Poetic Realism
In American theater naturalism is generally accepted as the de facto One True Theater. How deep this prejudice runs is often surprising but always painful. Consider the career of Tennessee Williams. Known for two of the most famous plays in American theater, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was acclaimed in 1962 as “the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world” by Time magazine. Within seven years, that same magazine was putting him on the front cover with the headline “Played Out?” and in their sister magazine, Life, Stefan Kanfer was accusing the playwright of infantile regression. His later plays were, with the possible exception of Small Craft Warnings, critical and commercial disasters.
What happened in those seven years to take Williams’ reputation from zenith to nadir so swiftly was that his plays began to abandon all pretense of naturalism–or, as people like to call it “realism.” Tennessee Williams built his reputation on works that critics and audiences regularly called “lyrical” and “poetic” yet always, above all, “realistic.” To turn away from realism was seen as the greatest heresy. The later plays of Williams, by which critics mean anything after Night of the Iguana, are primarily non-realistic. Therefore by conventional wisdom they are disastrous.
Witness Walter Kerr writing a personal letter to Williams to warn him against ever leaving the sacred grove of realism:
What worries me about Camino Real is not what you want to say but the direction in which you, as an artist, are moving. You’re heading toward the cerebral; don’t do it. What makes you an artist of the first rank is your intuitive gift for penetrating reality, without junking reality in the process; an intuitive artist starts with the recognizable surface of things and burrows in. Don’t swap this for the conscious, rational processes of the analyst, the symbolist, the abstract thinker.
In other words: don’t dare give us your thoughts, give us your illusions. We love superficial resemblances and above all we love recognizability. This calls to mind George Jean Nathan’s elegant quip that realism is the doctrine that what you already know (“the recognizable surface of things”) is inherently superior to what you don’t (analysis, symbols, abstraction).
Now Walter Kerr is of course one of the greatest Philistines in theater history but even more sensitive critics than he have offered the same caution. Brooks Atkinson, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman have all said similar things. Their consensus at the time, which remains largely the consensus today, is that Williams is one of the finest writers of dramatic prose, gifted with an ear for the poetry of realistic dialogue–and he should stick to realism.
Yet poetry is not realistic. Poetry relies upon symbols and where it does not draw on symbols, it creates them. As a poet himself, Williams knew this. In truth even Williams’ earlier plays often skew away from realism toward the conscious and the symbolist. Even the supposed realism of Streetcar wraps up ever so deftly with one of the dumbest bits of symbolism in modern theater. It is these symbolist moments that people find “lyrical” or “poetic” about much of Williams’ drama, but those symbols exist simultaneously alongside a nominal realism. The later plays abandon this formula. They dance on a permeable border between realism and non-realism, and often step (as Camino Real does) completely over the line.
http://www.seattlestar.net/2012/07/poetic-realism-vs-realistic-poetry-suddenly-last-summer/
