A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Her slovenly but good-hearted hard-of-hearing roommate Bodey unrelentingly urges Dottie to strike up a relationship with her portly, fashion-challenged, cigar-chomping twin brother Buddy (who never is seen onstage).

Sophie Gluck, a German immigrant manic-depressive mourning the loss of her beloved mother, is another tenant in the building, and Helena is Dottie's upscale and haughty friend and colleague.

Dorothea is planning to leave the crowded, tacky efficiency apartment she shares with Bodey and move in with Helena in order to have a larger and nicer place in which she can entertain the man she believes intends to marry her.

Dorothea is scheduled to join Bodey and Buddy for their weekly Sunday picnic in Creve Coeur Park, a short trolley car ride away, but she delays her departure, certain Mr. Ellis is going to call.

In 1976, Tennessee Williams wrote Creve Coeur, a one-act play he considered a companion piece to Demolition Downtown, a short work that had been published in Esquire in 1971.