Getting from 'Summer and Smoke' to 'Eccentricities'

I suppose most people, especially anyone reading an ostensibly theater blog, knows that Tennessee Williams’s mid-century plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are related texts.  If you read my blog post “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale” (20 March 2010), you certainly know this.  That article recounts some of the process by which Williams developed Summer and Smoke and then transformed it into Eccentricities.  There’s a good deal more to that progression, however, and it’s much more complex and intricate than a superficial account suggests.  From my research on the two plays, which resulted in the chapter on them in Phillip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood Press, 1998) and “The Lost Première” (Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Spring 1999), I’ve pieced together the story of that nearly unique circumstance.

Tennessee Williams was a habitual rewriter and recycler.  Many of his plays were developed through several versions and forms.  Quite a number started out as short stories (the 1961 play Night of the Iguana was adapted from a 1948 story of the same title), others as one-acts (1952’s The Enemy: Time became Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959, and the 1953 full-length Camino Real started as the one-act Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in 1949), and one famously began life as a screenplay (The Gentleman Caller for MGM in 1943 was the basis for The Glass Menagerie in 1944).  Almost all of Williams’s plays exist in two or more variations, usually considered an "acting" version for production and a literary version for reading (Summer and Smoke is one of these; the Broadway première in 1948 generated the shorter text, but José Quintero’s long-running Off-Broadway revival in 1952 was produced from the longer, “reading” edition); however, a few even rendered two separate scripts with different titles after the playwright revised and rewrote them, often after initial productions.  Seventeen years after Battle of Angles, Williams’s first professionally produced play, closed on opening night in Boston in 1940, his revised “new play based on an old one,” Orpheus Descending, opened on Broadway.  (I’m not even counting here the plays Williams used as the bases for films such as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, 1946, which the dramatist redeveloped for the movie Baby Doll in 1956, or The Fugitive Kind, Williams’s 1959 film adaptation of Orpheus Descending—using a title he borrowed from a 1937 play of his with a completely different plot.) 

Williams authority Nancy Tischler wrote that the playwright “does not abandon an unsuccessful or incomplete work”: “I revise continually, because I’m never quite satisfied,” the dramatist himself attested.  “Finishing a play, you know, is like completing a marriage or a love affair,” he once said.  “You feel very forsaken by that, that’s why I love revising and revising, because it delays the moment when there is this separation between you and the work.”  In his introduction to Williams’s Collected Stories (1985), many of whose pieces had been reworked a dozen times or more over many years, Gore Vidal asserted: “I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published.  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘rewrite what’s already in print?’  He looked at me, vaguely, then said, ‘Well, obviously it’s not finished.’”  He was such an inveterate reworker that one of his friends dubbed him “Tenacity” Williams. 

But no other of Williams’s plays resulted in two independent scripts that generated such impassioned comparisons and which are still today seen as competing texts for the attention and admiration of theater professionals and audiences than Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  In fact, the one-act predecessors of the full-length plays we know are almost never staged (Ten Blocks is performed in schools as if it were a cut-down version of Camino Real) and Battle of Angels, the early version of the better-known Orpheus Descending, is not in many theaters’ repertoires since it failed the first time around.  Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities, however, are both fairly frequently produced and there’s a rigorous debate every time one is staged about which play is better and which one people like more.  (In Williams’s estimation, Eccentricities “is less conventional and melodramatic,” but which is “better” is pretty much a toss-up, depending entirely on taste and personal interest.  Even Williams vacillated.)  Among Tennessee Williams’s works, that only occurs with regard to these two plays, and the wonderful things is—both scripts are readily available for production or reading.  (When I did a production of The Wood Demon, Anton Chekhov’s early version of Uncle Vanya, in 1976, we had to use a photocopy of the translation prepared for the Actors’ Company’s U.K. revival because the published text was long out of print.  Even the Russian-language version, which I consulted, was hard to locate.)  A few other playwrights have multiple versions of related plays in print, such as William Inge, who rewrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1957) into the more obscure Summer Brave (1962; produced 1975), which was actually an early version of the better-known script that Inge resuscitated (if you can follow that), but even here the second in the pair is seldom done and little known. 

All this makes the pairing of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale all the more fascinating to examine.  Not just why did Williams go from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities—a simple (and incomplete) answer to that would be that Summer failed in its first Broadway outing—but how did he get from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities?  The explanation, in my analysis, has as much, if not more, to do with the great writer’s personality as it does with circumstances and professional considerations.

In order to lay out the transformation as I perceive it, I have to recover some of the ground I reported superficially in “The Lost Première.”  Bear with me if you’ve already read this; it all links up in the end.

Williams developed Summer and Smoke from a short story, “The Yellow Bird,” published in 1947, which introduces Alma Tutwiler (the name Winemiller first appears in the short story “One Arm,” published in 1948) as an incipient spinster and daughter of a small-town Southern minister.  Aside from literary recycling, most of Williams’s writing also contains elements of his life and the lives of his family and neighbors, but next to the specifically autobiographical Glass Menagerie, none of the dramatist’s major plays are as tied to his private history as are the two Alma Winemiller plays.  The character of Alma, for instance, contains elements of both Williams’s mother, Edwina, who in her youth had been called a nightingale, and his cherished sister, Rose; the egocentric hedonist of Summer and Smoke, John, is a portrait of Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, the traveling salesman who preferred carousing to domesticity, and at the same time, the elder Dr. Buchanan, a remote and cold father, depicts another aspect of C. C. Williams.  The Reverend Winemiller is inspired by (but not a portrait of) Williams’s beloved grandfather, Rev. Walter Dakin.  (Port Gibson, Mississippi, where Reverend Dakin served as Episcopal minister from 1902-05, had a famous landmark: the steeple of the Presbyterian church was topped by “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven,” as Alma describes her father’s Glorious Hill Episcopal church in Eccentricities.)  The foundation of Summer and Smoke, in fact, are the tales of Edwina Williams about her youth in Port Gibson and Natchez, Mississippi.

