Previously unpublished.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Previously unpublished.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)