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16.05.2024

Tennessee Williams and the plastic theatre

per Cristina Llorca

While El zoo de vidre continues on stage, Cristina Llorca, president of #AsSocPerla, shares with us notes on Tennessee Williams and on what he called "plastic theatre".

"Go, said the bird, go, go: Humans
find reality hard to bear.
Past time and future time,
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present."
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets1

Tennessee Williams presents El zoo de vidre as a play of records, with pictorial and sculptural forms, aiming to stage it with a particular use of light - the author refers us to El Greco's religious paintings - and music - a soundtrack with cinematic features -, thus creating an atmosphere characteristic of what he calls plastic theatre, where visual elements are part of the dramaturgy, just as words and ideas are. A vision that seeks to distance itself from mere realism, conceiving all theatrical elements - text, movement, set design, music, costumes, sound, lighting - within a single artistic unity.2 Plastic theatre that aims to bring us closer to the understanding of human fragility and vulnerability.

The plot unfolds in the 1930s, in the USA, in the context of the Great Depression. The author refers to how the Wingfields live in "one of those narrow, cramped, cellular dwelling units that proliferate like mushrooms in overpopulated urban centers of the lower middle class and are symptomatic of the impulse of this sector, the largest in American society and essentially enslaved, to (...) exist and function as a confused mass full of automatism"3 and they try to escape -either physically or through imagination and memories- from the place they are in. The verse "Où sont les neiges d'antan?"4 present in the work, encapsulates one of its central motifs: the link and constant tension between temporal spaces, past, present, and future; the effort to escape the restrictions of time and its demands.

Eliot, T. S. (2010). Quatre Quartets. (Trad. Àlex Susanna). Viena Edicions.
2 Kramer, R. E. (2002). The Sculptural Drama: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre. The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 5, 1-13.
3 Williams, T. (2013). El zoo de cristal. Alba Editorial. [Traducció pròpia].
Ballade des dames du temps jadis de François Villon (segle XV). Podeu trobar la versió musicada del poema per George Brassens

Cristina Llorca
President #AsSocPerla
 

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