the history of a play

Up and down the aisles the ladies and gentleman began to converse with each other in sibilant whispers. Subdued hissings and chucking were punctuated now and then by the banging up of a seat and the regal swish of silken garments drawn hurriedly over projecting knees as here and there it became impossible for some spectator to countenance further infractions of standards. 

The nature of this phenomenon, the fashionable first night audience, become shockingly plain to me all at once. What interests them is themselves, their dignity, their prestige and pretenses. What they want is a flattering mirror, a picture that does the opposite of Dorian Gray's, one that takes off all their blemishes in its reflection. After the play had closed a Brookline dowager wrote the Theatre Guild-- I saw this letter-- to say that when she went to the theatre she wanted to see cultivated people, people who talked, acted and dressed as she and her friends. Pictures of other milieux were not acceptable to her. I am afraid that she expressed a fairly widespread attitude among what is know as the "carriage trade" on which our theatre is still financially dependent. Hence the failure of the theatre really to explore the many levels of society except in the superficial and sensational ways of "Tobacco Road" and its prototypes, which pleases the carriage trade inversely to polite drawing-room comedy by representing their social inferiors as laughable grotesques. 

Returning to the performance... When the curtain at last came down, as curtains eventually must, I had come to that point where one must laugh or go crazy. I laughed. There was a little joy in it, but knowing I had to laugh, I found that I could. The curtain bobs foolishly up and down to a patter of hands in the balcony that goes on after the lower floor is emptied. The failure of a play!

I have never written a play that I thought was completed and I don't think I ever will. There is too much to say and not enough time to say it. Nor is their power enough. I am not a good writer. Sometimes I am a very bad writer indeed. There is hardly a successful writer in the field who cannot write circles around me and I am the first to admit it. But I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action. I want to work more and more with a more plastic theatre than the one that I have so far. I have never for one moment doubted that there are people-- millions!-- to say things to. We come to each other, gradually, but with love. It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable. 

Tennessee Williams

Manhattan, March 1944