The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays (30 page)

Honor The Living
(c. 1937)

Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript at HRC, where a version of the same sketch as a story is also filed under the same title.

Willard Holland, director of a theater troupe called the Mummers of St. Louis, approached Williams in September 1936 about writing a curtain-raiser for an upcoming Veteran’s Day performance of Irwin
Shaw’s dark, anti-war fable
Bury the Dead
, in which soldiers climb out of their graves and refuse to be buried. Holland urged Williams to imitate the successful “Living Newspapers” performed at that time by the Federal Theater Project in New York City; he even gave Williams
Headlines
as the title of the piece. William Jay Smith, who attended the performance, feels that
Headlines
was not so much a play as an incoherent mishmash of shouted and projected news headlines. Williams was also disappointed and called
Headlines
“a piece of hack work.”

However, Williams may have been influenced by Shaw’s powerful message in
Bury the Dead
. Not only does Williams appear to challenge Shaw’s imperative title with his own, but
Honor the Living
is also one of the few Williams
one-acts—along
with
The Municipal Abattoir
,
The Chalky White Substance
,
The Demolition Downtown
,
Green Eyes, Mister Paradise
, and
Me
,
Vashya
—that
either voices an unambiguously political message or directly addresses the terrible toll of war.

A central image from Shaw’s play appears in
Me
,
Vashya
—Lady
Shontine’s visions of dead soldiers rising from their graves to punish her husband. Williams finished writing
Vashya
in June 1937. Seeing that
Bury the Dead
was still on his mind at that time, one might conjecture that
Honor the Living
was written between the autumn of 1936 and the summer of 1937.

The Case of the Crushed Petunias
(1941)

The text comes from an acting edition of five short plays by Williams,
American Blues
, published by Dramatists Play Service in 1948. Although that volume inherited the title of Williams’s “American Blues” cycle, only two of the five
plays—
Moony’s
Kid Don’t Cry
and
The Dark
Room
—had
ever been grouped by Williams as installments in that cycle.
Crushed Petunias
and the other two plays,
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real
, and
The Unsatisfactory Supper
, were written after Williams had essentially abandoned the
American Blues
rubric.

The author’s dedication of
Crushed Petunias
is dated “February, 1941.” This is confirmed as the date of composition by a letter of February 27, 1941, from Williams to Audrey Wood. Williams mentions enclosing “a one-act fantasy (light) which might do for the radio,” and he suggests that Wood submit it for publication.

Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
(1936)

The first play by Williams to be published,
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
was selected by the editor Margaret Mayora for
The Best One-Act Plays of 1940
(New York: Dodd Mead, 1941). The text published here comes from the
American Blues
acting edition, 1948.

According to biographer Lyle Leverich, the earliest known play by Tennessee Williams is
Beauty is the Word
, written in 1930 for an annual one-act play contest at the University of Missouri. Williams’s second attempt,
Hot Milk at Three in the Morning
, written in 1932 for the same annual contest, bears a strong connection to Eugene O’Neill’s one-act
Before Breakfast
. In 1934, Williams began rewriting
Hot Milk
as
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
.

Although the play is usually dated to its rewriting under the present title in 1934, Williams mentions revising it in a journal entry dated March 24, 1936: “. . . finished re-writing my ‘One
Act’—‘Moony’s
Kid Don’t Cry’ which I will submit to Prof. Webster
tomorrow—A
little too windy I’m
afraid—but
I think it would be effective on the
stage—Wish
I could have a play produced.”

The Dark Room
(c. 1939)

The text published here is that published by Dramatists Play Service in
American Blues
, 1948. A draft at HRC is dated 1938.

Not included on the “American Blues” list that Williams prepared in December 1938, the play is mentioned in a May 5, 1939, letter from Williams to Wood: “One of the dramatic sketches in American Blues (’the Dark Room’) actually was first in short-story
form—I
will send you a copy.” Williams could have revised the play at any time during that ten-year period from its first draft of 1938 to its initial publication in 1948. However, no evidence for revision after 1939 is known. The story version was published in
The Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams
in 1985.

The only available information on the first professional production of
The Dark Room
is found in a Williams sourcebook compiled by Catherine M. Arnott, who indicates that it premiered in London in 1966.

The Pretty Trap
(c. 1944)

Previously published in the
Tennessee Williams Annual Review
, 2006, edited by Robert Bray. The copy text is a unique typescript at HRC. It
is a one-act treatment of
The Glass
Menagerie
—or
, rather, it is a spin-off, as Brian Parker has more accurately called it in his introduction to Bray’s edition.

The date of composition is uncertain, in part because of the avalanche of
Menagerie
drafts and variants that Williams wrote from 1939 until the final Broadway production in 1945. However, his author’s note on the first page of the typescript is helpful: “This play is derived from a longer work in progress, The Gentleman Caller . . .”
The Gentlemen Caller
was the primary working title for the play prior to and during Williams’s tenure at MGM in 1943 until he changed it to
The Glass Menagerie
in September 1944. And since
The Pretty Trap
is related to the third act of
Menagerie
, it is possible that it was written well into
1944—though
it also may have been composed during Williams’s stay in Hollywood from May through November 1943. For more detailed information, see Brian Parker’s introduction.

Prior to its premiere at Southern Rep, New Orleans, in March 2011, a reading of
The Pretty Trap
was organized in October 2005 by Food for Thought Productions, New York City, with Kathleen Turner reading the role of Amanda.

