The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays (29 page)

BELLA
: She never was brilliant at school. D average, plus a little or
minus—you
know, passable, never flunked out but once. Refused to go back. Her and Charlie. But Chips was bawn artistic and Cornelius blames me for it. Three children, now reduced to just two. All run home from the school together, raced in the back door, straight to the kitchen, the icebox where I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches always ready an’ waitin’. Becomes such a habit, like life. Still keep Marches’ Peanut Butter and Ma Smileys jellies in ice-box. Come in several flavors. Each preferred different flavors.

JESSIE
[
raises receiver to ear
]: Why, they hung up. [
She dials again
.] Operator, would you please get me the Moose Lodge. Moose Lodge? You get me Emerson Sykes on this phone at once, please, his wife speaking.
—Emerson
, how
is—
? Hold on? Surely the problems have been straightened out now! Emerson!

BELLA
: Joanie’s letter. I don’t want Cornelius to find it.

JESSIE
: Don’t worry, Bella, I’ve got it. [
Shouting into phone
.]
EMM-ERR-SONN!
—
Sounds like terrific confusion, your son’s fiancé is still shouting Jesus! Useless to interfere yet. [
Jessie hangs up and slumps exhaustedly back against pillows
.]

BELLA
: Dresses.

JESSIE
: What was that Bella?

BELLA
: Chips designed such pretty girls’ dresses with colored crayons.

JESSIE
: Yes, I remember, Bella. We heard that he used to model them himself with a wig on and it was misunderstood? Correctly.

BELLA
: Charlie, youngest. Fine boy, not artistic. His problem was employment.

JESSIE
: Oh, I thought it was unemployment.

BELLA
: Charlie? Hit? Cornelius?

JESSIE
: Fawget it, Bella. I’m sure tomorrow everything will be . . . well, not
worse
.

BELLA
:
—Why—cain’t
I—git
up?

JESSIE
: Don’t try to, not necessary. You’re just worn out by the trip
but—I
will call Dr. Crane. Please connect me with Doc Crane’s.

BELLA
: Moose . . . ?

JESSIE
: Yais, he’s a Moose,
too—ten
antlers.
—Henry
? Jessie Sykes, callin’ from Bella McCorkle’s across the street. You’d better hurry right over, it looks to me like Bella has had a collapse.

BELLA
: Old bodies git older, heavy, heavy
with—time
. . .

JESSIE
[
rises with phone in hand, eyes wide with excitement
]: She is mumbling unconscious. Possibly’s had a stroke.
—Bella
? Can you hear me?

BELLA
: Jelly. [
She shuffles back slowly
.]

DR. CRANE
[
offstage
]: Yes, all right, the ambulance is called.

JESSIE
: Why,
the—ambulance
must of removed her!

DR. CRANE
[
crossly
]: Make sense. How could it without time? We’re thirty miles from Biloxi.

JESSIE
:
Must
of!
Must
of,
she’s—

JESSIE
: My God, Bella!
—What
is that you got there?

BELLA
[
slowly, eyes in a trance
]: Ma Smiley’s jellies and Marches’ peanut butter for sandwiches. They expect ’em in the
icebox—run
to it home after school. Habit of
life—not
changed at all . . .

JESSIE
: Bella? Are you all right, Bella?

BELLA
:
Life—habit
.
—Know
what I mean?

DR. CRANE
[
to Jessie
]: Remove that stuff, throw it out.

I’ve repeatedly told this woman either she sticks to the diet or it’s just a question of time.

Ambulance charge will have to be paid whether she goes or not.

BELLA
: With some bread, please, and a knife to spread it on with. Oh, Jessie, forgot glazed paper to wrap sandwiches separately in.

JESSIE
: [
offstage
]: Glazed paper?

BELLA
: In cabinet by ice-box in kitchen always.

JESSIE
: [
offstage
]:
—Cabinet
.
—Yes!—Got
it.

