February 26, 1983

A Playwright Whose Greatest Act Was His First; An Appreciation

By FRANK RICH

It seems only too ironic that the last Tennessee Williams play to be seen on Broadway, ''Clothes for a Summer Hotel'' in 1980, was an attempt to exhume the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald. For what writer more than Mr. Williams exemplified Fitzgerald's notion that there are no second acts to American lives?

During the first half of his career, Mr. Williams produced a body of work that did and still does give our theater one of its few claims to greatness. Though Mr. Williams continued to write prolifically for the rest of his life, the second act of his career cannot be said to have happened.

Yet the sad fall, while tragic, in no way diminishes the glory of what came before. Such is the timeless power of Mr. Williams's major plays that he remains the most important and influential American playwright after Eugene O'Neill. He wrote at least two masterpieces, ''The Glass Menagerie'' and ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' as well as at least five other works, not all of them universally beloved, that are a permanent part of the international theatrical repertory: ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' ''The Rose Tattoo,'' ''Summer and Smoke,'' ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' and ''The Night of the Iguana.'' There are shafts of light in many of the lesser plays, too, though they dimmed considerably as Mr. Williams's decline accelerated in the 1960's and 70's.

Characters Struggle for Dignity

What Mr. Williams created at the height of his powers were vulnerable, lost, tortured people struggling for dignity, compassion and at least a measure of salvation in a world of almost apocalyptic cruelty. If that world was grotesque and nightmarish, it was nonetheless, as the famous Williams phrase had it, ''lit by lightning.''

That lightning was provided by Mr. Williams's extraordinarily fecund and lyrical poetry, his mastery of dramatic moments and effects, and his ability to raise lowly characters to almost mythic size. If there is any literate person who has not encountered Amanda and Laura Wingfield, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski or Maggie and Big Daddy, his life is the poorer for it.

It is no coincidence that Mr. Williams's characters provided career highpoints for a remarkable array of actors, most (though not all) of them women: Laurette Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, Barbara Bel Geddes, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and Burl Ives, among many others. The film versions of the plays performed the same service for such stars as Vivian Leigh, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor.

Daring Theatrical Innovation

The idiom of Mr. Williams's works is indelibly linked to the decaying post-Civil War South, but his themes belong to no particular place or time. Mr. Williams's characters live in terrifying fear of death; they are torn between aspirations of the soul and hungers of the body; they hope against hope that strangers will be kind.

Though Mr. Williams's use of homosexuality and nymphomania were once considered shocking, we see now that the sexual and neurotic components of his people are highly theatrical expressions of the ontological chaos that is man's universal plight. And even so, not all Mr. Williams's plays were psychosexual hothouses. The tone of ''Menagerie'' and ''Iguana'' is elegiac. There is humor in most of the plays, as well as an outright comedy in the 1960 ''Period of Adjustment.''

The daring theatrical innovations and psychological liberation that mark Mr. Williams's breakthrough plays were built on foundations laid by O'Neill and, of course, Freud. In turn, Mr. Williams has exerted an enormous influence on the generation of writers that followed him. Hardly a month goes by without the production of a new American play that is written in the patented Williams style sometimes referred to, for lack of a better term, as ''poetic realism.'' Echoes of his voice can be heard in the works of Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson, to name just his two most prominent successors.

View of Early Works Revised

It took time for audiences to catch up with some of Mr. Williams's major plays, which often found second and enhanced lives in revised versions and revivals. Already there is a small critical community that champions the plays that were received poorly by critics and audiences over the past two decades.

In these works - among them, ''The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore,'' ''Slapstick Tragedy'' and ''The Seven Descents of Myrtle'' -- Mr. Williams indulged in explicit metaphysical symbolism and allegory; he experimented with surrealism, mysticism and the new techniques of the theater of the absurd. Though it would be worth looking at some of these plays in better productions than they originally received -- especially the autobiographical ''Vieux Carre'' of 1977 -- they are unlikely to be rescued. Poorly crafted and sometimes self-parodying, they have more to do with the personal tragedies of Mr. Williams's declining years than with the grandeur of his talent.

Though he wrote an autobiography (''Memoirs'') and granted many interviews, not all of Mr. Williams's own explications of his work and life can be taken at face value. But, along with his great plays, a fitting epitaph may be contained in the published afterword to ''Camino Real'' (1953).

''My own creed as a playwright,'' Mr. Williams wrote, ''is fairly close to that expressed by the painter in Shaw's play 'The Doctor's Dilemma': 'I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of art that has made these hands blessed. Amen.' ''