Sometime between January and July, 1941, Williams wrote optimistically about the short plays that he had been writing since the mid-to-late 1930s: “I may have some one-acts on Broadway – I hope they may prove to be the little glass slipper lost in my midnight scramble down the stairs.”
Williams might well have considered success as a theme for fairy-tales in these dark months, the ones that followed the failed Boston production of his full-length play Battle of Angels. His hopeful allusion to himself as a potential Cinderella occurs in a fragmentary draft of unpublished correspondence, now filed in HRC (54.15), and addressed to Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild—which had mounted Battle, and which by July, 1941 had rejected its option to mount a revised version. However, the hopes that Williams cherished for his short plays in 1941 reflect his ongoing artistic priorities over a much longer period, from 1937 to 1943, when one-acts were an especially significant part of his dramatic production.
It is frequently observed that Williams used the short form as a laboratory for ideas to expand into longer plays. What is less often noticed is that he also conceived of his short scripts, especially during these years, as building blocks for the construction of cycles defined by shared thematic and regional elements. In most cases, Williams saw his early one-acts not just as individual experiments, but as possible components of full-length programs for submission to prospective producers and publishers. Among many projects of this kind that he formulated in his mind and in his notes, though without ever seeing them materialize on stage or in print, one was a large, evolving group of scripts he called American Blues (1937–1943 and later). Another was a smaller trilogy notionally entitled Vieux Carré (1941—not to be confused with the later, full-length play that Williams began in 1939 and completed in 1977).
Summer at the Lake, The Big Game, and The Fat Man’s Wife are closely related by their common membership in a group of plays that Williams regarded collectively as a dramatic cycle, or group of scripts entitled American Blues. The idea germinated as early as April, 1937, when Williams wrote to Willard Holland concerning “some new one-acts” with this “compound title” (Selected Letters I, p. 94). In one of two drafts for a table of contents to American Blues, now filed at HRC (1.8), Williams named a number of works in progress as parts of this series. He clarified the concept by typing: “A program of one-act plays designed to approximate in dramaturgy the mood, atmosphere and meaning of American Blues music.” This rationale for the title, American Blues, is a fascinating one and might well have been typed on a cover-sheet, now unlocated, to the set of four one-act plays that Williams submitted (along with three full-length plays) to a contest held by the Group Theatre in the winter of 1938-39.
On March 20, 1939, Molly Day Thacher wrote to award Williams a “special prize” of $100.00 for “the first three sketches” that he had entered in the Group Theatre competition under the title American Blues. In the letter, which is now filed at HRC (57.11, under Thacher’s married name Kazan), Thacher also wrote: “Since there was no limitation as to the length of plays to be judged, we eliminated from consideration the fourth sketch in AMERICAN BLUES. It seems to us much inferior in quality to the first three, both in the writing and in the theatrical validity.”
The version of American Blues entered in the Group Theatre contest certainly included Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, and almost certainly included The Dark Room, according to evidence at HRC (61.8, letter from Roberta Barrett to William Kozlenko d. October 22, 1940) and in Williams’s correspondence (Selected Letters I, p. 170). Furthermore, the tables of contents for American Blues now filed at HRC (1.8) feature the titles of Hello From Bertha and The Long Goodbye in prominent positions, suggesting that these probably were the other two scripts that Williams submitted to the Group Theatre. If so, then all four of the original one-act submissions were to be published during the 1940s. However, the lists at HRC mention at least eight other titles as parts of American Blues. Among them are titles of at least three of the extant plays published here for the first time: Summer at the Lake, The Fat Man’s Wife, and The Big Game. (One of the lists also includes the title “Escape,” but this was probably meant to refer to Summer at the Lake by one of its original, alternate titles; see Note below.) It is possible, though unlikely that one or two of these, rather than Hello From Bertha and/or The Long Goodbye, were among the competition entries.
When in early 1939 the newly recognized Williams acquired his first real New York agent, Audrey Wood, she received the prize-winning American Blues plays from the Group Theatre and wrote to her brand-new client, lavishing welcome praise on what she called the “simple yet very true kind of character writing” in his one-acts. Wood told him, “Your attempt here to dramatize these different milieus comes off, in my opinion, very successfully” (Leverich, p. 303). Wood then began shopping around the four short scripts in the submitted version of American Blues to various venues, some of which proved unfruitful, such as Whit Burnett’s Story magazine (Selected Letters I, p. 170).
Wood also tried to get Williams to send her still more of the short plays on which he had been working. The most likely reason for the existence of the tables of contents filed at HRC (1.8) is that those parts of American Blues which were bound together and circulating in 1939—i.e., those that Williams had entered in the competition—were prefaced with a list very much like them. Presumably, this is how Wood knew not only the texts of the plays that Williams had submitted to the Group Theatre, but also the titles of a number of other one-act plays in progress. Certainly she had asked about them soon after becoming his agent. In June, 1939, Williams responded to her inquiries: “The additional ‘American Blues’ sketches you mention are existent – that, however, is about the best that can be said for most of them, as they are mainly in the first draft and were not bound with the others because they did not seem ready for professional consideration. I am slowly adding, however, to these dramatic cross-sections and will send you new installments from time to time. The old ones listed on the frontispiece are all packed away among my Mss. in St. Louis and the next time I pass through there I’ll see what I can excavate in the way of finished scripts” (Selected Letters I, p. 177).
