two world wars and a setback known as the Great Depression in the 20th century, left the social revolution launched by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the victory over slavery on the back burner, at least for a time.

Still, women were the first to step forward with force to demand a share of promise of equality cast in the nation's founding documents and affirmed by Lincoln in the heat of wartime, achieving the right to vote by the 1920s.

But it was really the horrors of Nazi Germany, and the lesson learned for all in war-mobilized America about just how cherished the nation's values of equality, justice and fair play were, that charged the U.S. to catch up with its broader social justice mandate after the war.

The appreciation of the importance and talents of Tennessee Williams was among the factors at the forefront of this. As the legendary Branch Rickey broke the radical barrier in baseball with the introduction of Jackie Robinson to the major leagues, Williams' plays, The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire, emerged just after the war as the first among a string of important stage contributions over the subsequent decade and a half that, among other things, introduced the world in a most sensuous fashion to the racist brutality of life in American south.

Novelist William Faulkner did much the same with compelling stories such as Intruder in the Dust and others, while in Hollywood, Bing Crosby brought Louis Armstrong from a smoky Chicago nightclub to the attention of the entire nation using the emerging medium of the television variety show.

In countless large and small ways, it had become the nation's time to take the promise embedded in the Emancipation Proclamation and make it real at last. That was the framework for "Brown Vs. Board of Education," and the desegregation and voter registration struggles that were launched and spilled over into the 1960s and the era of Martin Luther King.

Williams fired the energies of young idealists, socially conscious and devouring his works on college campuses and theatre venues across the land, to launch the Freedom Rides into the racist cultural backwashes of the south, confronting the brutes they'd become familiar with in Williams' plays in often violent and deadly pitched battles to secure the Afro-American right to vote.

What more can I say about my admiration for Tennessee Williams? He's seldom discussed in such terms these days because his works are perpetuated in a cultural milieu that too often insists on "arts for arts sake," and views the impact of art on the shaping of social values with distrust if not contempt. It's simply "un-cool."

Notwithstanding that, I was among the many back then who took a lot, in the terms I've just written, from Tennessee Williams, and his stark uncompromising reality, to buoy the idealism in ourselves that we saw in the most hopeful, if hopeless, of, especially, his heroines, his social outcasts and children. It set us in motion.

Perhaps it's more fitting than we know that Washington, D.C., is being flooded with a revival of Tennessee Williams works this summer. In a time when new offensives are called for to defend civil liberties against Patriot Act excesses and the Williams-esque brutality depicted at the Abu Ghraib prison, Williams, his characters and his times ring all too familiar.

Orpheus Descending, at the Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage through June 27, was written at the height of Williams' powers in 1957. In its Broadway premiere on March 21, 1957, the play's lead role of Val Xavier was played by future Academy Award winner Cliff Robertson.

Both dramatic and operatic versions of Streetcar Named Desire are currently being performed at the Kennedy Center, where a bundled set of shorter Williams plays, called Five By Ten, concluded a run earlier this month.

In mid-June, A Distant Country Called Youth and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof open at the Kennedy Center, followed by The Glass Menagerie in mid-July.

They're all worth a thoughtful look.