introduction:
a play for tomorrow
Stairs to the Roof is a rare and different Tennessee Williams play; a boy–girl romance with an optimistic ending. The last of his youthful plays, it was his first piece deliberately crafted for Broadway. Having a New York agent, Audrey Wood, made the difference. It was Wood who encouraged him to apply for a Rockefeller Fellowship. The grant of a thousand dollars received in December, 1939, enabled him to escape St. Louis to study under John Gassner at the New School for Social Research in New York. Overnight he was transformed from a jobless “deadbeat,” as his unsympathetic father characterized him, to a young man with a future.
In response to war in Europe, the New School was welcoming eminent refugees like Erwin Piscator to its faculty. Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop opened January, 1940, with Williams in the first class. The Workshop was designed to put in practice Piscator’s avant-garde theatrical techniques: such devices as treadmills, various playing levels, film projections and the documentary approach to narrative which Williams had already used in Not About Nightingales (written in 1938). In New York, through his agent, he met Lawrence Langner, founder of the Theatre Guild; Elia Kazan and Eddie Dowling,who would figure in his future; saw the current plays; attended professional rehearsals and so sharpened the tools of his craft. The Playwrights’ Seminar chaired by John Gassner and Theresa Helburn, was limited to ten, admission granted on approval of a script, and Williams had brought to New York a long play, Battle of Angels, the product of his vagabond trip to Mexico the year before. But evidently he also brought a second script, for he first mentioned Stairs to the Roof in his journal of February 12, 1940, as “a rather promising idea about white collar workers.” Both Piscator and Gassner recognized Williams’ work as exceptional; in February Piscator produced his one-act play, The Long Goodbye, in the Studio Theatre—it was Williams’ first New York production. Gassner called Battle of Angels “the best play done in his class” and showed it to Harold Clurman and Elmer Rice. By May the Theatre Guild had optioned the play, and Tennessee left school for the summer to revise it. However, he seemed more interested in Stairs to the Roof, writing Langner: “If someone else were writing it, it might turn out to be a great American drama—there is so much amplitude in the theme.” Referring to having attended rehearsals of Odets’ Night Music he added that he would never release a play—however profound in subject—“till I felt it had sufficient theatricality to make it commercial. Any play that is not ‘commercial’—that is, ‘good theatre’—is necessarily still-born, isn’t it?” By October, he wrote Theresa Helburn that his first long comedy was practically finished, and even in November, with Battle of Angels going into rehearsal, Williams told a reporter: “The [play] I’d like most to get on is my ‘Stairs to the Roof,’ which is a social comedy about a lowly paid clerk trying to escape his economic cage. My interest in social problems is as great as my interest in the theater. . . .” He had already changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to “Tennessee.”
His concentration on Stairs rather than Battle of Angels may have been a form of avoidance. By December, 1940, summoned back to New York to embattled Battle rehearsals, the inexperienced author was caught in the maelstrom of casting, rewrite, and production and completely overwhelmed. With Gassner, Williams, Helburn and Langner all frantically working on Battle, Williams unwisely accepted changes and corrections from every side, especially from Helburn, executive director of the Guild. Battle of Angels opened in Boston on December 30 and quickly closed, censored for mixing sex with religion. The chastened playwright went off to Key West to rewrite Battle and to perfect Stairs to the Roof.
The evolution of Stairs as a play shows the complex way in which Williams developed a script. At least four early stories fed into the play. “A System of Wheels” describes the daily life of an office worker who is depressed by his routine job but continues on his treadmill. “The Swan” is an extended treatment of Ben’s love episode with the Girl. A sketch called “Beauty and the Beast” became the play-within-the-play of the Carnival scene. Stairs evolved most directly from a story of the same title written in October, 1936, the fall after Williams’ recovery from the nervous breakdown which freed him from his job in the shoe factory (see Editor’s Note) Here the clerk is Edward Schiller, a young poet, just as Williams thought of himself at the time. The story opens with a body splattering on the pavement. In a series of flashbacks it excerpts the life of Schiller who, discovered writing poems on company time, is fired in front of the entire office, grows hysterical and jumps from the roof to his death.