In mid-1939 Williams left most of his recent drafts of one-acts at home with his parents while he was away in California. Those one-acts that had been included in the American Blues cycle, but not in the contest submission, lay fallow. Their author would not return to Missouri until September, 1939, and then only by way of heading toward New York City to meet Wood in person for the first time.
We do not know whether Williams ever supplied Wood with drafts of The Big Game or The Fat Man’s Wife, but we may be sure that he sent the agency some version of Summer at the Lake, a play which he also continued revising in future years (see our Note to Summer at the Lake). In any event, it may be noted that Williams’s phrase, “in the first draft,” in the letter quoted above should not be taken to apply literally to the text of any play that appears in this edition. Certainly the designation cannot refer technically to our copy-texts for Summer at the Lake, The Big Game, or The Fat Man’s Wife, all of which survive at HRC in earlier versions than those chosen for publication here.
During the early 1940s, while he completed full-length plays including Battle of Angels, Stairs to The Roof, and You Touched Me! (and, at length, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire), Williams also continued to work on his one-acts. These included entries in American Blues series—which he had described in mid-1939 as “still in progress” (Selected Letters I, p. 180)—as well as texts that he filed mentally under other categories such as “Mississippi Sketches” and, mysteriously, “Dominos” (in a list from 1943; see Note to Summer at the Lake). In all this Williams was encouraged, surely, by the selection of several of his one-acts for performance and publication.
The exposure of Williams’s shorter dramas to a public audience began in February, 1940, when The Long Goodbye was produced at The New School in New York City. Margaret Mayorga, editor of the annual anthology Best One-Act Plays, became one of Williams’s important early champions by including his first published script (the short play Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry) in her 1940 volume, following it up with other one-act publications in succeeding years. In 1941, another one-act collection, American Scenes, edited by William Kozlenko, included two more plays by Williams.
According to unpublished correspondence filed in HRC (61.8), Kozlenko was negotiating in late 1940 for the rights to publish the four-play American Blues as a complete unit. However, pre-empted either by Mayorga’s separate publication of Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, or else by the agency’s insistence on charging him the full publication rate for each individual play, Kozlenko settled instead for two different one-acts which he grouped under the title Landscape With Figures (At Liberty and This Property Is Condemned). Consequently, nothing ever became of American Blues as Williams had envisioned it since 1937. At length the title was demoted to a catch-all rubric for a pamphlet of five disparate short plays, published by the Dramatists Play Service in 1948 and still in print today. Throughout the later 1930s and earlier 1940s, however, Williams kept coming up with other groupings of one-acts that—like American Blues in any of its various incarnations—might be used to generate full dramatic programs.
During the latter half of 1941, when Williams probably typed the unfinished letter quoted at the beginning of this essay, he was casting about for new, potentially lucrative ideas and projects. He travelled to Provincetown, to the Gulf coast, to New York, to New Orleans, to his parents’ home in Missouri, back to New Orleans, and again to New York. At this time the nearest thing to a Prince Charming in his life was Hume Cronyn: a “rich actor” who, for “$50.00 a month,” had purchased a option on Williams’s one-acts (Selected Letters I, pp. 362, 328–9). That did not prevent Williams from looking to his short plays as possible sources of income from other places. In an unpublished letter to Audrey Wood dated October 28, 1941, filed at HRC (54.16), Williams enclosed an unidentified “short sketch” that, he said, was “removed from the long comedy… ‘A Daughter of the American Revolution” (i.e., part of what eventually became The Glass Menagerie). Williams predicted that the sketch “should serve to leaven any one-act program, if directed with sufficient legerdemain,” and noted in a postscript: “New Theatre League offers $50.00 prize for a 15-minute skit – This might do – (the comedy).”
Of the scripts in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, at least one emerged from this difficult juncture in Williams’s career. In an unpublished letter to Audrey Wood, written in New Orleans and dated October 27, 1941, Williams wrote, “I am enclosing two more one-acts which I have written in the past two days without barely reading them over. They might be combined [with] the sketch I sent you before in a group of three, called Vieux Carré and submitted to the Mayorga or Cronyn” (cf. Selected Letters I, p. 368). One of the three plays that Williams was now contemplating as candidates for Mayorga’s or Cronyn’s consideration was almost certainly Thank You, Kind Spirit.
