Festival Spotlight - The Eye That Saw Death
Directed by Jennifer Restak
“I lay transfixed, smothered with terror, unable to move, staring helplessly …”
A troubled patient with a transplanted eye takes on the tormented vision of a murderer (from whom the eye was removed after execution). As a teenager in the late 1920’s, Tennessee Williams wrote this ghoulish tale in the manner of Edgar Alan Poe, probably hoping to sell the story to a pulp magazine. It wasn’t published until 2015. The Festival’s unsettling adaptation is the brainchild of the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre of Baltimore.
Every issue of Weird Tales during 1927 and 1928 touted
If Poe Were Alive!
THERE is no doubt whatever that Edgar Allan Poe would be a contributor to WEIRD TALES if he were alive today. The brilliant success of WEIRD TALES has been built upon tales of the grotesque and terrible, such as that great American fictionist used to write.
Poe often portrayed people paralyzed with fear, as in The Eye that Saw Death, “smothered with terror.” Poe’s ornate vocabulary echoes in Williams’ purple prose and Williams’ descriptions recall the evil eye of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Williams probably learned about Poe in high school. In A Streetcar Named Desire, when high school teacher Blanche looks out the window at New Orleans and declares “Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe could do it justice!” she assumes (as did Williams) that people knew to whom she was referring. Knowing about Poe was once common in America, as was the gossip that Poe had been a drunk.
In college, in 1937, Williams submitted a paper titled “Comments on the Nature of Artists with a few Specific References to the Case of Edgar Allan Poe.” Among the comments:
Edgar Allan Poe is held up—or down—as a superlative example of the abnormal artist. This is merely because he is one of the few great artists that have received popular recognition and hence the irregularities of his life are more widely known than those of artists whose fame was more selective.
With that, Williams prophesied his own fate. Williams’ surgical story was prophetic, too. Between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four he would undergo four eye surgeries. According to his Memoir
The worst of these operations was performed completely free of charge in a medical college … because I consented to have it performed before a class of student ophthalmologists, seated all about the operating table, while the surgeon-teacher delivered a lecture on what he was doing, the whole theatrical procedure.
Williams typed his St. Louis address— 6254 Enright Avenue—on the last page of “The Eye that Saw Death” manuscript, as he had on the “Nitocris” manuscript. The Williams family lived at Enright from 1926 to September 1935, but is impossible to pinpoint when “The Eye that Saw Death” was written. The question the story poses—whether it is better to retain a horrific vision or have it surgically removed— is the same question posed in Suddenly Last Summer written in 1957. Williams’ ultimate answer, having it both ways, lies in the title of Something Cloudy/Something Clear written in 1981.
