BOOK REVIEWS
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Harry J. Elam, Jr., in “Theatre of the Gut: Tennessee Williams and SuzanLori Parks,” discusses Parks’s play In the Blood in relation to Williams’s Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof. For both of these playwrights, Elam maintains, “one pathway to
the gut in their dramas was through the ‘gutter,’ through the depiction and
disclosure of dirty little secrets, of sexual indiscretions and
transgressions . . . Clearly, sex and sexuality operate in Parks and Williams at
the gut level” (201-202). In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Elam notes “family secrets,
questions of sexual impropriety and deviance lurk behind closed doors.
Previously hidden truths are exposed and reverberate loudly as what constitutes
the normal and the prurient are called into question” (202). Likewise, “in Parks’s
In the Blood, the confession of sexual proclivities compels the audience to
contest the purported morality of the social order and to reconsider who is the
victimizer and the victim. Form functions as the internal logic of content in these
two plays as Williams and Parks challenge heterosexual normativity and the
legitimacy of family values” (202). The final piece in The Influence o f
Tennessee Williams is a brief original interview with Edward Albee by David A.
Crespy in which Albee speaks about the particulars of Williams’s influence on
him and his work.
Each chapter length essay in The Influence o f Tennessee Williams is a
discrete entity in its own right, complete with its own set of endnotes and works
cited lists. A comprehensive index also facilitates serious study of Williams and
any of the other American playwrights he is associated with. If there is any fault
with The Influence o f Tennessee Williams, it lies in the copyediting/proofreading
of the volume itself. Though by no means a major problem, there are a few
surprising instances in the text where needed punctuation (such as commas,
apostrophes, and question marks) is missing, and some words are misspelled
and/or used inappropriately. Two examples: on page 80, in the phrase “she
herself frequency affirms,” frequency should be frequently, while on the very
next page, the phrase “Kennedy valotized a Williams’s work” simply does not
make sense given that valotized should be valorized and the indefinite article
preceding Williams’s should have been eliminated. Nevertheless, The Influence
o f Tennessee Williams belongs in every literary drama collection in order to
serve the needs of students, specialists, and aficionados alike.
Anthony Guy Patricia, University of Nevada, Las Vegas