In 1916, the year in which the play is set, the Williamses were living with Edwina’s parents, Walter and Rose Otte Dakin, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the town which became Glorious Hill.  Like Reverend Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, Reverend Dakin was the Episcopal minister of the town and like “The Nightingale of the Delta,” Williams grew up at the rectory.  Reverend Dakin’s father had been a small-town doctor like the Drs. Buchanan and Rose Dakin had taught piano and voice like Alma.  There were Tutwilers in Clarksdale, and other names from Williams’s life appear in the play: Williams’s own first love was Hazel Kramer and the salesman in Summer and Smoke is Archie Kramer (who, like the playwright’s father, is a commercial drummer for a shoe company); Rosa Gonzales shares her first name with Williams’s sister and grandmother; and Williams, himself, had a hot-tempered lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez (the inspiration for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire), in the 1940’s. 

Williams began composing Summer and Smoke, originally entitled A Chart of Anatomy, in St. Louis as early as February or March 1944.  As was his habit, he continued to work on the script—in 1945 in Mexico, where he went to recuperate from a cataract operation, and in Texas, where he met with Margo Jones in Dallas; in New Orleans; in Taos, New Mexico; on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in 1946, where he shared a cottage with Carson McCullers while she dramatized her novel The Member of the Wedding; and on until well after its successful Dallas première in 1947.  (A typescript of Summer and Smoke in the theater archive of New York Public Library is labeled “Rome Version (March 1948)” and hand-annotated “Produced by Margo Jones at the Music Box Theatre, 6 October, 1948.”)

Summer and Smoke’s world première was presented by Jones and her Theatre ’47 at the Gulf Oil Theatre in Dallas on 8 July 1947. The original cast included Katherine Balfour as Alma and Tod Andrews as John, with the appearance of Jack Warden as the waiter at the Moon Lake Casino.  It was a significant success, garnering even a laudatory review in the New York Times and extending its scheduled run, but because Streetcar had already opened on Broadway that December, the transfer of Summer and Smoke to New York’s Music Box Theatre was delayed until 6 October 1948, when nearly every critic unfavorably compared it not only to Streetcar but also to The Glass Menagerie.  Though they praised Jo Mielziner’s set and the performance of Margaret Phillips, who replaced Balfour as Alma, the production closed on 1 January 1949 after 100 performances.  (The production marked an early appearance of Anne Jackson, who played Nellie Ewell.)

Most critics condemned Williams for re-covering in Summer and Smoke the ground he previously covered more movingly and magically in Menagerie and more dynamically and powerfully in Streetcar.  Alma was seen as a wan successor to Laura and a pale precursor to Blanche, and some reviews felt that Williams had overlooked the characters in favor of a theme which becomes unclear because the characters don’t actually represent the ideas Williams intended to place in opposition.  The overall point was often deemed too obvious, with schematic characters representing superficial traits making a simplistic statement.  Several critics remarked that Summer and Smoke’s short scenes don’t cohere into a whole drama.  The play’s too symmetrical and too pat, they said, and the reversals too neat; Williams, some charged, had composed an elementary psychology lecture, not a play, because the text is larded with such obvious symbols. 

Having sailed for Gibraltar in December 1948 with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo (the basis for Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo), and his friend, writer-composer Paul Bowles (who composed the music for Summer and Smoke), Williams was in Fez, Morocco, when he received the telegram announcing the closing.  He was depressed, according to his brother Dakin, but the character of Alma Winemiller was indelibly imprinted on his soul.  Indeed, Alma means ‘soul’ in Spanish, as Williams points out in the script, and the character was, indeed, the writer’s soulmate.  She “seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” he wrote, and later, during rehearsals for the Broadway premiere of Eccentricities, Williams candidly acknowledged, “Look, I’m Alma.”  As Williams explained, “You’re totally absorbed in the play or the novel or the piece of writing” so that it becomes “the center of your life.”  Williams confessed once that “I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”  That suggests that once having conceived of this desire, it was hard, even perhaps impossible to let it go.  I don’t know which character in Summer and Smoke would have attracted the playwright physically—perhaps John Buchanan, Jr.—but Williams frequently acknowledged that his emotional connection to this story was the Nightingale of the Delta, and that relationship was likely just as compelling for the writer as physical attraction.  Numerous critics have asserted that Alma was Williams’s favorite character of all those he created, including Blanche, Laura, and Maggie the Cat.  Even Williams himself admitted, “Alma is my favorite—because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle.”  He could not let her go.

Ronald Hastings, theatre correspondent of London’s Daily Telegraph in the 1960s and ’70s, reported that Williams “did not, eventually, like his play, but he liked the characters and decided to write another play for them.”  So, while on one of his frequent retreats to Rome in the summer of 1951, the dramatist continued to rework Summer and Smoke.  Correspondence from Williams to producer Cheryl Crawford and his agent Audrey Wood between January and September 1951 affirm that he’d completed a new version of the script. 

Around New Years 1951, Williams wrote Crawford, who was producing The Rose Tattoo on Broadway at the time, “I am still working on the new ‘Summer’.  It has turned into a totally new play, even the conception of the characters is different,” and in June, he wrote: “I am doing a completely new version, even changing the title as it now takes place in winter, and I think I have a straight, clean dramatic line for the first time, without the cloudy metaphysics and the melodrama that spoiled the original production.”  By August, Williams was writing to Wood that he’d completed a draft of the new script, which he was still calling Summer and Smoke, and by September, he must have finished the revision because he wrote Crawford that he didn’t know which version the London company would present, “the new or old one.” 