The story is especially interesting for Williams’ description of the job which caused his own breakdown—apparently—the only such account in any of his writing. “You insert a sheet of paper (form No. 246-M) in your Ditto machine. . . . At the top of the page . . . you type the name of that particular one of the company’s forty-odd factories . . . then you type the number of the order, the date, the number of cases, and the number of dozens it contains. . . . Across and down the sheet you go for page after page after page, typing stock numbers. . . .” Schiller’s mental state as he types numbers eight hours a day is described: “The duplicating machine is a monster with gaping jaws that will . . . crush him between its gelatined rolls, if he doesn’t feed it fast enough . . . the ticking clock that might have brought deliverance is now an axe hanging over his head . . . the pile of untyped orders climbs higher . . . the penciled digits he is copying have a maddening way of creeping close to his eyes until they appear enormous. . . . His temples are throbbing . . . his haunches are sore. . . .” This description was transposed into stage action as the mechanized opening scene of Stairs to the Roof, and the story formed the background of Benjamin Murphy, the play’s protagonist.
Converting tragedy to comedy sacrificed some of the poetry for a crisp, energetic dialogue entirely new in Tennessee Williams’ work, but he retained the serious subtitle, “A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That are Kept in Cages.” Ben works in a shirt factory and has a nagging wife. In trouble for his frequent trips to the washroom, where he writes poetry, he discovers unused stairs to the factory roof where he can escape to view wider horizons. This is the reality of his everyday life until he meets the Girl, a secretary also trapped in a dead-end job, and the two escape on a series of romantic adventures. Back at the factory, their mutual support enables each to rebel. The Girl, who has discovered she loves Ben, not her boss, confronts her employer with his treatment of her as a nonentity and throws away his clock. Ben, about to be fired when his boss and stockholders discover his mysterious stairs, leads a general insurrection of the office workers to the roof. Conveniently, Ben’s wife has left him, freeing him for a happy—and even more fantastic—final adventure with the Girl.
Stairs to the Roof is set in the St. Louis of 1933–36, as is The Glass Menagerie, which takes place in a drab apartment. The interior scenes in Stairs are equally drab, but the fantasy scenes are set outdoors in the city’s Forest Park, with its lagoon, and on its outskirts, the Highlands, a large amusement complex. In the park was the Municipal Opera, the country’s largest outdoor theatre. Here Williams saw his first professional productions, and their choruses, dancers, and sets introduced him to theatre as spectacle. Remembering the “Muny” may have influenced him to write into Stairs a cast of thirty-one, a chorus, and a spectacular ending.
Besides being his first long comedy, Stairs was the last of his apprentice plays. The others, Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm and the concurrent Battle of Angels were all essentially tragic. Stairs would be affirmative—and Tennessee vowed, a commercial success. He made a list of the plays he admired, especially those of prizewinning playwrights, but his first influence was an actor. “I have written the part of Benjamin Murphy with Burgess Meredith in mind,” Williams wrote in his foreword and gave his spunky little hero the initials, B.M. Williams would write with a specific actor in mind throughout his career, usually choosing a top star. He had seen Meredith in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset in St. Louis on stage and in film and had written in his journal: “Burgess Meredith is an exquisitely fine actor.” Anderson’s High Tor, in which a man and girl thwart commercial developers may have also influenced him.
But the specific play which comes to mind as a model for Stairs to the Roof is The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. Both plays show the workers typing like robots, have a scene by a lake, and an instance of divine intervention. Williams uses his Messrs. P, D, Q, T, to represent the impersonality of the workplace. Rice has Messrs. One, Two, Three, Four, etc. voice the prejudices of society. He calls his male lead “Mr. Zero”; Williams calls his female lead “Girl.” If he did borrow ideas from the established playwright, it was perhaps a deliberate tribute to Rice and another move in his campaign to get his play staged. Like all writers, Williams got ideas from his predecessors; the new ways he built on them made them unique. Finally it was his contemporary, William Saroyan, with whom he would often be compared. Almost the same age, both were rebels against a society which they sought to change. Fresh young voices in the theatre, each brought a new freedom and impressionistic concept of playwriting to the stage. The two were inevitable competitors as each produced a new one-act or full length play each year. Saroyan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, Williams won it in 1947; his star rose as Saroyan’s descended. Some critics would call Stairs “Saroyanish,” but where Saroyan was fey to the extreme, Williams was more disciplined.
