Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays Review

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(More customer reviews)Although Tennessee Williams provided the world theatre with nearly a dozen full-length plays that are still continually done, from the very beginning until the end of his life he also worked in the one-act form. "This Property Is Condemned" and "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton" are classics of the genre. The short plays collected in this volume were mostly discovered after his death and have been published posthumously. The first few selections would probably be more aptly classified as juvenilia and are really more vignettes than actual plays. And to tell the truth, we probably wouldn't be interested in them at all if their author were not Tennessee Williams. However, their author WAS Tennessee Williams and for that reason they command our attention. We can see the small seeds that later blossomed into more fully realized work. "These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch," set in a run-down movie theatre where unsavory acts are performed by audience members in the balcony brings to mind the short stories, "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" and "Hard Candy." "Mr. Paradise" has echoes of "Lord Byron's Love Letter" and "Auto-Da-Fe." "The Palooka" and "Escape" show traces of NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES and "Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?" and "Summer at the Lake" foreshadow THE GLASS MENAGERIE. "The Pink Bedroom" and "The Fat Man's Wife" are more fully developed and could truly be called plays. These are both bittersweet comedies about adultery and could provide good material for actors looking for scenes to perform in acting classes. The other plays are somewhat more profound. "Thank You Kind Sprit" is a sad play about faith. It deals with an ancient Negress who conducts spiritualist meetings in New Orleans' French Quarter. Her session is interrupted by boorish people who denounce her as a phony and destroy her "temple," leaving her bereft of everything except for a crippled child who still believes in her. (This one would make a good television film, I think.) "The Municipal Abattoir" deals with people living in a totalitarian regime and has a lot in common with some of Caryl Churchill's work. "Adam and Eve on a Ferry," like another Williams short play, "I Rise in Flame Cried the Phoenix," deals with D.H. Lawrence. The best of the plays in this volume is "And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens..." This play was one he worked on sporadically for decades and provides insight into the mind of Williams like none of the other one-acts. Set in The French Quarter, it deals with a lonely transvestite who has been jilted and now seeks new love from men who are unable and unwilling to give it to "her." But it has a layer of symbolism that is equal to SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER.
None of these plays could be called an undiscovered masterpiece, but for Williams scholars, they provide a valuable source of insight into the major works. I also think these plays could be inspirational to beginning playwrights simply because they are so primitive. This is how Tennessee Williams started and look how much he developed. It shows the power of persistence and the value of continuing to write even if the early results are not all that great.
This volume includes a breezy introduction by actors Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach as well as some excellent notes by the editors, Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel.

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Thirteen previously unpublished short plays now available for the first time.
Tennessee Williams had a distinct talent for writing short plays and, not surprisingly, this remarkable new collection of never-before-published one-acts includes some of his most poignant and hilarious characters: the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens...; the strange little man behind the nom de plume Mister Paradise; and the extravagant mistress who cheats on her married man in The Pink Bedroom. Most were written in the 1930s and early 1940s when Williams was already flexing his theatrical imagination. Chosen from over seventy unpublished one-acts, these are some of Williams's finest; several have premiered recently at The Hartford Stage Co., The Kennedy Center, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Included in this volume:
These Are the Stairs You 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 Abattoir
Adam and Eve on a Ferry
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens...
Long associated with Williams, acclaimed stage and film actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson provide a fresh and challenging foreword for actors, directors, and readers.

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Four Plays: Summer and Smoke; Orpheus Descending; Suddenly Last Summer; Period of Adjustment (Signet classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)Tennessee Williams is so well-known for other plays like "The Glass Menagerie" and "Streetcar Named Desire" that one like me not terribly familiar with him, except via his reputation for overwrought Southern Gothic drama, approaches this collection of Williams' lesser-known plays from his major period with trepidation.
"Four Plays" is pretty Gothic, and sometimes overwrought, but it makes for a pretty immersive read, not to mention a tough-love rollercoaster for the human condition.
Up first is "Summer And Smoke" (1948), a tale of a raucous young medical student and the girl next door who has pined for him since childhood. Right away you get that you are in the hands of an unusual playwright in Williams, who gives very detailed instructions on dressing the set, including which constellations should be projected on the overhead cyclorama during evening scenes and what colors the actors should wear.
Williams is just as controlling with his characterizations. Alma is a sincere, spiritually-inclined woman who tries to bring order to her household, hostage to a crazy mama who spitefully embarrasses Alma and her minister father. John also teases Alma, with talk of sex, yet a curious qualm holds him back from the ravishment he knows could be his at his pleasure: "Many's the time I've looked across at the Rectory and wondered if it would be worth trying, you and me..." That yard's worth of distance is the substance and the tragedy of this curious, arresting play.
The other three plays develop similar dialogues between intimacy and loss. Nowhere in this book does that come out more hot and heavy than "Orpheus Descending" (1957), a play which Williams in an introduction explains was a decades-long labor of love which he never gave up on. In a small southern town, gossip travels quickly, especially when a mysterious man takes a job at a general store owned by a dying man and his wife, who suspects her husband had something to do with the long-ago murder of her father. It all boils up rather quickly and unconvincingly, even for Williams where a certain suspension of disbelief is helpful. Still, you keep reading.
"Suddenly Last Summer" (1958) is the most recognized title, though more for me from the Motels' hit song in 1983. It's a more subtle but just as ripping dramatic piece as "Orpheus". A batty rich widow tries to have her niece lobotomized to destroy her memory of how the widow's son died in Mexico. "My son, Sebastian, was chaste," she declares. "I was the only one in his life who satisfied the demands he made of people."
Sebastian wasn't exactly Ivory Snow-pure, of course, and in the widow's many daiquiri-fueled discursions there's both poignancy and hilarity. Definitely surreal, "Suddenly Last Summer" probably plays better on the page than the stage, as the major plot comes entirely in eyewitness narrative.
"Period Of Adjustment" (1960), the final and last-written of these plays, is my favorite in the crowd, a Christmas tale of domestic dysfunction that plays out as a subdued comedy of manners. A newlywed couple shows up at the door of the groom's Air Force buddy. The honeymoon, it turns out, was over before it started.
Williams sets up a rich satire of middle-class life. The groom fantasizes about raising Texas longhorn cattle, not for beef, but for herding on television. His pal is on the outs with his own wife for a variety of reasons, including the fact he fears she is raising their son to be a sissy by buying him dolls. Williams plays against his M.O. by showcasing a talent for lower-register exposition, realistic dialogue instead of soliloquy, and gentle, effective comedy throughout.
There may not really be a Williams M.O. Sure, there's neurotic women and beefy satyr-like men on display here, but reading these four plays reveals a master of multiple facets, too virtuosic for easy stereotyping. Flawed as they may be, "Four Plays" presents a pretty strong argument for people like me to take Tennessee more seriously.

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