27 Wagons Full of Cotton
Jake, a shady cotton-gin owner, burns down a rival plantation’s mill. Silva Vicarro, who knows Jake was responsible but cannot prove it, retaliates by assaulting Jake’s young wife Flora.
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Tennessee Williams
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27 Wagons Full of Cotton
Jake, a shady cotton-gin owner, burns down a rival plantation’s mill. Silva Vicarro, who knows Jake was responsible but cannot prove it, retaliates by assaulting Jake’s young wife Flora.
A House Not Meant to Stand
During Christmas in a deteriorating Mississippi home, Cornelius McCorkle pressures his wife Bella to reveal inherited money soon after their eldest son’s burial. Their negligent son Charlie returns with a pregnant, zealously religious fiancée as family tensions rise through a storm.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
In 1930s St. Louis, civics teacher Dorothea waits for a call from a school principal she imagines will marry her, delaying a Sunday picnic with her roommate Bodey and Bodey's unseen twin Buddy. When her friend Helena reveals that the principal is engaged to someone else, Dorothea abandons plans to move and rushes to catch the siblings at the trolley stop.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans seeking refuge with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband Stanley. Her manners and romantic illusions clash with the life of their crowded apartment. As Stanley questions her past, the tensions between desire, dependence, and vulnerability become increasingly difficult to contain.
A Streetcar Named Desire
The opera centers on Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski and Mitch.
Adam and Eve on a Ferry
In a villa’s sun porch in the Alps-Maritimes, Ariadne visits D. H. Lawrence for advice after an encounter with a man on a boat. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are the other characters.
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens ...
Candy Delaney, a successful interior decorator and landlord who is transgender, navigates his private life.
At Liberty
A once-successful actress retreats to her childhood home in Mississippi and fantasizes about reviving her career.
Auto-da-Fé
Postal worker Eloi’s sexuality is repressed by his rigidly moralistic mother. He intercepts a lewd photograph sent between a university student and an antique dealer, then visits the student to warn him about sending such material.
Beauty Is the Word
South Pacific missionary Abelard and his wife Mabel are at the center of a play that endorses the minister’s life while challenging his Victorian prudery.
Camino Real
Kilroy, a young American visitor, fulfills some of the functions of the play's narrator, as does Gutman, (named after Sydney Greenstreet's character from The Maltese Falcon, but bearing more resemblance to Signor Ferrari, Greenstreet's character in Casablanca) manager of the hotel Siete Mares, whose terrace occupies part of the stage. Williams also employs a large cast of characters including many famous literary characters who appear in dream sequences. They include Don Quixote and his partner Sancho, Marguerite "Camille" Gautier (see The Lady of the Camellias), Casanova, Lord Byron, and Esmeralda (see The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and others. The play has one location — the plaza at the end of the road — Camino Real. On one side of the plaza is the dining area of the Siete Mares hotel, on the other side is Skid Row. The town is near the sea, and is tropical, mythic, and sometimes dream-like. It isn’t named, though it suggests Mexico or Louisiana. According to the author, the play exists "outside of time in a place of no specific locality". It is a place of refuge for the quirky misfits that turn up there, and find their illusions crumble. Characters include Lord Byron, Gypsy and her sex-driven daughter, Esmerelda, La Madrecita, a blind singer, and Casanova at an advanced age. Taking place in the main plaza, the play goes through a series of confusing and almost logic-defying events, including the revival of the Gypsy's daughter (Esmeralda)'s virginity and then the loss of it again. A main theme that the play deals with is coming to terms with the thought of growing older and possibly becoming irrelevant. The division of the play includes a prologue followed by 16 scenes or “blocks” and monologues. Sancho Panza has left Don Quixote, who then falls asleep, and Quixote's dream, which ensues, becomes the play. Quixote needs someone to replace Panza, so he selects Kilroy, a dispirited American soldier, who had appeared on the plaza. Kilroy has been courageous in his boxing career, but now he feels lost, and needs to sell his golden gloves. The cruel Gutman, builds The Seven Seas Hotel above the town's water source. Other characters appear in dreams, including Camille, Lord Byron, Esmeralda, La Madrecita (a blind singer), and Baron de Charlus, the sexual seeker who is murdered. Some characters find partners and some do not. Resurrections occur: Esmeralda regains her virginity, the singer’s eyesight is restored, Kilroy and Lord Byron are transformed. Marguerite tells Casanova that she has outlived the tenderness of her heart, and that "tenderness, the violets in the mountains—can't break the rocks!" Casanova falls in love and has the last line of the play: "The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."
