The next incarnation, also filed at Columbia, is titled I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays, “A Play in Two Scenes.” A prefatory note to the play is dated, “May 1, 1970.” Jane and Tye first appear in this second Columbia version, establishing the relationship that continues through to Vieux Carré.

A short play titled The Reading was submitted by Audrey Wood to New Directions along with Green Eyes and The Demolition Downtown in 1971. The Reading involves actors playing the roles of Jane and Tye at a rehearsal attended by a playwright and a director. It has been edited by Robert Bray and published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2010.

The play-within-a-play premise was expanded in the present version to include a prickly stage manager and scenes in which the playwright prompts the actors to talk through the essence of their actions and states of being. These devices were dropped for the Broadway and London versions of Vieux Carré, the latter published by New Directions in 1978. For more information, see Linda Dorff’s article on the origins of Vieux Carré in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2000.

Some Problems for The Moose Lodge (1980)

Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript filed in the Goodman Theatre Archive, Special Collections of the Chicago Public Library. It is identified as “revised 11/10/80,” presumably with cuts made after the opening night on November 8, 1980. Some Problems for the Moose Lodge was presented at the Goodman along with two other one-act comedies, The Frosted Glass Coffin and The Perfect Analysis Given by A Parrot, under the collective title Tennessee Laughs.

Williams later expanded Moose Lodge into the full-length A House Not Meant to Stand, published by New Directions in 2008. House was produced by the Goodman in their Studio Theater in April 1981 and, rewritten and revised, presented in its final version on their main stage in April 1982.

Moose Lodge contains the same characters, some of the plot, and even some of the dialogue of House, but has none of the darker elements—the ghosts, the battle for money, the collapsing house, and Bella’s death—that warrant the full-length play’s subtitle, A Gothic Comedy.

Thomas Keith

Bibliographic Sources

Bibliographic Sources

Catherine Arnott, Tennessee Williams on File (London and New York: Methuen, 1985).

Chicago Public Library, Goodman Theatre Archive.

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, New York.

George Crandell, Tennessee Williams: An Illustrated Bibliography (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).

Drewey Wayne Gunn, Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography, second edition (Metuchen, NJ & London: 1991).

Harry Ransom Humanities and Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

The Historic New Orleans Collection.

Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

New Directions Publishing Archives, New York.

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Washington University Library, St. Louis.

By Tennessee Williams:

American Blues: Five Short Plays (New York: Dramatists Plays Service, 1948).

Collected Stories, (New York: New Directions, 1985).

Dragon Country, (New York: New Directions, 1970).