The Pretty Trap was first performed on March 23, 2011 at the Southern Rep Theatre, New Orleans, as part of the Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival’s centennial tribute to Williams. It was directed by Aimée Hayes; the set design was by Ashley Sehorn; the costume design was by Laura Sirkin-Brown; the sound design was by Mike Harkins; the props were designed by Sarah Zoghbi; and the lighting design was by Joan Long.

CHARACTERS

AMANDA WINGFIELD

LAURA WINGFIELD

TOM WINGFIELD

JIM DELANEY

Character Descriptions:

Amanda Wingfield, a perennial southern belle, transferred to more rigorous climate and conditions.

Laura Wingfield, her daughter, a shy and sensitive girl of eighteen who “needs to be pushed a little.”

Tom Wingfield, her son, the dreamy type, who also needs pushing a little.

Jim Delaney, a gentleman caller, who represents dreams plus action, the man coming toward us. Needs pulling.

Author’s Note: This play is derived from a longer work in progress, The Gentleman Caller. It corresponds to the last act of that play, roughly, but has a lighter treatment and a different ending.

The feeling of the play is nostalgic. It belongs to memory, which is softly lighted and not too realistic, and often has the quality of faint music. The curtain rises on the interior of Apartment F, third floor south, on Maple Street in Saint Louis, in a block that also contains the Ever-ready Garage, a Chinese laundry, and a bookie’s shop disguised as a cigar store. It is early summer. There are billowing white lace curtains at the windows and the furnishings of the little apartment contrive to have a certain grace and charm in spite of their cheapness. The scene is played in two areas, downstage for the living room and upstage for the dining room. Portieres are between the two areas, which give the effect of a second proscenium or a stage within a stage. That faint music, which is the music of memory, is heard as the curtain rises.

AMANDA [offstage]: Don’t come into the kitchen in your white dress! Go in front and relax till they get here.

[A door at the back of the upstage area is opened and Laura comes in. She is a very slight and delicate girl of nineteen. She has a fugitive prettiness that could easily escape attention, that comes and goes, but sometimes could stab your heart. Probably the dress that she actually wore on this evening was not so lovely as that which memory gives her. She seems to move in a radiance of her own. Amanda enters the dining room with a bowl of jonquils, which she places between the candelabra on the drop leaf table. She is a middle-aged woman of great energy whose early prettiness was more emphatic than Laura’s. She has relinquished none of the girlish vivacity that must have been so charming in her youth but now is a little comical or pathetic.]