Chris Phillips

When I was about 10 years old, my father, for some reason known solely to him, took me to see a community theater production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I fell asleep in the middle of the second act. The play didn’t leave much of an impression, other than my wondering why this woman dressed in nothing but a slip would not shut up.

Fast-forward to my junior year of high school, in which I was assigned by my English teacher to write a research paper on a Great American Writer and one of his Great American Works. Convinced I was destined for life as an actor (a calling that has since evaporated), I decided to choose one of the two playwrights on her list. Unsexy-sounding titles like Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh meant Eugene O’Neill was out, so by default I chose Tennessee Williams and the one play of his with which I was, albeit superficially, acquainted.

One biography, myriad literary criticisms and multiple readings of the play later, I was hooked. This chatty and slip-clad woman, her drunken and miserable husband and her loud, vulgar father-in-law became like a second family to me, relations I got to know better and better with each passing year. And yet, hovering over all of them was the specter of this mysterious person named Skipper — a man we never see but whose presence is felt as strongly as if he were standing in the room, handing Brick his tumblers full of booze.

Daniel Marks and Miles Cooper

Cat is a miracle of a play, one in which nothing actually happens and not one character changes in any significant way from first act to third, yet one that takes the audience through an exhausting catharsis in spite of itself. It’s my favorite work of drama, a piece that gets richer and more heartbreaking every time I experience it on stage or on the page.

It also pisses me off like no other. Why did Skipper have to die? What was so terrifying about this character that Williams couldn’t let him live? Or at least let him crack Brick over the head with one of his crutches before heading off to that football stadium in the sky?

As time went on, I became obsessed with Skipper. I dug through every word of Cat, hunting for clues as to who this man was. Where did he grow up? How did he meet Brick? Were he and Maggie friends? What was he — in the grand tradition of Williams’ characters — running away from? The more my imagination filled in the blanks to create Skipper’s persona, the more protective I became and the more I resented Brick for rejecting him.

In the fall of 2010, I attended a performance of The Glass Menagerie at the Mark Taper Forum and was struck by how boldly director Gordon Edelstein left no doubt as to where protagonist Tom’s sexual bread was buttered, or what exactly he was doing on all those late-night walks. I immediately went home and tore back into my copy of Cat, then spent the next week poring over my other two Williams favorites, A Streetcar Named Desire and Suddenly Last Summer.

Daniel Marks, Karah Donovan, and Scott Hinson

I realized why these were the Williams works that haunted me most — all three are set in motion by the demise of characters who are doomed not due to any euphemized addiction, loneliness or “sensitivity” but by their homosexuality, pure and simple. I also saw more clearly than ever that it was Williams, a gay man himself, who doomed them. Their tragic, violent deaths weren’t what disturbed me; it was their silence, their invisibility. I longed to see these men and hear them speak for themselves. The result of this longing is my play Garden District.

The conflict between the people we show to the world and the people we are on the inside is an internal battle that human beings, in all our neurotic glory, never stop fighting. It’s the struggle that sends Streetcar’s Blanche DuBois to the nuthouse, forces Alma Winemiller (Summer and Smoke/Eccentricities of a Nightingale) out of the rectory and into the streets, and leads Menagerie’s Tom Wingfield to abandon his family. The most vivid Williams characters, including the three gay men whose voices the playwright doesn’t allow us to hear, all hunger to express their true natures while never overcoming the feeling that there is something very wrong with doing just that.

Skipper made the mistake of confessing his love for Brick; of course he overdosed on pills and alcohol. Streetcar’s Allan was discovered in the arms of another man; of course he shot himself. Suddenly Last Summer’s Sebastian committed the fatal error of indulging his sexual urges in the middle of polite society; of course he was ripped to shreds.

Karah Donovan and Aaron Hartzier

As a man who’s lived openly gay for more than half my life — a personal awakening due in no small part to my discovery of Williams and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at age 16 — I ache for the psychological torment Williams must have felt in banishing these parts of himself to darkness. It’s a tough call determining whether Williams identifies more with the dead or with the guilt-ridden survivors they leave behind.

In Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian’s cousin Catharine sums up her checkered past by spitting, “I came out in the French Quarter years before I came out in the Garden District.” It’s a telling line, not just because Catharine — and, by extension, Williams — seems to have enjoyed her time in the seedy French Quarter much more than her years as a failed debutante in the Garden District; it also crystallizes why Williams continues to move, provoke and inspire me. His greatest strength was creating characters that, like most of us, live and love in both places.

Garden District, presented by CT Tuesdays, opens May 3; Tues.-Wed., 8 pm; through May 11. Tickets: $15. Celebration Theatre, 7051B Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; 323.957.1884 or www.celebrationtheatre.com.

CHRIS PHILLIPS is a former contributor to the publications Movieline, Out and Frontiers. He received a GLAAD Media Award nomination in January 2011 for his first play, revolver. He currently lives in West Hollywood, California.