The plays collected here all help to illuminate the work of America’s great poet-playwright.
— Kathleen Chalfant
These Are the Stairs You’ve Got to Watch / Mister Paradise / The Palooka Escape / Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? / Summer at the Lake / The Big Game / The Pink Bedroom / The Fat Man’s Wife / Thank You, Kind Spirit / The Municipal Abbatoir / Adam and Eve on a Ferry / And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens
This collection of previously unpublished one-acts includes some of Tennessee Williams’s most poignant and hilarious characters: the tough and outrageous drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens…; the betrayed wife who refuses to take a lover in The Fat Man’s Wife; and the extravagant mistress who cheats on her married man in The Pink Bedroom.
Most of these plays were written in the 1930s and early 1940s, when Williams was already flexing his formindable theatrical imaginations: lovers scramble for quick assignations in the closed movie theater balcony of These Are the Stairs You’ve Got to Watch; Chekovian-style family ennui in Summer at the Lake leads to heartbreak; and in Thank You, Kind Spirit a mulatto spiritualist from New Orleans’ French Quarter is visciously exposed as a fraud – or is she?
Acclaimed stage and film actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson have conitrbuted a delightful foreword based on their memories of working with the playright, while an insightful introduction and notes by editors Nicholas Moschovakis and David Rossel provide biographical and textual background.