Williams had mailed a draft of Thank You, Kind Spirit to Wood less than a week before writing to her on October 27. Moreover, we are able to identify two other one-acts that he set in the French Quarter during this time, and that were both published during the 1940s. Wood wrote to Williams in early November that a draft of Lord Byron’s Love Letter, which she had recently received from him, seemed to contain “a commercial idea” (Selected Letters I, p. 358). Finally, in a journal entry from this period labeled “Monday Midnight,” Williams stated: “I wrote a new one-act play today—‘The Lady of Larkspur Lotion’—and feel not too badly” (Lyle Leverich, Tom, p. 432).
Mayorga shared Williams’s good feeling about The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, which she selected for inclusion in The Best One-Act Plays of 1941. Lord Byron’s Love Letter was published in 1945, in Williams’s first collection of plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Acts (also currently available in Theatre VI), along with Hello From Bertha, The Long Good-bye, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, This Property is Condemned, and four other short plays. Now, with the publication of Thank You, Kind Spirit, it would possible to put on a program of three short plays entitled Vieux Carré, much as Williams must have envisioned it in the fall of 1941.
The typed manuscripts of the first eleven plays in this volume are preserved in the Tennessee Williams Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Of the copy-texts for the remaining two plays, one is in Michael Kahn’s possession. The last is located in the Department of Special Collections at the University Research Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. In editing these manuscripts for a general readership, as well as for students and specialists, we have tried to convey what Williams wrote as directly and accurately as we can, subject to the reader’s need for a clear and uncluttered presentation, and to the need of potential directors and actors for a workable performance text.
In three instances, we have had to choose between two or more complete drafts of a play in the archives, rejecting one or more extant alternative drafts. The principles of our selection in each case are different and may be found in the respective Notes.
In two other, exceptionally complex cases—also explained in the Notes—we have had to cut substantial portions of one script as Williams left it, while emending parts of the remainder for consistency (And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …), and have conflated two drafts of another play, each of which is missing some pages (Adam and Eve on a Ferry).
Our texts may not reflect particular changes, cuts, or alternative readings that have been preferred on occasion, whether by the directors of the stage productions listed earlier, or by directors of other staged readings and workshops.
All of our copy-texts were typed by Williams; many bear additional insertions, deletions, and comments written in Williams’s hand. In some cases the intended location of an insertion, or the precise extent of a deletion, is partly subject to interpretation, yet in all of these instances we have been able to achieve a fair degree of confidence in our fidelity to Williams’s text, and we do not note these cases individually.
Like all writers, Williams made occasional errors due to momentary lapses in memory or attention, as well as orthographical mistakes. Even his revised drafts look nothing like publishers’ copy. They contain many incidental irregularities in format and presentation, not to mention obvious typing errors. We have emended a few inconsistent references in the dialogue to concrete details (such as names, places, periods of time and points in time), corrected what appear to be blatant misspellings, and, in many cases, normalized doubtful spellings. However, we have retained instances of the latter that may have been meant to reflect regionalisms, or to represent features of spoken dialect phonetically. Accidental typographical features, especially punctuation, have been subject to thoughtful editorial review and emendation.
Elements of dramatic texts that are conventionally presented in a thoroughly predictable format, such as speech headings and stage directions, have been regularized according to house-style. They have also been emended for consistency. This means that in most places where Williams’s original stage directions lack articles or grammatical subjects, we have added them. In a few cases we have removed, added, or altered verbs related to particular actions in the stage directions (e.g., replacing “crosses” with “walks.”).
We have made the incidental and substantive emendations enumerated in the preceding two paragraphs silently. Our copy-texts for these plays are, in any event, available to the scrutiny of scholars and prospective directors, since they are held in publicly accessible archives (with the exception of the surviving draft of The Municipal Abattoir).
These are the Stairs You Got to Watch
Our copy-text is a unique typescript draft filed in HRC (49.7).
Since Carl refers to Joan Bennett as a “grandmother” (p. 5), the copy-text must have been drafted after Bennett’s first grandchild was born in 1948 (by her own account).
A note in Collected Stories indicates that the story “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” was written in New Orleans in 1941, although in a letter of November 22, 1946 he suggests that he got the idea for the story at that time: “I have an idea for a lovely long story about a sad little Mexican who repairs watches – called ‘Joy Rio’“ (Selected Letters II, p. 79). The Joy Rio then reappeared in another, derivative but different story entitled “Hard Candy.”
Mister Paradise
Our copy-text is one of two typescript drafts filed in HRC (24.12).
Since the published version is set in the French Quarte it seems almost certain that Williams wrote it in or after 1939, when he first visited New Orleans. An alternate version, in the same folder at HRC, is set in Greenwich Village and depicts the same action, but with substantially different dialogue. In early 1940, Williams’s one-act play The Long Good-bye was performed in the Village, at the New School; in early 1942 he worked as a waiter in the same neighborhood. From this information, however, it is hard to deduce anything about the priority of either draft; Williams might well have chosen the Village as the setting for a script about a down-at-the-heels poet long before he ever saw it himself. To us, it appears that our copy-text is the later of the two scripts filed under this title. We have preferred the French Quarter version, in any case, because of what we judge to be its greater interest and superior quality. The Greenwich Village version, though possessing the advantage of fuller stage directions (see below), lacks the longer speeches which exist in our copy-text, and which approach the status of the “arias” for which Williams is famous in his more developed works.
