'Like a great actor inhabiting one of Tennessee Williams' characters, Michael Paller brings intelligence, nuance and considerable artistry to the complex figure of the man himself. He shatters the mythology surrounding Williams - that he was an innately tragic, self-loathing homosexual - and bravely recontextualizes him not only as an incomparable artist, but as a ground-breaking social pioneer. His book is a welcome re-evaluation of one of our most revered and misunderstood American originals.' - Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize winning author of I Am My Own Wife
'Tennessee Williams was America's most original dramatic talent. He was also gay. The significance of this fact is explored by Michael Paller in a book full of striking insights into the man, the plays, and the theatre of which he was a part. What emerges from this study is a familiar figure seen in a new complexity. What also emerges is an America whose oppressive laws and casual cruelties toward those who shared his sexuality in part created the pressures that created the context, if not always the subject, of his art.' - Christopher Bigsby, Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Arthur Miller Centre
'Gentlemen Callers and Michael Paller look at the writing of Tennessee Williams through a gay perspective that is insightful and blessedly free from many of the distortions and exaggerations that previous studies have indulged in. It will be of interest totheatre goers and practitioners alike.' - Michael Kahn, Artistic Director, The Shakespeare Theatre
'Michael Paller's Gentleman Callers offers an innovative, perceptive, and very readable examination of the works Tennessee Williams produced in his long and productive career...Paller reveals the extent to which misguided 'political correctness' among some recent critics has prevented a judicious reading of the works. This sensitive and informed analysis is destined to become a major addition to Williams scholarship, offering insights to both long-time Williams fans and scholars and to those unfamiliar with his work.' - Kenneth Holditch, author of Tennessee Williams and the South and founding editor of The Tennessee Williams Journal
'...an insightful debunking of the conventional wisdom characterizing the theatre icon as a tragic figure, a self-hating homosexual inherently incapable of true happiness. Instead, in Paller's thoughtful and convincing re-evaluation of both the playwright and his plays, William's emerges a ground-breaking figure on both personal and professional grounds, an ironically happy ending for an envelope-pusher who freed the stage from that very same convention.' - ELLE Magazine
Dramaturg, academic and journalist Paller situates Tennessee Williams within the New York gay theater of the mid-40s through 70s in a thoughtful, articulate defense of the playwright's work. By no means is Paller's study an adequate biography of Williams: He quotes freely from Lyle Leverich's Tom (1995) for a comprehensive look at the life. Instead, Paller concentrates on how the playwright's work, especially its treatment of homosexuality (and evasion thereof), formed and fit into New York theater-excluding A Streetcar Named Desire, by the way, curiously ignored by Paller for "space limitation," and also because, some may argue, "there are no gay characters in it, anyway." Paller accepts the evidence of Williams's "self-loathing" only in terms of the savage condemnation of homosexuality that permeated the society-Southern, WWII-he grew up in. In most of Williams's best work, from Lord Byron's Love Letter to The Night of the Iguana (1961), he would wrestle with "his urge to conceal with the equally strong need to reveal." Paller tracks Williams's work on Broadway, where he showcased almost exclusively, starting from the 1945 production of The Glass Menagerie. He examines each play with a probing analysis of plot, character and author's intention. While mining Williams's internal acceptance of his homosexuality (allowing, however, few clues from his actual life), Paller delves most effectively into the forms of institutionalized homophobia generated at the time of the Cold War, as in the Army's justification for the rejection of homosexuals; the backlash to the Kinsey Report of 1948; the de facto criminalization of homosexuality, and the classification of homosexuality by the increasinglyinfluential psychoanalytic establishment as a sickness. Moreover, Paller demonstrates a goodly knowledge of the entire context of New York theater. Yet his work will suffice only for readers already well familiar with Williams's bittersweet trajectory as "founding father of the uncloseted gay world."A well-documented, important study of one facet of a complex artist.
