Content area
Full text
Tennessee Williams. Stairs to the Roof. Allean Hale, ed. New York. New Directions. 2000. ix + 101 pages. $11.95. ISBN 0-8112-1435-4.
STAIRS To THE RooF JOINS two other early Tennessee Williams plays, Not About Nightingales and Spring Storm (see respectively WLT 72:4, p. 833, and 74:2, p. 369), as now published for the first time. Late in 2000, New Directions will release two more of Williams's apprentice plays, Candies to the Sun and Fugitive Kind. Written in 1940-41, four years before The Glass Menagerie skyrocketed Williams to fame, Stairs to the Roof is, according to editor Allean Hale, "a rare and different Tennessee Williams play." It is a romantic comedy that ends happily. A remarkable melange of techniques and themes found in Elmer Rice's Adding Machine and Street Scene and Clifford Odets's Paradise Lost and Waiting for Lefty plus such sciencefiction romances as Shangri-La, the play is also an analogous precursor of Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and especially Camino Real. Stairs has received only two productions, one in 1945 at the Pasadena Playbox for a select audience of fifty and another at the larger Pasadena Playhouse two years later.
Like Nightingales and Candles to the Sun before it, Stairs should put to rest the notion that Williams was not a political playwright. Aggressively socialist/reformist, the play is dedicated as a "prayer for the wild of...