Many people first encounter the work of Tennessee Williams through the more than 20 film adaptations his plays have inspired. “The Glass Menagerie” alone has spawned four of them.
Williams drew on his experiences working in the offices of the International Shoe Company in downtown St. Louis for that breakthrough play. It also reflects one of the prime influences on the playwright in the years before he left Washington University and sought fame elsewhere.
Tennessee Williams loved going to the movies. And he got the habit by frequenting the grand movie palaces that dotted the area now known as Grand Center.
“I think he was influenced by the movies more than real life at that point in his career,” stage director Brian Hohlfeld said of the playwright’s early work, written in his 20s.
Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis is presenting a trio of those early plays at Curtain Call Lounge, the postshow hangout spot adjacent to the Fabulous Fox Theatre. “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” includes three rarely produced one-act plays: “In Our Profession,” “The Magic Tower” and “The Fat Man’s Wife.” Hohlfeld directs. The company also will perform a few period songs that relate to the themes of the plays, led by musical director Tom Clear.
Performances of “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” begin Saturday and run through Aug. 18.
On Saturday, the festival will present panel discussions at the Grandel Theatre about the Midtown entertainment district Williams frequented in the 1930s; the role of Williams’ stage directions; and the revisions made to different iterations of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the festival’s mainstage production this year.
“He was really introduced to show business through those big movie theaters that also had live stage performances, often as the warm-up to the movie or between features,” said Tom Mitchell, the festival’s resident scholar and a professor emeritus in the theater department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who specializes in Williams’ early work. “He also went to the theater around St. Louis to see some of the big Broadway productions by touring companies that came here.”
Williams’ one-act “The Magic Tower,” which he wrote for a contest held by the Webster Groves Theatre Guild in 1936, appears to borrow its central conflict from the film “Seventh Heaven.” Films like “Top Hat,” “Gold Diggers” and the 1936 version of “Show Boat” also gave Williams a picture of show business life that he couldn’t yet access elsewhere.
The three plays that compose “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” are filled with characters and situations that would have been familiar to the playwright from Hollywood.
There’s the fading actress exhausted by life on the road, who longs for a man to marry and save her. A strident artist who elects to live in poverty rather than compromise his vision. A successful theater producer who doesn’t seem too interested in theater or the fact that his much younger wife is directing her affections elsewhere.
“You would not know, watching these plays, that they were by Tennessee Williams,” Hohlfeld said. “But they have good structures. Each of them has that A to Z journey that you need in a good short story or a good one-act play. It’s interesting to see the seeds that will grow five or 10 years later. Even then, he was observant and he knew human behavior and he could write human behavior.”
At least one of the plays was well-received at the time: “The Magic Tower” won that contest in Webster Groves. But it and “In Our Profession” were not published widely until 2011. The finale of the trilogy, “The Fat Man’s Wife,” remains unpublished.
Even if Williams had not yet found his voice when he wrote these one-acts, “The Fat Man’s Wife” shows sparks of a quality that would enrich his mature work.
“I've always found that Tennessee Williams understands a woman really well,” said Julie Layton, who portrays a central character in each of the three pieces. Though they are different women as written, this production suggests that the three plays depict the same actress at different points in her life.
“I find that the words I get to say, and the intention I have in that last play, are very authentic to any woman of any time period,” Layton added. “He understands. He has compassion for women.”
