Red Devil Battery Sign

by Tennessee Williams

It is not widely enough appreciated that in his late plays Tennessee Williams had become a largely experimental playwright who, in the words of one London critic of  The Red Devil Battery Sign , “bursts the seams of the theatre.” Williams is our great poetic visionary and in  The Red Devil Battery Sign  the vision has become nightmare, the nightmare of a corrupt and decadent civilization on the brink of destruction. The Red Devil Battery Company (which first appeared in the 1966 novella, “The Knightly Quest”) is Williams’ symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials, to assassination plots directed against those who won’t play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots. Trapped in a surreal Dallas landscape (lit by the flickering menace of the Red Devil billboard) are the Woman Downtown––the abused daughter of a crooked Texas politician and electro-shocked wife of the Red Devil president––and King, once the leader of a mariachi band, but now dying of a brain tumor and demeaned by being his hard-working wife’s “invalid dependent.” And in wordless counterpoint to the hallucinatory plot of the Woman and King’s affair are heard the mariachi guitars strumming life’s illusions and the wolf-like cries of roaming gangs of homeless youths poised on the outskirts of the city. “No one can write better [than Tennessee Williams] of the brief passion of two victims of life’s dirty tricks,” wrote the  Daily Mail ’s Peter Lewis of the 1977 London production on which this edition is based.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

94 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Taylor Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll start by saying I love some of Tennessee Williams' later work that is often dismissed or made fun of - but this one is full of so many holes it's difficult to even tell what it's about. TW stock characters, government conspiracy, unreliable narrators, a pack of violent boys with bombs, an invalid artist ready to end his life, an unimportant subplot that wastes 3 scenes... I even read it twice, just to make sure it was really as bad as I thought it was the first time.

[Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in 1975, presented in London in 1977 and revised, from the text used for that production, in 1979, THE RED DEVIL BATTERY SIGN has the merit of poetic phrasing. I imagine very few performances of this play have ever been attempted, but reading it is worthwhile. Who has not experienced, encountering one of Williams's canonical plays, the sense of being personally addressed? Here, Williams has a conversation with himself.
Two broken minds commune. A character named King and a character named Woman Downtown share a romance and paranoia. Williams's settings here are typical of his settings: a hotel bar, a hotel room and a small house at the edge of town, but there is a Modernist place beyond the house which is called the Wasteland. One of the stage directions is "The play stylistically makes its final break with realism." What may be off-putting to people who are moved by the pathos in Williams's earlier plays is the unvarnished harrowing of the characters in this one.
I suggest reading it in two sittings. Don't drag it out over two or three nights. There are some evocative monologues. My guess is Downtown Woman is based partly on Williams's friend Talullah Bankhead, almost ten years dead when this was written. The great temptation, in reading this well-documented playwright, is to say such things as I have just said. Certainly, if Talullah Bankhead had not existed, he'd have found someone like her to howl at the moon with. And yes, THE RED DEVIL BATTERY SIGN has howling.
So did KING LEAR.

[Jojo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately this being the last of the Williams plays (I believe), this one was a bit disappointing. It's still probably better than some of those shorter plays in previous volumes but it just didn't do it for me personally.

[Robby Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Tennessee Williams, but worth a read. It's one of his "way out there" plays.