Two handwritten draft versions of the play’s final lines survive on a program for a series of film screenings held by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, in Manhattan, which took place in October-November 1935; the program is now filed in HRC (53.2). These dialogue scraps are interesting, but as clues to the play’s date they would seem useless, since it appears that Williams never set foot in New York between 1928 and 1939. Presumably the fragments were scribbled on the program years after it was printed, whenever and wherever Williams may have found it to hand.
In the New York version, Mr. Paradise is described as “a small middle-aged man” who opens the door “in crumpled purple pyjamas” worn under “a brown robe.” His apartment is “an extremely squalid bedroom or ‘studio’ in Greenwich Village,” with “a sky-light and slanting walls” and “utterly nondescript” furniture, including “a chiffonier with drawers hanging ajar, a marble-top wash-stand, a small iron bed in the alcove.”
In our copy-text there is no opening stage direction. Based on the opening directions from the alternate version (quoted above) and on internal evidence from our copy-text, we have supplied a simple opening stage direction.
The Palooka
Our copy is a unique typescript draft filed in HRC (34.3).
In our Introduction to this volume we have discussed the range of dates that could be assigned to The Palooka. We cannot date the play with any degree of probability, except by making the plausible a priori assumption that Williams must have written it during the 1930s or 1940s.
Escape
Our copy-text is one of two extant typescript drafts, filed together in HRC (4.10).
Escape appears to be a product of the later 1930s or earlier 1940s, Williams’s “apprentice” years. It would be pure speculation to assign a more particular date based on historical events, since the political reverberations of Scottsboro lasted from the 1930s through the 1960s and into the present. Williams must have been thinking about the case in other writings including a story from 1931–2, “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” (posthumously published in Collected Stories); a revised and unpublished version of that story, entitled “Bottle of Brass” (see below); and an unpublished longer one-act play (probably from the late 1930 or early 1940s) entitled Jungle, at HRC (22.2). He would allude to lynching and related issues again in his full-length play of 1940, Battle of Angels, and its later successors, Orpheus Descending and the film Fugitive Kind. An untitled short script filed in HRC (53.6) features two men in jail, Bum and Lem, who, though not Black themselves, discuss the fate of lynched Black men.
One of the two drafts of Escape in HRC bears an alternate title, “Bottle of Brass,” which Williams cancelled, but which appears elsewhere as the title of drafts for an unpublished short story filed in HRC (4.10) and among the unsorted drafts in Box 53. The story, “Bottle of Brass,” is a revised and expanded version of the posthumously published early work “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” (in Collected Stories). The phrase “Bottle of Brass” refers to a bottled spirit in the Arabian Nights, according to an epigraph in Williams’s unpublished story. Both the published and unpublished versions of the story, in any case, are entirely different from the present one-act—except in so far as all depict African American men on the run from racist whites.
Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?
Our copy-text is a unique typescript filed in HRC (51.16), at the end of which Williams has hand-written “Feb. 1935.” The script is filed along with a short story, which bears the same title, and contains virtually the same action and dialogue.
An alternate version of Lily’s attempt to cope with her situation occurs in the unpublished, less focused playlet Lily and La Vie, or The Chain Cigarette, filed in HRC (23.10), where Lily’s problem is focused more simply on sexual frustration. After discussing her dissatisfaction with an effeminate male literary friend, Lily ends the play by running out the door after a virile delivery boy named Butch. The conclusion suggests a distant kinship between Lily Yorke and Blanche DuBois, whose libido is aroused by the young subscription-collector in A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as Lily’s relationship to Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Summer at the Lake
Our copy-text is one of three complete typescript drafts, filed along with fragments of at least one later, but incomplete draft in HRC (12.10 and 47.1). Some of these materials are filed under the alternate title “Escape,” though none are related to the other, very different one-act play which is published in this volume as Escape (cf. our Note above to that play). “Escape” is also the title under which Summer at the Lake was produced in 2004 as part of Five By Tenn. We have preferred the title Summer at the Lake, in part because it was Williams’s latest title for a draft of this play, and in part to distinguish it from the other play here titled Escape.
Our copy-text must have been composed before 1939, since it bears the name “Thomas Lanier Williams” on its title-page; it is evidently the second, rather than the third of the three complete drafts in order of composition. An apparently later draft is preserved in the file, also bearing the name “Thomas Lanier Williams” (and therefore predating 1939); it incorporates some of Williams’s handwritten additions on our copy-text, and also introduces further changes to the dialogue, both typewritten and handwritten. However, the file at HRC contains other typescript fragments that must have originated still later than either of these complete versions. Clearly, throughout the later 1930s and the early 1940s, the materials for Summer at the Lake were undergoing a continual process of evolution; ultimately they were subsumed by a vastly dissimilar, unfinished project (see below).
