The characters and plot first appeared in a short story, “The Kingdom of Earth,” written in 1942 and published in a limited edition of Hard Candy, 1954, and The Knightly Quest, 1966. Williams wrote in his essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” as it appeared in The New York Times on March 17, 1957, “On my workbench are two unfinished plays, Kingdom of Earth and Sweet Bird of Youth. I don’t know which I’ll return to. . . .” He returned to the latter. The full-length version of Kingdom of Earth opened on Broadway March 27, 1968, under the title The Seven Descents of Myrtle, which the producer David Merrick favored. Williams later changed the title of the full-length play back to Kingdom of Earth for its publication in 1968, and it retained this title for a revised version in 1975.

In Esquire this one-act bears an epigraph from the Bible:

“. . . to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven.”

—Genesis 6:17

Although apocalyptic visions thread several of his later works, Williams edited the verse in such a way as to remove mention of a flood and its resulting devastation. The verse in full reads: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”

I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays (1973)

Previously unpublished. The copy text, from the New Directions files, is a photocopy of a typescript that had emendations in Williams’s handwriting as well as corrections and insert pages typed on different paper with a different typewriter. The original typescript has not yet been identified. In the files at HRC is a similar, but not identical typed draft dated October, 1973; one of two manuscripts constituting “Vieux Carré, A Double-bill, The Angel in the Alcove & I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays.” All of Williams’s corrections on the New Directions photocopy are incorporated in the present published text. They are also incorporated in a typescript with a handwritten note in pencil on the cover page, “Circle Rep. Theater, 1979,” now filed in the Billy Rose Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library.

Never Get Dressed is part of an evolution of poems, short stories, and one-acts that lead to the full-length Vieux Carré, which opened on Broadway in May 1977. Skylight or Broken Glass in the Morning (circa 1964–65), the draft of an earlier incarnation filed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, shares the same setting and much of the imagery of Never Get Dressed. Yet the main characters are quite different: Paul and Virginia, are a soldier on leave for a nervous condition and a nurse. Curiously, Williams typed on the manuscript of Skylight, “This play should be bound with two others in the manuscript called ‘The Mutilated.’”