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“Go to church, tend the kitchen, and rear the children”—these three precepts for moral and social conduct that Freud's Vienna assumed to be axiomatic for a woman's well-being even before Hitler's Germany adopted them as national feminine ideals—have in modern times become symptoms of and metaphors for the socially and sexually unliberated woman. Theatergoers might therefore assume from the title of Tennessee Williams' new “play in progress” that they could look forward to an evening of pro-feminist iconoclasms. If so, they would be greatly mistaken.
The protagonist of Williams' “outrage for the stage” (the playwright's own subtitle for his play) is neither an entrapped Victorian ingenue, like Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, nor a more recent female disruptor of male complacency, like Ann Whitefield in Shaw's Man and Superman. Rather, the spotlight falls upon a “volumtarily” retired male hustler who ultimately feels himself hemmed in by those same above-mentioned female-associated constraints: a kutchen (dominated by a scullery-maid kind of wife wedded to her stove and preoccupied with making and eating crullers) and two kinder (in the shape of a giggling adolescent son and daughter still in kindergarten).
The kirche is a more complex matter. Supposedly located in Manhattan's Soho, it is the play's principal mise en scène, a refuge for both body and mind. It is where the ex-hustler practices his new profession, minister of some private religion, and where he can feel himself to be enthroned like a “descendant of the old kings of Ireland.” Oddly enough, he continues to wear the alluring tight leather pants of the male prostitute, a sight that casts considerable doubt on his priestly vocation. We also wonder if we can really be looking at a church even though the stage area that is so labeled is dominated by a surrealistic-looking pipe organ. We soon discover the kirche to be a compartment of the psyche, a “chambered nautilus,” a sanctuary for private thoughts and fantas