Of post-modern pre-performances: Williams´s late characters and "plastic acting"

In the “Production notes” of The glass menagerie Tennessee Williams calls for a “plastic” theater that would use all theatrical means to make it a visual and total performative art. However, the theatrical productions that contributed to make Williams one of the greatest American playwrights staged the plays in a realistic style which also appears in the actors’ style of acting. Most of the actors, indeed, were trained in a modern and realistic American technique. The tradition of realistic acting invites actors to build their character from a psychological basis that helps to explain and identify the character. To what extent did the realistic style of acting help establish Williams’s theater in the category of psychological and naturalist theater and contribute to misunderstanding his later and more subversive plays? How can acting help prepare actors and spectators to the total and “plastic” theater Williams imagined? Williams’s late work radically subverts the realistic order and brings into play unrealistic, elusive, even grotesque characters that require the actor to approach them in a new way. This article proposes to reflect on the responsibility of the actor and the possibility of rehabilitating the late texts of Williams in practice. The aim is to study the texts’ new and post-modern imaginary and to study their practical implications. The late plays’ subversive and anti-psychological body, the unfathomable characters call for new bodies on stage that incorporate post-modern reflections into their very practice.