FOREWORD:

AN INVISIBLE CAT ENTERS, MEWING

Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, I used to stare across the Gulf of Mexico in what I thought was the direction of Key West, Florida. I knew that Tennessee Williams lived there and I had decided, in high school, that one day I would live there, too. Some fifty-plus years later I do. The house he lived in is a five-minute bike ride from mine.

And now I sit contemplating some fifteen plays previously unknown to me—seven never before published and the rest not always easy to find—and wondering what I should tell you about them. Perhaps he would not be pleased at their publication. These short plays do not always represent him at his considerable best. As a writer, I get that. A reputation is at stake.

But as a playwright who reveres his work, I am overjoyed at their arrival on my desk. As Mendy says in my play The Lisbon Traviata about an unpublished recording of Maria Callas in less than her optimal voice, “I’ll take crumbs when it comes to Maria.” I feel the same way about Tennessee Williams.

Artists, especially esteemed ones like Tennessee Williams, leave behind a more or less official canon of work. There are the universally recognized masterpieces—The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—that are produced annually as part of the core repertory of the American Theater, taught in universities and read by people who have never been inside a theater.

There are the plays jockeying for their position in the Williams hierarchy—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of The Iguana—plays still waiting for the definitive production or radical re-interpretation that will reveal them as the equals of Menagerie or Streetcar.

There are the plays we are always intrigued to see in revival, knowing they may never achieve the popularity of the better-known titles—Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, and Orpheus Descending—plays we are always grateful to see and grow frustrated waiting to see again.

And finally there are the mostly ignored Williams plays that we personally cherish as something rare and precious in the canon and wonder why more people don’t—Vieux Carré and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel are my candidates for another look by the right director, cast, and designers.

And now there are these almost completely unknown Williams one-act plays gathered as The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays.

Written between 1936, when he was a student in St. Louis just beginning to write plays, and 1980, three years before his death, when his fall from critical grace seemed all but complete, these fifteen short plays—some complete and begging for production while others are tantalizing fragments of what might have been or misfires that are suigeneris, but all authentic Williams nevertheless—are invaluable. Even if they add nothing to his reputation, they add to our knowledge of this fascinating chameleon of a playwright. Any new glimpse of Williams is one to be grateful for.