Previously published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2006, edited by Robert Bray. The copy text is a unique typescript at HRC. It is a one-act treatment of The Glass Menagerie—or, rather, it is a spinoff, as Brian Parker has more accurately called it in his introduction to Bray’s edition.

The date of composition is uncertain, in part because of the avalanche of Menagerie drafts and variants that Williams wrote from 1939 until the final Broadway production in 1945. However, his author’s note on the first page of the typescript is helpful: “This play is derived from a longer work in progress, The Gentleman Caller . . .” The Gentlemen Caller was the primary working title for the play prior to and during Williams’s tenure at MGM in 1943 until he changed it to The Glass Menagerie in September 1944. And since The Pretty Trap is related to the third act of Menagerie, it is possible that it was written well into 1944—though it also may have been composed during Williams’s stay in Hollywood from May through November 1943. For more detailed information, see Brian Parker’s introduction.

Prior to its premiere at Southern Rep, New Orleans, in March 2011, a reading of The Pretty Trap was organized in October 2005 by Food for Thought Productions, New York City, with Kathleen Turner reading the role of Amanda.

Interior: Panic (1946)

First published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2007, edited, with an introduction, by Robert Bray. The copy text comes from two draft typescripts filed at HRC, Interior: Panic and Interior: Panic (a 1-act Play). These appear to be two distinct variations, the latter one dated “1945–46” in the author’s handwriting. But upon careful reading, Bray determined that they combine to form this complete early one-act treatment of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Gladys Shannon of Interior: Panic will later become Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire, just as Stella and Jack Kiefaber will become Stella and Stanley Kowalski—their surnames changed from Irish and German, respectively, to French and Polish. The interior voices heard by Gladys and the audience, and triggered by panic, will become—in Streetcar—the exaggerated New Orleans street sounds, or the music that is played when Blanche thinks of Allan Grey.

For further details about Interior: Panic, see Bray’s introduction. The play premiered at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in March 2005.

Kingdom of Earth (1967)

Published in the February 1967 issue of Esquire. The copy text is a typescript sent by Audrey Wood to New Directions, marked on the cover “1965–66 version” by then editor-in-chief, Robert M. MacGregor. Kingdom of Earth also appears in an internal New Directions memo from 1966 listing several one-act plays for possible inclusion in the volume Dragon Country, which was eventually published in 1970 but did not include this play.