BY MICHAEL KEARNS

Tennessee's Legacies: Playing in L.A.

In ways both monumental and minute, it is the tortured soul of Tennessee Williams that fuels the creativity of many queer theater artists. It was Williams who granted us permission to explore the gay male psyche in all its florid emotionality; it was Williams who eavesdropped on our inner voices and external exploits, then dared to record them. Even at a time when innuendo trumped veritableness, the playwright opened the closet door of the American theater with an amassment of plays that had homo written all over them.

Williams' emphatic poetic prose is thriving on a number of Los Angeles stages and not only in plays written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. In addition to a number of local revivals (The Glass Menagerie at Actors Co-op, Crossley Theatres and The Night of the Iguana at A Noise Within) as well as recently discovered work (The Lost Plays of Tennessee Williams at the Davidson/Valenti Theatre, Gay & Lesbian Center), Williams' mighty legacy includes what he has passed on to gay writers like James Carroll Pickett and myself.

Southern Gothic is a label that could be used to describe Pickett's Dream Man, a one-man play that shares the twisted sensibilities of Williams' world. Written in 1985, Dream Man exposes the animus of a man who is as demoralized as any of Williams's protagonists. The character of Christopher is a manifestation of Pickett's pain, an ancestral ache that gay artists have yet to quell.

Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911 and died in a New York hotel room in 1983, choking on an eyedrop bottle cap, a demise likely exacerbated by drugs and alcohol. Pickett was born in Kentucky in 1949 and died in Los Angeles of AIDS in 1994. Beyond their Southern roots, the playwrights shared the angst of being queer boys with archetypical parents: father in absentia and mother in a state of madness. Writing became their obsession and their medication, a respite from the horror that always threatened to engulf them.

The very notion of legacy—something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor, according to the dictionary—is luminously at play here. Williams bequeathed the energy to rip into the shredded hearts of sexually-charged gay male characters to Pickett, and Pickett granted the same gift to me. I learned to write for the theater from performing Pickett's play hundreds of times.

My new play, Comeback, references Williams with respectful abandon, beginning with the name of the lead character, Wayne Chance (the inversion of Chance Wayne, the character originated by Paul Newman on Broadway and on screen in Sweet Bird of Youth). However, the role that I play—a dilapidated porn star bent on making a comeback—is more akin to the play's washed-up movie diva, Alexandra del Lago, from the 1959 play that boldly incorporated venereal disease into the storyline. Yes, that's 1959.

Venereal disease provides the leitmotif of both Dream Man and Comeback. Even though the plays are separated by 22 years, and neither play is about AIDS per se, both are draped in the plague's shimmering black curtain.

When I saw The Lost Plays, I was fascinated by the eerily similar tones in plot shared by Mister Paradise and Comeback. Even though the plays were written a half a century apart, the human connection between the hopeful young person and the grizzled has-been strikes similar cords. Mister Paradise and Wayne Chance, like so many of Williams' characters, are dying in a state of agonizing loneliness awaiting the arrival of an angel. However, as Mister P says, “Gabriel has not yet blown his horn.”

Dying, literally and figuratively, vivifies Dream Man and Comeback. The leading men flirt with death and rebirth, perniciousness and redemption. They are doomed from the first scene until the last spoken line, but we watch them because they reflect the darkest incarnations of ourselves. Like the Rev. Shannon and Laura and Stanley and Blanche and Amanda and Chance, Christopher and Wayne are shattered by life's immoral cruelties, clinging to life with bloodied fingernails, as twinkling lights of hope flicker seductively but never really save them.

It is the complexity of Williams' gay soul that infects his characters and the characters created by those of us who bask in his genius.