This is a list of the one-act plays written by American playwright Tennessee Williams .
Beauty Is the Word is Tennessee Williams' first play. The 12-page one-act was written in 1930 while Williams was a freshman at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri and submitted to a contest run by the school's Dramatic Arts Club. [1] Beauty was staged in competition and became the first freshman play ever to be selected for citation (it was awarded honorable mention); the college paper noted that it was "a play with an original and constructive idea, but the handling is too didactic and the dialog often too moralistic.". [1] The play tells the story of a South Pacific missionary, Abelard, and his wife, Mabel, and "both endorses the minister's life and corrects his tendency to Victorian prudery." [1]
Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? was written in February 1935. In it, Lily, a frustrated chain-smoking young woman, is hounded by her mother. After being discovered in the papers left to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, "Lily" was first produced by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre (Chattanooga, TN) as part of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Conference on Southern Literature, a biennial event that was hosted by the influential Arts and Education Council of Chattanooga.
Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! was Williams' first produced play. He wrote it in 1935 while he was staying in the Midtown, Memphis home of his grandparents. It was first performed July 12, 1935, by the Garden Players community theater in Memphis, Tennessee. [2] Regarding this production, Williams wrote in his Memoirs, "The laughter, genuine and loud, at the comedy I had written enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that's saved my life." [3] [4] It was published for the first time in 2016, in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review. [5]
The Magic Tower was written quickly by Williams in April 1936 in order to meet the deadline for a one-act play contest sponsored by the Webster Groves Theatre Guild in St. Louis, Missouri. [6] Williams won first place and The Magic Tower was performed by the Guild on October 13, 1936, to positive reviews. [7] The play tells the story of a young artist and his ex-actress wife living in a slum that they refer to as their "magic tower," following them as their optimism gradually fades.
Written in 1937 under the title Escape, Summer at the Lake was unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn . [8] The autobiographical play tells the story of Donald Fenway, a sensitive teenager who feels trapped by his self-absorbed Southern mother and his shoe-company executive father, who wants him to abandon his plans for college and find a menial job. The play was interpreted by several critics as "an early snapshot" of the characters and themes that later appeared in Williams' breakthrough 1944 play The Glass Menagerie , which also focused on a combative mother and a dreamy son bent on escape. [8] [9]
The Palooka is a 1937 one-act about an old has-been boxer. The characters are The Palooka (Galveston Joe), The Kid and The Trainer. The Kid is nervous about his first fight, and The Palooka relieves the Kid's anxiety by telling about the fictional life he wanted to lead after he retired as Galveston Joe. Its world premiere was presented by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre (Chattanooga, TN) as part of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Southern Writers Conference in 2000, and was later performed on October 2, 2003, by the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Fat Man's Wife was written by Williams in 1938 but remained unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn . [8] The play tells the story of Vera Cartwright, a sophisticated Manhattan society lady who is forced to choose between her boorish husband, a theatrical producer, and a young playwright who has become her admirer. The Fat Man's Wife received the sharpest criticism of any of the five exhumed plays; in The New Yorker , John Lahr called it a "heterosexual fantasy awash with false emotion and bad writing," [9] and The New York Times noted that "Williams is obviously attempting to write in a style entirely alien to him, trying on a faux-urbane manner that fits him like a rented tuxedo in the wrong size." [8]
Adam and Eve on a Ferry was written in 1939. It contains three characters: D.H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, and a female visitor named Ariadne. Ariadne comes seeking D.H. Lawrence because she had a run-in on a boat with a man, and wants romance and sex advice from Lawrence. The setting is described as "The sun porch of a villa in the Alps Maritimes." The only things mentioned on the stage are numerous potted plants, two wicker chairs, and "a banner bearing the woven figure of a phoenix in a nest of flames." Ariadne is described as plain and "spinsterish looking," and she wears a hat, while Lawrence sports a "gold satin dressing robe with a lavender shawl."