We have preferred our copy-text, first, because it has a more complete appearance, including a detailed opening stage-direction (which its successor draft lacks). Secondly, we prefer our copy-text because in most respects it is dramatically superior to the draft that followed it, at least in our judgment—a judgment that accords with Michael Kahn’s selection of our copy-text as the version to be premiered in Five By Tenn.
What appears to be the earliest complete, extant draft of Summer at the Lake lacks speech headings, has few stage directions, and bears two alternative titles in Williams’s handwriting (“The Lake” and “Quicksilver”). Our copy-text—which, as stated, was probably the penultimate rather than the latest of the three complete drafts—bears the title “Escape,” handwritten above two other cancelled alternate titles (“Quicksilver” and “The Lake,” both typewritten). The third, and probably the latest complete draft bears the title “Summer At The Lake,” handwritten above the alternate typed title “Escape” (which has not been cancelled). On the title-page of this third complete draft, Williams wrote the annotation “American Blues: III” and designated the script as a “First draft.”
Williams’s use of his given name on what appears to be the latest complete draft of Summer at the Lake shows that all the extant, complete versions were done before the beginning of 1939. Among the related fragments in the files at HRC, however, there is another typed title-page for Summer at the Lake on which Williams gave the name “Tennessee Williams.” This shows both that Williams finally settled on “Summer At The Lake” as the play’s title, and also that he continued revising the play, or at least intended to revise it, in or after 1939. Indeed, a fragmentary draft of dialogue from the play exists in HRC (53.3), written on stationery from the YMCA in New York City (356 West 34th St.), where Williams stayed in the first half of 1940, again during the “late spring” of 1941 (Selected Letters I, p. 317), and yet again in March, 1943. The title “Summer at the Lake” also appears on a two-page typed list, evidently from 1943, in which Williams identified the names and locations of his currently circulating “properties” or manuscripts; this list is now filed in HRC (54.16) together with two letters that Williams wrote to Audrey Wood in May, 1943.
Some time between the end of 1937 and mid-1940 (most likely in 1939) Williams drafted a scenario, now filed in HRC (47.1), for another, longer play entitled “Summer at the Lake” or “Words are a Net to Catch Beauty.” The phrase “Nets to catch beauty” appears in related dialogue fragments in HRC (53.6) in which a youth drowns himself by swimming out too far, but—very unlike Donald Fenway—leaves behind a cache of literary manuscripts. Williams seems to have been recurrently preoccupied with the image of the young man disappearing into the water, experimenting with different contexts for this event, and imagining various possible motives for such an action.
In the handwritten fragment on YMCA stationery, after the play’s last line of dialogue (“He didn’t come back”), Williams wrote a closing stage direction that does not appear on the other drafts: “The gulls are heard crying outside as they circle close to the windows.” A seagull is also mentioned, albeit less prominently, in our copy-text, along with various incidental echoes of Chekhov, whose work Williams discovered in the 1930s and the playwright who had the greatest influence on Williams. In the 1970s and 1980s Williams adapted Chekov’s play, The Seagull, under his own title, The Notebook of Trigorin.
The Big Game
Our copy-text is one of two typescript drafts, filed in HRC (4.3), which Williams probably prepared in 1937.
At the end of our copy-text, Williams wrote his name (as “T. L. Williams”) above the street address, “6634 Pershing.” Between September, 1935 and July, 1937, the Williams family resided at this location in Saint Louis. Also, in a fragmentary draft of a dialogue between two characters named “Pierrot” and “Pierrette” (HRC 53.3), one page was typed on the reverse of a typed title-page for “THE BIG GAME (A one-act play).” Since it was in 1937 that Williams submitted a play entitled “The Death of Pierrot” to a local play contest (Leverich 211), it would seem most likely that he was at work on The Big Game during this year. (In this rogue title-page, the “Time” is specified as “Autumn of the present year, A Saturday.”)
In the alternate draft, which was evidently earlier, Williams’s opening stage direction suggests that Tony should have a more obviously stereotypical appearance. “He is evidently the recipient of all kinds of attention and he’s the type of boy that deserves it, fresh, hearty, exuberant, magnificently normal.” The other boy, the “Dave” of our copy-text (in the alternate draft he remains nameless), “is evidently less fortunate. On his table is a single vase of withered flowers of the inexpensive kind.”
The Pink Bedroom
Our copy-text, a unique typed draft, is filed in HRC (35.4).
Presumably this playlet was completed by May, 1943, since the title appears on the two-page typed list of Williams’s “properties” (described earlier, in the Note to Summer at the Lake). In fact, the title “The Pink Bedroom” appears twice on that 1943 list: once as the title of a short play, and again as the title of a short story.
