Kenneth J. Emberly
Letter of Encouragment to a Canadian playwright from Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams was known for helping aspiring writers. On Oct,19,1980, he wrote a letter of praise to young Kenneth J. Emberly.
In addition to being a master playwright, Tennessee Williams was known for jumpstarting writing careers. He was instrumental in the career of playwright William Inge and novelist Carson McCullers. While working in Vancouver, Tennessee Williams discovered a promising Canadian playwright, and one of his plays, through the encouragement of a man named Mauro Mavrinac. The piece was called The Visit.
Did you know that your play was being sent to Tennessee Williams?
I had no idea. I always sent Mauro my work because he lived out in Vancouver at the time and we had a lively correspondence. He was a great inspiration to me. He is a philosopher, and so we would have lots of exchanges about my stuff and I’d sent him the play. But I had no idea this was going to happen.
Why was Tennessee Williams in Vancouver in 1980?
Williams was in Vancouver doing The Red Devil Battery Sign and I guess he was also doing some mentoring and courses ( Williams was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of British Columbia) but he was really there to put the play on because he was having some frustration getting people to put it on. It (RDBS) was a bit odd for Tennessee Williams. Mauro just gave The Visit to Tennessee Williams and Williams read it, and responded. I was shocked. The first inkling I had - no warning at all - I got a special delivery package in the mail containing my play and a letter from Tennessee Williams. I went – what is this?? I knew Mauro had to have something to do with it because he was out there. I was totally shocked.
What did the letter say?
Tennessee Williams was nice enough to say The Visit was an 'excellent' play, that I had a 'fine dramatic sense' and keep writing a lot of plays. It was incredibly inspiring to get that kind of reaction and he said he wanted to meet me if possible and so forth, but I never got out there in time. He was back to wherever he goes – all over the place. You could never pin him down.
(Williams apparently vanished because he was nervous about The Red Devil Battery Sign and some time later ended up in San Francisco and then New York)
Why did you write The Visit?
Well, in a lot of ways, it was written in anger. It was very personal. The events themselves did not happen though in many ways I wish they could have happened. There were people in my life who had suffered and I was incredibly angry about it and that was the spark for the play.
There are similarities between you and Williams – you both write from personal life experiences, and inner demons, with a Gothic poetic bent to your work. You write from dark places without being judgmental of your characters who all crave some kind of hope, yet there is comedy within the chaos.
Because nothing's funnier than despair (Emberly laughs). It’s absurd. But the darker life gets and the crazier, a lot of the time, when you get a chance to breathe and look at it , you go My God, that’s funny. Some of the craziest things that happen, that almost kill you 10 years later--there you are still alive. And that’s funny. I should have been killed by that – that should have done me in – this despair, this misery, or this self butchery. Williams was very self destructive, and I’ve had lots of occasions of that to put it mildly. That comes through in the work. I hate to drag up poor old Wordsworth who said ‘poetry is really violent intense emotion recollected in tranquility.’ – Can’t say I’ve had a whole lot of tranquility but there are periods of calm, when you can get angry without feeling the stabbing rage that you’ve experienced and that’s where something like The Visit comes from. I was just angry but I was able to transform it into art.
Williams spent the last 20 years of his life trying to please the critics, but the attitude of theatre criticism changed in the 60's.. Were the later works as bad as the critics say they are?
It just wasn’t the Williams they wanted. When you have written Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire and you’ve got Marlon Brando screaming "Stellahhhh Stellahhh … and then years later, you don’t want to write that. That’s not where you’re at anymore. You’ve moved on. But the critics were angry at Williams because they wanted their Blanche Dubois and they wanted Maggie the Cat, and they wanted all that stuff and he just wasn’t going to turn that out anymore. Some of his later stuff is brilliant. It’s just very different and much shorter. He really economized his style and he paid for it. They were rough on him.
I think Williams' plays are being rediscovered by a new generation and not just the classics but some of the rarely performed plays as well (Orpheus Descending at Manitoba Theatre Centre and Toronto's Royal Alex )
Have you written other plays?
Yes… Okay, so I wrote this play The Visit. I spent most of my writing career focusing on short stories which is my great love. But The Visit, I hardly ever tried to get anybody interested in it . I had Tennessee Williams telling me all these nice things about it, and all that, and what did I do? It just sat there. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to finding a way to get my work out there. It’s agony for me to get something to a publisher. It’s an ordeal.. Oh My God... I’d rather be an accountant right now… I’ m just not good at it.
