Comparative Drama

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater by S. E. Gontarski proposes to come "to grips with the Williams we thought we knew, as he grew, developed and reconfigured himself into a playwright we didn't" (7). Gontarski's main argument is that Williams's continued popularity owes much to Europe's recognition of his experimental nature, present even in his early plays, a point that American theatre largely missed or ignored in the 40s and 50s (as it had locked Williams into a naturalistic mode to better work through its own cultural preoccupations with sexuality) and purposefully excoriated in the 60s and later (when it had labeled Williams derivative of the European avant-garde). It is a bold, albeit not entirely new, approach to reexamining the classic Williams plays and revisiting his vilified late work within a contemporary Euro-American theatre scene. While there are certainly moments of original insight and astute analysis, the book's over-ambitious attempt to capture so large a portrait on so small a canvas, and its infelicitous efforts to force the various arguments of eight previously published articles into one encompassing thesis, ultimately render it more patchwork than monograph.

A rather thin book, comprised of three chapters, an introduction and an afterword, Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater covers a lot of ground in Williams's theatrical career on both sides of the Atlantic, from early to contemporary productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Clothes for a Summer Hotel. In the opening pages, entitled "Saint Tennessee: An Introduction," Gontarski establishes his thesis that Williams repeatedly attempted "to refashion himself amid the vortices of changing sexual mores, including the redrafting of masculinities and the queering of theater, the struggle for a literate, literary theater and the place of the theatrical experience in contemporary culture" (7). In defending that claim, Gontarski aims to "continu[e] and exten[d] the reappraisal of Tennessee Williams" that previous research on his post-1960 image had initiated (notably through the work of David Savran, Annette Saddik and Linda Dorff) by refocusing Williams's work "against the larger fabric of cultural change in the post World War II era in which he came to prominence" (7).

Chapter 1, "T-shirt Modernism and Performed Masculinities: The Theatrical Refashionings of Tennessee Williams and William Inge," details Gontarski's intriguing twist on the paradigm shift in masculine semiotics in the U.S. from a sartorial perspective, an echo of Jacqueline O'Connor's 2008 work, "'Feathers and Furs': Dressing and the Performance of Identity in A Streetcar Named Desire." Undergarment companies, such as Hanes and Jockey, were at the fore of the movement's push to replace the formal suit as a masculine signifier with more [End Page 548] casual wear, such as blue jeans, T-shirts and, when The North Face and Nike expanded their market influence, athletic and outdoor wear (9-10). He argues convincingly here that Williams's Broadway productions, namely Streetcar's T-shirt sporting Brando, had played no small role in sexualizing working-class masculinity onstage. While Gontarski rightly points out the earlier efforts of U.S. dramatists O'Neill, Rice, and Treadwill to celebrate the working-class male, he glosses over the role Hollywood had played in sexualizing that American male, such as when Clark Gable stripped onscreen in the 1934 film It Happened One Night to reveal a T-shirt-free bare chest, apocryphally prompting a slump in undergarment sales for men by 75 percent in the U.S. Arguably, Hollywood's impact on the masculine paradigm shift in the U.S. was much stronger and widespread than Broadway's.

Gontarski next applies this T-shirt Modernism theory to Streetcar. He innovatively argues that sporting underclothes became socially acceptable (and sexually defining) for men in the U.S. once the...