The script of Stairs to the Roof demonstrates his new sophistication. Where Not About Nightingales was sometimes careless in accounting for situations and characters, and where Battle of Angels tried to crowd all of his concerns into one play, Stairs is a model of craftsmanship. The opening set is dominated by a huge clock, the controlling metaphor of the play, suggesting the mechanical, relentless world where individuals are ruled by a machine. The opening lines introduce the plot—where is Ben? The Designer’s entrance sets a comedic tone and provides exposition—this is a shirt factory; the initial scene between Mr. Gum and Ben establishes dramatic conflict and lets Ben introduce the play’s theme: “people have got to find stairs to the roof.” As the scene ends in a stalemate between his boss and Ben, the plot poses three questions: Will Ben be fired? Where are the stairs to the roof? Whose is the mysterious offstage laugh which comments on the action? All of this is accomplished in the first few pages of script. The Clock in some form is a reminder in almost every scene, and each scene skillfully advances the plot by developing suspense. Conflict is furthered by characters who bring the idealistic Ben down to earth, his wife Alma, Mr. Gum, his college friend Jim. Ben is poetic, philosophical, dreamy; Jim is pragmatic, sardonic, realistic. When Boy meets Girl romance enters the plot but when this results in a sexual embrace, the tone is ironic rather than sentimental, as each mentally substitutes another for the real person in the action. With their romance the play shifts from realism towards fantasy, culminating in the Carnival scene and “Beauty and the Beast,” the Mummers’ show. This was conceived as “the orgasmic center of the play, representing the . . . dreams of childhood.” This seems more relevant if we recall the Jean Cocteau film of Beauty and the Beast which Williams, the movie-goer, probably saw, with its surreal ending of the lovers floating into space. The action when Ben jumps to the stage and delivers his speech on brotherhood seems a direct precursor of Camino Real as does the chase where he knocks down the guard and frees the foxes in the zoo. When Ben tells the Girl he is married, the play moves back to reality, with a series of short scenes showing Ben and Jim each trapped in a miserable marriage. The ending returns to the play’s beginning as board members and boss confront the mutiny and are forced to follow their workers to the roof. There Ben and the Girl finally meet Mr. E who effects their fantastic escape as the entire cast celebrates. Williams asked his agent if this ending was too frankly a deus ex machina. Fortunately, rather than go for a more conventional solution, the young playwright’s instinct was to let it stand.
In his play synopsis Williams stated, “Written for stage or screen,” which may be why there are few stage directions, as if he were leaving these to a future director. Minimal furniture and no props called for some action to be pantomimed. His few descriptions are expressionistic: “the eerie blue atmosphere of a landscape by . . . Dali,” a clue to the surreal nature of the play; skyscraper towers pointing upward “like so many fingers.” “Projected on the backdrop,” he writes. This seems to be the first example of Williams using film projections. The stairs are not shown, although when the play was finally produced their image dominated the set: a spiral curving upward and out of sight. They may represent the play’s ascending movement from reality to fantasy, as Nancy Tischler suggests; they also symbolize the upward movement towards a new life. In his script requirements, the playwright broke any bounds of commercialism and freed the true Williams, for whom anything imagined was possible. From the large cast to the final airborne escape, he challenged the practicalities of production. His aim was to use every medium possible to the stage. Music was indicated throughout, to set the mood or comment on the action. Expressionism combines with realism in his characters as it does in the play. Although Ben represents the universal “little man,” Williams’ projection of Burgess Meredith as Murphy tied him to realism. Also, Ben is the Tennessee Williams figure and Jim was a real character, Jim Connor, a college friend. Jim’s wife with her “Rise and shine” is a less flattering portrait of Williams’ mother. The characters based on real people were seen realistically; the generalized characters were more expressionistic.
For today’s audience, Stairs to the Roof has certain gender issues which should be considered in the light of yesterday’s mores. To portray a gay character in 1941 was still daring. In the original script the Designer was called “An Effeminate Man” and presented the comedic portrait of a gay male then acceptable on the commercial stage. (This was the era of Charley’s Aunt, the tremendously popular transvestite farce.) This stereotype may have been Williams’ ultimate nod to commercialism, for in Not About Nightingales, he had portrayed a homosexual sympathetically. In the 1945 Pasadena production “Effeminate Man” was changed to “The Designer.” In the politically correct atmosphere of the year 2000, the issue might be avoided by casting the designer as a woman. Williams does interpolate lines in the final scene which may be his defense of homosexuality, when Mr. E refers to the “sorry mess that having two sexes has made of things.” Another problem for today’s critics is The Girl. The label suggests a generic female. Ben pictures her in turn as sexual object, Madonna, and mother figure—all masculine cliches. The Girl’s own assertions that “love is a woman’s Wonderland” give us pause today. The fact that the Girl is in love with her boss cancels our potential sympathy for her as a victim, although he does victimize her by not even remembering her name. She is delightful as a character, but we want her to develop rather than travel through the play as an appendage to Ben. It is when she confronts her boss that she becomes real. If Williams was using his sister as model, he may not have wanted to get too close to reality, preferring to recall the fairy-tale days of their childhood. There is one reference to Rose in the play, when Bertha warns her roommate of having known a girl with dementia praecox—Rose’s diagnosis.