Candles to the Sun
In an Alabama coal-mining town, miners struggle to form a union while their families face the difficult conditions of life in the community.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A family in the American South is in crisis, especially the husband and wife, Brick and Margaret (usually called Maggie or "Maggie the Cat"), and the crisis unspools with Brick's family over the course of one evening's gathering at the family plantation in Mississippi. The party celebrates the birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, "the Delta's biggest cotton-planter", and his return from the Ochsner Clinic with what he has been told is a clean bill of health. All family members (except Big Daddy and his wife, Big Mama) are aware of Big Daddy's true diagnosis: he is dying of cancer. His family has lied to Big Daddy and Big Mama to spare them pain on the patriarch's birthday, but throughout the course of the play, it becomes clear that the Pollitt family has long constructed a web of deceit for itself. Maggie, determined and beautiful, has escaped a childhood of poverty to marry into the wealthy Pollitts, but finds herself unfulfilled. The family is aware that Brick has not slept with Maggie for a long time, which has strained their marriage. Brick, an aging football hero, infuriates her by ignoring his brother Gooper's attempts to gain control of the family fortune. Brick's indifference and his drinking have escalated with the suicide of his football buddy Skipper. Maggie fears that Brick's malaise will ensure that Gooper and his wife, Mae, inherit Big Daddy's estate. Over the evening, each member of the family faces the issues they have bottled up inside. Big Daddy attempts a reconciliation with the alcoholic Brick. Both Big Daddy and Maggie separately confront Brick about the true nature of his close friendship with Skipper, which appears to be the source of Brick's sorrow and the cause of his alcoholism. Brick explains to Big Daddy that the friendship troubled Maggie, who jealously believed it had a romantic undercurrent, and says Skipper took Maggie to bed to prove her wrong but could not complete the act, raising inner doubts that made him "snap". Brick also reveals that, shortly before his suicide, Skipper confessed his attraction to Brick, but Brick rejected him. Disgusted by the family's mendacity, Brick tells Big Daddy that the report from the clinic about his condition was falsified for his sake. Big Daddy storms out of the room, leading the rest to drift inside. Maggie, Brick, Mae, Gooper, and Doc Baugh (the family's physician) decide to tell Big Mama the truth about her husband's illness, and she is devastated by the news. Gooper and Mae start to discuss the division of the Pollitt estate. Big Mama defends her husband from their proposals. Big Daddy reappears and makes known his plans to die peacefully. Attempting to secure Brick's inheritance, Maggie tells him she is pregnant. Gooper and Mae know this is a lie, but Big Mama and Big Daddy believe that Maggie "has life". When they are alone again, Maggie locks away the liquor and promises Brick that she will "make the lie true".
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
Tennessee Williams's two-act play centers on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's one-day visit to his institutionalized wife Zelda, with flashbacks to their marriage in the 1920s. Through their meeting, the work explores the creative artist's ambition and decline, themes Williams connected to his own life.
Confessional
In a seedy Southern California bar, four regulars confess their lives. The staging makes their confessions feel directed privately to the audience rather than to one another.
Fugitive Kind
In a flophouse in Two Rivers, Mississippi, a lonely clerk is befriended by Terry Meighan, an on-the-run gangster who claims to be a victim of a corrupt social system and represents hope to the clerk.
Hello from Bertha
In a low-class bordello, Bertha imagines events and allusions to her final moments as Lena listens and landlady Goldie threatens to evict her.
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
A fictionalized drama presents the death of English writer D. H. Lawrence, one of Williams’s chief literary influences.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
In a Tokyo hotel, alcoholic painter Mark suffers a mental breakdown while trying to revive his career with a new artistic style. His wife Miriam attempts to enlist his dealer and friend Leonard to take Mark back to New York; Mark dies, leaving Miriam without plans or direction.
Lord Byron's Love Letter
During Mardi Gras in late-19th-century New Orleans, a spinster and an old woman claim to possess a love letter Lord Byron sent the spinster’s grandmother. As the grandmother’s diary is read to visitors, it becomes clear that the old woman and grandmother are the same person, who has lived in seclusion in Byron’s memory.
Moony's Kid Don't Cry
A poor young married couple argue over their child and, eventually, their relationship.
Not About Nightingales
In a brutal prison, inmate Jim and secretary Eva fall in love as prisoners begin a hunger strike against abusive conditions. When inmates are sent to a boiler room used for torture, a revolt erupts; Jim escapes toward the river while Eva is taken away, leaving his fate uncertain.
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws
Set in the anteroom of Hell, the play is described as a tale of madness, depravity, and death.
Orpheus Descending
In a Mississippi town, a wandering singer named Val takes a job at a store run by Lady Torrance, whose husband Jabe is dying. Their relationship and hopes for a new life collide with the town's hostility and Jabe's violence.
Period of Adjustment
On Christmas Eve, two couples—one newly married, the other married for five years—confront difficulties in their relationships. Their troubles include one veteran’s combat trauma and another husband’s feelings of inadequacy; seeing each other’s struggles helps the couples reconcile.
