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

Mister Paradise & Other One Act Plays

Theater by Tennessee Williams

Edited by Nicholas Moschovakis David Roessel

With a contribution by Eli Wallach Anne Jackson

This collection of previously unpublished one-acts includes some of Tennessee Williams’s most poignant and hilarious characters: the tough and outrageous drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the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.

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Paperback (published April 1, 2005)

ISBN
9780811216203
Price US
15.95

Tennessee Williams

America’s playwright

The plays collected here all help to illuminate the work of America’s great poet-playwright.
—Kathleen Chalfant
A compact and wry political gem, The Municipal Abattoir proves (as he said himself) that Williams was not asleep in the ’60s.
—Michael Kahn
Adam and Eve on a Ferry is delightfully absurd.
—John Simon, New York Magazine
Summer at the Lake bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Williams’s style: it is compassionate, vivid, lyrical and true.
—The New York Times
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens… is nothing less than a lost miniature masterpiece.
—Jonathan Warman, HX Magazine
Mister Paradise is an x-ray look into Williams’ soul – it is acidic, sad, and most moving.
—Eli Wallach