Unknown Tennessee Williams play comes to the source of its inspiration

In 1956, Jackson Pollock died after driving his car into a tree a mile south of his home on Springs Fireplace Road in East Hampton. His death inspired one of his friends, the great American playwright Tennessee Williams, to write a wildly experimental play about art and death, “The Day on Which a Man Dies,” that evoked the notorious painter.

More than 50 years later, the play is still virtually unknown. It had never been staged when it was “discovered” in 1991, and was presented for the first time last year in Chicago by David Kaplan, the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams festival.

The play is now coming back to its source of inspiration. Three East Hampton performances start Friday evening at the Ross School in conjunction with the new exhibition at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, “‘Under Each Other’s Spell’: The Gutai and New York,” which opened on July 30. The play echoes aspects of the Japanese Gutai art movement, which Mr. Williams was exposed to around the time he wrote the play, according to Pollock-Krasner House Director Helen Harrison.

In 1957, after a summer visit to painter Larry Rivers on the East End, Mr. Williams began to write “The Day on Which a Man Dies,” inspired by all the discussion of Mr. Pollock’s death in the art world at the time.

Mr. Williams had befriended Mr. Pollock in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1940.

“They kept in touch through a network of gossip. Williams certainly knew what was happening to Pollock in the last months of his life,” Mr. Kaplan said in a recent interview.

Mr. Williams had tried to commit suicide by driving into a tree in Italy several years prior, so when he heard how Mr. Pollock had died, he immediately characterized the accident as a suicide. While the suggestion that Mr. Pollock’s death was a suicide is widely rejected, there are few who would argue with the notion that he was acting in self-destructive ways toward the end of his life.

“Williams made art out of subconscious motives,” said Mr. Kaplan, explaining that the playwright could easily have believed that Mr. Pollock had a subconscious death wish.

The play is about an artist whose struggle to create ultimately climaxes in his suicide. It is an experimental work, nothing like—at least overtly—such famous plays by Mr. Williams as “The Glass Menagerie,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

At the time of writing the play, Mr. Williams was influenced by an emerging art movement in Japan called the Gutai. Considered by some to be the very first performance artists, Gutai painters and sculptors believed in the beauty of destruction. As in Gutai works, in “The Day On Which A Man Dies” paintings are created and destroyed in the course of a performance, the bodies of the performers are painted, and the setting is made of paper.

Mr. Williams also adapted the Japanese theatrical form called Noh drama into performance art; the text is subtitled “An Occidental Noh Play.” Mr. Kaplan said that a Noh play is supposed to create serenity in the heart of the audience, just as a comedy is supposed to make people laugh and a tragedy is meant to make people cry.

Even though the play is about a suicide, it’s not tragic. “That’s what’s fascinating about it,” Mr. Kaplan said. “In a Western form he would kill himself and that would be it, but the play continues well past that with other images and another discussion about what is death and what is annihilation.”

Even though the play was written at the height of the playwright’s career, he kept it in his desk and it was not rediscovered until 1991 by an academic.

“There are a bunch of plays by Williams like that,” Mr. Kaplan said. As one of the founders of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams festival, he said he has been presented with several plays by Williams that have never been performed, despite their quality, mainly because they were far too experimental.

“He reconciled himself to the issue that he would write these things, he would keep them, then after that, time would tell.”

Mr. Kaplan said that it’s hard to convince directors and actors to do some of the experimental plays. One director that Mr. Kaplan asked to do an unknown Williams play said, “even if we were so foolish to agree to this, our audience coming to see a Williams play expects certain things. They are not going to be happy, no matter what we tell them in advance.”

“They’re still expecting moonlight and magnolias,” Mr. Kaplan said, “and there’s none of that in this.”

“The Day On Which A Man Dies” by Tennessee Williams will be presented in the Senior Thesis Auditorium at The Ross School, 18 Goodfriend Drive, East Hampton, on Friday and Saturday, August 7 and 8, at 8 p.m., and on August 9 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, or $22.50 for students, seniors and Pollock-Krasner House members, and may be purchased at: http://www.twptown.org/the-day-on-which-a-man-dies-east-hampton or https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/664615. To order by phone, call 866-789-TENN, ext. 1.