Producer H. M. Tennant’s London première of Summer on 22 November was already in preparation by this time, but Williams rushed off with his new version of the play.  His friend Maria Britneva, who was playing Rosemary at the Lyric Theatre, met the writer at the airport but he arrived too late to substitute the new script for the one Britneva explained was “already deep into rehearsals” under the direction of Peter Glenville (who, ten years later, would direct the film version).  “Crestfallen,” as Williams described himself at the bad timing, the playwright recounts that his friend told him, “Give me the new play and I’ll put it safely away . . . .”  That script, which Williams says he didn’t see again for “10 or 15 years,” the dramatist insists was The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  

I found no archival evidence that Williams focused on Eccentricities, under either its old or new title, between 1951 and 1961, so apparently Britneva, a model for Maggie the Cat of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, did keep the script hidden away during the intervening decade.  There doesn’t seem to be any existing typescript of the revised Summer and Smoke dated 1951 or 1952 in any archive I could search; the latest Summer and Smoke script of which I know is the 1948 “Rome Version” and the earliest Eccentricities edition is a 1961 text in the NYPL and New Directions archives.  So Williams appears to have returned to his new Alma play in about 1961.  A typescript of Eccentricities in the NYPL is dated 20 June 1961, and letters in 1963 and 1964 to Robert MacGregor and Jay Laughlin at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, state that he was working again on the play he now called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  Except for a subtitle—The Sun That Warms the Dark (A very odd little play)—the typescript is nearly identical to the published 1964 text.  A duplicate typescript is in the New Directions archive, but it was marked for typesetting.  One change from the NYPL copy is that the subtitle had been crossed out, indicating that it never again appeared on any version of the play—which, with one exception, it didn’t.

In any event, Williams reworked the new play between at least 1961 and its première in 1964.  (Even though by this time, the play was officially entitled Eccentricities of a Nightingale, many people still referred to it as Summer and Smoke.)  New Directions announced in June 1964 the publication of a single volume to comprise the texts of both Alma plays and the New York Times’ report of the forthcoming publication noted that the new play would receive its première later in the month.  The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premiered at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York, on 25 June 1964 under the direction of George Keathley.  Edie Adams, star of TV variety shows and Broadway musicals, was cast as Alma and Alan Mixon played John.  Because of an early-morning backstage fire at the theater, however, the play’s scheduled Broadway try-out of 10 days was truncated after the Friday night performance on 26 June.  Eccentricities of a Nightingale got a world première of two performances.

There wasn’t a lot of critical coverage for the début.  The only New York City paper which reviewed the Tappan Zee Playhouse opening of a new play by one of America’s most renowned and respected playwrights was the New York World-Telegram and Sun.  Review-writer Norman Nadel complained that “‘Summer and Smoke’ never looked better than it does in comparison with this revision” and that Williams “has made Alma and the play more, rather than less melodramatic.”  Nyack’s own Rockland County Journal-News touted the “excitement” of seeing “variations on a familiar theme” in Williams’s new version of Summer and Smoke with the “added fillip” of “a new play, still in try-out.”  Reviewer Mariruth Campbell, citing part of the subtitle in the production’s program, confirmed that Eccentricities was, indeed, “a very odd little play”—the Nyack production was, in fact, the only one that ever carried the subtitle as it appears on the title page of the NYPL collection’s typescript.  Campbell objected that the play was “over-long” and noted that the cast “[a]ll worked valiantly to breathe life” into the play. 

Nevertheless, the new Alma play was launched, and publication followed in February 1965.  Over the rest of the decade, there were revivals and regional premières of Williams’s new play, and the British début was staged on 10 October 1967 at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, Surrey, directed by Philip Wiseman with Sian Phillips as Alma and Kevin Colson as John.  Then on 16 June 1976, the play’s profile was considerably raised when it was aired on PBS for Great Performances’ Theatre in America, in collaboration with San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, starring Blythe Danner as Alma and Frank Langella as John, directed by Glenn Jordan.  Following that broadcast, which Williams himself pronounced his “most successful” television adaptation, a staging at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre starring Betsy Palmer as Alma and David Selby as John was transferred to Broadway’s Morosco Theatre for a long-awaited New York City première on 23 November 1976.  Directed by Edwin Sherin, who’d staged a Long Island revival eight years earlier, the play was not well received in New York despite a successful run in Buffalo, with evaluations ranging from “a pleasing, small play” to “a pale outline of a play” whose “production was in every way substandard.”  Clive Barnes, on the other hand, wrote in the New York Times that while he’d expected Eccentricities just to be “a rewrite of Summer and Smoke,” he was surprised to find “a different play with different characters and even a different theme.”  Williams “new work effectively knocks Summer and Smoke off the map,” Barnes declared, “except as a literary curiosity.”  The Times reviewer concluded, “This is a warm, rich play full of that compassion and understanding and that simple poetry of the heart that is Mr. Williams at his shining, gentle best.  It may be an eccentric nightingale but its tune is still sweet.”  Brother Dakin recalls that Williams felt good about Barnes’s response: “It was the best Broadway reaction he had received in a long time.”  Nevertheless, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale on Broadway closed on 12 December after eight previews and only 12 regular performances. 

