A House Not Meant to Stand
A House Not Meant to Stand | |
---|---|
Written by | Tennessee Williams |
Date premiered | April 1982 |
Place premiered | Goodman Theatre Chicago |
Original language | English |
Genre | Black comedy |
Setting | Pascagoula, Mississippi |
A House Not Meant to Stand is the last play written by Tennessee Williams. It was produced during the 1981–82 season at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago by Gregory Mosher[1] and published for the first time in 2008 by New Directions.[2] with a foreword by Gregory Mosher and an Introduction by Thomas Keith.
Plot
Subtitled A Gothic Comedy, the play is set during the Christmas holiday in the deteriorating Pascagoula, Mississippi house of Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, who have just buried their eldest son, a gay man Cornelius banished from the home years earlier. During a raging storm, heavy drinker Cornelius, who once had political aspirations, tries to get Bella, who suffers from mild dementia, to disclose where she concealed the considerable amount of money she inherited from her grandfather, who accumulated his wealth by making and selling moonshine. When she refuses to cooperate, her husband threatens to have her institutionalized, just as he did their daughter Joanie. Coming to her rescue is their negligent youngest son Charlie, who has returned home with his zealously religious pregnant fiancée Stacey in tow.
History
The play is derived from a one-act titled Some Problems for the Moose Lodge (published in 2011 in The Magic Tower & Other One-Act Plays) that was staged—together with A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and The Frosted Glass Coffin—under the umbrella title Tennessee Laughs by the Goodman Theatre in 1980. Director Gary Tucker and Goodman artistic director Gregory Mosher urged Williams to expand it into a full-length play. The playwright returned to his home in Key West and began working on what was now called A House Not Meant to Stand, a title suggested by a production assistant on Tennessee Laughs. Williams called it a "Southern Gothic spook sonata," a deliberate reference to an August Strindberg play known as The Ghost Sonata in its English translation. The crumbling house was a metaphor for contemporary society, while the characters were drawn from the Williams family, notably his father Cornelius, his aunt Belle, his paternal grandfather, and his brother Dakin. The play opened in late April 1982 at the Goodman, where it did respectable business through the end of May. Time, calling it "a rich collection of scarred characters," said it was the best play Williams had written in a decade.[3]
Williams received a $15,000 commission to write a new play for the New World Festival of the Arts, held June 4-26, 1982 in Miami. His original offering, called Now, the Cats with Jeweled Claws, was rejected, ostensibly for being too short. As a substitute, A House Not Meant to Stand was transferred, its production intact, from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Reviewing the play from Miami for The Boston Phoenix, Carolyn Clay remarked that " What makes A House Not Meant To Stand so shaky is that though the author means it to be funny, even grotesque, he can no more carve out its bittersweetness than he could his own heart. ... Although Williams retains his ability to write stage poetry buttressed by crisp, eccentric dialogue, he seems to have lost his carpenterial skills. It’s a good thing this house isn’t meant to stand since it would take a concrete high-rise to accommodate all that Williams has stuffed into it."[4]
Further reading
- Prosser, William (2008). The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-8108-6361-3.
- Williams, Tennessee (2008). A House Not Meant to Stand. New York, NY: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1709-5.
- Williams, Tennessee (2011). The Magic Tower & Other One-Act Plays. New York, NY: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1920-4.
References
- ^ Goodman Theatre timeline
- ^ New Directions Publishing website Archived July 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Spoto, Donald (1997). The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Da Capo Press. pp. 347–350, 359. ISBN 0-306-80805-6.
- ^ Clay, Carolyn (June 29, 1982). "Belles-lettres in the sand: Williams, Albee, and Wilson become beach-blanket bards". The Boston Phoenix. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- v
- t
- e
- Candles to the Sun (1936)
- Spring Storm (1937)
- Fugitive Kind (1937)
- Not About Nightingales (1938)
- Battle of Angels (1940)
- Auto-da-Fé (1941)
- The Glass Menagerie (1944)
- You Touched Me! (1945)
- Stairs to the Roof (1947)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
- Summer and Smoke (1948)
- The Rose Tattoo (1951)
- Camino Real (1953)
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
- Orpheus Descending (1957)
- Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
- Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
- Period of Adjustment (1960)
- The Night of the Iguana (1961)
- The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
- The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968)
- In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)
- Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969)
- Out Cry (1971)
- Small Craft Warnings (1972)
- The Two-Character Play (1973)
- The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
- This Is (An Entertainment) (1976)
- Vieux Carré (1977)
- A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979)
- Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
- The Notebook of Trigorin (1981)
- Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981)
- A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
- In Masks Outrageous and Austere (1983)
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950)
- Moise and the World of Reason (1975)
collections
- Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954)
- Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories (1960)
- The Knightly Quest: a Novella and Four Short Stories (1966)
- One Arm and Other Stories (1967)
- Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: a Book of Stories (1974)
- The Glass Menagerie (1950)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
- The Rose Tattoo (1955)
- Baby Doll (1956)
- Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
- The Fugitive Kind (1959)
- Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1966)
- Boom! (1968)
- The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (1957, filmed 2008)
- "The Catastrophe of Success" (1947)
- "A Streetcar Named Success" (1947)
- In the Winter of Cities (1956)
- Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977)
- The Glass Menagerie (1950)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
- The Rose Tattoo (1955)
- Baby Doll (1956)
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
- Suddenly Last Summer (1959)
- The Fugitive Kind (1960)
- Summer and Smoke (1961)
- The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961)
- Period of Adjustment (1962)
- Sweet Bird of Yourth (1962)
- The Night of the Iguana (1964)
- This Property Is Condemned (1966)
- Boom! (1968)
- Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)
- The Glass Menagerie (1987)
- The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2008)
- Three by Tennessee (1958)
- The Glass Menagerie (1966)
- Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1966)
- The Glass Menagerie (1973)
- The Migrants (1974)
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976)
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1984)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1984)
- Sweet Bird of Youth (1989)
- Orpheus Descending (1990)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1995)
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003)