Twelve years earlier, in 1931, Williams had submitted a short story entitled “The Pink Bedroom” to a student fiction contest at the University of Missouri, according to recently published research (Philip C. Kolin, “‘No masterpiece has been overlooked’: The Early Reception and Significance of Tennessee Williams’s ‘Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,’“ ANQ, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 27 –34). A story by Williams entitled “The Pink Bedroom” survives in HRC, where it is filed along with the play. Its plot, though, is substantially different.
The image of the pink bedroom, and an odd response to pink as a peculiarly disconcerting color, appear elsewhere in Williams’s writing. In typescript fragments that are currently filed among Williams’s untitled or unsorted materials in HRC (Box 53), a European writer-director turned Hollywood screenwriter provides his “modern Galatea” with an entirely pink bedroom. And, in the early play Stairs to the Roof, a character is told by her employer that “I’d rather you didn’t wear pink – I have an allergy to it” (Stairs to the Roof [New York: New Directions, 2000], p. 18).
The Fat Man’s Wife
Our copy-text is a typescript, filed in HRC (13.1).
Below the title on the copy-text, Williams gives his name as “Thomas Lanier Williams,” meaning that this draft was completed in or before 1939. In the copy-text, the play is set on New Year’s morning in 1938. However, alternate drafts in HRC, filed with this one, set the action on New Year’s morning, 1937. It may be concluded plausibly that Williams wrote some versions of the play in 1937, and then completed the text as published here in 1938 (or, perhaps, when 1938 was approaching).
An alternate draft bears the annotation “First draft” in Williams’s handwriting. An alternate title, “The Chance Acquaintance,” appears among the drafts in HRC.
An undated page of Williams’s reflections in HRC (53.3) shows that at some point—possibly for a formal course in the drama—he read Bernard Shaw’s play, Candida, the theme of which resembles that of The Fat Man’s Wife (see Introduction). The fragment expresses Williams’s puzzlement at Shaw’s moral, perhaps explaining part of the reason why Williams attempted to dramatize a similar scenario.
Thank You, Kind Spirit
Our copy-text is a unique typescript draft filed in HRC (49.4).
In a letter to Audrey Wood dated October 21, 1941, Williams indicated clearly that he had written this play shortly before he wrote the letter: “In response to the request for another one-act I have hastily banged out this little sketch of a spiritualist meeting I attended here in the quarter a few nights ago.— It did not end so dramatically as here represented but the characters are from life” (Selected Letters I, p. 350). In an undated journal entry from the same period, Williams wrote: “Visited a chapel— spiritualist earlier in the evening. In the A.M. wrote a new scene in play and a short story.” And, in a somewhat later entry which is simply dated “Tuesday,” Williams reported with satisfaction: “Good humor returned with the sale of a suit, good food, the writing and dispatching of a 1-act about the spiritualist, and a kind letter from Audrey.” Both journal entries survive in the same notebook, filed in HRC (21.15).
In HRC (54.16) there is another, unpublished letter from Williams to Wood, dated October 27, 1941, that illustrates his intentions for three plays to be grouped together under the collective title Vieux Carré. The proximity in the dates makes it all but certain that this “group of three” included Thank You, Kind Spirit (see discussion above, at the beginning of the Notes).
The Municipal Abattoir
Our copy-text—the only text of this play that we know to be extant—is currently in the possession of Michael Kahn, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. Kahn received the script from Lee Hoiby, to whom Williams gave the play after Hoiby worked on the operatic version of Summer and Smoke.
Williams seems to have been revising The Municipal Abattoir in 1966, when this title was included—along with that of The Two-Character Play—on a list of titles for possible inclusion in the volume Dragon Country and Other Plays. (Both entries were then crossed out, with a notation: “TW still working on.”) The list, written in Williams’s hand and dated March 11, 1966, survives in the files at New Directions.
The Municipal Abattoir has some thematic links to a short story of 1937 entitled “The Treadmill,” which was published posthumously in an edition by Allean Hale, as well as to the poem “The Death Embrace” and other writings about impersonal and oppressive governments such as Camino Real.
Adam and Eve on a Ferry
We produced the present, edited text by conflating portions of two substantially complete, yet partly defective typescripts filed in HRC (1.4).
Williams must have written this play after July 1939, since it features the ferry between Oakland and San Francisco on which he traveled that month, during his first visit to the Bay area.
We made the editorial decision to combine parts of two different drafts because both of the surviving scripts are marred by significant lacunae. Whereas one draft (A) lacks one or more pages in the middle, the other draft (B) has a middle, but lacks one or more pages at the beginning and one or more pages at the end. Moreover, a separate page contains an alternate, apparently revised version of the original ending to to A; we have followed this revision (see below).
In our view, the essential similarity between the two scripts justifies their interpretation as variant texts of a single work. While it is difficult to be certain which draft was chronologically prior, both appear to have been produced at around the same time.