Among the differences between Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, possibly the most discussed are the changes Alma and John undergo.  Alma, it has been observed, evolves from hyper-conventional and old-fashioned but essentially normal to truly eccentric.  John, on the other hand, mellows from a rebellious, hedonistic egocentric to a decent, if somewhat dull, young man.  The other significant alteration is the replacement of John’s father in Summer and Smoke with his mother in Eccentricities. 

We have seen that both John and his father are, in part, depictions of Williams’s own father, the man who called him “Miss Nancy” and lost part of an ear in a fight over a card game.  Shortly before C. C. Williams’s death in 1957, Williams acknowledged, he stopped hating him and began to understand, even love him.  This adjustment, Williams has confessed, resulted from treatment by Lawrence Kubie, a Freudian psychoanalyst he began seeing in 1957.  As a consequence of his treatment, Williams asserted, “I felt like a great load was lifted from my mind.”

Williams saw Kubie every weekday for nearly a year, and, according to Williams biographer Ronald Hayman, Kubie even telephoned his patient on Saturdays and Sundays to check on him.  During the time of this treatment, the writer also began to become estranged from his mother, whom he had adored as a child just as he had hated his father.  He described the shift in a 1961 radio interview with writer Studs Terkel: “My homelife was dominated by a very wonderful but rather puritanical mother, who was in conflict with a very wonderful but rather profligate father. . . .  First I sided with the mother’s side and then after my father’s death, for some strange reason, I began to see his point of view better.”  Under analysis, Williams came to see that his very survival had depended on his father’s fighting spirit, inherited, according to family lore, from 18th-century East Tennessee Indian fighters like John Sevier (Revolutionary War officer and first governor of the State of Tennessee), and the playwright himself later wrote of C. C. Williams: “I wonder if he knew, and I suspect that he did, that he left me something far more important [than inherited money], which was his blood in my veins?  And of course I wonder, too, of there wasn’t more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.”

As for Williams’s feelings toward his mother, he came to blame Edwina for allowing his beloved sister’s lobotomy, which left Rose a hopeless invalid, surviving in what Dakin Williams said his brother “considered . . . a kind of living death.”  Williams also felt that Edwina, whom the playwright called in his 1975 Memoirs “a little Prussian officer in drag,” had alienated him from his father and “that my mother had made me a sissy.”  Under analysis, his affections shifted as did the personas of the parental villains in the Alma plays, from the remote and absent father in Summer and Smoke to the imperious and controlling mother in Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  A similarly striking change for the worse takes place between the Mrs. Winemiller of Summer and Smoke, whom critic Felicia Londré characterizes as “a querulous and perverse child,” and the Mrs. Winemiller of Eccentricities, who’s become “a social liability.”   

As Williams biographer Lyle Leverich asserts:

Although Tom’s mother and grandmother were giving him the concrete support he needed, paradoxically it was not so much their inspiration as his rage against his father that inflamed his burning desire to write.  Tennessee Williams’s career could be called an act of revenge, until at length he entered analysis, understood his sublimated love for his deceased father, and turned his anger on his mother, thus changing the character of his plays.

It seems clear that Kubie’s influence on Williams’s feelings for his parents are reflected in the shifts in character manifested in the reworking of Summer and Smoke into Eccentricities.  I contend that though he may have begun the new play in 1951, he certainly continued to work on it during the years he underwent psychoanalysis or just afterwards when he was still under the psychoanalyst’s Freudian influence, and the completed script illustrates the new-found Freudian outlook.  Indeed, Williams acknowledged that his plays “reflect somehow the particular psychological turmoil I was going through when I wrote them.”  Without a copy of the earlier revision from 1951 or ’52, it’s impossible to know for sure if that’s so, but that’s my sense of Williams’s process. 

Rather than a cold and distant father, for instance, John now has a dominating, controlling mother, the “heavy” that theater historian W. David Sievers pointed to in his psychoanalysis of the American stage as a Freudian figure.  John’s relationship with Mrs. Buchanan in Eccentricities  is nearly classic Oedipalism, a distinctly Freudian concept.  (It is also significant that Mrs. Winemiller transforms from a childlike personality to a potentially destructive one.  Compare, also, the pre-analysis mother, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, 1944, with the post-analysis Eccentricities mothers.  The most salient manifestation of this attitude change is Violet Venable, Sebastian’s dragon-lady mother in Suddenly, Last Summer, 1958.)  Sievers also identifies as Freudian developments “the dethroning of motherhood and the liberation of children from possessive parents,” both of which appear in Eccentricities but not so much in Summer and Smoke.  John, himself, is no longer the undisciplined savage that was Williams’s other image of his father.  Together, Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are a study of a shifting parent-child relationship, a depiction of Williams’s own vacillating allegiance.

With the elimination of the fiery Gonzaleses, furthermore, the violence of Summer and Smoke is also eliminated in Eccentricities .  (The Daily Telegraph announcement of the British première of Eccentricities was even entitled “Unviolent Williams.”)  There’s no longer, for instance, a stabbing or shooting, and the Moon Lake Casino episode has been replaced with a visit to a cheap hotel.  The excision of the violence of Summer and Smoke, a hallmark of Williams writing since the beginning, from Eccentricities  was almost certainly also a direct response to Williams’s treatment under Kubie.  “If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people and violent material,” Williams acknowledged in a 1958 interview in the New York Herald Tribune.  (This outcome of the psychoanalysis didn’t last long, as Williams returned to writing about violence in later plays like Suddenly, Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth.  In 1959, after the playwright had stopped seeing Kubie, he wrote that in the previous 19 years, “I have only produced five plays that are not violent: The Glass Menagerie, You Touched Me, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo and, recently in Florida, a serious comedy called Period of Adjustment, which is still being worked on.”  Most critics would argue with his appraisal of Summer and Smoke—unless, of course, the playwright meant the “new” Summer and Smoke  which was actually Eccentricities of a Nightingale and which had been stashed away by this time for eight years.)

