List of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams
"[1] The play tells the story of a South Pacific missionary, Abelard, and his wife, Mabel, and "both endorses the minister's life and corrects his tendency to Victorian prudery.
[5] The Magic Tower was written quickly by Williams in April 1936 in order to meet the deadline for a one-act play contest sponsored by the Webster Groves Theatre Guild in St. Louis, Missouri.
[7] The play tells the story of a young artist and his ex-actress wife living in a slum that they refer to as their "magic tower," following them as their optimism gradually fades.
Written in 1937 under the title Escape, Summer at the Lake was unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn.[8] The autobiographical play tells the story of Donald Fenway, a sensitive teenager who feels trapped by his self-absorbed Southern mother and his shoe-company executive father, who wants him to abandon his plans for college and find a menial job.
The Fat Man's Wife was written by Williams in 1938 but remained unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn.[8] The play tells the story of Vera Cartwright, a sophisticated Manhattan society lady who is forced to choose between her boorish husband, a theatrical producer, and a young playwright who has become her admirer.
The Fat Man's Wife received the sharpest criticism of any of the five exhumed plays; in The New Yorker, John Lahr called it a "heterosexual fantasy awash with false emotion and bad writing,"[9] and The New York Times noted that "Williams is obviously attempting to write in a style entirely alien to him, trying on a faux-urbane manner that fits him like a rented tuxedo in the wrong size.
The only things mentioned on the stage are numerous potted plants, two wicker chairs, and "a banner bearing the woven figure of a phoenix in a nest of flames."
Ariadne is described as plain and "spinsterish looking," and she wears a hat, while Lawrence sports a "gold satin dressing robe with a lavender shawl."
The Parade is set on the wharfs of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tells the story of a young playwright named Don dealing with his unrequited homosexual love for another man.
The situations and characters in the play were "clearly drawn from a very autobiographical foundation,"[10] with Don's dilemma reflecting a relationship Williams had in Provincetown with "his actual lover for [one] summer, Kip Kiernan.
Original cast members: Ben Griessmeyer, Vanessa Caye, Elliot Eustis, Megan Bartle, David Landon.
The scheme of the play consists of the main character moving out of the apartment he grew up in while experiencing extreme flashbacks of both terrible and glorious moments in his past.
It depicts the conflict between a dreamy, delusional heroine (à la Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire) and her brusque, practical landlady, who wants to kick her out of her apartment.
A 1973 summer production was staged by Producer, William T. Gardner, at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, Directed by José Quintero.
At Liberty was written in 1941 and tells the story of a once-successful actress who retreats to her childhood home in Mississippi, with fantasies of resuscitating her career.
"[14] Moony's Kid Don't Cry originated as an eight-page melodrama titled Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, which Williams wrote in 1930 at the University of Missouri.
[1] Hot Milk was produced at MU in 1932, and was revised and titled Moony's Kid Don't Cry in 1941, when it was published in Margaret Mayorga's Best One Act Plays of 1940.
Being of Latin descent, with an Italian surname, and thus a community outsider, Vicarro, who knows what happened but cannot prove it, seeks revenge by raping Jake's young and voluptuous but childlike and naïve wife Flora.
Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 film Baby Doll, which Williams described as a "grotesque folk comedy", was based on this play and The Unsatisfactory Supper, which has two similar main characters.
[19] Archie Lee and his Baby Doll Meighan, who parallel Jake and Flora in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, are reluctantly providing a home to Aunt Rose, an elderly relation who has been passed around among the family.
A production was staged by Producer, William T. Gardner, in the summer of 1973 at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois Directed by José Quintero Written in 1946, Lord Byron's Love Letter takes place in New Orleans in the late 19th century during Mardi Gras.
After he died, the grandmother retired from the world and remained in complete seclusion as an honor to his memory (this does not prevent her from commenting on the spinster's every action).
Unlike the large scenic demands of his larger works (i.e. A Streetcar Named Desire) Talk Like The Rain... features a small-scale, bare-room situation.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias was written in 1941 and is the story of Dorothy Simple, a woman trapped in her job at a prim and proper shop in Massachusetts.
Suddenly Last Summer was written in New York in 1957 and debuted as part of a double bill of one-act plays by Williams, titled Garden District.
Something Unspoken was written in London in 1951 and debuted as part of a double bill of one-act plays by Williams, titled Garden District.
The play premiered in July 1971 at the Maine Theatre Arts Festival in Bar Harbor in a double bill with Williams's I Can't Imagine Tomorrow.
"[32] I Can't Imagine Tomorrow was a two-character play written for television, broadcast with Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen under the collective title "Dragon Country" on WNET-TV in 1970.
Written in 1976, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur introduces Bodey, a hard-of-hearing 50-something, sharing her flat with Dorothea, 'Dottie', a Blanche DuBois-like 40-something civics teacher, smitten with the social-climbing principal of the school where she works, having already been taken advantage in the back seat of his car.
On January 26, 2002, June Havoc and Dick Cavett starred in a production of the play as part of the fourth annual Tennessee Williams marathon at the Hartford Stage Company.
