The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
The Last of My Solid Gold Watches (German: My last gold watch ) is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams . It was published in 1946 in the volume 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays and premiered in 1948 at the Laboratory Theater in Los Angeles . Williams dedicated the play to actor Sydney Greenstreet , whom he thought of when designing the main character.
action
78-year-old Charlie Colton, who travels from city to city as a sales representative for a shoe company, arrives in a hotel room somewhere in the Mississippi Delta . He has been in this area for decades and used to often meet up with colleagues in this room to play poker in the evenings. He sends the (also old) black porter downstairs to ask 35-year-old Harper, a colleague of Colton's, upstairs. Colton laments to Harper how much times have changed: some of his colleagues and regular customers have died, the city is falling into disrepair, and when they buy shoes, people no longer pay attention to quality, but only to appearance. Colton presents Harper with a couple of models that he brought with him in large suitcases. Harper initially listens, but becomes less and less interested and eventually begins to read a comic book. Colton finds this disrespectful and complains about the moral decline among younger people. Harper dismisses this as an old man's talk, and Colton shows him out of the room. The porter reappears and agrees with Colton's wistful recollection of better times: The graveyard is crowded with folks we knew, Mistuh Charlie. It's mighty late in the day. (The cemetery is filled with people we knew, Mister Charlie. It is very late in the evening.) Colton opens the blinds and realizes that it is no longer late evening but (literally and figuratively) night .
The title of the piece refers to the fact that Colton carries several gold pocket watches with him, which he received from his company as a gift for his sales successes. He is aware that his career is coming to an end and that he will probably not get another watch.
Historical and autobiographical context
The economic and social changes that Colton laments are to be seen in the context of the Great Depression and the New Deal . Coltons says he's not one of those who claim a communist is now in the White House. This statement alludes to the criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's social policy.
Williams' father also worked as a traveling shoe seller; Williams himself had to work in a shoe factory after dropping out of college.
Film adaptations
Together with two other Williams pieces, The Last of My Solid Gold Watches was staged, recorded and broadcast on television on April 16, 1958 by Sidney Lumet . In 2010, this recording was released as bonus material on the DVD of Lumet's film The Man in the Snakeskin , also an adaptation of a Williams play.
In 1961 there was a German-language film adaptation under the title The last of my eight golden clocks , directed by Ludwig Cremer .
literature
- Stephen W. Souris (ed.): Great American One-act Plays . Stuttgart: Klett 1985, pp. 43-51. ISBN 3 12 578210 4
Web links
- Recording of a production in St. Louis, Missouri in 2016 (Directed by David Kaplan)
- Philip C. Kolin: 'Night, Mistuh Charlie': the Porter in Tennessee Williams's 'The Last of My Solid Gold Watches' and the kairos of negritude. In: The Mississippi Quarterly, March 22, 1994.
- Saima Huc: On Race, Class and Tennessee Williams: Why My Theater Company Chose to Remove Racial Slurs in “The Last of My Solid Gold Watches” Stagebuddy.com, July 10, 2017
Individual evidence
- ↑ Greta Heintzelman, Alycia Smith Howard: Critical Companion to Tennesse Williams . New York: Facts on File 2005, p. 134.
- ↑ Review of the television recording on The Classic TV History Blog, June 23, 2010
- ↑ Klaus M. Schmidt, Inge Schmidt (ed.): Lexikon Literaturverfilmungen. German-language films 1945-1990. Stuttgart: Metzler 1995, p. 309.