Another shift that takes place between Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities is the one from a summer setting to a winter one.  It’s less clear that Kubie’s therapy had an effect on this change, especially since Williams noted that it had already taken place in the 1951 script on which he was working in Rome that June.  Nevertheless, it reflects a change in the writer’s psychological adjustment—as well as the manifestation of his lifelong bugaboo, the destructiveness of “life’s destroyer, time.”  As Williams said to New York Post writer Robert Rice in 1958: “It haunts me, the passage of time. . . .  I think time is a merciless thing.  I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.”  (Remember that his one-act precursor to Sweet Bird was entitled The Enemy: Time.)  Summer and winter echo the two aspects of Alma: fire and ice, and the passage from one to the other accompanies Alma’s passing from “brief bloom to . . . decay.”

With the change from a summer setting to a winter one came also the title change.  With that was also the elimination of a focus, almost an obsession, in which Williams engaged in Summer and Smoke: the life, and particularly the death by suicide, of poet Hart Crane.  The title of Summer and Smoke is adapted from a line from Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” and Crane, a homosexual like Williams, drowned himself on 27 April 1932 in a moment of deep despair by throwing himself overboard while aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico.  (The line, “By that time summer and smoke were past,” is from a stanza that seems to predict the poet’s own death.)  Williams viewed Crane’s struggle to confront a hostile and indifferent world as a reflection of his own and even left instructions, which were ignored, that his body should be buried at sea near where Crane is believed to have drowned.  In the 1937 one-act play Escape (presented under the title Summer at the Lake for its 2004 New York première; see my report, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” 5 March 2011), Williams depicts a young man who swims out into the sea to his death, a clear reference to Crane’s suicide, an act with which Williams was preoccupied.  All this is gone from Eccentricities and I suspect that Kubie’s treatment had something to do with why Williams deemphasized the poet’s watery death—perhaps because he’d come to know himself better. 

Williams consistently identified two conflicting strains in his nature: the Puritan, representing the gentler, poetic side of his character, inherited, he felt, from the Dakin line of his family, as embodied by his mother, versus the Cavalier, vital, dynamic, even violent, side passed down through the Sevier-Lanier-Williams line, personified by his father.  One reason, I think, that Summer and Smoke  and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale were such important works for Williams, plays for which he had such a constant and irrepressible commitment, is that though this internal war plays out in most of his dramas (Blanche Du Bois-Stanley Kowalski; Lady Torrance-Val Xavier, Princess Kosmonopolis-Chance Wayne), in no texts other than the Alma plays is this conflict so front-and-center—dramatically, thematically, scenically, symbolically.  Dakin Williams even asserts that the Alma plays “would haunt him all his life.”  None of Williams other plays, including the autobiographical Glass Menagerie, is the dramatization of the playwright’s own inner struggle.  Kubie’s psychoanalysis may have shifted Williams’ allegiances to one side of his nature or the other, but the fundamental focus on the conflict remained from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities.  Alma Winemiller may have been Williams alter ego, his soulmate, but the plays were, quite literally, about the writer’s own soul.  No wonder he couldn’t let them go. 

'Camino Real,' The Musical

In 1997, when I was doing a great deal of research on Tennessee Williams’s connected plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, I learned a fact that surprised me. As part of the research, I looked into the 1976 Broadway production of Eccentricities, which had started at a regional repertory company in Buffalo, the Studio Arena Theatre. I wrote to the SAT and asked them to send me all their papers on the production, which included, along with local reviews and press coverage, the company’s press releases.

As most theaters are, SAT was very generous with its records and the theater copied its entire file on the show and sent me a packet of documents that was invaluable in my work. (I was writing the chapter on the two plays for Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, ed. Philip C. Kolin [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998].) The production of Eccentricities which went to Broadway in November 1976 opened in Buffalo in October that year. Previously, it had been a summer stock tour and SAT announced its appearance on their stage in August. But among the papers the theater sent me were three clippings and a news release from July which didn’t look like they were about Eccentricities at all. In fact, they were about another Tennessee Williams play altogether, Camino Real, the playwright’s Absurdist script from the early 1950s. At first, I just thought the papers had slipped into the collection on Eccentricities by mistake—until I looked at them more closely. That’s when I learned the surprising little fact—which not only was news to me, a theater generalist and no authority on Williams, but, I found out later, was news to some of the real experts on the playwright I got to know from working on projects like this one.

The newspaper articles and Studio Arena press release were the announcement of a project to turn Camino Real into a musical with the cooperation of Tennessee Williams himself. The project foundered, and the reason the papers were part of the packet concerning Eccentricities SAT sent me was that Eccentricities had been brought in to take the spot in the Studio Arena schedule that Camino Real, the musical, had been expected to occupy; the Camino papers were part of the Eccentricities file (or, perhaps more accurately, the Eccentricities production took over the Camino file). Despite that little factoid, the existence of the Camino Real project was not pertinent to my work on the two other Williams plays, so I put the papers aside and didn’t really look at them until I’d finished the TW Guide chapter in ‘98. As Camino Real wasn’t part of my assignment, I didn’t do any research on the abortive production, but I glanced through the reference works I had used for my work on S&S and Eccentricities and I found that there was no mention anywhere, including the CR chapter in the new TW Guide, of this plan to set the play to music. (Since that time, Philip Kolin also published The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, and its Camino entry doesn’t mention the musical version, either.) I haven’t gone looking far and wide to see if there’s any record of this effort, which was, after all, reported in the press, including the New York Times. Like the world première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (see my report on ROT, 20 March 2010), Williams’s failed collaboration to create a new version of his 24-year-old play has passed under everybody’s radar. Had it succeeded, however, it would have been only the second full-length play of Williams’s that had been set to music in his lifetime (the opera of Summer and Smoke composed by Lee Hoiby in 1971 was the first) and the only one on which Tennessee Williams himself would have collaborated. (André Previn’s 1995 opera of Streetcar débuted 12 years after Williams’s death.) In any case, there’s not very much information available on the short-lived project, so here’s what I learned.