DR. CRANE
: What are you going to do with the sandwiches, Bella?

BELLA
: Will keep in the ice-box till they run home from school. [
Jessie returns with tray that bears plate, bread, knife and glazed paper
.] Thank you, Jessie. One for Chips, his flavor blackberry. One for Joanie, wild cherry. Charlie will have to be satisfied with the same. Cornelius is only interested in beer. [
Glancing toward Jessie and the doctor
.] I’m sorry to
be—such
a question of time.
Well—Maybe
the Moose Lodge will straighten everything out. . . .

THE END

Playwrights often learn their craft by writing one-acts. Once successful, most move on to full-length plays and never look back. Tennessee Williams was different: he continued writing one-acts and experimenting with the short form throughout his life. Nearly all of his thirty-three full-length plays can be traced back to drafts that include one-act versions, and often closely related short stories or poems. Even the play thought to be his
last—dated
“January 1983” by the
author—is
a one-act,
The One Exception
, recently collected for the first time in
The Traveling Companion and Other Plays
, 2008.

Now, with the publication of the fifteen previously unpublished or uncollected titles in this volume, more than seventy one-act plays by Tennessee Williams are available in print. From the beginning, Williams envisioned evenings of his one-acts grouped in thematic cycles or performed as combinations. Some of the thematic groups were titled “Vieux Carré,” “Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre,” “Garden District,” “Dragon Country,” “Mississippi Sketches,” “Of Babylon, the Fall,” “Dominoes,” and “Williams’
Guignol
.” But perhaps the most ambitious was a project titled “American Blues,” on which Williams worked from 1937 until at least 1943.

It was in 1939 that “the first three sketches in the series AMERICAN BLUES” won Williams “a special prize” of $100.00 from the prestigious Group Theatre. Though it has never been established exactly which short plays Williams submitted, it can be plausibly inferred from references in his letters, journals, and the typed lists (discussed below), that he had submitted four:
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
,
The Dark Room
,
Hello From Bertha
, and
The Long Goodbye
. To meet the contest requirement of being twenty-five or younger, Williams “changed” his birth year from 1911 and wrote it as 1914 on the entry form. Just
for good measure, he went ahead and used his nickname as his first name and submitted his plays as “Tennessee Williams.” This was done in December 1938, just before he left on his first trip to New Orleans.

Two draft
lists—trial
balloons or musings,
perhaps—of
the “American Blues” plays are filed in Harry Ransom Humanities and Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin (“HRC”). Both are carefully typewritten to resemble playbills or title pages for a bound manuscript of completed plays. One reads as follows: “AMERICAN BLUES / (A program of one-act plays designed to approximate in dramaturgy / the mood, atmosphere and meaning of American Blues music) / 1. American Gothic / 2. Hello From Bertha / 3. Escape / 4. The Fat Man’s Wife / 5. The Big Game / 6. Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry.”

The other list is a bit more involved: “AMERICAN BLUES / A Program of One-act Plays / (designed to approximate in dramaturgy the mood, atmosphere and / meaning of American blues music) / by / Tennessee Williams / 1. Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry / 2. Hello From Bertha / 3. The Long Goodbye / (Also included in this cycle are Summer at the Lake, Every Twenty / Minutes, The Fat Man’s Wife, The Big Game, In Our Profession, Man- / ana Es Otro Dio, Death in the Movies and American Gothic).”

The first, shorter list is likely older (about 1937–38), since it is signed in the upper right corner by “T. L.
Williams”—the
name that Williams used professionally only until the end of 1938. The second list, by “Tennessee Williams,” likely was typed around the time Williams began writing under this pseudonym (late 1938).

