Previously unpublished.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The copy text is from a unique typescript filed at HRC, and is previously unpublished.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Previously unpublished.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)