First, a little background for the source material. Williams first wrote a non-realistic play about Kilroy, the all-American boy, as a one-act in 1946 called Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. The short experimental play, part dream part carnival, was published in American Blues in 1948 and Elia Kazan, who’d already directed the stage version of Streetcar (1947) which had won Williams a Pulitzer and provided him with his second great Broadway success (after The Glass Menagerie in 1945), directed a scene from the one-act at the Actors Studio. Kazan encouraged Williams, whom he’d known since 1938 when the young playwright had submitted a series of one-acts to the Group Theatre where Kazan had been a member, to expand the play into a full-length treatment. Comprising now 16 “blocks” (as the scenes were called), Camino Real was born in 1952 and staged on Broadway the next year. Kazan directed it. It met with cool reception from both critics and audiences, neither of whom understood what Williams was up to. (The great Absurdist play, which had its own receptivity difficulties, Waiting for Godot, didn’t come along in the U.S. for another three years. Non-realistic, experimental plays like CR and Godot weren’t even yet a presence Off-Broadway as early as 1953, whose major success at this point in theater history was another Tennessee Williams play, one that had previously failed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke. Its 1952 revival at Circle in the Square downtown made OB an important venue for serious theater, but S&S is hardly an avant-garde play.)

Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, which has been compared to the work of Beckett and Ionesco, is a fantasy—sometimes Existential, sometimes Surreal, sometimes Absurdist, sometimes Symbolist, sometimes Expressionistic—about romantics who find it hard to survive in a world devoid of human feeling and taken over by cynical self-interest and political oppression. William Hawkins, reviewer for the old New York World-Telegram, described the plot as having “no limits of time or space. The set is a walled community, from which the characters ceaselessly try to escape, without success. Only Don Quixote, who calls himself ‘an unashamed victim of romantic folly,’ has access to the outside, and finally Kilroy goes with him. Kilroy is a central figure, an ex-boxer, always the patsy, the fall guy, who asks so little and always gets short-changed, but he never quits hoping . . . . The other principal story is a romance between the aging, hunting Camille, and the fading Casanova, who yearns now only for tenderness and faithfulness . . . . The play has subdued sequences of tenderness and pathos. It also has scenes of cataclysmic violence. The near escape of Kilroy, the battle to ride the escape plane are hair-raising, as is the wild fiestas crown the ‘tired old peacock,’ Casanova.”

The original play premièred at the Martin Beck Theatre on 19 March 1953 and ran only 60 performances (until 9 May). Designed by Lemuel Ayers, the cast included Eli Wallach as the boxer, Kilroy, and included Martin Balsam, Barbara Baxley, Michael V. Gazzo, Hurd Hatfield, Salem Ludwig, Nehemiah Persoff, Henry Silva, Frank Silvera, and Jo Van Fleet. It was met with bad reviews almost across the board, starting with Walter Kerr’s New York Herald Tribune notice, which averred Camino Real was “the worst play yet written by the best playwright of his generation” and Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, who called the play “a strange and disturbing dream” and “a kind of cosmic fantasy.” A few reviewers demurred, but Camino Real accumulated a history of critical negativity that stretched beyond 1976. An Off-Broadway production staged by Jose Quintero at Circle in the Square (the same director and theater that had done the Summer and Smoke to immense success in ’52) played in 1960, receiving further negative reviews; British and Continental productions met with similar receptions. Martin Sheen appeared on NET Playhouse (PBS’s predecessor) in the one-act version in 1966 and Al Pacino starred in a Lincoln Center revival in 1970. Little by little, however, the play began to see a reevaluation of its dramatic worth and impact as audiences, especially in the United States, became more used to such experimental stage fare. Actors and directors seemed to gravitate to the script, but in 1976, Camino Real was still regarded with confusion and apathy by both critics and audiences.

On 22 July 1976, the Studio Arena Theatre announced that its 100th production would be the new musical based on Williams’s Camino Real. It was to première on 1 October, the opening of SAT’s 1976-77 season, the theater’s twelfth. The title of the new play had not been decided at the time of the first announcement; however, it later acquired a “working title” of El Camino (which is what I’ll call the musical to keep it differentiated from the non-musical script). The book for El Camino was to be by Tennessee Williams himself in collaboration with Larry Arrick, who was at the time the Artistic Director of the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and who’d previously adapted the Broadway script for Unlikely Heroes: 3 Philip Roth Stories (1971). Arrick was to direct the cast of 20 as well; he’d directed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and at Yale Rep previously. The musical’s lyrics were to be by Williams and Barbara Damashek (Quilters, 1984), who’d also have composed the music and overseen the musical direction. (Damashek, who’d known Arrick at Yale and was music director at the O’Neill under him, researched and edited the music selections for his Unlikely Heroes, which Arrick had also directed.) Though both Williams’s potential partners, particularly Arrick, would accumulate several credits in TV and regional theater, in 1976, neither the writer-director nor the composer-lyricist had what I’d call a substantial record of accomplishment and success in the theater. The producers of El Camino, which was characterized as a future Broadway transfer “sometime later this year at a theatre still to be announced,” were to have been Charles Bowden and Isobel Robins, co-producers of David Storey’s The Changing Room (1973) on Broadway. (Bowden had also previously produced many other Broadway shows, including three Williams premières: Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton, 1955—part of All in One; The Night of the Iguana, 1961; and Slapstick Tragedy, 1966—The Gnädiges Fräulein and The Mutilated. He’d also produced a national tour of Streetcar.) Williams was expected to be in residence in Buffalo during the development of El Camino and to oversee the production.

