Reviewing a series of productions for the New York Times on December 15, 1988, under the title, “In London: Taking Williams Seriously,” Frank Rich makes an insightful comment about America's most influential playwright five years after his freakish, accidental death in 1983:

Rich's observation could be extended to the better part of Europe, of course, where the most serious rediscoveries of Williams's work seem centered. Much of the neglect of Williams in the United States has indeed been fueled by preoccupations with the playwright's biography, his tempestuous life and sensational, even clownish public and media appearances, all of which often overshadowed his art. His Memoirs in particular, published in 1975 and admittedly written for the cash advance, was exceptionally candid about his sexuality and love life and so did little to redeem his falling reputation. On the other side of the Atlantic, Williams's early plays were quickly performed by allies and in newly liberated European countries, including the European premiere of The Glass Menagerie in Stockholm in 1946 (although Sweden was nominally neutral during World War II) then in London in 1948; A Streetcar Named Desire opened in most major European capitals, including Rome, London and Paris, by 1949.1 These were subsequently followed by “the critically controversial yet financially successful Paris production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof a decade later” (Gindt, 2013, 19). In a Britain still struggling to emerge from its Victorian legacy, Williams's more sexually charged work often appeared in heavily censored productions, and early publications tended to follow those sanitized versions of his work.

Something of a dandy drawn to the tuxedo life, the glitz of luxury hotels and room service, Tennessee Williams unleashed a more slovenly, gritty, workingclass modernity in his theatrical revolution in which undergarments grew emblematic. Williams's images of postwar masculinity would develop through the work of his protégé, William Inge, continue on the stage and extend into the iconography of film at least through James Dean, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Sam Shepard as the distinctions between stage and celluloid blurred into performing arts. Such images became dominant in a mode casually called Southern Gothic, generally emblematized by the working man's depressionera uniform, rivetted overalls or “waist overalls.” Such anti- fashion began to emerge as high fashion in an evolution from cheap, durable emblems of labor to unisexual, shabby- chic fashion statements by century's end (even as fashion and durability are often at cross purposes), and runways, too, became performative spaces as street style merged with, overlapped and became indistinguishable (price tags excepted) from high style. Once foundational, the mere “under- shirt,” the form- fitting, stretch T- shirt, an “unmentionable” at one point, became an emblem, often in tandem with “overalls,” or “blue jeans,” not only of working- class vitality if not virility but also of rugged, middle- class, heightened (mostly white) masculinity as well. These postwar images extended through the youth rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s, into the subsequent tie dye era of the 1960s and 1970s, the grunge of the 1980s and 1990s, to the general shift in American public appearance from suits to sweats, from neckties to tie dyes, to their eventual co- option by corporate America; that is, the emergence, in what is here called T- Shirt Modernism, of athletic wear and training gear as acceptable, even fashionable, public dress and as emblems of masculine virility.

Tennessee Williams emerged from obscurity and poverty suddenly, almost overnight on December 26, 1944, when the Lyric Theatre in Chicago opened The Glass Menagerie.txt. That opening catapulted the impoverished, struggling writer to stardom.1 Williams called it “a memory play,” which he began working on in June of 1943 as a story about a young girl not unlike his sister Rose, with whom he was very close, who would finally undergo a highly experimental prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 to treat her worsening mental disorder. The barbaric, “ice pick” procedure designed to insure her docility left her institutionalized for the remainder of her life. A rejected screenplay at MGM studios, “The Gentleman Caller,” and a short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (published in 1948), featuring a glass- collecting introvert named Laura who takes refuge in repeatedly listening to old music on a 1920s Victrola, were the play's prototypes. These became, then, in subsequent years, The Glass Menagerie, Rose Williams transformed to the equally fragile Laura Winfield, herself the prized unicorn in her magic kingdom, her collection of glass figurines. As Williams suggests in his notes to the play, Laura (Rose) “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf “ (cited in the New York Times obituary of Rose). The story and play set the tone for a life's work that would be personal, autobiographical, and more poetical and symbolic than realistic or naturalistic. The play's staging was precedent breaking, featuring slide projections and nonrealistic, often dreamlike lighting and was finally more about memories of failed fatherhood (or parenthood) than about the failures of capitalist economics, although the latter was not without pertinence in an America still emerging from the Great Depression.

Tennessee Williams may never have been the playwright we thought he was, or, at least, there has always been a Tennessee Williams we knew and understood (or thought we did) and a Williams we didn’t. That division may be between early and late Williams, or between the Actors Studio Williams and a more poetical, lyrical Williams, or between, say, the Williams of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Williams of The Two- Character Play. He was, it seems, always more lyrically Chekov than grittily Zola. His sin, if sin at all, was to have peaked too soon, as Gordon Rogoff reminds us, and thereby to have raised expectations in his audiences and among those handlers on whom theater relies, often strangers upon whose kindness Williams, too, depended (Rogoff, 2000, 59).