Portrait of a Madonna
A spinster living in poverty is consumed by memories of a former lover.
Small Craft Warnings
A motley group gathers in a seedy Southern California coastal bar: a troubled beautician and her lover, an alcoholic doctor, a short-order cook, the bartender, a washed-up screenwriter and a young traveler. Their individual confessional monologues form a kaleidoscopic portrait without a single dramatic arc.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
Set on the Provincetown wharfs, the autobiographical drama follows young playwright August as he grapples with unrequited love for another man.
Spring Storm
In a small Mississippi town during the Great Depression, Heavenly Critchfield resists her family's pressure to marry wealthy Arthur Shannon and considers leaving with Dick Miles. Her and Arthur's entanglement with the troubled local girl Hertha ends in Hertha's death and leaves Heavenly alone.
Stairs to the Roof
An idealistic protagonist confronts the mechanized routine of office work. Williams reshapes material from his earlier stories into an optimistic work combining romance, fantasy, a play-within-a-play, and scenes by a lake.
Suddenly Last Summer
In 1936, in the Garden District of New Orleans, Mrs. Violet Venable, an elderly socialite widow from a prominent local family, has invited a doctor to her home. She talks nostalgically about her son Sebastian, a poet who died under mysterious circumstances on the fictional island of Cabeza de Lobo, not (as it is sometimes assumed) in South America, by referring to Catharine's return "from Europe" aboard the Berengaria, an Atlantic liner. During the course of their conversation, she offers to make a generous donation to support the doctor's psychiatric research if he will perform a lobotomy on Catharine, her niece, who has been confined to St. Mary, a private mental institution, at her expense since returning to America. Mrs. Venable is eager to "make her peaceful" once and for all by erasing her memories of Sebastian's violent death and his homosexuality; Mrs. Venable is especially adamant that Catharine stop talking about the latter, in order to preserve her late son's reputation. Catharine arrives, followed by her mother and brother. They are also eager to suppress her version of events, since Mrs. Venable is threatening to keep Sebastian's will in probate until she is satisfied, something Catharine's family can't afford to challenge. But the doctor injects Catharine with a truth serum and she proceeds to give a scandalous account of Sebastian's moral dissolution and the events leading up to his death, how he used her to procure young men for his sexual exploitation, and how he was set upon, mutilated, and partially devoured by a mob of starving children in the street. Mrs. Venable lunges at Catharine but is prevented from striking her with her cane. She is taken off stage, screaming "cut this hideous story from her brain!" Far from being convinced of Catharine's insanity, however, the doctor concludes the play by stating he believes her story could be true.
Summer and Smoke
Summer and Smoke is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the "turn of the century through 1916", and centers on Alma Winemiller, a highly strung, unmarried minister's daughter, and the spiritual romance that nearly blossoms between her and John Buchanan Jr., a young doctor who grew up next door. She, ineffably refined, identifies with the Gothic cathedral, "reaching up to something beyond attainment"; her name, as Williams makes clear during the play, means "soul" in Spanish; by contrast Buchanan, a doctor and sensualist, defies her with the soulless anatomy chart. By the play's end, Buchanan and Alma have traded places philosophically. She has been transformed. She throws herself at him, saying "she doesn't exist any more, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her". But he has changed, he is engaged to marry a respectable, younger girl, and as he tries to convince Alma that their relationship was indeed a "spiritual bond", she realizes that it is too late to rescue it. In the final scene, Alma accosts a young traveling salesman in the park and follows him to enjoy the entertainment at Moon Lake Casino.
Summer at the Lake
Sensitive teenager Donald Fenway feels trapped by his self-absorbed Southern mother and his shoe-company executive father, who wants him to abandon college plans for menial work.
Sweet Bird of Youth
Chance Wayne, a failed actor who has become a gigolo, returns to his Southern hometown escorting faded film star Alexandra del Lago, whom he hopes will help him launch a movie career. He also seeks to reunite with Heavenly Finley, but her family holds him responsible for the disease that left her unable to have children. Alexandra learns that her comeback film has succeeded and declines to advance Chance's career; Chance stays in town to face the punishment her family intends for him.
Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen
An unnamed man and woman are bound together in an endless cycle by hopeless poverty. The small-scale, bare-room play gives both characters monologues, with the woman’s substantially longer.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias
Dorothy Simple feels trapped in a prim, proper Massachusetts shop. A tall man from LIFE Inc. visits after trampling her petunias and offers her poetry and seeds that help her break from her dreary life.
The Fat Man's Wife
Vera Cartwright, a sophisticated Manhattan society woman, must choose between her boorish husband, a theatrical producer, and a young playwright who admires her.
The Frosted Glass Coffin
A group of retirees live at a hotel in Miami, Florida.