The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer is a short autobiographical play that was written in 1941. The Parade is set on the wharfs of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tells the story of a young playwright named Don dealing with his unrequited homosexual love for another man. The situations and characters in the play were "clearly drawn from a very autobiographical foundation," [10] with Don's dilemma reflecting a relationship Williams had in Provincetown with "his actual lover for [one] summer, Kip Kiernan." [11] The Parade was written after a fight with Kiernan, and Williams reflected in 1962 that "[the version of Kip in that play] is very, in fact completely different from Kip as he was. When someone hurts us deeply, we no longer see them at all clearly. Not until time has put them back in focus." [12] That year, Williams retitled and expanded The Parade into a full-length play that was produced in 1981 as Something Cloudy, Something Clear . [11] [12] The Parade was not performed until 2006, when it opened on October 1 in Provincetown as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival by Shakespeare on the Cape. Original cast members: Ben Griessmeyer, Vanessa Caye, Elliot Eustis, Megan Bartle, David Landon. Co-Directed by Jef Hall-Flavin and Eric Powell Holm.
The Long Goodbye is a 1940 one-act that deals with the male main character's memories of his life from when his family consisted of four people through his father leaving the family, his mother's death, and his sister's fall from grace. The scheme of the play consists of the main character moving out of the apartment he grew up in while experiencing extreme flashbacks of both terrible and glorious moments in his past.
Auto Da Fé was written in 1941. The plot concerns a young postal worker, Eloi, whose sexuality is repressed by a rigidly moralistic mother.
The Lady of Larkspur Lotion was written in 1941. It depicts the conflict between a dreamy, delusional heroine (à la Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire ) and her brusque, practical landlady, who wants to kick her out of her apartment. A 1973 summer production was staged by Producer, William T. Gardner, at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, Directed by José Quintero.
At Liberty was written in 1941 and tells the story of a once-successful actress who retreats to her childhood home in Mississippi, with fantasies of resuscitating her career.
In January 1941, Williams completed a one-act play centering on "a deranged spinster living in poverty and with her memories of a former lover." [13] Variously titled Port Mad and The Leafless Block, he revised the play in 1944 and renamed it Portrait of a Madonna. [13] After seeing Jessica Tandy's performance in a 1947 West Coast production of Madonna, Williams decided to cast her in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire . He later wrote, "It was instantly apparent to me that Jessica was Blanche [DuBois]." [14]
Moony's Kid Don't Cry originated as an eight-page melodrama titled Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, which Williams wrote in 1930 at the University of Missouri. [1] Hot Milk was produced at MU in 1932, and was revised and titled Moony's Kid Don't Cry in 1941, when it was published in Margaret Mayorga's Best One Act Plays of 1940. [15] It was the first of Williams' plays to be published. In both versions of the play, a poor young married couple get into an argument over their child and, eventually, their relationship.
The Strangest Kind of Romance was written in 1942. The play takes place in a boardinghouse run by the Landlady, who welcomes a new, but troubled, tenant known only as "Little Man". He develops a strange attachment to a cat named Nitchevo, the pet of the previous tenant.
The Purification is the only verse play Tennessee Williams wrote; Williams recalled that it was written in the summer of 1940, although his biographer Lyle Leverich thought it more likely written in spring 1942. It was published in 1944 in the anthology New Directions 1944 under the title Dos Ranchos, or the Purification (in later publications, this was shortened to The Purification). Set on a ranch in the mid-19th century, the play deals with an incestuous brother/sister relationship and a murder trial. [16] The Purification had its New York debut off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys on December 8, 1959.
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real is a one-act play that was written in early 1946 and published in Williams' 1948 play collection American Blues; in 1952, the playwright expanded it into a full-length play, Camino Real . [17] Williams directs the reader to use the Anglicized pronunciation "Cá-mino Réal"
This one-act play was written in 1946. In 1966, the play was expanded into the film of the same name, which starred Natalie Wood and Robert Redford.
27 Wagons Full of Cotton is a 1946 one-act play that Williams referred to as "a Mississippi Delta comedy." Jake, a middle-aged, shady cotton gin owner with antiquated equipment burns down the mill of the Syndicate Plantation, a rival in the cotton business, where Silva Vicarro serves as Superintendent. Being of Latin descent, with an Italian surname, and thus a community outsider, Vicarro, who knows what happened but cannot prove it, seeks revenge by raping Jake's young and voluptuous but childlike and naïve wife Flora. Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 film Baby Doll , which Williams described as a "grotesque folk comedy", was based on this play and The Unsatisfactory Supper, which has two similar main characters. The name and character of Silva Vicarro is used in Baby Doll. [18]
This play was first copyrighted in 1946. [19] Archie Lee and his Baby Doll Meighan, who parallel Jake and Flora in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, are reluctantly providing a home to Aunt Rose, an elderly relation who has been passed around among the family. An "unsatisfactory supper" cooked by Aunt Rose brings the issue to a head. Rose was the name of Tennessee Williams' sister. [20]
Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 film Baby Doll was based on this play and 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, which has two similar main characters; the names Archie Lee and Baby Doll are used for the main characters in Baby Doll.