Every surviving script that Williams named on these “American Blues” lists is now available in one of three New Directions volumes:
The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays
, and
27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays
. The one-acts can now be performed as Williams envisioned
them—or
in a variety of other combinations.
Death in the Movies
was a draft title for
This Property is Condemned
. Complete scripts of the two other listed one-acts are not known to have survived:
Manana Es Otro Dio
is thus far only found in draft fragments at the HRC under the English title
Tomorrow is Another Day
, and likewise the tantalizing
American Gothic
, inspired by the Grant Wood painting, is either unfinished or incomplete in surviving drafts at HRC.

The present volume also allows a reader to follow the development
of Williams’s ideas for five more full-length plays by comparing them with their one-act counterparts:
The Glass Menagerie
with
The Pretty Trap
;
A Streetcar Named Desire
with
Interior: Panic;
the full-length
Kingdom of Earth
with the one-act
Kingdom of Earth; Vieux Carré
with
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
; and
A House Not Meant to Stand
with
Some Problems for the Moose Lodge
. Additional pairings of plays with their shorter precursors are available in various other New Directions
volumes—
The
Rose Tattoo
and
The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View; Camino Real
and
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real; Sweet Bird of Youth
and
The Enemy: Time
;
Small Craft Warnings
and
Confessional;
and finally,
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
and
The Parade
.

According to Williams’s college friend William Jay Smith, when Tennessee showed a new one-act play to his friends he never called it a one-act or a play, but rather offered them his latest “fantasy.” And some of them
are
fantasies. Others are
sketches—still
others are like poems, theatrical poems. Whatever they are called, and however beautifully some of them may read, these plays were written to be performed.

At Liberty
(c. 1939)

The copy text is an undated script bound in a folder printed with the name and address of Williams’s agent, Audrey Woods, and filed at The Historic New Orleans Collection. This agency script corresponds closely to the first published version of the play in
American Scenes
, edited by John Kozlenko, John Day Company, New York, 1941, where it appeared along with
This Property is Condemned
under the collective title
Landscape with Figures
, (“Two Mississippi Plays”).
At Liberty
was subsequently published in
25 Non-Royalty One-Act Plays for All-Girl Casts
, compiled by Betty Smith, Greenberg Publishers, New York, 1942.

At Liberty
’s year of composition is most likely
1939—Williams
mentioned it to Woods in a letter of January 29, 1940 as a one-act play in her possession, but not bound with “American Blues.” It is not on the known lists of “American Blues” plays. The first professional production of
At Liberty
has yet to be identified, but interestingly it was produced off-off-Broadway at LaMama Experimental Theater Club in 1964.

At Liberty
has motifs and images that would show up fully developed in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and it contains nascent lines from
The Glass
Menagerie
—
“The past keeps getting bigger and bigger at the future’s expense!” It is also notable for introducing Blue Mountain, which would soon join other locations both real (Moon Lake and Sunflower River) and fictional (Two River County, Tiger Tail, and Glorious Hill) to create the mythic Mississippi Delta of Williams’s plays.

The Magic Tower
(1936)

Previously unpublished. The copy text is a typescript filed at HRC, which has handwritten notes of at least four different individuals, one of them very likely Williams. I have only incorporated those handwritten additions that affect the clarity or flow of action and
dialogue—not
incorporated are any personal notes and cues presumably written by an actor or stage manager. An earlier draft of the play at HRC does not affect this edition. Simultaneously with this trade edition, a scholarly edition of the play edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David
Roessel—using
the same copy
text—appeared
in the April 2011 volume of
Resources for American Literary Studies
(AMS Press, Brooklyn, New York). For analysis and history of the play, see Moschovakis and Roessel’s detailed introduction and notes.

Prior to its first professional production at Southern Rep, New Orleans in March 2011,
The Magic Tower
was staged by the Webster Groves
Theatre—an
amateur group located in a wealthy St. Louis
suburb—on
the evening of October 13, 1936. One of three finalists in a play contest,
The Magic Tower
had received first prize and the promise of a full production.

