Every surviving script that Williams named on these “American Blues” lists is now available in one of three New Directions volumes: The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, and 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays. The one-acts can now be performed as Williams envisioned them—or in a variety of other combinations. Death in the Movies was a draft title for This Property is Condemned. Complete scripts of the two other listed one-acts are not known to have survived: Manana Es Otro Dio is thus far only found in draft fragments at the HRC under the English title Tomorrow is Another Day, and likewise the tantalizing American Gothic, inspired by the Grant Wood painting, is either unfinished or incomplete in surviving drafts at HRC.

The present volume also allows a reader to follow the development of Williams’s ideas for five more full-length plays by comparing them with their one-act counterparts: The Glass Menagerie with The Pretty Trap, A Streetcar Named Desire with Interior: Panic; the full-length Kingdom of Earth with the one-act Kingdom of Earth; Vieux Carré with I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays; and A House Not Meant to Stand with Some Problems for the Moose Lodge. Additional pairings of plays with their shorter precursors are available in various other New Directions volumes—The Rose Tattoo and The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View; Camino Real and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real; Sweet Bird of Youth and The Enemy: Time; Small Craft Warnings and Confessional; and finally, Something Cloudy, Something Clear and The Parade.

According to Williams’s college friend William Jay Smith, when Tennessee showed a new one-act play to his friends he never called it a one-act or a play, but rather offered them his latest “fantasy.” And some of them are fantasies. Others are sketches—still others are like poems, theatrical poems. Whatever they are called, and however beautifully some of them may read, these plays were written to be performed.

At Liberty (c. 1939)

The copy text is an undated script bound in a folder printed with the name and address of Williams’s agent, Audrey Woods, and filed at The Historic New Orleans Collection. This agency script corresponds closely to the first published version of the play in American Scenes, edited by John Kozlenko, John Day Company, New York, 1941, where it appeared along with This Property is Condemned under the collective title Landscape with Figures, (“Two Mississippi Plays”). At Liberty was subsequently published in 25 Non-Royalty One-Act Plays for All-Girl Casts, compiled by Betty Smith, Greenberg Publishers, New York, 1942.