Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennessee Williams

First published: 1959

First produced: 1956, in Coral Gables, Florida (early version); 1959, at the Martin Beck Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: A fictional Gulf coast town called St. Cloud

Principal Characters:

• Chance Wayne, an unsuccessful actor, a gigolo
• Princess Kosmonopolis, an aging actor
• Boss Finley, the local political boss
• Tom Junior, his son
• Heavenly Finley, the daughter of Boss Finley
• Aunt Nonnie, her aunt
• Miss Lucy, the mistress of Boss Finley
• Scudder, a young doctor, ally of Boss Finley
• The Heckler, a protester against Boss Finley
• Fly, a waiter at the hotel

The Play

Sweet Bird of Youth opens on Easter morning in the bedroom of an old-fashioned grand hotel, the Royal Palms. Chance Wayne rises from bed, where Princess Kosmonopolis (the alias of actor Alexandra Del Lago) is sleeping uneasily. Fly comes to the door with coffee and recognizes Chance, who has just returned to his native St. Cloud. Fly leaves, but immediately another voice is heard outside the door; it is Scudder, who enters and warns Chance that he is unwelcome in St. Cloud because he disgraced Heavenly Finley. Chance says he will stay until he can get Heavenly to leave with him.

Scudder leaves as Princess awakes from a stupor of alcohol and drugs. She does not remember how she got to St. Cloud or who Chance is. As she struggles to her senses Chance explains that he accompanied her as she fled from another state, where she had attended the disastrous premiere of a film with which she had hoped to make a comeback. As they talk, they resume drinking and smoking hashish. Unbeknownst to Princess, Chance is tape-recording their conversation, and he soon lets her know that he intends to blackmail her. She has the power to put him in films—his dream—and with the recording he has the power to ruin her. Princess, acquiescing, now wants Chance to make love to her; that is how she forgets pain and time and shame.

After Chance has made love to Princess, she gives him a mock screen test: He is to tell his life story. He describes a youth of frustration, without money or fame. All he had was beauty and erotic power. By the time he was discharged from the Army, he was past his prime, he explains, and that is when he found real love with Heavenly. Now that love for Heavenly has brought him back to St. Cloud.

Heavenly is forbidden to Chance; at their last meeting she warned him away. He has returned to St. Cloud to find her, and (with Princess’s cash and expensive car) he wants to take her away in style to a film career in Hollywood. As act 1 ends, Chance leaves Princess at the hotel and goes in search of Heavenly.

Act 2 opens at Boss Finley’s seaside mansion. Boss knows that Chance is back in St. Cloud. He is incensed because earlier Chance had infected Heavenly with venereal disease, and this led to a hushed-up hysterectomy that cost her emotionally and Boss politically. Boss and his henchmen are discussing how to get Chance out of town just as he arrives at the driveway of the house.

Chance has come to see Aunt Nonnie, who knows where Heavenly is. Aunt Nonnie feels tenderly about Chance and his romance with Heavenly. She promises Boss that she is trying to get Chance out of town so that violence can be avoided. As Boss talks with Tom Junior and other supporters, it becomes clear that Boss has his own guilty secrets to hide. Chance leaves without Heavenly learning that he is in town.

Boss Finley summons Heavenly. He wants her to appear alongside him at a political rally that night wearing a white dress to symbolize purity. Heavenly refuses; she is cynical and bitter, recalling how Boss forced her away from Chance earlier, when they wanted to marry. She confronts Boss with his duplicity, and he tells her that Chance is back in town but will be removed. The curtain falls.

The next scene takes place in the hotel lounge shortly before Boss’s rally. In the complicated choreography a number of characters move in and out—Aunt Nonnie, the heckler, Princess, Miss Lucy (Boss’s mistress), and other townspeople. Chance, drinking and taking pep pills, swears his love for Heavenly and proclaims his grandiose dreams of escape with her to a better life. He knows what Boss Finley will be discussing at the rally—the recent castration of a black man—but he is heedless of the danger of staying in town through the night. Princess appears, dazed and drugged, to swear her faith in Chance.

As Boss Finley’s entourage arrives at the hotel for the rally, Chance and Heavenly come face to face for a moment just before Boss takes her onstage with him. Tom Junior confronts Chance with the story of Heavenly’s health problems. Tom exits without hurting Chance, who is left alone onstage briefly with the heckler. As Miss Lucy reenters the cocktail lounge, the heckler leaves and goes to the hall where the rally is, intending to confront Boss Finley about his hypocrisy. The television in the lounge shows the heckler’s questions and how he is beaten. The scene ends as Heavenly collapses at the rally.