Knowing that this play was written as the United States went into World War II, one may ask why war has no more presence in the drama. It is actually referred to in almost every scene but is submerged by the playwright’s comedic intent. Later Williams wrote that war should only be described by soldiers. As his foreword says, “Wars come and wars go . . . but Benjamin Murphy and [his] problems . . . go on forever.” The growing impersonality of American life, the dehumanization of man in an increasingly mechanistic world, those nameless individuals whose humdrum existence prevents any fulfillment—these are the concerns of Stairs to the Roof. In its way, the play is very American, patriotic in its plea for individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Williams wrote in his Note to Potential Producers: “I wish that I were sufficiently an economic or political theorist to advance a scheme for correction of these unlucky circumstances which I have tried to show. As it is, I can only show them. . . .” After Pearl Harbor, which he wrote was “the end of the world as we know it,” he finished his script and by Christmas wrote that the play “shines very brightly in places. It is all I really have to say. Said about as well as I am able to say it right now.” He signed it “T. Wms., New Orleans, Dec. 1941.” And to Audrey Wood he wrote, “this may be more a play for tomorrow than today. . . . Today is pretty dreadful, isn’t it?” Audrey sent him a copy of his draft card that she held in safe-keeping—4-F because of his poor eyesight.
He had had a hopeful episode in November when Piscator proposed to revive Battle of Angels as a studio production. Desperate as Williams was for money, when he realized that Piscator had rewritten his play as an anti-fascist polemic, he withdrew it. Hume Cronyn had taken an ongoing option on his short plays, and with the $25 a month installments his only dependable source of income, Williams was steadily turning out one-acts. He was also working on a trilogy, The Americans, which he had proposed to Audrey as early as 1939. Daughter of Revolution would be a sort of “Life With Mother” portrait; The Aristocrats would portray an artistic woman forced into prostitution by poverty. Now he thought of using Stairs to the Roof, his own story, as the third play. Audrey had sent Stairs to producer David Merrick and in June, 1942, Tennessee received the answer which seemed to seal that play’s fate. Merrick had found the script “interesting and beautifully written” but opined, “I don’t think a producer would be likely to risk a more than average amount of production money on a fantasy . . . at this time. Not unless it had a chorus of pretty girls, and a part for Gertrude Lawrence.”
When Stairs was finally performed on March 25, 1945, at the little Pasadena Playbox the timing was out of joint. The Glass Menagerie had just finished its triumphal Chicago run and was moving to Broadway, to win all “Best Play of the Year” awards. By 1944 the playwright was making $1000 a week and his treatise on the penniless clerk seemed nostalgic rather than propagandistic. When Stairs had a mainstage production at the Pasadena Playhouse on February 26, 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire was about to hit Broadway like a bomb. The optimistic Stairs would no longer represent the Tennessee Williams who wrote tragedy and was being hailed as the new Eugene O’Neill.
Williams did not go to see Stairs, although the Playhouse, one of the two best regional theatres in the United States, gave his play a lavish production. Seven of the dozen reviews were enthusiastic, calling it impassioned, provocative, poetic, a play “in the modern manner” but not “arty.” Apparently Williams read only the first, from Daily Variety, which, he wrote Audrey, “was no accolade.” “Stairs to the Roof Rickety,” called the play “Williams’ crackpot, alleged theatrical piece.” Since the reviewer did not identify himself and also disparaged The Glass Menagerie, his opinion can be dismissed.
Although Williams would never again write a play as lighthearted as Stairs to the Roof, he never relinquished his love of fantasy. This strain of fantasy fed into Camino Real, which his agent advised him to hide immediately. Not till after the Royal Shakespeare production of 1988 did Camino win universal praise. Was Stairs to the Roof indeed “a play for tomorrow,” as its author speculated fifty-eight years ago? Its science-fiction ending, predating the inter-galactic explorations of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek is on target today. Ben’s quarrel with the clock—man against machine—was contemporized as the year 2000 approached when a computer-programming oversight had far-reaching economic effects. Today’s machine is the computer, and Ben’s contemporary concern might be whether mankind will become its victim. Meanwhile, there are still little people toiling at dehumanizing jobs and dreaming of freedom. In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller wrote that Tennessee Williams wanted to change the world. Stairs to the Roof still testifies as a plea for that change.