Can a Flower Break a Rock?
Blog 49
Some of this blog is from my book, Theatre Is My Life!
“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”
Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real
Tennessee Williams passed from this life on this day, February 25, in 1983. Less than a week later, the Southeastern Theatre Conference convention was held in Savannah, Georgia, and his death was all anyone could talk about. He was a powerful figure in the theatre world.
Williams was found dead in his bedroom suite in New York City at age 71 at the Elysee Hotel (a fitting ending place, name-wise for him). The medical examiner revealed he had choked on the cap from a bottle of eye drops. It is also said that the cause of death was asphyxia, but that the overcap was being used to take the barbiturates. Nonetheless, I use saline eye drops almost every morning upon waking and as I lie there, I think of Tennessee Williams. I keep the cap far away from my mouth, but I can understand exactly how someone could choke on any sort of bottle cap.
The unfavorable reviews of and confusion over Williams’s Camino Real astound me, because it is one of my favorite plays to have ever had the privilege of working on. No, it is not realistic. No, it does not take place in a modern kitchen. No, it is not based on linear time. No, it is not easy to follow. But it is lyrical, dark, illuminative, haunting, beautiful, chaotic, and theatrical—like life itself. Williams himself said the play is “nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.”
I love the violet quote for many reasons: it reminds me of running spotlight on the play when I was a sophomore in college. Faculty member Charles Harbour directed the show, and several other favorite professors and many students filled out the large cast. Violets bloom this time of year, and are my favorite flower. One of my granddaughters carries the name of Emmeline Violet. (The other is Lucia Rose!) My great-grandmother and grandmother both wore the scent April Violets, a perfume created in 1913 by Yardley of London. Yardley makeup and fragrances were wildly popular in America after the Beatles and other British rock stars invaded the U.S. If you can remember Twiggy, the fashion model of the 1960s and ‘70s, her long eyelashes were made by Yardley. About this time—when I was working on Camino Real—I, too, had claimed April Violets as my scent of choice. The quote struck me as I heard it night after night in rehearsals and performance, with its note of triumph—and stuck with me.
The image of violets—those tiny, fragile, fragrant petals—even growing in the crags of a massive mountain, much less breaking apart its rocks—is fascinating. Modern life often causes us to be precautionary with others. In Camino Real, cold-hearted actions abound and people move about oblivious to other characters’ misfortunes. This sterility is symbolized by a defunct fountain. But near the play’s end, in reaction to a simple act of compassion, the water gushes and that is when Don Quixote proclaims, “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!”
Violets are symbolic of love and faithfulness. So if a violet can crack rocks, perhaps my casual, small acts of kindheartedness can pierce through aloof detachment —or even hatred—as I travel the difficult journey down my own Camino Real. Maybe Tennessee Williams is right: it just takes a tiny loving action to split the fissure opening onto a more beautiful world.