Tennessee Williams. Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays.

Kolin, Philip C.

Tennessee Williams. Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays. Nicholas Rand Moschovakis & David E. Roessel, eds. Eli Wallach & Anne Jackson, foreword. New York. New Directions. 2005. xxxvi + 245 pages. $15.95. ISBN 0-8112-1620-9

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1998, at least five of Tennessee Williams's early, full-length plays have been published. His posthumous premieres continue with the publication of the thirteen one-act plays in this most welcome collection. Written primarily from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, none of these plays was performed before 2003. Williams regarded them as works in progress from which longer plays would evolve. He was right: Camino Real emerges from "The Palooka," strains of Orpheus Descending are heard in "Escape," and Glass Menagerie and Streetcar are unpacked in "Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?" Still, years later the self-doubting Williams remarked, "The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays, some of which are like firecrackers in a rope."

These early plays explode, showing how Williams experimented with themes, characters, and sets he would later perfect. Here are Williams's quintessential ideas about the plight of the rejected artist ("Mr. Paradise"), taboo sexual experiences ("And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens...'), conflicts young people have with suffocatingly conformist families ("Summer at the Lake," "Lily"), and the evils of a repressive slaughterhouse regime ("The Municipal Abattoir," one of Williams's most bitter plays). Not typical of the early socialist-leaning Williams is the comic gem "Adam and Eve on a Ferry," where an omniscient D. H. Lawrence (a Williams hero) makes fun of a female fan who has forgotten the name of the hotel assignation. These characters foreshadow the outrageous outcasts Williams embraced--convicts, a drag queen, an octoroon spiritualist who fills bottles of "Lady of Lourdes spring water" from her kitchen sink ("Thank You, Kind Spirit"), a has-been prizefighter, an old morphodite with a "hemorrhage of the bowels" ("These Are the Stairs"), and a terminally ill boy ("Big Game"). The plays are set in New Orleans, St. Louis, the Gulf Coast, New York, and a Spanish-speaking dictatorship--sites destined for prominence in Williams's mythic geography.

As in his later plays, Williams projects himself across gender and racial lines. In "Stairs," he is the sixteen-year-old usher who hates his job and whose father thinks he is lazy, even though the boy writes poetry. In "Summer at the Lake," Williams, like Donald Fenway, swims to his death to escape a domineering mother. As the disillusioned Mr. Paradise, the forgotten artist, Williams concludes, "Death is the only thing that can possibly save my reputation." Like the black convicts in "Escape," he saw himself imprisoned by a cruel society. Although linked to Williams's sister, Rose, Lily is really Tom written all over--condemned by a harridan mother for devouring "filthy fiction" read only by "Bohemians, Bolsheviks, and long-haired Russians." Williams inscribed his own homoeroticism into Lily, "dark and sallow.... She would make a rather good-looking young man." In the longest play, "Sad Stories" (begun in *957), Williams expresses the winsome agony of his own sexuality through drag queen Candy, who lives in a world of gender fictions in New Orleans.

Kudos to Nicholas Rand Moschovakis and David E. Roessel for locating and so ably editing these "firecrackers."

Philip C. Kolin

University of Southern Mississippi