At Liberty’s year of composition is most likely 1939—Williams mentioned it to Woods in a letter of January 29, 1940 as a one-act play in her possession, but not bound with “American Blues.” It is not on the known lists of “American Blues” plays. The first professional production of At Liberty has yet to be identified, but interestingly it was produced off-off-Broadway at LaMama Experimental Theater Club in 1964.

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Previously unpublished.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)