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ALICE GRIFFIN. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1995. Pp. xv, 266. $29.95.
Alice Griffin's Understanding Tennessee Williams, the most recent instalment in a growing body of book-length criticism of one of America's signature playwrights, is a very accessible, never pretentious study of the nine play from The Glass Menagerie to The Night of the Iguana -- those which established and secured Williams's place in the American literary canon -- that gives the Williams newcomer a competent introduction to a potentially difficult and certainly complex subject. By analyzing "language, characters, themes, dramatic effects, and staging," Griffin attempts to "call attention to Williams's unique gift for heightened dialogue, which is convincing as speech and at the same time poetic" (xii). However, given that her book is part of Matthew Bruccoli's Understanding Contemporary American Literature series -- which provides, in his words, "guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers" (ix) -- seasoned Williams scholars might want to give this book a miss.
Griffin opens her study with the traditional Williams literary biography, replete with semi-apocryphal stories (which both Williams himself and indiscriminate biographers have helped to perpetuate) surrounding his years in college, his sister Rose's prefrontal lobotomy, and his stint at MGM. Griffin then briefly discusses a few of the one-act and full length plays written between the years 1944 and 1961 -- the years that form the locus of her study -- touching on Baby Doll, one-act plays from 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Period of Adjustment, and Suddenly Last Summer. (I do find it a bit disconcerting that she relegates one of Williams's masterpieces to this chapter.) Griffin next quickly (all within five and one-half pages])...