So that our procedure may be as transparent as possible to the reader, we here present the following guide to our conflated text.
From the opening stage direction through Lawrence’s line, “Don’t bring that thing in here!” we follow A.
From the Visitor’s reply (“Oh, I beg your—!”) through Lawrence’s line, “Whispered what?” we follow B.
From the Visitor’s reply (“He whispered his name …”) through the Visitor’s line, “He also mentioned the name of a certain hotel,” we follow A.
From Lawrence’s reply (“And you did what?”) through Lawrence’s line, “Luckily you had been left some money in trust by an Aunt?” we follow B (restoring the word “Aunt,” cancelled in the copy-text).
From the Visitor’s reply (“Not an Aunt—an Uncle.”) through the Visitor’s line, “O’Reilly, O’Reilly, Adam O’Reilly!” and the subsequent direction, we follow A (with “Adam” substituted here for the copy-text’s “Clarence”).
Finally, from the Visitor’s line, “Oh, Mr. Lawrence, now, now, now I remember!” through the end of the present edition, we follow a one-page typescript that appears to be Williams’ last revision of the conclusion to A (unlike B, it shares A’s unusually wide left typewriter margin, and the change of name from “Clarence” to “Adam” evidently represents an afterthought whereby Williams added to the play’s symbolism).
This completes our account of the relation between the present edition of Adam and Eve on a Ferry and the manuscripts at HRC. However, we may also note the presence in the file at HRC (1.4) of a lone page, perhaps representing an intermediate stage of the play (between A and B), that depicts a fascinatingly different conclusion to the encounter. It begins as Lawrence “GOES ABOUT KICKING OVER THE POTTED PLANTS,” apparently enraged in some way related to the presence of these tokens sent by his “friends and admirers.” Lawrence then announces, “This concludes the audience, Miss Preston.” The Visitor wrings her hands and replies, “Oh, but Mr. Lawrence— I hoped— hoped— hoped—!” Lawrence retorts, “Yes, I know what you hoped[.] You hoped that I with a word could undo centuries of wrong-thinking, all of the mischief committed by stupid, sterile intellectualism pointing the finger of shame at the sensible flesh. Unfortunately I can’t do that, Miss Preston. There’s a new clean wind that’s going to blow through the world and it’s going to blow all the dry old dust off the furniture of the world. But that takes time, dear lady. – Me, I’ve only kicked up a breeze, a very little breeze! The great big death-giving and life-beginning tornado – comes after my time.” At last he advises the Visitor, “Your only possible course of action is plain. You will have to go back, and retrace your footsteps to Adam.” When the Visitor (“wonderingly”) responds, “Adam?” then Lawrence continues, “Yes, Adam, Adam, the everlasting Adam! The one who embraced you – openly – On a San Francisco ferry!” To which the Visitor, reacting “with sudden conviction, the dawn of a new world,” replies: “Adam! – ADAM! That was his name, it was Adam, Adam O’Reilly!” The rest of this alternate draft is cut short by the end of the sole surviving page in the file.
A few further notes are needed here with regard to the discussion of this play in our Introduction. First, as Annette Saddik has reminded us, the phrase “One of those rare electrical things between people” adumbrates a phrase spoken by Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (with reference to the meeting of Stanley and Stella): “Now don’t say it was one of those mysterious electric things between people! If you do I’ll laugh in your face” (Theatre I, p. 320). If the image originated in the context of Adam and Eve on a Ferry, then its original association with Lawrence’s teachings on sexuality may shed light on Blanche’s complex feelings. Second, Williams’s prefatory remarks on the first complete draft of You Touched Me!, which we quoted in the Introduction, survive in HRC (53.1). Finally, Williams’s reference to Lawrence as “a funny little man” is quoted from published correspondence of late 1941 (Selected Letters I, 346).
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …
Our copy-text is a draft at UCLA (University Research Library, Special Collections, Tennessee Williams, box 1, folder 2).
Accompanying Williams’s manuscripts at UCLA is a letter dated September 9, 1970, in which Williams attested to his authorship of the texts preserved there, with annotations on each item in the collection. Williams’s note for And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens … reads as follows: “A play in two scenes. Complete, unproduced, unpublished. A tragi-comedy concerning a transvestite’s adoration for a rough merchant-seaman in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans. Written in Havana shortly before Castro regime: also lost and recovered in Miami storage house. About 31 pages, a rough first draft, in author’s typing with author’s hand-written corrections, Etc. – Requires revisions: production rights reserved by author.” This information should not be assumed to be accurate in every detail (for instance, the draft is indeed “rough” but contains portions of second or subsequent drafts). Based on the note, however, we can probably date the beginning of Williams’s work on this play to 1957, a year when he visited Havana and stayed in the Comodoro—the name that appears on the hotel stationery on which he typed part of the extant script. (For corroborating evidence of his stay at the Comodoro cf. Tennessee Williams’s Letters to Donald Windham [New York, 1977], p. 293.) Other pages in the surviving draft are typed on stationery from “The Colony Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida” and “The Robert Clay, Miami.” When Candy alludes to “the war-years” as though they are now at least seventeen years in the past (p. 191), we may infer tentatively that Williams was still working on the play at some point between 1958 and 1962.
