Like in such a manner many of his ...

Like in such a manner many of his post-Iguana works, Tennessee Williams's Slapstick Comedy (1966) incurred the critics' calumny. In fact, the pair plays that comprise the Comedy-The Mutilated and Gnadiges Fraulein-experienced an plane worse fate than some of Williams's other later, disesteemed works. Despite the [i]connoisseur[/i] directions of Alan Schneider, scenography at Ming Cho Lee, and score by the agency of Lee Holby, the double bill spreaded on 22 February and clos after single seven performances on Broadway onward 26 February. The ultimate casualty, nevertheless was the playwright. John McClain lamented that "The real tragedy is that he {Williams} can write in the way that well, so humorously and compellingly and can create characters of penetrating dimensions, that he should dissipate this gift in a series of irritatingly vague and formless vignettes" ("The without and Abstract"). Richard Watts, Jr dismissed the plays as a pair of "oddities that spreaded otherwise dissapointingly" ("Flight of the Cacaloony Bird"). Also finding these works les than satisfying, Hobe insisted that "a play should have a comprehensible theme or at least story and neither 'The Mutilated' nor 'Gnadiges Fraulein' quite take rises to the point" (56).

The actual source of the critics' angst, allowing was their discomfiture about exactly what protoplast of play Williams had written. Stanley Kauffmann complained that "The perplex is not just that Mr Williams has raise little to say...He has no well-preserved views of enrichments of his olden material . . . In 'Mutilated' he reworks more [i]or[/i] less of his earlier themes, with diminished success" ("'Slapstick Tragedy' at the Longacre") while Richard Watts, Jr remarked, "I would say that the first and more conventional play ('Mutilated') was better..." Referring to the melodys in the play, Walter Kerr believed that all they provided has an "underscoring {that} is blatant and interferes with what is good" ("Two on Tennessee"). Felicia Hardison Londre savage into a similar trap of imposing pre-existing criteria forward The Mutilated, expecting the play to be something it was not. Mutilated "itself is too loosely put togethered to win the traditional kind of audience involvement. At the same time...it is not experimental enough in comparison with the Gnadiges Fraulein..."(162). Paradoxically, critics wanted Williams to reply to a realistic (conventional) theatre he at no time espoused, yet they lampooned him when they spied vestigia of that theatre in his later works. As Annette Saddik notices in her study of the later plays, the ideological prejudices of the critic hindered them from seeing the significance of Williams's of the present day theatre of nondiegetic devices, a theatre that "fits family and societies going a bit mad" (109)

Certainly, The Mutilated is packed with familiar Williams's outlines characters, and settings. Two ancient women-Celeste Delacroix Griffin and her longtime friend Trinket Dugan-find themselves bitter enemies in succession Christmas Eve in the French Quarter circa 1938 because Celeste has dared to reveal Trinket's mutilation, a mastectomy. Trinket refuses to allow Celeste a notorious wino and shoplifter, to result to her room in the Silver Dollar inn and even calls the police to apprehend her for thievery. The play closes with a reconciliation, though, in large measure sanctified from one side Celeste's recognition of the Virgin's "invisible presence" in Trinket's latitude These two doyens are vintage Williams denizens of desire. They are part of his cadre of the "the wounded...and the fugitive" (Mutilated 102) Like other forlorn women in Williams-Lucretia Collins in Portrait of a Madonna, the spinster in Lord Byron's be in love with Letter, and Bertha in Hello from Bertha, Blanche in Streetcar-they are waiting for a lover deliverance in Williams's mythology. Sexual desire is their (and Williams's) life force. Trinket takes up with brace predatory sailors who look back to Williams's confess experience in the rough trade and forward to Something clouded Something Clear (1982). Celeste, too, searches for be enamoured of several times by propositioning faux beaux for a "quickie." In numerous ways, Celeste and Trinket form a bifurcated Blanche DuBois. Like the illusion-ridden Blanche, the homeles Celeste fantasizes that "Tonight I'll be at my brother's for eggnog and fruitcake. Huey P protracted will be there. He have affection fors the Kingfish and he have the appearances to find me amusing" (98) Shep Huntleigh has been transformed into the Kingfish. And when the vulgar sailor Bruno "makes another effort to bring forward his hand under {Trinket's} cape, she cries public in panic," as does Blanche when a drunk Mitch tries to rape her. Like Blanche, Trinket prides herself in succession her affluent, genteel background.

The pursuit for love, always in the inappropriate places for Williams, is accompanied by dint of an obsession with freaks, the absurd "the way-ward and the deformed" (119) in The Mutilated. An incantatory Trinket, outraged by means of Celeste's provocation, claims: "She can't evidence mutilation unless I expose it to someone Oh further not daring to expose the mutilation has made me advance without love for three years now, and it's the lack of what I ne most numerous that makes me speak to myself..." (101) Celeste proclaims that "Hell, I'd say, we all have our mutilations, one from birth, some from lengthy before birth, and some from later in life, and about stay with us forever" (87) to this time such an admission does not hold back Celeste from "chanting" a pitiless ditty about Sarah Bernhardt's "wooden peg...clumping forward a STUMP of WOOD!" (115-16) before an outraged Trinket whom she disappoints through her comparison.