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Williams is an electrifying scenewright, because his people are the sort who make scenes, explosively and woundingly. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy jerks the crutch out from under his son Brick's arm and sends him sprawling in agony; a few minutes later Brick kicks the life out of Big Daddy by telling the old man that he is dying of cancer. In an age that suppresses its tantrums as impolite, part of Williams' cathartic appeal for an audience is to allow it to act out its hostilities vicariously. Above all, Williams is a master of mood. Sometimes it is hot, oppressive, simmering with catastrophe (Streetcar, Cat); at other times it is sad, autumnal, elegiac (Menagerie, Iguana). To achieve it, he uses the full orchestra of theatrical instruments: setting, lighting, music, plus the one impalpable, indispensable gift, the genius for making an audience forget that any other world exists except the one onstage.
A Dark & Narrow Vision. No amount of technical skill can make a major playwright. He must have a vision of life. Williams has one. It is dark, it is narrow, it lacks the fuller resources of faith and love, but it is desperately honest. In the plays, it springs intuitively from the playwright's unconscious. Says Williams: "There is a horror in things, a horror at heart of the meaninglessness of existence. Some people cling to a certain philosophy that is handed down to them and which they accept. Life has a meaning if you're bucking for heaven. But if heaven is a fantasy, we are in this jungle with whatever we can work out for ourselves. It seems to me that the cards are stacked against us. The only victory is how we take it."
Although this sounds very much like Hemingway's "grace under pressure," there is a vast difference between the two writers. Hemingway's winners took nothing, but he was for the winner; Williams' special compassion is for "the people who are not meant to win," the lost, the odd, the strange, the difficult people—fragile spirits, who lack talons for the jungle. If Williams wins an audience's sympathy for these people, it may be because he speaks to a common condition: loneliness. All his characters yearn to break out of the cell of the lonely self, to touch and reach another person. "Hell is yourself," says Williams. "When you ignore other people completely, that is hell." The revelation towards which all of Williams' plays aspire is the moment of self-transcendence—"when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person."
Four Who Live Through. The Night of the Iguana is Williams' greatest play of self-transcendence. Esthetically, it is a comeback from recent plays (Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer), in which he seemed to confuse assaults on the nerves with cries from the heart. Instead of willful self-destruction, the characters in Iguana are bent on living through and beyond despair.
Four of them gather on the