He told John Gruen in 1965 that it was "the play that I worked on longest," and he premiered a version of it at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1962.

[1] The play was based on a short story of Williams called "Man Bring This Up the Road" which he wrote in Italy when he was working on the film Senso.

Noël Coward saw a production and said "I found it so intolerable and Hermione Baddeley’s acting so vulgar that I left after about twenty minutes and went home.

[11] In 1968, the play was adapted by Williams into the film Boom!, co-starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and directed by Joseph Losey.

[13] The play is set in Italy and centers on a dying, wealthy woman, Mrs. Flora Goforth, who catches a young man, Christopher Flanders, allegedly trespassing on her estate.

As a character, Mrs. Goforth is in a position where under the traditions of classic drama she could be a Stoic, but she deliberately rejects the consolations of philosophy and chooses, instead, to affirm eroticism and mysticism.