I don’t know how far along the work on the adaptation had gotten before the collaboration collapsed. One report stated that Williams had already rewritten some of Camino Real “to some extent” by the time SAT made the announcement. There are at least two versions of the script, one labeled "An Untitled Musical" and dated “May 1976” and another called "El Camino," but without a date, on reposit among the Charles Bowden papers at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Other papers in that file are casting notes and even some design notes, so some consideration of these aspects of the planned production were already underway when the work was abandoned. The reasons for the dissolution of the collaboration aren’t clear and when Eccentricities was announced in August for the 100th-production slot in the SAT schedule, only “creative differences” was cited as the cause. Williams was apparently displeased at some aspect of how El Camino was developing, but I have no idea what that might have meant, even if it was true. (I imagine that Tennessee Williams wouldn’t have been an easy collaborator. He might just have stalked out.) The Bowden collection at HRC lists correspondence, but specifies only “director correspondence” and “Correspondence re Larry Arrick and Barbara Damashek arbitration” (whatever that means). One other file is called “Production materials, clippings, correspondence”; if there’s any communication with Williams among the producer’s papers, it’s not specified—which I think it would be—but somewhere among those papers in Austin might be the explanation of what happened to El Camino.

As far as I can tell, the HRC archive is the only one to hold any papers acknowledged to concern El Camino, though papers elsewhere might contain documents if someone wanted to do a collection-by-collection, file-by-file search. But Williams’s own papers are scattered in disparate archives all across the country, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Austin, Texas, and from Newark, Delaware, to Sewanee, Tennessee—just to name a few. Williams-related documents in the collections of his correspondents, collaborators, and friends could come to hundreds of locations. (Just here in New York City, I myself have searched in four archives—two universities and two NYPL divisions—in easily a score of separate holdings for various Tennessee Williams documents, plus a few incidental folders in repositories around the city.) The Studio Arena Theatre, unhappily, is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy status now, and I doubt there’d be anyone around with access to records, if any remain from 36 years ago. Charles Bowden, the co-producer, died in 1996. That leaves only lyricist Barbara Damashek, book-writer Larry Arrick and Isobel Robins, Bowden’s partner, from the original creative and production team still around to tell the tale.

Coincidentally, the New York Times announced late last year that Williams and Kazan would be the main characters in a new play from 17 April to 8 May. The Really Big Once is set during the years from 1948 to 1953 when the playwright and the director worked on Camino Real. Based on letters, notebooks, and research, The Really Big Once is being produced (and created) by the Target Margin Theatre in association with Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Incubator at St. Mark’s.

The Lost Première of 'The Eccentricities of a Nightingale'

[This column is adapted from an earlier essay published in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (11.2 [Spring 1999]: 42-59). It grew out of my research on Eccentricities and its predecessor, Summer and Smoke, which resulted in the chapter on the two plays in Philip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).]

From 10 to 28 October 1967, Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale was presented at the two-year-old Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, Surrey, about 30 miles from London. The production, directed by Philip Wiseman, an American who worked in England, and starring Sian Phillips as Alma Winemiller opposite Kevin Colson’s John Buchanan, Jr., was declared the “world premiere” of this new version of the story of the Winemillers and the Buchanans of Glorious Hill, Mississippi. Seven months later, the Theatre Society of Long Island announced the presentation from 14 to 26 May 1968 of the “American premiere” of Eccentricities at the Mineola Theatre. The second of four plays in the inaugural eight-week season of “Long Island’s first all-professional repertory company,” this Eccentricities, also dubbed the play’s “New York premiere,” starred the original Stella Kowalski, Kim Hunter, as Alma, with Ed Flanders as John and James Broderick as Rev. Winemiller. The director was Edwin Sherin, who later directed the 1976 production at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre that went on to Broadway.

The problem with these proud pronouncements is that they were plain wrong. This wasn’t an incidence of reinterpretation or spin; both the British and Long Island producers were simply flat-out overlooking three previous U.S. productions of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, all professionally mounted and duly recorded in local newspapers. Furthermore, because of the publicity from the theaters and the press coverage of the two productions, the errors have become a permanent part of the historical record. In a 1965 announcement in London’s Daily Telegraph, Ronald Hastings emphasized that the British production of Williams’s Eccentricities would be “the first play by this author to have its opening performance in Britain.” The British and international press went on to designate the Guildford Eccentricities, which International Herald Tribune reviewer Thomas Quinn Curtiss further erroneously identified as “the first draft of . . . ‘Summer and Smoke’” and incorrectly predicted would go on to London’s West End “before long,” as its “world premiere.” The local paper, the Surrey Advertiser and County Times, even described Eccentricities as “a hitherto unstaged play by one of the greater American playwrights of the century”; the announcement of the theater’s season one week earlier in the Advertiser had referred to the play as a “World Premiere.”

Then, while acknowledging the earlier British presentation, the Theatre Society of Long Island also asserted in a press release that Eccentricities “has never been professionally produced in the U.S.” These assertions, too, became the record, as Long Island’s own Newsday reported that the show was Eccentricities’ U.S. debut, and Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post wrote that Williams attended opening night “when, at long last, at the Mineola Theater, L.I., ‘Nightingale’ received its American premiere.”