The third act opens in the hotel bedroom at midnight. Boss’s henchmen have come to remove Princess from the hotel and to find Chance, who has been waiting out of sight outside. He enters as they leave and has Princess talk by telephone to a Hollywood entertainment reporter, who tells her that the film in which she made her comeback was a success after all; her confidence bolstered, she refuses to mention Chance and Heavenly to the reporter. Princess and Chance talk wistfully about the futility of trying to beat time. A state trooper comes to escort her away from town. Boss’s henchmen enter the room for Chance. The play ends as Chance addresses the audience to ask for understanding.

Dramatic Devices

One of the striking parallels between the themes of Sweet Bird of Youth and its stage appearance is the bareness of the sets. The stage directions call for a number of special effects that are used to accentuate the starkness of the themes. While the dialogue is at times flowery and rich, the sets are minimalist.

The action in different scenes is unified by one cyclorama specified by Williams. Projections of abstract images occur throughout. The most important of these, and the most constant, is a grove of palm trees. Wind plays through the palms, with the sound rising and falling according to the mood of the action, at times interspersed with a musical lament. The images on the cyclorama change somewhat according to the time of day.

During the first act, the stage is dominated by a large double bed. There is little else but several incidental props to enrich the Moorish style of the bedroom, and only the suggestion of walls. Thus, the bed, the focal point of the stage, also sets the central theme of sexual interaction. In the first scene of act 2 as well, the action is played against the suggestion of walls, this time on the veranda of Boss Finley’s mansion. Williams strongly guides the lighting to a specific paleness—the colors of a Georgia O’Keeffe canvas, he says—as a backdrop to the sinister machinations of Boss Finley. Boss fancies himself a savior, and so all the characters here are instructed to wear white. The telephone ringing, ringing, ringing for Heavenly breaks in to bring the discussion back from the general to the specific.

During the cocktail-lounge scene—arranged, again, with the suggestion of a room—Williams specifies that the heckler is to be portrayed as El Greco would portray a saint. The heckler is given a certain pallor, a lanky build, that contrasts with the fullness of build and conventional clothing of the other characters. The others are morally bankrupt, whereas the heckler is constant in his denunciation of Boss Finley’s style of rule.

During the rally scene, which takes place offstage, the action can still be followed through a curious device: The rally is carried on the television in the cocktail lounge, but the television is larger than life, the projected image taking up an entire wall of the stage set. Although the volume is adjusted up and down, the image of Boss Finley as a deus ex machina is unavoidable. At the climax of the scene, as the heckler is beaten, the action is split: The heckler has fallen into the lounge, but the television image contains Heavenly’s reaction.

Sweet Bird of Youth was met with derision because of its surfeit of brutality and its alleged sexual perversion, but the integrity of the sets as they reflected the vision of the story only served to reinforce Tennessee Williams’s reputation as a dramatic poet.

Critical Context

Tennessee Williams readily admitted that the sometimes repellent and warped lives portrayed in Sweet Bird of Youth contained much of his own experience. Drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous sex were part of his makeup, and they grew out of the darkly hypocritical society of his native Deep South. This was by no means the first of his plays to expose the hyperbolic vice that had grown into him. The 1959 production of Sweet Bird of Youth came soon after two of his most violent plays, Orpheus Descending (pr. 1957, pb. 1958) and Suddenly Last Summer (pr., pb. 1958). They, too, feature unusual, violent death scenes and bear the theme of personal atonement for social ills.

Despite the morbid aspect of much of Williams’s theatrical work, Sweet Bird of Youth carries the mark of his early poetic gift. His authentic ear for the language of the South, as well as his innate grasp of the region’s rich and complex social fabric, gave each of his plays an appealing glint, no matter how difficult the subject matter. In this respect, Sweet Bird of Youth does not stand out particularly from his other works. Conspicuously missing from this and other late works, however, is the more genteel presentation of plays such as The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944, pb. 1945).

By the time Sweet Bird of Youth was produced, it was clear that Williams drew his characters from a closetful of symbolic figures who appeared repeatedly throughout his literary life—the sexually ungrounded middle-aged woman and the pure young girl, the sinister political boss, the sensitive young man, and so on—each of whom carried his or her heavy emotional baggage. Although Williams’s plays seldom intersect the everyday world, his characters inhabit a real world of theatricality.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold. Tennessee Williams. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999.

Clurman, Harold. “Theatre.” Nation, March 28, 1959, 281-282.

Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986.

Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.

Kolin, Philip C. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Londre, Felicia Hardison. Tennessee Williams: Life, Work, and Criticism. Fredericton, England: York Press, 1989.

Stanton, Stephen S., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977.