To sum up our case for the date of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens …, it appears that while the initial concept for the play may have occurred to Williams in 1957, he must have returned to it within the next five years. It may well have been as late as 1970 when he finally put together a complete script from all his drafts.
Williams used different typewriters for different parts of this script. In fact, there is abundant internal evidence—including inconsistencies in the names of characters and redundancies in the dramatic action—showing that Williams combined parts of at least two, substantially different drafts of this play in order to produce the text that was deposited in the archive. (For instance, in what appear to be the earliest portions of the composite text, the character ultimately called “Karl” was named “Buck.”) As a result, this play poses an unusual editorial challenge. To eliminate Williams’s inadvertent redundancies, in order to produce a readable and performable text, we have made more substantial changes here than in the other edited texts that comprise this volume.
On p. 189, the first sentence in the opening stage direction is non-authorial and has been added.
On p. 193 we have added a non-authorial stage direction, “Turns his attention to the photo again.”
On p. 196, we have adapted the direction beginning “During this or his next long speech …” from a retrospective direction originally placed by Williams after Candy’s long speech, on p. 197.
On p. 206 we have added a non-authorial stage direction, “She pours bourbon and goes out to the garden,” and have inserted the non-authorial words, “A splash is heard, followed by” and “As the lights come back up,” into Williams’s next stage direction.
On pp. 208 and 209-210, we have cut many lines that, in the copy-text, relate to an alternate, second version of Candy’s prior phone-call to the stripper. Evidently, Williams overlooked the redundancy of this conversation here, and left it in by mistake. However, we have preserved Karl’s question, “When did she say she’d get here?” (which, in the copy-text, refers to the redundant phone-call that is here omitted). Finally, we have emended the rest of the scene slightly to make it consistent with the information provided earlier (p. 204)—replacing three brief lines in the copy-text with Candy’s single line, “Nine-thirty” (changed from Williams’s “nine”), and replacing Karl’s “five of nine” in the copy-text with “nine.” The closing stage direction in Scene One is non-authorial and has been added.
On p. 211, at the beginning of Scene Two, we have constructed the stage direction that appears in our edition by restoring portions of a cancelled direction in the copy-text, and condensing these together with the cursory, handwritten direction with which Williams replaced it—” (A week later) Sunday A.M., rain.” Williams apparently cancelled the earlier, longer direction because it no longer served, as it once had, as an opening direction for the beginning of a new play. (The original, cancelled stage direction here reads: “A rainy winter morning in New Orleans. A queen on her thirty-fifth birthday is having coffee and Knox gelatine in fruit juice at a daintily set breakfast-table on which is a pale blue Japanese vase of pussy-willows. The entire room is decorated in a Japanese fashion. The queen is unhappy on this birthday morn, feeling her youth has gone by. In the next room of her two-room apartment, someone is sleeping loudly. All of her motions and actions are muted not to disturb the loud sleeper. Presently another, younger queen enters without knocking. This one is still under thirty, is handsome but with a pinched look and a humorous lisp.”)
In two instances on p. 213, following Karl’s requests for “vodka” and “ice-cubes,” we have substituted two specific stage directions where Williams wrote simply, “Same business.”
On pp. 216, 217, and 218, we have substituted the name “Alice Jackson” for a different name (“Clare Hackett”) that appears in the copy-text. This is part of our policy of regularizing character names throughout the play, though here the change is also motivated by a clear dramatic advantage.
The song, “Poor Butterfly” (p. 189), is presumably the popular tune by Golden and Hubbell (1916). For the poem recited by Candy (p. 199), see The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2002), pp. 150, 254.
Filed in HRC (24.12), as well as among the unsorted scripts in Box 53, are drafts of a related playlet, in some cases entitled “The Meeting of People.” Among these drafts are pages typed on Havana hotel stationery. Some passages closely resemble parts of the present text, and the conception as a whole is strikingly similar. In the untitled version from Box 53, set in “A bedroom in a lower second class hotel in New Orleans,” a woman named Mrs. Venable confronts a younger sailor named “Jim Casky,” who has woken up in her bed with a severe hangover and takes it into his head to believe that that he has been robbed; neat the end of this draft, Mrs. Venable tells Casky ironically: “I supplied the money and you the charm.” At one point in the same draft, when reports arrive that the hotel management is outraged at Mrs. Venable’s having a male guest who is not registered with her, she proposes telling them that she is “flying tomorrow to Havana.”
“Venable,” of course, is a name that Williams used for characters in his longer play, Suddenly Last Summer. Intriguingly, the title “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens” also appears among early materials for Suddenly Last Summer at HRC (Boxes 14 and 15).