Interior: Panic
(1946)

First published in the
Tennessee Williams Annual Review
, 2007, edited, with an introduction, by Robert Bray. The copy text comes from two draft typescripts filed at HRC,
Interior: Panic
and
Interior: Panic (a 1-act Play)
. These appear to be two distinct variations, the latter one dated “1945–46” in the author’s handwriting. But upon careful reading, Bray determined that they combine to form this complete early one-act treatment of
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Gladys Shannon of
Interior: Panic
will later become Blanche Dubois of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, just as Stella and Jack Kiefaber will become Stella and Stanley
Kowalski—their
surnames changed from Irish and German, respectively, to French and Polish. The interior voices heard by Gladys and the audience, and triggered by panic, will
become—in
Streetcar
—the
exaggerated New Orleans street sounds, or the music that is played when Blanche thinks of Allan Grey.

For further details about
Interior: Panic
, see Bray’s introduction. The play premiered at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in March 2005.

Kingdom of Earth
(1967)

Published in the February 1967 issue of
Esquire
. The copy text is a typescript sent by Audrey Wood to New Directions, marked on the cover “1965–66 version” by then editor-in-chief, Robert M. MacGregor.
Kingdom of Earth
also appears in an internal New Directions memo from 1966 listing several one-act plays for possible inclusion in the volume
Dragon Country
, which was eventually published in 1970 but did not include this play.

The characters and plot first appeared in a short story, “The Kingdom of Earth,” written in 1942 and published in a limited edition of
Hard Candy
, 1954, and
The Knightly Quest
, 1966. Williams wrote in his essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” as it appeared in
The New York Times
on March 17, 1957, “On my workbench are two unfinished plays,
Kingdom of Earth
and
Sweet Bird of Youth
. I don’t know which I’ll return to. . . .” He returned to the latter. The full-length version of
Kingdom of Earth
opened on Broadway March 27, 1968, under the title
The Seven Descents of Myrtle
, which the producer David Merrick favored. Williams later changed the title of the full-length play back to
Kingdom of Earth
for its publication in 1968, and it retained this title for a revised version in 1975.

In
Esquire
this one-act bears an epigraph from the Bible:

Although apocalyptic visions thread several of his later works, Williams edited the verse in such a way as to remove mention of a flood and its resulting devastation. The verse in full reads: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”

I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
(1973)

Previously unpublished. The copy text, from the New Directions files, is a photocopy of a typescript that had emendations in Williams’s handwriting as well as corrections and insert pages typed on different paper with a different typewriter. The original typescript has not
yet been identified. In the files at HRC is a similar, but not identical typed draft dated October, 1973; one of two manuscripts constituting “
Vieux Carré
, A Double-bill,
The Angel in the Alcove
&
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays.”
All of Williams’s corrections on the New Directions photocopy are incorporated in the present published text. They are also incorporated in a typescript with a handwritten note in pencil on the cover page, “Circle Rep. Theater, 1979,” now filed in the Billy Rose Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library.

Never Get Dressed
is part of an evolution of poems, short stories, and one-acts that lead to the full-length
Vieux Carré
, which opened on Broadway in May 1977.
Skylight
or
Broken Glass in the Morning
(
circa
1964–65), the draft of an earlier incarnation filed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, shares the same setting and much of the imagery of
Never Get Dressed
. Yet the main characters are quite different: Paul and Virginia, are a soldier on leave for a nervous condition and a nurse. Curiously, Williams typed on the manuscript of
Skylight
, “This play should be bound with two others in the manuscript called ‘the Mutilated.’”

The next incarnation, also filed at Columbia, is titled
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
, “A Play in Two Scenes.” A prefatory note to the play is dated, “May 1, 1970.” Jane and Tye first appear in this second Columbia version, establishing the relationship that continues through to
Vieux Carré
.

A short play titled
The Reading
was submitted by Audrey Wood to New Directions along with
Green Eyes
and
The Demolition Downtown
in 1971.
The Reading
involves actors playing the roles of Jane and Tye at a rehearsal attended by a playwright and a director. It has been edited by Robert Bray and published in the
Tennessee Williams Annual Review
, 2010.

The play-within-a-play premise was expanded in the present version to include a prickly stage manager and scenes in which the playwright prompts the actors to talk through the essence of their actions and states of being. These devices were dropped for the Broadway and London versions of
Vieux Carré
, the latter published by New Directions in 1978. For more information, see Linda Dorff’s article on the origins of
Vieux Carré
in the
Tennessee Williams Annual Review
, 2000.

Some Problems for The Moose Lodge
(1980)

Previously unpublished. The copy text is a unique typescript filed in the Goodman Theatre Archive, Special Collections of the Chicago Public Library. It is identified as “revised 11/10/80,” presumably with cuts made after the opening night on November 8, 1980.
Some Problems for the Moose Lodge
was presented at the Goodman along with two other one-act comedies,
The Frosted Glass Coffin
and
The Perfect Analysis Given by A Parrot
, under the collective title
Tennessee Laughs
.

Williams later expanded
Moose Lodge
into the full-length
A House Not Meant to Stand
, published by New Directions in 2008.
House
was produced by the Goodman in their Studio Theater in April 1981 and, rewritten and revised, presented in its final version on their main stage in April 1982.