The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays
Read The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays Online
Authors: Tennessee Williams
“Just as young painters make their stabs at impressionism and cubism, in his early one-acts Williams tried his hand with political satire, expressionism, social realism, and even drawing-room comedy.”
—Eli
Wallach and Anne Jackson
“Within his early one-acts there are intriguing prototypes of characters and seeds of ideas Williams developed more fully in his later, larger dramas.”
—
The
New York Times
“Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths.”
—Randy
Gener,
American Theater Magazine
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope.”
—Tennessee
Williams in a 1950 letter to Elia Kazan
“Reading these plays of the very young Tennessee, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s he had become, we are offered a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, the demons, and the wit of this iconic playwright.”
—Terrence
McNally, from his foreword, “An Invisible Cat Enters, Mewing”
The Case of the Crushed Petunias
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
AN INVISIBLE CAT ENTERS, MEWING
Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, I used to stare across the Gulf of Mexico in what I thought was the direction of Key West, Florida. I knew that Tennessee Williams lived there and I had decided, in high school, that one day I would live there, too. Some fifty-plus years later I do. The house he lived in is a five-minute bike ride from mine.
And now I sit contemplating some fifteen plays previously unknown to
me—seven
never before published and the rest not always easy to
find—and
wondering what I should tell you about them. Perhaps he would not be pleased at their publication. These short plays do not always represent him at his considerable best. As a writer, I get that. A reputation is at stake.
But as a playwright who reveres his work, I am overjoyed at their arrival on my desk. As Mendy says in my play
The Lisbon Traviata
about an unpublished recording of Maria Callas in less than her optimal voice, “I’ll take crumbs when it comes to Maria.” I feel the same way about Tennessee Williams.
Artists, especially esteemed ones like Tennessee Williams, leave behind a more or less official canon of work. There are the universally recognized
masterpieces—
The
Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named
Desire
—that
are produced annually as part of the core repertory of the American Theater, taught in universities and read by people who have never been inside a theater.
There are the plays jockeying for their position in the Williams
hierarchy—
Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof
,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, and
The Night of The
Iguana
—plays
still waiting for the definitive production or radical re-interpretation that will reveal them as the equals of
Menagerie
or
Streetcar
.
There are the plays we are always intrigued to see in revival, knowing they may never achieve the popularity of the better-known
titles—
Summer
and Smoke
,
The Rose Tattoo
,
Camino Real
, and
Orpheus
Descending
—plays
we are always grateful to see and grow frustrated waiting to see again.
And finally there are the mostly ignored Williams plays that we personally cherish as something rare and precious in the canon and wonder why more people
don’t—
Vieux
Carré
and
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
are my candidates for another look by the right director, cast, and designers.
And now there are these almost completely unknown Williams one-act plays gathered as
The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays
.
Written between 1936, when he was a student in St. Louis just beginning to write plays, and 1980, three years before his death, when his fall from critical grace seemed all but complete, these fifteen short
plays—some
complete and begging for production while others are tantalizing fragments of what might have been or misfires that are
sui-generis
, but all authentic Williams
nevertheless—are
invaluable. Even if they add nothing to his reputation, they add to our knowledge of this fascinating chameleon of a playwright. Any new glimpse of Williams is one to be grateful for.
It is tempting to say that “It’s all there, the Williams cosmos” in these fifteen plays. It is and it’s not.
It can never be “all there,” of course, when talking about a writer of genius. Good plays are not that neat. But reading these plays of the very young Tennessee, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s he had become, we are offered a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, the demons, and the wit of this iconic playwright.
For example, we have an embryonic
Glass Menagerie
in
The Pretty Trap
, “a comedy in one-act,” written between 1943 and 1944. The Wingfields and the Gentleman Caller are there and so is the central event of the full-length “memory play” soon to follow. What is most striking about this version of their story (Williams reworked the story of Amanda and her two children, many times, even as a film script) is
the absence of the framing device of the
play—Tom’s
narratives and his extraordinary language, which opens the doorway to the extraordinary language of the play and the extraordinary language of his mother and of his sister and the Gentleman Caller as well. But in this early version, Tom is the least interesting character in the quartet, easily upstaged by his own family and their visitor. Until he found Tom Wingfield’s voice, Williams seems not to have completely found his own.
There are traces of it, to be sure, in the plays written in the 1930s but for the most part the dialogue is more workmanlike than inspired.
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
(1936) is written by a young playwright who clearly knows his O’Neill. And yet, in the stage directions, there are traces of the Williams who would soon stand up and take his place apart from the other Broadway playwrights he often set out to emulate. The Moony’s kitchen is “eloquent of slovenly housekeeping” and his wife is “like a tiny mandarin, enveloped in the ruins of a once gorgeously-flowered Japanese silk kimono.” Felicities like these abound in these plays of the ’30s. Their suddenness amidst the ordinariness of the rest of the text is breathtaking. Just when you’re thinking, “When does he become Tennessee Williams?” he does precisely
that—right
in front of your eyes. Almost every one of the plays from this period has a moment that is gloriously prescient of the artist to come. Reading these plays you will be present at the creation of a writer.