The Last of My Solid Gold Watches was written in 1946, and centers on a Mississippi shoe salesman named Charlie Colton "whose time has passed and who pathetically echoes himself"; Williams is thought to have drawn on aspects of his father, a traveling salesman, in his portrait of Colton. [21]
Hello from Bertha is a 1946 one-act, about the dramatic life and death of a prostitute in a low-class bordello. It is very strong and very poetic as Bertha imagines events and allusions to her last moments. There are three characters in the play: Lena, a young prostitute who listens to Bertha, and Goldie the old lady of the house who wants to evict Bertha. A production was staged by Producer, William T. Gardner, in the summer of 1973 at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois Directed by José Quintero
Written in 1946, Lord Byron's Love Letter takes place in New Orleans in the late 19th century during Mardi Gras. A Spinster and an Old Woman advertise that they have one of Lord Byron's love letters (written to her grandmother). A Matron stops by to look at it and drags her partially inebriated Husband along. As the spinster reads from her grandmother's diary, it becomes apparent that the grandmother and the old woman are one and the same. According to the two women, the grandmother met Lord Byron in Greece, shortly before his death, and they had a summer filled with romance. After he died, the grandmother retired from the world and remained in complete seclusion as an honor to his memory (this does not prevent her from commenting on the spinster's every action). They only gave permission to The Matron and her Husband to see the letter from a distance and they refused to show this letter from near. [22]
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix presents a fictionalized version of the death of English writer D. H. Lawrence on the French Riveria; Lawrence was one of Williams' chief literary influences. [23] The play was completed in 1941, but was not published until 1951, when New Directions Publishers released it in a limited edition. [24] [25]
Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen was written in 1953 as part of a series of one-acts Williams wrote in particular for community theatre. Unlike the large scenic demands of his larger works (i.e. A Streetcar Named Desire ) Talk Like The Rain... features a small-scale, bare-room situation. It involves an unnamed Man and Woman who are bound together in an endless cycle by their hopeless poverty. Major William's themes are explored in the Man's alcoholism and the Woman's desperation. Although not specified, the one-act can be worked in a more surrealist fashion. Monologues for both sexes, with the Woman's being substantially longer, spanning several pages.
The Dark Room was written in c. 1939, and published in 1958.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias was written in 1941 and is the story of Dorothy Simple, a woman trapped in her job at a prim and proper shop in Massachusetts. Her complacent existence is interrupted by a visit from a tall man who works for LIFE Inc. who, she discovers, trampled her petunias the night before. With offers of poetry and packets of seeds, he helps her break free from her dreary life.
A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot was written in 1958.
Suddenly Last Summer was written in New York in 1957 and debuted as part of a double bill of one-act plays by Williams, titled Garden District. [26] (The other one-act play was Something Unspoken.) Garden District premiered Off-Broadway at the York Playhouse on January 7, 1958.
Something Unspoken was written in London in 1951 and debuted as part of a double bill of one-act plays by Williams, titled Garden District. [27] (The other one-act was Suddenly Last Summer.) Garden District premiered Off-Broadway at the York Playhouse on January 7, 1958. The title Garden District is a misnomer, because while Suddenly Last Summer takes place in the Garden District of New Orleans, Something Unspoken takes place in Meridian, Louisiana.
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens ... (A Play in Two Scenes) was initially written in 1957 and worked on as late as 1962. It was published in 2005 by New Directions in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays (NDP1007). A slightly different version was first published in Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2002). The play concerns the private life of "Candy" Delaney, a successful interior decorator and landlord who is also transgender. It was first performed by the Shakespeare Theatre Company on April 22, 2004, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The Mutilated was written in 1966, and debuted as part of a double-bill of one-act plays written by Williams titled Slapstick Tragedy (the other one-act was The Gnädiges Fräulein.) Slapstick Tragedy premiered on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on February 22, 1966. For acting in the two halves of Slapstick Tragedy, Zoe Caldwell won the first of her four Tony Awards. [28]
The Gnädiges Fräulein was written in 1966, and debuted as part of a double-bill of one-act plays written by Williams titled Slapstick Tragedy (the other one-act was The Mutilated.) Slapstick Tragedy premiered on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on February 22, 1966.