The Glass Menagerie
Tom Wingfield recalls life with his mother Amanda and his shy sister Laura in their St. Louis apartment. Amanda hopes that a gentleman caller will secure Laura’s future, while Tom longs to escape. A dinner invitation brings their competing dreams together in Tennessee Williams’ memory play.
The Lady of Larkspur Lotion
A dreamy, delusional heroine clashes with her brusque, practical landlady, who wants to evict her from her apartment.
The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
Mississippi shoe salesman Charlie Colton realizes that his time has passed and pathetically echoes himself; Williams is thought to have drawn on his own traveling-salesman father.
The Long Goodbye
As a man moves out of his childhood apartment, memories of his family’s four-person household unfold in flashbacks: his father leaves, his mother dies, and his sister falls from grace.
The Long Stay Cut Short, or The Unsatisfactory Supper
Archie Lee and Baby Doll Meighan reluctantly house Aunt Rose, an elderly relative passed among the family. An unsatisfactory supper brings their resentment and the family’s treatment of Rose to a head.
The Magic Tower
A young artist and his former-actress wife live in a slum they call their “magic tower”; the play follows their optimism as it gradually fades.
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
At an Italian villa, dying widow Flora Goforth resists acknowledging her illness while engaging with the enigmatic Christopher Flanders, whom some regard as an opportunist and who says he helps people face mortality.
The Night of the Iguana
Tour guide and defrocked Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon brings a group of women to a hotel in coastal Mexico, where he is drawn into a fraught relationship with the hotelkeeper Maxine and the traveling artist Hannah Jelkes. Hannah and Shannon form the play's central human bond amid emotional turmoil and the hotel guests' conflicts.
The Notebook of Trigorin
An aspiring writer presents his new play at his uncle’s country estate and faces his actress mother’s contempt. His love for Nina is frustrated as she becomes drawn to the established writer Trigorin.
The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer
On the Provincetown wharfs, young playwright Don struggles with unrequited love for another man. The autobiographical drama draws on Williams’s relationship with Kip Kiernan, while Williams later described Don as unlike Kiernan in life.
The Purification
Set on a mid-19th-century ranch, this verse drama concerns an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and a murder trial.
The Red Devil Battery Sign
In a Dallas hotel lounge soon after President Kennedy’s assassination, a confined businessman's wife seeks escape with King Del Rey, a former mariachi leader with a brain tumor. Her affair has exposed her to a conspiracy involving the assassination. King dies trying to help her, and she is seized by a gang as the world around them collapses.
The Rose Tattoo
The Rose Tattoo is a three-act play written by Tennessee Williams in 1949 and 1950; after its Chicago premiere on December 29, 1950, he made further revisions to the play for its Broadway premiere on February 2, 1951, and its publication by New Directions the following month. A film adaptation was released in 1955. The Rose Tattoo tells the story of an Italian-American widow in Mississippi who has withdrawn from the world after her husband's death and expects her daughter to do the same. The setting is a place in proximity to Biloxi. Jacob Adler stated that the story is disconnected from the culture of the Southern United States as the plot "has almost no Southern connections".
The Seven Descents of Myrtle
Tubercular Lot returns to his decaying ancestral home with his new bride Myrtle, a former showgirl hoping to nurse him back to health. Lot instead wants Myrtle to help him steal the property deed from his half-brother Chicken, who has farmed the land for years. Lot reveals his hidden identity before dying, as Chicken and Myrtle face the rising flood.
The Strangest Kind of Romance
At a boardinghouse, a troubled new tenant known as Little Man develops an unusual attachment to Nitchevo, a cat belonging to the previous tenant.
The Two-Character Play
Two actors, siblings Felice and Clare, find themselves abandoned by their touring company in a decaying state theatre. They perform a play within the play about siblings isolated after witnessing their parents' murder-suicide, while the performers' own reality and their characters' story become increasingly difficult to distinguish.
This Is (An Entertainment)
A hedonistic countess arrives at an elegant resort hotel in a war-torn Central European country seeking sexual adventures. A chauffeur and his look-alike, a revolutionary leader, help her pursue them in this vaudeville-like farce of old-world decadence.
Vieux Carré
In a decaying New Orleans boarding house in the late 1930s, a young writer from St. Louis becomes entangled with the troubled residents, including an aging artist, a dying society woman and her drug-addicted lover. The semi-autobiographical play draws on Williams’s earlier writings.
Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?
Lily, a frustrated young woman who smokes constantly, is hounded by her mother.
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
In early-twentieth-century Bethesda, widowed landlady Louise waits for her former boarder and lover, Mr. Merriwether, who has left for Memphis and may never return. She and her neighbor Nora hold séances, while Louise’s daughter discovers first love; ghosts, fate-weaving figures and musical interludes mingle with the town’s romantic and social life.