Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
ONE-ACT PLAYS
THE MAGIC TOWER, MOONY’S KID
DON’T CRY, THE DARK ROOM,
SOME PROBLEMS FOR THE
MOOSE LODGE, THE PRETTY TRAP
AND OTHER PLAYS
“Just as young painters make their stabs at impressionism and cubism, in his early one-acts Williams tried his hand with political satire, expressionism, social realism, and even drawing-room comedy.”
—Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson
“Within his early one-acts there are intriguing prototypes of characters and seeds of ideas Williams developed more fully in his later, larger dramas.”
—The New York Times
“Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths.”
—Randy Gener, American Theater Magazine
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope.”
—Tennessee Williams in a 1950 letter to Elia Kazan
“Reading these plays of the very young Tennessee, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s he had become, we are offered a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, the demons, and the wit of this iconic playwright.”
—Terrence McNally, from his foreword,
“An Invisible Cat Enters, Mewing”
CONTENTS
Tennessee Williams: 1911–1983
Foreword by Terrence McNally
At Liberty
The Magic Tower
Me, Vashya
Curtains for the Gentleman
In Our Profession
Every Twenty Minutes
Honor the Living
The Case of the Crushed Petunias
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
The Dark Room
The Pretty Trap
Interior: Panic
Kingdom of Earth
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
Some Problems for The Moose Lodge
Notes on the Text
Acknowledgments
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: 1911–83
| 1908 | Williams’s sister, Rose Isabelle, is born 19 November in Columbus, Mississippi. |
| 1911 | Thomas Lanier Williams III is born on 26 March in Columbus, Mississippi. |
| 1911–18 | Rose, Tom, and their mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, live with Edwina’s parents, the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest, and his wife Rosina Otte Dakin, chiefly in Clarksdale, while father Cornelius Coffin Williams works as a travelling salesman. |
| 1918 | The Williams family moves to St Louis where father becomes a branch manager at the International Shoe Company. |
| 1919 | Williams’s younger brother, Walter Dakin, born on 21 February 1919, in St Louis. |
| 1926 | After only one semester at Soldan High School in St Louis, Williams transfers to University City High School. |
| 1928 | Publishes the first story for which he is paid – “The Vengeance of Nitrosis” – in Weird Tales. Goes on a European trip with his maternal grandfather. |
| 1929 | In September, Williams enters the University of Missouri and joins Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. In October the stock market crashes resulting in the Great Depression. |
| 1932 | Williams’s father withdraws him from the University of Missouri for failing ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Course) and starts him as a clerk at the International Shoe Company, a job he loathes. |
| 1935 | First production of Williams’s one-act play – Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! – by Memphis Garden Players, a group of amateur actors. |
| 1936 | In January, Williams enrols at Washington University in St Louis and writes the one-act play Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton. |
| 1937 | Writes a full-length, leftist play, Candles to the Sun, about a coalmine strike, staged by the Mummers (amateur group of actors) in St Louis. Rose is committed to Farmington (Missouri) State Mental Hospital; Williams is heartbroken and feels tremendous guilt. |
| 1937–39 | Studies playwriting at the University of Iowa with Edward Charles Mabie, nicknamed “the Boss”; Mummers stage Fugitive Kind. Graduates from Iowa with a BA in English. Writes another leftist play, Not About Nightingales, about a prison riot in Pennsylvania. Becomes a vagabond, travelling to New Orleans where he possibly has his first homosexual experience in the French Quarter. |
| 1939 | Meets Audry Wood, his agent for over thirty years. Signs his name Tennessee Williams for the first time in a short story “Field of Blue Children” in Story Magazine. Receives a $100 prize in a competition organised by the Group Theatre (where Elia Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thacher, is one of the readers) for his collection of one-act plays American Blues. Wins a grant of $1,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. |
| 1940 | Studies playwriting with John Gassner and Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research. His first professional production of a play – The Battle of Angels – has a disastrous Boston try-out on 30 December but closes on 11 January 1941 after the City Council protests about its sexual content. |
| 1941–42 | Travels around the country, writing one-act plays, stories, and poems; visits Key West for the first time; has the first of his four cataract operations. Collaborates on You Touched Me! with Donald Windham. Meets Jordan Massee, Sr, a model for Big Daddy. |
| 1943 | Works for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) on a screenplay The Gentleman Caller (later The Glass Menagerie) but is fired after only six months. Rose has a prefrontal lobotomy, leaving her mentally challenged for life; the operation is referenced in Suddenly Last Summer. |
| 1944 | National Institute for Arts and Letters awards Williams $1,000 for Battle of Angels. Margo Jones, theatre founder and longtime friend, directs the one-act play The Purification at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. The Glass Menagerie premieres in Chicago on 26 December. |
| 1945 | The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s first big success, runs for 561 performances on Broadway, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Donaldson Award. He publishes thirteen one-act plays in Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton. |
| 1947 | A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, opens on 3 December at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway and runs for 855 performances, spawning two road companies. Williams meets his longtime companion and lover Frank Merlo (1929–63), a US Navy veteran. |
| 1948–49 | Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male is published on 3 January 1948. Streetcar wins the triple crown of the Pulitzer, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award. It premieres across the world (e.g., Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden). British premiere of Streetcar (Sept.) directed by Laurence Olivier, starring wife Vivien Leigh. One Arm and Other Stories, a collection of sexually explicit stories, is published. Summer and Smoke opens on Broadway. |
