At Liberty has motifs and images that would show up fully developed in A Streetcar Named Desire, and it contains nascent lines from The Glass Menagerie—“The past keeps getting bigger and bigger at the future’s expense!” It is also notable for introducing Blue Mountain, which would soon join other locations both real (Moon Lake and Sunflower River) and fictional (Two River County, Tiger Tail, and Glorious Hill) to create the mythic Mississippi Delta of Williams’s plays.
The Magic Tower (1936)
Previously unpublished. The copy text is a typescript filed at HRC, which has handwritten notes of at least four different individuals, one of them very likely Williams. I have only incorporated those handwritten additions that affect the clarity or flow of action and dialogue—not incorporated are any personal notes and cues presumably written by an actor or stage manager. An earlier draft of the play at HRC does not affect this edition. Simultaneously with this trade edition, a scholarly edition of the play edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel—using the same copy text—appeared in the April 2011 volume of Resources for American Literary Studies (AMS Press, Brooklyn, New York). For analysis and history of the play, see Moschovakis and Roessel’s detailed introduction and notes.
Prior to its first professional production at Southern Rep, New Orleans in March 2011, The Magic Tower was staged by the Webster Groves Theatre—an amateur group located in a wealthy St. Louis suburb—on the evening of October 13, 1936. One of three finalists in a play contest, The Magic Tower had received first prize and the promise of a full production.
The Magic Tower offers a veneer of comedy and a cast of stock characters—the salty Irish landlady, the fast-talking and somewhat sinister “show people,” and the naïve young artist. But it also takes a bleak view of romance and marriage, as values sustained only through a lens of shared delusion that would later characterize relationships in Williams’s plays such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Sweet Bird of Youth.
Me, Vashya (1937)
Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript filed in the Washington University Library, St. Louis, with the author’s name typed as “Tennessee Williams” and handwritten below as “Thomas Lanier Williams.” The presence of both names indicates that the script likely was typed in or after December 1938, when Williams first began to use the name “Tennessee.” The copy text matches the final draft at HRC, which also holds variant drafts under the titles, I, Vaslev, Me, Vashya!, The Tears of Christ, and Death is the Drummer.
Described by the author as a “melodramatic fantasy,” Me, Vashya was written as a final project for a playwriting class, “Technique of Modern Drama,” given at Washington University by Professor William Carson. The project was a contest at the end of the term, with three finalists to be chosen by an independent jury and given workshop productions that summer; a single winner would be awarded $50. Williams handed in his play on June 4, 1937, received fourth place and did not take the rejection well. Recounting his frustration to a reporter from The New York Post in 1958, he said, “It was a terrible shock and humiliation to me. It was a crushing blow . . .” The title character is based on a real munitions maker, the Greek-born Sir Basil Zaharoff who trafficked in arms from 1889 until his death in 1936.
The first college production of Me, Vashya was directed by Henry I. Schvey in February, 2004 as part of “Tennessee Williams: The Secret Year,” an international symposium at Washington University that focused on Williams’s time there as a student. A St. Louis radio troupe, The Little Theater of the Air, had broadcast an adaption of Me, Vashya in the summer of 1938. But as Williams wrote to his mother from the University of Iowa, the crucial gunshot that kills Vashya had “failed to go off.”
Curtains for the Gentleman (1936)
Previously unpublished. The copy text, a unique typescript at HRC, has “Thomas Lanier Williams” and “January 9, 1936” typed on the final page. It is an unusually clean typescript, possibly prepared for submission to a contest—Williams was at that time still on hiatus from college. There are also loose draft pages at HRC with some of the same characters, although Flossie is named Goldie and the cop is identified as “Flatfoot.”
This is one of many early plays that show the overt influence that movies of the 1930s had on Williams. Other examples include Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Honor the Living, The Palooka, In Our Profession, Every Twenty Minutes, The Pink Bedroom, The Magic Tower, and The Big Game. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Hollywood released nearly fifty gangster films in 1935 alone, and over a dozen of those with plots involving a “squealer.” Williams dropped mob crime as subject matter from about 1940 until the 1970s when it appeared again in I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays, Vieux Carré, and Something Cloudy, Something Clear.
In Our Profession (c. 1938)
Previously unpublished. The copy text, a unique typescript at HRC, is on the long “American Blues” list probably typed in 1938—perhaps also the year of this play’s composition.
The impact of 1930s screen dialogue appears again in this play, with its quick repartee between the characters of Annabelle, Richard, and Paul. The play’s interest in show business “types” and their banter gives it an affinity with Every Twenty Minutes, The Pink Bedroom, and The Fat Man’s Wife—other one-acts that share a funny and cynical take on male-female relationships.
Every Twenty Minutes (c. 1938)
The copy text is from a unique typescript filed at HRC, and is previously unpublished. In the typescript, the play comes with the qualifying subtitle, A Satire. But in the longer “American Blues” list circa 1938, Williams simply calls it Every Twenty Minutes.
Essentially a two-handed curtain-raiser and, indeed, a satire, Every Twenty Minutes premiered at Southern Rep in New Orleans in March 2011, as part of a centennial tribute to Williams by the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.
