Vieux Carré (play)

[2] Set in the late 1930s in a dilapidated boarding house at 722 Toulouse Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the play focuses on a nameless writer, who has newly arrived from St. Louis.

He gradually becomes involved with other residents, including Mrs. Wire, his manipulative landlady; Nightingale, an older, predatory, tubercular artist who refuses to accept his condition; Jane, a New Rochelle society girl dying of leukemia; her sexually ambiguous, drug-addicted lover Tye, who works as a bouncer in a strip club; Mary Maud and Miss Carrie, two eccentric, poor, elderly women, who are literally starving to death; and a gay photographer with a passion for orgies.

Galt MacDermot composed incidental music and co-wrote the songs "Sugar in the Cane" and "Lonesome Man" with Williams.

It is a series of vignettes, based on fact, falsified by art, transformed into short stories, and woven into a play...If we always expect the unexpected to happen—and as playgoers we do—nothing happens.

A critic covering a 2008 production in St. Louis wrote "This semi-autobiographical account of an innocent young writer being exposed to illness and death, love and violence in a seedy boarding house intrigues both as one of Williams' earliest — and also as one of his final — works.