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The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays. By Tennessee Williams. Edited by Thomas Keith. Foreword by Terrence McNaIIy. (New York: New Directions, 2011. 286p. Paper: $16.95. ISBN: 978-0-8112-1920-4.)
Published in early 20 1 1 , The Magic Tower and Other One- Act Plays collects fifteen of Williams's unpublished or uncollected one-act plays into a new volume. Eight of these - The Magic Tower, Me, Vashya; Curtains for the Gentleman; In Our Profession', Every Twenty Minutes; Honor the Living; I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark On Sundays; and Some Problems for the Moose Lodge - appear in print for the first time,1 while the other seven appeared in various publications over the course of Williams's lifetime. Drawn from a range of research institutions and special collections around the country, these plays are a welcome addition to the Williams library, and this volume receives them beautifully. With a warm foreword by Terrence McNaIIy, and a brief yet detailed scholarly appendix to each play by Thomas Keith, the volume is more than a mere collection. It is nothing short of an implication.
On such an event Williams would have wanted a party. Heralding the publication of this volume was the production of Every Twenty Minutes, The Magic Tower, and The Pretty Trap at the 201 1 Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, staged at Southern Rep under the direction of Aimée Hayes. While any play is open to differing interpretations by director, actor, critic, and patron alike, taken together, the three performances brought Williams's famously acerbic wit and his forgiving, spacious romanticism once again to the stage. The Pretty Trap, as an early precursor to The Glass Menagerie, may have received top billing, but for this reviewer The Magic Tower stole the show. A lyrical, wistful meditation on art and ambition featuring a struggling, newly married couple, the piece wraps its reader in the flag of shared hopes and slowly shows the frays upon its edge. (It is worth nothing that this particular staging was more reluctant to damn its characters than the text; Lara Grice's Linda stayed her own hand even as it shut the final door - a door that, given the speed with which...