It is the three plays belonging to the 1940s, and one from 1939, that present the Williams we are most familiar with. Besides the Menagerie pencil-sketch of The Pretty Trap, we can see a very preliminary, very successful character study for Serafina in The Rose Tattoo as Mrs. Pocciotti in The Dark Room (1939). The playwright is clearly in love with his fractured-English-speaking immigrant. She leaps off the page as swiftly and completely as she will in her full-length incarnation eleven years later. Williams enjoyed writing with famous actresses in mind. The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941) is “respectfully dedicated to the talent and charm of Miss Helen Hayes,” and Miss Dorothy Simple is a part a charming and talented actress could have a triumph with. One wonders if Miss Hayes ever read it. In this play, the nameless Young Man is the harbinger of life. Twenty years later the Young Man in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) will become the Angel of Death.

In the last play of this 1940s trio, Interior: Panic (1946), Blanche Shannon is no one else but Blanche DuBois. The situation is familiar, the cramped quarters in New Orleans with her sister and her husband, and Blanche’s desperation and need for rescue by her own “gentleman caller” are all there, but this time there is hope at the end, faint yet surely there, for Blanche.

The full force of Stanley Kowalski is barely suggested in Jack Kiefaber, who is as much Blanche’s victim as her predator. The full-length play is presaged in Blanche’s reveries but the actual working out is forestalled. But as a playwright’s note, a jotting, a fragment of the masterpiece that is soon to come, Interior: Panic is an invaluable addition to the Williams oeuvre. The discovery of a preliminary study for Michelangelo’s David, no matter what its size or medium, would be treasured for itself. It would inform our knowledge and understanding of “the original” we have already come to know.

The last three plays in the collection were written after Williams had been recognized as one of America’s greatest playwrights and his descent into critical indifference had begun. These were surely puzzling, troubled times for him. As he sought to discover new styles to explore his familiar themes, the commercial theater began its inexorable abandonment of him as a moneymaker. They were tired of the “old” Williams and unconvinced by the “new.” Kingdom of Earth (1967) is an early sketch for The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), one of the first of the so-called “disasters” of Williams’s later career. Read thoughtfully, and not expecting another Streetcar, it is funny, shocking, and moving. The full-length Myrtle is even better. Clearly, Williams knew he was on to something when he expanded this first, short draft into a full evening.

The poetry-laced I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays (1973), takes us back to New Orleans and all the familiar Williams themes. What is different this time is a sense of theatrical adventure: he is taking risks with language, style, and structure. This is a bolder Williams striking out in a different direction than his audience had come to expect and demand of him. I think Williams was always drawn to the “experimental” (a dread word to most producers), but also understood the constraints of commercial success once he hit the big time. The time had come to shake them off. It is a play written by a mature playwright who seems to have rediscovered the joy of writing for the theater. You can hear Williams having a good time! A playwright who can ask in a stage direction that “an invisible cat enters, mewing” is a playwright who stills has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Even if he does fall into the orchestra pit at the end of the play, the Playwright climbs out saying, “Old cats know how to fall.” This is the Williams who wasn’t afraid to fall (or fail) doing something different, even though he was soon to pay the price for it.