Confessional was written in 1967 and published in 1969 in the Williams anthology Dragon Country. It is set in a seedy bar in Southern California and centers on the confessions of four of its habitués of the bar. The staging creates the sense that the characters are confessing privately to the audience rather than to each other. The play premiered in July 1971 at the Maine Theatre Arts Festival in Bar Harbor in a double bill with Williams's I Can't Imagine Tomorrow. Williams later expanded Confessional to a two-act play Small Craft Warnings which premiered in 1972. Confessional was revived in 2016 for its British premiere at London's Southwark Playhouse. [29] [30] [31]
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws was written in 1969. Set in the anteroom of Hell, it was described by Williams biographer Donald Spoto as "gruesome....a tale of madness, depravity and death." [32]
I Can't Imagine Tomorrow was a two-character play written for television, broadcast with Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen under the collective title "Dragon Country" on WNET-TV in 1970. Kim Stanley plays a lonely but spirited spinster being courted by a pathologically shy teacher, played by William Redfield. "Dragon Country" is available on DVD as part of the Broadway Theatre Archive.
Written in 1970, The Frosted Glass Coffin follows a group of retirees living at a hotel in Miami, Florida. In his memoirs, Williams wrote that he believed the "rather depressing" work to be "one of [his] best short plays." [33]
The Demolition Downtown was written in 1970.
A Cavalier for Milady is a two-act play written in 1976.
Written in 1976, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur introduces Bodey, a hard-of-hearing 50-something, sharing her flat with Dorothea, 'Dottie', a Blanche DuBois-like 40-something civics teacher, smitten with the social-climbing principal of the school where she works, having already been taken advantage in the back seat of his car.
Kirche, Küche und Kinder was written in 1979. The title translates as "Church, Kitchen and Children" and is a reference to a well-known German slogan. It was first performed by The Jean Cocteau Repertory Company as a work-in-progress in September, 1979, at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York City, where it ran in repertory until January, 1980. The play is subtitled (An Outrage for the Stage). It was published in 2008 by New Directions in The Traveling Companion & Other Plays (NDP1106).
Lifeboat Drill was written in 1979. On January 26, 2002, June Havoc and Dick Cavett starred in a production of the play as part of the fourth annual Tennessee Williams marathon at the Hartford Stage Company. [34]
The Chalky White Substance was written in 1980. It was originally published in issue 66 of Antaeus in 1991. It was first performed by the Running Sun Theater Company on May 3, 1996, at the Center Stage (New York) in New York City on a double-bill with The Traveling Companion, collectively entitled Williams' Guignol. The play is dedicated to author James Purdy.
This Is Peaceable Kingdom or Good Luck God was written in 1980.
Steps Must be Gentle was written in 1980.
The One Exception was written in 1983. It was originally published in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Volume 3, in 2000. It was first performed on October 2, 2003, by the Hartford Stage Company of Hartford, Connecticut.
Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 American three-act play written by Tennessee Williams. The play, an adaptation of his 1952 short story "Three Players of a Summer Game", was written between 1953 and 1955. One of Williams's more famous works and his personal favorite, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the "Cat", Brick's wife.
Baby Doll is a 1956 American black comedy film directed by Elia Kazan and starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach. It was produced by Kazan and Tennessee Williams, and adapted by Williams from his own one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1955). The plot focuses on a feud between two rival cotton gin owners in rural Mississippi.
Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, written in New York in 1957. It opened off Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of a double bill with another of Williams' one-acts, Something Unspoken. The presentation of the two plays was given the overall title Garden District, but Suddenly Last Summer is now more often performed alone. Williams said he thought the play "perhaps the most poetic" he had written, and Harold Bloom ranks it among the best examples of the playwright's lyricism.
Camino Real is a 1953 play by Tennessee Williams. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, Williams directs the reader to use the Anglicized pronunciation "Cá-mino Réal." The play takes its title from its setting, alluded to El Camino Real, a dead-end place in a Spanish-speaking town surrounded by desert with sporadic transportation to the outside world. It is described by Williams as "nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in."
The Night of the Iguana is a stage play written by American author Tennessee Williams. It is based on his 1948 short story. In 1959, Williams staged it as a one-act play, and over the next two years he developed it into a full-length play, producing two different versions in 1959 and 1960, and then arriving at the three-act version that premiered on Broadway in 1961. Two film adaptations have been made: The Oscar-winning 1964 film directed by John Huston and starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr, and a 2000 Croatian production.