| 1950 | First (and worst according to Williams) film adaptation of The Glass Menagerie released by Warner Brothers. The novel The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone is published. 1951 The Rose Tattoo opens in New York for 306 performances. Warner Brothers releases film of Streetcar, also directed by Kazan and designed by Jo Mielziner; produced by Irene Selznick, former wife of David O. Selznik, producer of Gone with the Wind. |
| 1952 | Streetcar wins National Film Critics’ Circle Award. Williams is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Publishes the story “Three Players of a Summer Game”, the genesis of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. |
| 1953 | Camino Real opens on Broadway. |
| 1954 | Hard Candy (another collection of explicit fiction) is published. Works on drafts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Kazan insists on major revisions. |
| 1955 | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premieres on 24 March on Broadway and runs for 649 performances, winning Williams his second Pulitzer Prize and third New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; film of The Rose Tattoo released; Reverend Walter Dakin dies, aged ninety-seven. |
| 1956 | Baby Doll screenplay condemned for sexual content by the Catholic Church. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens in Paris (16 December); it is banned in Ireland. First book of poetry, In the Winter of Cities, is published. |
| 1957 | Orpheus Descending (revision of Battle of Angels) closes in New York after 68 performances. Cornelius Coffin Williams dies. |
| 1958 | Film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is released by MGM, directed and co-written by Richard Brooks; it is Williams’s biggest box-office hit; Suddenly Last Summer opens Off-Broadway. British premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof using Williams’s original third act is staged at a private club because of ban by Lord Chamberlain. |
| 1959 | Sweet Bird of Youth, with antagonist Boss Finley, opens for 95 performances on Broadway. Screen version of Suddenly Last Summer is released. |
| 1960 | Williams’s comedy, Period of Adjustment, opens in New York for 132 performances. Film of Orpheus Descending, set in a hellish Delta, opens under the title of Fugitive Kind. |
| 1961 | Williams’s last Broadway success, The Night of the Iguana, wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and runs for 316 performances. Film versions of Summer and Smoke and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone come out. |
| 1962 | Films of Sweet Bird of Youth (starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page) and Period of Adjustment (starring Jane Fonda) are produced. |
| 1963 | The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens on Broadway. Frank Merlo dies of lung cancer. |
| 1964 | Film of The Night of the Iguana is released, starring Richard Burton as a drunken clergyman. |
| 1966 | Slapstick Tragedy (The Mutilated and The Gnadiges Fraulein) closes after only seven performances. |
| 1967 | First version of The Two-Character Play, about a brother and sister, opens in London. |
| 1968 | The Seven Descents of Myrtle (later entitled Kingdom of Earth) opens on Broadway for 27 performances; contains graphic sex scene. |
| 1969 | In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel premieres 11 May in New York for 23 performances. Williams is committed to psychiatric unit of Barnes Hospital, St Louis, 27–8 June. The Stonewall (named after the gay bar) Riots erupt in New York City, marking the start of the Gay Liberation movement. Williams is baptised a Roman Catholic in Key West. |
| 1970 | Dragon Country: A Book of Plays is published. Williams appears on the David Frost Show and for the first time publicly admits his homosexuality. |
| 1971 | Out Cry (rewritten version of The Two-Character Play) opens on 2 July in Chicago. |
| 1972 | Small Craft Warnings moves to Broadway for 200 performances; Williams plays the role of Doc, a drunken, disbarred physician, the only time he acts in a professional production of his plays. |
| 1974 | Eight Mortal Ladies: A Book of Stories is published. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Stratford, CT, with Williams’s final, new third act. |
| 1975 | Williams given the Medal of Honor for Literature by the National Arts Club. Memoirs published, as well as a novel, Moise and the World of Reason. Red Devil Battery Sign, occasioned by Watergate, is staged in Boston and New York. First Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Williams’s final script. |
| 1976 | Eccentricities of a Nightingale (revision of Summer and Smoke) premieres in New York. |
| 1977 | Vieux Carré closes after only 11 performances. Second book of poetry, Androgyne, Mon Amour, published. First televised Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. |
| 1978 | A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur opens in New York for 36 performances. |
| 1979 | Receives Presidential Arts Achievement Award. |
| 1980 | President Jimmy Carter presents Williams with Medal of Freedom. Edwina Dakin Williams dies at the age of ninety-five. Clothes for a Summer Hotel, about Zelda Fitzgerald’s madness, opens. |
| 1982 | A House Not Meant to Stand opens in Chicago; the last of Williams’s plays to be professionally produced while he was alive. |
| 1983 | Williams dies on 24 February in New York at the Hotel Elysée (Elysian Fields, the “Land of the Happy Dead” in Streetcar) after an overdose of barbiturates. 1984 Showtime (cable TV) airs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, re-shown on PBS TV in 1985. |
| 1985 | Tennessee Williams’s Collected Stories is published. |
| 1988 | British revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Howard Davies, uses Williams’s original script (1955), the first production of the play in Britain in thirty years. |
| 1990 | Davies directs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for its Broadway revival. |
| 1996 | Rose Williams dies on 5 September at the age of eighty-eight. |
| 1998 | Not About Nightingales premieres at London’s Royal National Theatre. Written in 1938, the play was rediscovered in the 1980s by Vanessa Redgrave. Corin Redgrave stars as warden Boss Whalen. |
| 2004 | Williams Revival at the Kennedy Center. |
| 2005 | Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, including thirteen previously unpublished one-acts, is released. |
| 2008 | Dakin Williams dies on 20 May. The Traveling Companion and Other Plays (twelve previously uncollected experimental plays) is published. First professional production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with a black cast on Broadway (comes to London in 2009). |