"Steps Must Be Gentle" and the presence of Hart Crane in Tennessee Williams' work

Abstract

The one-act play Steps Must Be Gentle – A Dramatic Reading for Two Performers (1980), by Tennessee Williams, has its unrealistic aspects investigated. The expedients that presents the mimetic digression are raised, to frame it as an anti-realist play: expressionism, unreal characters, epic estrangement, and setting and language that displace human reality. Furthermore, characterizations of the characters, the homosexual man and the divorced woman – the poet Hart Crane and his mother – are analyzed within the historical, social, and political contexts of the early 1980s. It is concluded that the work functions predominantly as a critique of the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency (1977-1981) and the beginning of the Reagan Era (1982-1989), exposing characters who are on the fringes of the conservative campaign of that historical moment, restricting feminism, homosexuality, and human rights. Williams presents a theatricalist poetics that exposes the situation of the divorced woman and the homosexual man facing a state that denied licenses and democratic conditions for equal human status in imperialist and capitalist society. Keywords: Dramaturgy; Theatre; Reagan Era; AIDS.