Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Williams, Tennessee (Vol. 11) - Michael Anderson

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MICHAEL ANDERSON

The storm-waters are rising around the farmstead somewhere in rural Mississippi when Lot, coughing ominously, comes back to the family home with his new bride; everyone has fled except his half-brother Chicken, who sits morosely in the kitchen downing liquor from an earthenware jug when he is not carving indecent figures on the wooden table or entertaining his new sister-in-law by hurling a startled cat into the flooded cellar….

[Kingdom of Earth] reminds one occasionally of Pinter, but more frequently of Victorian melodrama, hinging as it does upon that old standby, a disputed inheritance….

[The] Southern air is heavy with symbolism, too: the farmstead … stands for the corrosive influence of long-dead parents…. Chicken, loutish and sensual, relishes only the physical pleasures of life and never penetrates far beyond the culinary regions of the house…. Lot, pouring sherry wine from a cut-glass decanter in the tarnished...

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1. Introduction
2. John Simon
3. M. A. Corrigan
4. Michael Lassell
5. John Whitty
6. Mary Ann Corrigan
7. Charles Marowitz
8. Michael Anderson
9. Richard Gray
10. Copyright

1. Tennessee Williams