John Henry Lahr is an American theater critic and writer. From 1992 to 2013, he was a staff writer and the senior drama critic at The New Yorker. He has written more than twenty books related to theater. Lahr has been called "one of the greatest biographers writing today".
Clothes for a Summer Hotel is a two-act play written in 1979–80 by Tennessee Williams concerning the relationship between novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. A critical and commercial failure, it was Williams' last play to debut on Broadway during his lifetime. The play takes place over a one-day visit Scott pays the institutionalized Zelda at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, with a series of flashbacks to their marriage in the twenties. Williams began work in 1976 on what he envisioned as a "long play" about the Fitzgeralds, and had Geraldine Page in mind to play Zelda from the start.
Period of Adjustment is a 1960 play by Tennessee Williams that was adapted in the film version of 1962.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear is an autobiographical play by Tennessee Williams that was originally written in 1941 as a short play titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer, which was produced posthumously in Provincetown in 2006. In 1962, Williams retitled and expanded The Parade into a full-length play that was first produced Off-Off-Broadway in 1981. Both versions of the play are set on the wharfs of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tell the story of a young playwright named August dealing with his unrequited homosexual love for another man.
The Seven Descents of Myrtle is a play in seven scenes by Tennessee Williams. It started as a short story, The Kingdom of Earth, which Williams began in 1942 while in Macon, Georgia, but did not publish until 1954, in the limited edition of his story collection Hard Candy. Williams subsequently adapted the story into a one-act play, "Kingdom of Earth," published in the February 1, 1967, edition of Esquire magazine. He then expanded that play into a full-length seven-scene version, premiered the following year in New York with the title The Seven Descents of Myrtle and published on October 31, 1968, by New Directions as Kingdom of Earth. Its title character is reminiscent of another Williams' heroine, Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Small Craft Warnings is a two-act play by Tennessee Williams, written in late 1971 and early 1972. Williams expanded his two-scene play Confessional (1970), which had been published in his 1970 compilation Dragon Country, into this full-length play that centers on a motley group of people gathered in a seedy coastal bar in Southern California.
A House Not Meant to Stand is the last play written by Tennessee Williams. It was produced during the 1981–82 season at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago by Gregory Mosher and published for the first time in 2008 by New Directions. with a foreword by Gregory Mosher and an Introduction by Thomas Keith.
The Traveling Companion and Other Plays is a collection of experimental plays written by American playwright Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions and in New York City in 2008. It is edited by Williams scholar Annette J. Saddik, who provides the introduction.
Out Cry is a play by Tennessee Williams, his rewrite of The Two-Character Play which he had written in 1966 and which was staged in 1967 and published by New Directions Publications in 1969. Williams began rewriting the play after its publication, and Out Cry premiered at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago on July 8, 1971, with Eileen Herlie as Clare and Donald Madden as Felice. It debuted on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with a preview on February 28, 1973 and ran from March 1 to 10; the production was directed by Peter Glenville and starred Cara Duff-MacCormick as Clare and Michael York as Felice. Out Cry was published by New Directions in 1973 – by which time Williams had already rewritten the play into a third version, again titled The Two-Character Play, which New Directions published in 1975. In a 1971 interview Williams said of the first version of The Two-Character Play, "I wrote it when I was approaching a mental breakdown and rewrote it after my alleged recovery. I was thoroughly freaked out."
Maria Britneva, Baroness St Just, was a Russian-British actress who was a close friend of Tennessee Williams. As co-trustee of the trust which he set up for his sister, she became his literary executor.
The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays is a collection of 15 plays, seven of them previously unpublished, by American playwright Tennessee Williams. Published by New Directions in New York City in 2011, Williams' scholar Thomas Keith edited the volume and provided the critical notes while playwright Terrence McNally, winner of four Tony Awards, wrote the foreword.
“The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” is a work of short fiction by Tennessee Williams. Written in 1941, the work first appeared in the collection Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954), published by New Directions.
“The Night of the Iguana” is a short story by Tennessee Williams first appearing in the collection One Arm and Other Stories (1948) published by New Directions. Elements of the story provided the basis for Williams's play The Night of the Iguana (1961).
“Portrait of a Girl in Glass” is a work of short fiction by Tennessee Williams, first appearing in the collection One Arm and Other Stories published in 1948 by New Directions.