Honor The Living (c. 1937)
Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript at HRC, where a version of the same sketch as a story is also filed under the same title.
Willard Holland, director of a theater troupe called the Mummers of St. Louis, approached Williams in September 1936 about writing a curtain-raiser for an upcoming Veteran’s Day performance of Irwin Shaw’s dark, anti-war fable Bury the Dead, in which soldiers climb out of their graves and refuse to be buried. Holland urged Williams to imitate the successful “Living Newspapers” performed at that time by the Federal Theater Project in New York City; he even gave Williams Headlines as the title of the piece. William Jay Smith, who attended the performance, feels that Headlines was not so much a play as an incoherent mishmash of shouted and projected news headlines. Williams was also disappointed and called Headlines “a piece of hack work.”
However, Williams may have been influenced by Shaw’s powerful message in Bury the Dead. Not only does Williams appear to challenge Shaw’s imperative title with his own, but Honor the Living is also one of the few Williams one-acts—along with The Municipal Abattoir, The Chalky White Substance, The Demolition Downtown, Green Eyes, Mister Paradise, and Me, Vashya—that either voices an unambiguously political message or directly addresses the terrible toll of war.
A central image from Shaw’s play appears in Me, Vashya—Lady Shontine’s visions of dead soldiers rising from their graves to punish her husband. Williams finished writing Vashya in June 1937. Seeing that Bury the Dead was still on his mind at that time, one might conjecture that Honor the Living was written between the autumn of 1936 and the summer of 1937.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941)
The text comes from an acting edition of five short plays by Williams, American Blues, published by Dramatists Play Service in 1948. Although that volume inherited the title of Williams’s “American Blues” cycle, only two of the five plays—Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry and The Dark Room—had ever been grouped by Williams as installments in that cycle. Crushed Petunias and the other
two plays, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, and The Unsatisfactory Supper, were written after Williams had essentially abandoned the American Blues rubric.
The author’s dedication of Crushed Petunias is dated “February, 1941.” This is confirmed as the date of composition by a letter of February 27, 1941, from Williams to Audrey Wood. Williams mentions enclosing “a one-act fantasy (light) which might do for the radio,” and he suggests that Wood submit it for publication.
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry (1936)
The first play by Williams to be published, Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry was selected by the editor Margaret Mayora for The Best One-Act Plays of 1940 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1941). The text published here comes from the American Blues acting edition, 1948.
According to biographer Lyle Leverich, the earliest known play by Tennessee Williams is Beauty is the Word, written in 1930 for an annual one-act play contest at the University of Missouri. Williams’s second attempt, Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, written in 1932 for the same annual contest, bears a strong connection to Eugene O’Neill’s one-act Before Breakfast. In 1934, Williams began rewriting Hot Milk as Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry.
Although the play is usually dated to its rewriting under the present title in 1934, Williams mentions revising it in a journal entry dated March 24, 1936: “. . . finished re-writing my ‘One Act’—‘Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry’ which I will submit to Prof. Webster tomorrow—A little too windy I’m afraid—but I think it would be effective on the stage—Wish I could have a play produced.”
The Dark Room (c. 1939)
The text published here is that published by Dramatists Play Service in American Blues, 1948. A draft at HRC is dated 1938.
Not included on the “American Blues” list that Williams prepared in December 1938, the play is mentioned in a May 5, 1939, letter from Williams to Wood: “One of the dramatic sketches in American Blues (’the Dark Room’) actually was first in short-story form—I will send you a copy.” Williams could have revised the play at any time during that ten-year period from its first draft of 1938 to its initial publication in 1948. However, no evidence for revision after 1939 is known. The story version was published in The Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams in 1985.
The only available information on the first professional production of The Dark Room is found in a Williams sourcebook compiled by Catherine M. Arnott, who indicates that it premiered in London in 1966.
The Pretty Trap (c. 1944)
Previously published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2006, edited by Robert Bray. The copy text is a unique typescript at HRC. It is a one-act treatment of The Glass Menagerie—or, rather, it is a spin-off, as Brian Parker has more accurately called it in his introduction to Bray’s edition.
The date of composition is uncertain, in part because of the avalanche of Menagerie drafts and variants that Williams wrote from 1939 until the final Broadway production in 1945. However, his author’s note on the first page of the typescript is helpful: “This play is derived from a longer work in progress, The Gentleman Caller . . .” The Gentlemen Caller was the primary working title for the play prior to and during Williams’s tenure at MGM in 1943 until he changed it to The Glass Menagerie in September 1944. And since The Pretty Trap is related to the third act of Menagerie, it is possible that it was written well into 1944—though it also may have been composed during Williams’s stay in Hollywood from May through November 1943. For more detailed information, see Brian Parker’s introduction.
Prior to its premiere at Southern Rep, New Orleans, in March 2011, a reading of The Pretty Trap was organized in October 2005 by Food for Thought Productions, New York City, with Kathleen Turner reading the role of Amanda.