The familiar themes of Williams’s mature plays are all to be found here: a brutal environment destroying the individual; the desire for respite from battering circumstances; the strong pull of carnality as it trumps resolution time after time; the unbearable loneliness of the individual who cannot find love in a crass, capitalistic world; the sudden moments of a little happiness and even grace that keep a person going.
Reading these plays, I was reminded how much time the young Williams, like Tom Wingfield, spent at the movies. One could write a paper on the influence of Warner Bros. crime and prison melodramas on the aspiring playwright. Fortunately, he grew out of them. The hysterical politics of
Me, Vashya
do not return until
The Red Devil Battery Sign
in 1975. The seeds for political commentary were always there but perhaps wisely Williams left the field to his peer, Arthur Miller.
It is the three plays belonging to the 1940s, and one from 1939, that present the Williams we are most familiar with. Besides the
Menagerie
pencil-sketch of
The Pretty Trap
, we can see a very preliminary, very successful character study for Serafina in
The Rose Tattoo
as Mrs. Pocciotti in
The Dark Room
(1939). The playwright is clearly in love with his fractured-English-speaking immigrant. She leaps off the page as swiftly and completely as she will in her full-length incarnation eleven years later. Williams enjoyed writing with famous actresses in mind.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias
(1941) is “respectfully dedicated to the talent and charm of Miss Helen Hayes,” and Miss Dorothy Simple is a part a charming and talented actress could have a triumph with. One wonders if Miss Hayes ever read it. In this play, the nameless Young Man is the harbinger of life. Twenty years later the Young Man in
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
(1963) will become the Angel of Death.
In the last play of this 1940s trio,
Interior: Panic
(1946), Blanche Shannon is no one else but Blanche DuBois. The situation is familiar, the cramped quarters in New Orleans with her sister and her husband, and Blanche’s desperation and need for rescue by her own “gentleman caller” are all there, but this time there is hope at the end, faint yet surely there, for Blanche.
The full force of Stanley Kowalski is barely suggested in Jack Kiefaber, who is as much Blanche’s victim as her predator. The full-length play is presaged in Blanche’s reveries but the actual working out is forestalled. But as a playwright’s note, a jotting, a fragment of the masterpiece that is soon to come,
Interior: Panic
is an invaluable addition to the Williams oeuvre. The discovery of a preliminary study for Michelangelo’s David, no matter what its size or medium, would be treasured for itself. It would inform our knowledge and understanding of “the original” we have already come to know.
The last three plays in the collection were written after Williams had been recognized as one of America’s greatest playwrights and his descent into critical indifference had begun. These were surely puzzling, troubled times for him. As he sought to discover new styles to explore his familiar themes, the commercial theater began its inexorable abandonment of him as a moneymaker. They were tired of the “old” Williams and unconvinced by the “new.”
Kingdom of Earth
(1967) is an early sketch for
The Seven Descents of Myrtle
(1968), one of the first of the so-called “disasters” of Williams’s later career. Read thoughtfully, and not expecting another
Streetcar
, it is funny,
shocking, and moving. The full-length
Myrtle
is even better. Clearly, Williams knew he was on to something when he expanded this first, short draft into a full evening.
The poetry-laced
I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
(1973), takes us back to New Orleans and all the familiar Williams themes. What is different this time is a sense of theatrical adventure: he is taking risks with language, style, and structure. This is a bolder Williams striking out in a different direction than his audience had come to expect and demand of him. I think Williams was always drawn to the “experimental” (a dread word to most producers), but also understood the constraints of commercial success once he hit the big time. The time had come to shake them off. It is a play written by a mature playwright who seems to have rediscovered the joy of writing for the theater. You can hear Williams having a good time! A playwright who can ask in a stage direction that “an invisible cat enters, mewing” is a playwright who stills has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Even if he does fall into the orchestra pit at the end of the play, the Playwright climbs out saying, “Old cats know how to fall.” This is the Williams who wasn’t afraid to fall (or fail) doing something different, even though he was soon to pay the price for it.
Some Problems for The Moose Lodge
(1980) is my favorite play in the collection. Written three years before his death, when Williams was virtually forsaken by the theatrical establishment that had nourished him all those salad years ago, it is a play of immense sadness, utter chaos, and infinite compassion. I will be surprised if this collection does not inspire subsequent productions. Just when you may begin to think you’ve lost him in these last, lost works, Tennessee Williams comes roaring back at us in all his manic, disheveled, life-embracing wonderfulness. It would be a hard person who could resist him. This is a man who loved life despite
everything
.
Finishing these plays, I feel a bit like I’ve gone through his wastepaper basket. I wish I could pedal over and ask him if that was okay. I have a pretty strong feeling he would say yes, with a smile and a cackle, and head for the White Street Pier for his legendary daily swim.
Terrence McNally
Key West
December 2010