This new volume gathers some of Williams' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."
THE STORIES: MOONY'S KID DON'T CRY. A short play about a worker, his wife and child. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE DARK ROOM. A tragic sketch about an Italian woman and a welfare worker. (1 man, 2 women.) THE CASE OF THE CRUSHED PETUNIAS. A delightful, hum
The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life—its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love—into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams This new collection of fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams’s most potent, comical and disturbing short plays?Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws, while the poet Hart Crane is confronted by his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle. Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman’s entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span. This volume is edited, with an introduction and notes, by the editor, acting teacher, and theater scholar Thomas Keith.
ATTACK OF THE GIANT TENT WORMS. Billy and Clara are nearing the end of their summer vacation on Cape Cod, as their cottage is being devoured by billions of tent-worms. Worse, Billy has just gotten word from his oncologist that there are no more treatment options for his brain cancer. A darkly humorous exploration of which is more terrifying: bugs or death? (1 man, 1 woman.) DESIRE QUENCHED BY TOUCH. In 1950s New Orleans, a black masseur must account for the disappearance of his favorite white customer. People don’t just vanish inside massage parlors… (3 men.) THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN. Everything in Layley’s life is going according to plan. She belongs to the best sorority at her university and has a devoted boyfriend who could easily become a devoted husband. But Layley suspects that there is more to life than stifling conformity. So she signs up for a poetry class in the hopes of expressing herself. There she meets Dylan, a sensitive poet with whom she enjoys a night of passion that opens up a truly revolutionary prospect: living a life of her own. (3 men, 4 women.) ORIFLAMME. Oriflamme (noun): A red or scarlet banner; a knight’s standard; a rallying principle…Sickly Anna Kimball, on her final day, reaches out for, and becomes, all of these. (1 man, 1 woman.) YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT CENTRALIA. Jim, the Gentleman Caller, leaves the Wingfields’ disastrous dinner party to meet his fiancée Betty’s train. The evening won’t turn out the way either of them expected. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN A VIOLIN CASE AND A COFFIN. Tom and his sister Roe’s childhood comes to a painful end when Richard Miles, who moves in light, arrives in town with his violin in a case. (2 men, 4 women.)
Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.
"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.
One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.