Interior: Panic (1946)
First published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2007, edited, with an introduction, by Robert Bray. The copy text comes from two draft typescripts filed at HRC, Interior: Panic and Interior: Panic (a 1-act Play). These appear to be two distinct variations, the latter one dated “1945–46” in the author’s handwriting. But upon careful reading, Bray determined that they combine to form this complete early one-act treatment of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Gladys Shannon of Interior: Panic will later become Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire, just as Stella and Jack Kiefaber will become Stella and Stanley Kowalski—their surnames changed from Irish and German, respectively, to French and Polish. The interior voices heard by Gladys and the audience, and triggered by panic, will become—in Streetcar—the exaggerated New Orleans street sounds, or the music that is played when Blanche thinks of Allan Grey.
For further details about Interior: Panic, see Bray’s introduction. The play premiered at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in March 2005.
Kingdom of Earth (1967)
Published in the February 1967 issue of Esquire. The copy text is a typescript sent by Audrey Wood to New Directions, marked on the cover “1965–66 version” by then editor-in-chief, Robert M. MacGregor. Kingdom of Earth also appears in an internal New Directions memo from 1966 listing several one-act plays for possible inclusion in the volume Dragon Country, which was eventually published in 1970 but did not include this play.
The characters and plot first appeared in a short story, “The Kingdom of Earth,” written in 1942 and published in a limited edition of Hard Candy, 1954, and The Knightly Quest, 1966. Williams wrote in his essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” as it appeared in The New York Times on March 17, 1957, “On my workbench are two unfinished plays, Kingdom of Earth and Sweet Bird of Youth. I don’t know which I’ll return to. . . .” He returned to the latter. The full-length version of Kingdom of Earth opened on Broadway March 27, 1968, under the title The Seven Descents of Myrtle, which the producer David Merrick favored. Williams later changed the title of the full-length play back to Kingdom of Earth for its publication in 1968, and it retained this title for a revised version in 1975.
In Esquire this one-act bears an epigraph from the Bible:
“. . . to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven.”
—Genesis 6:17
Although apocalyptic visions thread several of his later works, Williams edited the verse in such a way as to remove mention of a flood and its resulting devastation. The verse in full reads: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays (1973)
Previously unpublished. The copy text, from the New Directions files, is a photocopy of a typescript that had emendations in Williams’s handwriting as well as corrections and insert pages typed on different paper with a different typewriter. The original typescript has not yet been identified. In the files at HRC is a similar, but not identical typed draft dated October, 1973; one of two manuscripts constituting “Vieux Carré, A Double-bill, The Angel in the Alcove & I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays.” All of Williams’s corrections on the New Directions photocopy are incorporated in the present published text. They are also incorporated in a typescript with a handwritten note in pencil on the cover page, “Circle Rep. Theater, 1979,” now filed in the Billy Rose Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library.
Never Get Dressed is part of an evolution of poems, short stories, and one-acts that lead to the full-length Vieux Carré, which opened on Broadway in May 1977. Skylight or Broken Glass in the Morning (circa 1964–65), the draft of an earlier incarnation filed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, shares the same setting and much of the imagery of Never Get Dressed. Yet the main characters are quite different: Paul and Virginia, are a soldier on leave for a nervous condition and a nurse. Curiously, Williams typed on the manuscript of Skylight, “This play should be bound with two others in the manuscript called ‘the Mutilated.’”
The next incarnation, also filed
at Columbia, is titled I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays, “A Play in Two Scenes.” A prefatory note to the play is dated, “May 1, 1970.” Jane and Tye first appear in this second Columbia version, establishing the relationship that continues through to Vieux Carré.
A short play titled The Reading was submitted by Audrey Wood to New Directions along with Green Eyes and The Demolition Downtown in 1971. The Reading involves actors playing the roles of Jane and Tye at a rehearsal attended by a playwright and a director. It has been edited by Robert Bray and published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2010.
The play-within-a-play premise was expanded in the present version to include a prickly stage manager and scenes in which the playwright prompts the actors to talk through the essence of their actions and states of being. These devices were dropped for the Broadway and London versions of Vieux Carré, the latter published by New Directions in 1978. For more information, see Linda Dorff’s article on the origins of Vieux Carré in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2000.
Some Problems for The Moose Lodge (1980)
Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript filed in the Goodman Theatre Archive, Special Collections of the Chicago Public Library. It is identified as “revised 11/10/80,” presumably with cuts made after the opening night on November 8, 1980. Some Problems for the Moose Lodge was presented at the Goodman along with two other one-act comedies, The Frosted Glass Coffin and The Perfect Analysis Given by A Parrot, under the collective title Tennessee Laughs.
Williams later expanded Moose Lodge into the full-length A House Not Meant to Stand, published by New Directions in 2008. House was produced by the Goodman in their Studio Theater in April 1981 and, rewritten and revised, presented in its final version on their main stage in April 1982.
Moose Lodge contains the same characters, some of the plot, and even some of the dialogue of House, but has none of the darker elements—the ghosts, the battle for money, the collapsing house, and Bella’s death—that warrant the full-length play’s subtitle, A Gothic Comedy.