Opening a roundtable discussion on Williams's late plays in 2002,1 however, Annette Saddik outlines a continuous thread between Williams's acknowledged successes and what we have come to think of as the later or lesser- known efforts:

“Becoming Beckett” is a designation neither of disparagement nor of belatedness. It suggests, further, neither a creative decline nor a character deficiency. It is rather an expression of one of the creative multitudes that comprised Tennessee Williams, who was several. Its emphasis is on “becoming,” to suggest, after Gilles Deleuze, an immanence, a continuous creative exploration and development, a process that Williams expected directors and actors to continue. Beckett is used here as an image of theatrical experiment and as a recognizable instance of such becoming. A revolutionary theatrical gesture like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for instance, ought not freeze its author's talents, nor condemn an artist to a career of devising sequels, although sequels can themselves break new ground, as Beckett demonstrated with his follow- up theatrical enterprise, Endgame. Beckett considered this sequel to be, on one level, the story of Vladimir and Estragon at a later stage of their existence. Terence Killeen changes the terms of Beckett's equation, observing in the Irish Times during the 2020 pandemic lockdown that “Endgame is what would now be called a ‘spin- off,’ “ and, further, “Hamm is a more reduced Pozzo: by the second act of Godot, Pozzo is already blind and barely able to walk; here in Endgame he is confined irrevocably to a chair.” One can quibble with Killeen's easy allegory and offer, instead, the position that Endgame broke sharply with Godot, as it turned theater back on itself. Beckett's theater followed his narrative art toward its famed self- reflexivity, but one might say as well that both readings (or viewings) pertain. Like Beckett’s, much of Williams's later work is theater as theater, theater as subject of theater.

In 1997 Apple computers launched an advertising campaign (in print and on television) that entreated us to ‘Think Different’, and Samuel Beckett was one of Apple's icons. Avoiding Apple's solecism, we might modify the appeal to say that Other Becketts is a call to think differently as well, in this case about Beckett's work, to question, that is, even the questions we ask about it. Other Becketts, then, is a series of monographs focused on alternative, unexplored, or under-explored approaches to the work of Samuel Beckett, not a call for novelty per se, but a call to examine afresh those of Beckett's interests that were more arcane than mainstream, interests that might be deemed quirky or strange, and those of his works less thoroughly explored critically and theoretically, the late prose and drama, say, or even the poetry or criticism. Volumes might cover (but are not restricted to) any of the following: unusual illnesses or neurological disorders (the ‘duck foot, goose foot’ of First Love, akathisia or the invented duck's disease or panpygoptosis of Miss Dew in Murphy, proprioception, or its disturbance, in Not I, perhaps, or other unusual neurological lapses among Beckett's creatures, from Watt to the Listener of That Time); mathematical peculiarities (irrational numbers, factorials, Fibonacci numbers or sequences, or non-Euclidian approaches to geometry); linguistic failures (from Nominalism to Mauthner, say); citations of or allusions to contrarian aesthetic philosophers working in a more or less irrationalist tradition (Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze, among others), or in general ‘the simple games that time plays with space’. Alternative approaches would be of interest as well, with foci on objects, animals, cognitive or memory issues, and the like.

In 1997 Apple computers launched an advertising campaign (in print and on television) that entreated us to ‘Think Different’, and Samuel Beckett was one of Apple's icons. Avoiding Apple's solecism, we might modify the appeal to say that Other Becketts is a call to think differently as well, in this case about Beckett's work, to question, that is, even the questions we ask about it. Other Becketts, then, is a series of monographs focused on alternative, unexplored or under-explored approaches to the work of Samuel Beckett, not a call for novelty per se, but a call to examine afresh those of Beckett's interests that were more arcane than mainstream, interests that might be deemed quirky or strange, and those of his works less thoroughly explored critically and theoretically, the late prose and drama, say, or even the poetry or criticism. Volumes might cover (but are not restricted to) any of the following: unusual illnesses or neurological disorders (the ‘duck foot, goose foot’ of First Love, akathisia or the invented duck's disease or panpygoptosis of Miss Dew in Murphy, proprioception, or its disturbance, in Not I, perhaps, or other unusual neurological lapses among Beckett's creatures, from Watt to the Listener of That Time); mathematical peculiarities (irrational numbers, factorials, Fibonacci numbers or sequences, or non-Euclidian approaches to geometry); linguistic failures (from Nominalism to Mauthner, say); citations of or allusions to contrarian aesthetic philosophers working in a more or less irrationalist tradition (Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze, among others); or in general ‘the simple games that time plays with space’. Alternative approaches would be of interest as well, with foci on objects, animals, cognitive or memory issues, and the like.

Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of re-making himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright, to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of the Second World War, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt, and En attendant Godot between Malone meurt and L'Innommable. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired attention he had struggled so hard to achieve barbed with threats to his art (and even perhaps to his self-image). Enthusiastic about his anti-boulevard play, Eleutheria, and eager for its publication and performance, for example, he would finally repudiate it, withdrawing it from publication after the staging of Godot, finding it in later years impossible either to revise or to translate even for his long-time publisher, Barney Rosset, refusing again to have it published, at least in his lifetime, and finally, if fundamentally by proxy, prohibiting any staging, apparently in perpetuity. It was, however, a play central to Beckett's theatrical reinvention as it, almost literally, swept the stage clear of both boulevard and naturalistic debris and so bared the stage for what would become, in English, Waiting for Godot.