The Magic Tower
offers a veneer of comedy and a cast of stock
characters—the
salty Irish landlady, the fast-talking and somewhat sinister “show people,” and the naïve young artist. But it also takes a bleak view of romance and marriage, as values sustained only through a lens of shared delusion that would later characterize relationships in Williams’s plays such as
The Glass Menagerie
,
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
The Rose Tattoo
, and
Sweet Bird of Youth
.

Me, Vashya
(1937)

Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript filed in the Washington University Library, St. Louis, with the author’s name
typed as “Tennessee Williams” and handwritten below as “Thomas Lanier Williams.” The presence of both names indicates that the script likely was typed in or after December 1938, when Williams first began to use the name “Tennessee.” The copy text matches the final draft at HRC, which also holds variant drafts under the titles,
I, Vaslev
,
Me, Vashya!
,
The Tears of Christ
, and
Death is the Drummer
.

Described by the author as a “melodramatic fantasy,”
Me, Vashya
was written as a final project for a playwriting class, “Technique of Modern Drama,” given at Washington University by Professor William Carson. The project was a contest at the end of the term, with three finalists to be chosen by an independent jury and given workshop productions that summer; a single winner would be awarded $50. Williams handed in his play on June 4, 1937, received fourth place and did not take the rejection well. Recounting his frustration to a reporter from
The New York Post
in 1958, he said, “It was a terrible shock and humiliation to me. It was a crushing blow . . .” The title character is based on a real munitions maker, the Greek-born Sir Basil Zaharoff who trafficked in arms from 1889 until his death in 1936.

The first college production of
Me, Vashya
was directed by Henry I. Schvey in February, 2004 as part of “Tennessee Williams: The Secret Year,” an international symposium at Washington University that focused on Williams’s time there as a student. A St. Louis radio troupe, The Little Theater of the Air, had broadcast an adaption of
Me, Vashya
in the summer of 1938. But as Williams wrote to his mother from the University of Iowa, the crucial gunshot that kills Vashya had “failed to go off.”

Curtains for the Gentleman
(1936)

Previously unpublished. The copy text, a unique typescript at HRC, has “Thomas Lanier Williams” and “January 9, 1936” typed on the final page. It is an unusually clean typescript, possibly prepared for submission to a
contest—Williams
was at that time still on hiatus from college. There are also loose draft pages at HRC with some of the same characters, although Flossie is named Goldie and the cop is identified as “Flatfoot.”

This is one of many early plays that show the overt influence that movies of the 1930s had on Williams. Other examples include
Fugitive Kind
,
Not About Nightingales
,
Honor the Living, The Palooka
,
In Our Profession
,
Every Twenty Minutes
,
The Pink Bedroom, The Magic Tower
, and
The Big Game
. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Hollywood released nearly fifty gangster films in 1935 alone, and over a dozen of those with plots involving a “squealer.” Williams dropped mob crime as subject matter from about 1940 until the 1970s when it appeared again in
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays, Vieux Carré
, and
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
.

In Our Profession
(c. 1938)

Previously unpublished. The copy text, a unique typescript at HRC, is on the long “American Blues” list probably typed in
1938—perhaps
also the year of this play’s composition.

The impact of 1930s screen dialogue appears again in this play, with its quick repartee between the characters of Annabelle, Richard, and Paul. The play’s interest in show business “types” and their banter gives it an affinity with
Every Twenty Minutes
,
The Pink Bedroom
, and
The Fat Man’s
Wife
—other
one-acts that share a funny and cynical take on male-female relationships.

Every Twenty Minutes
(c. 1938)

The copy text is from a unique typescript filed at HRC, and is previously unpublished. In the typescript, the play comes with the qualifying subtitle,
A Satire
. But in the longer “American Blues” list
circa
1938, Williams simply calls it
Every Twenty Minutes
.

Essentially a two-handed curtain-raiser and, indeed, a satire,
Every Twenty Minutes
premiered at Southern Rep in New Orleans in March 2011, as part of a centennial tribute to Williams by the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.