Clinging to a Spar

By T.E. Kalen

SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS

Yesterday is dead and gone

And tomorrow's out of sight

And it's sad to be alone

Help me make it through the night.

--Help Me Make It Through the Night, by Kris Kristofferson

Many of the scenes in Tennessee Williams' plays take place at night. For his characters, this is a time of terror. Alone, heart-hungry, desolate of spirit, they reach out for a voice, a touch, any kindly stranger who may help them make it through the night.

A bar is a logical place for a convocation of strangers who are terrorized yet basically humane. In the world's judgment, the characters in Small Craft Warnings are seedy derelicts: a strident middle-aged beautician (Helena Carroll) who rarely bathes and whose trailer shack-up is a monosyllabic semi-Neanderthal (Brad Sullivan); a red-headed hooker (Cherry Davis) whose hand is on every man's groin except that of her woefully plastered boy friend (William Hickey); a drunken doctor (David Hooks) who kills when he aborts and a sardonically nihilistic homosexual (Alan Mixon). The world casts stones; Williams applies the balm of compassion to the bruises. In his eyes and under his poetic alchemy, these people become the embodiment of the fears that course through all of us at some time or other, the frailties that make us lie, betray any trust, cringe before bullies, vilify others--though in our hearts we wish to do none of those things.

To these characters, the bar is a spar to which they cling in the shipwreck of existence and over which they confess their hidden better selves. These confessional arias are what they have always been in Williams, eloquent trib utes to the English tongue and moving explorations of the human spirit. This is not to say that Small Craft Warnings is on a par with the durable canon of his finest plays. Here he reminds us of the size and scope of his genius, but dis plays it diminuendo. Call this then a five-finger exercise from the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world.

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