Once on the record for future writers or producers to look up, such statements simply become “The Facts.” In Contemporary Authors, for instance, Williams’s 1990 profile states that the first production of Eccentricities--noted only under Summer and Smoke, as a revision of that play--was in Washington, D.C., in 1966. An earlier profile reports an unspecified “summer-stock tour” in 1964, and records a production at the “Guildford Theatre, London” in the fall of 1967. Aside from its publication with Summer and Smoke, the play isn’t otherwise mentioned in these lengthy profiles; not even the television or Broadway productions in 1976 are noted. Even when the 1976 Buffalo production that moved on to Broadway was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Edwin Wilson asserted that Betsy Palmer had “performed in the first stage version” of Eccentricities when she played Alma in the summer-stock tour that became the Studio Arena’s one hundredth production. Someone who knows that the play had been published in 1964 and suspects that a production had been mounted that year would still have a difficult time locating even the spare New York Times coverage of the event. The Times calls itself “the paper of record,” but looking up Tennessee Williams or The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in the 1964 volume of the New York Times Index, under either “books” or “theater,” reveals nothing. All three pieces that year are buried under the entry for the producing theater, making the record easy to miss unless the researcher already knows a great deal of the actual history. No other U.S. newspaper has indexes that far back, and such usual sources as the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature don’t reveal any articles on either the production or the publication of the text. It’s little wonder, then, that many have missed this significant little event.

Because many chronologies of Williams’s life and work don’t even include Eccentricities, this factual confusion’s seldom addressed. Indeed, Eccentricities, which Williams considered a new play rather than a revision of Summer and Smoke, has generally flown under the radar of most Williams chroniclers and biographers. Even when the actual première is correctly identified, the writer doesn’t mention, let alone refute, the other claims, so the error’s not even acknowledged, much less laid to rest. There are, however, records that document the actual chronology of the birth of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.

Summer and Smoke, whose première was successfully presented by Margo Jones’s Theatre ’47 in Dallas on 8 July 1947, had received devastatingly bad reviews in New York and closed on 1 January 1949. Having sailed for Gibraltar in December 1948 with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo, and his friend, writer-composer Paul Bowles, Williams was in Fez, Morocco, when he received the telegram announcing the closing. He was devastated and bitter, but the character of Alma Winemiller was indelibly printed on his soul. She “seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” he wrote, and later, during rehearsals for the Broadway première of Eccentricities, Williams candidly acknowledged, “Look, I’m Alma.” Alma had actually first appeared earlier in 1947 as the main character of Williams’s short story, “The Yellow Bird,” originally published that June in Town and Country magazine. She was named Alma Tutwiler then; Williams had first used the name Winemiller in another story, “One Arm,” written between 1942 and 1945. Unable to shake her, even after the rejection of her latest incarnation, the playwright, one of whose friends came to call him “Tenacity” Williams, determined to create a new play for the Nightingale of the Delta to inhabit.

After closing on Broadway, Summer and Smoke had a meager production record until its reputation was resuscitated by the historic Off-Broadway revival in 1952. There was a summer-stock run (22-27 August 1949) at the Mountain Playhouse in Jennertown, Pennsylvania, whose only historical significance seems to be that it’s believed to be the first summer-stock performance to include blind actors. In 1950, the Portuguese-language première, O Anjo de pedra (The angel of stone), opened at the Teatro Brasiliero de Comedia, São Paulo, Brazil, and in October of that year a tour of the Western states went out with film stars Dorothy McGuire and John Ireland as the would-be lovers and Una Merkel as Mrs. Winemiller.

Williams, who seldom let a script alone even after it was published, continued to rewrite Summer and Smoke and in the summer of 1951, while on one of his many retreats to Rome, completed a new version. Letters Williams wrote between January and September 1951 to producer Cheryl Crawford and agent Audrey Wood attest to this. At the beginning of 1951, Williams wrote Crawford, who was producing The Rose Tattoo on Broadway at the time, “I am still working on the new ‘Summer’. It has turned into a totally new play, even the conception of the characters is different,” and in June, he wrote:

I am doing a completely new version, even changing the title as it now takes place in winter, and I think I have a straight, clean dramatic line for the first time, without the cloudy metaphysics and the melodrama that spoiled the original production.

Williams was even contemplating returning the new version to the United States with “a big star like Peggy Ashcroft” or Margaret Sullavan, whom, apparently, Crawford had suggested. By August, he was writing to Wood that he’d completed a draft of the new script, which he was still calling Summer and Smoke, and by September, he must have finished the revision because he wrote Crawford that he didn’t know which version the London company would present, “the new or old one.” He added, “I prefer the new one.”

He rushed off to London where a production of Summer and Smoke was in preparation by producer H. M. Tennant. Met at the airport by his friend Maria Britneva (later Lady St. Just), who was playing Rosemary in the production, he arrived too late to substitute the new script for the one “already deep into rehearsals” under the direction of Peter Glenville who, ten years later, would direct the film version.

Williams insisted that that script, which Britneva “put safely away,” was The Eccentricities of a Nightingale--though that title didn’t appear until later correspondence--and that it didn’t resurface for “some 10 or 15 years.” A typescript of Eccentricities in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Billy Rose Theatre Collection bears the date 20 June 1961, and letters to Robert MacGregor and Jay Laughlin at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, indicate that he was working again on the new play, now under its present title, in 1963 and 1964. Except for a subtitle (deleted before publication)--The Sun That Warms the Dark (A very odd little play)--the typescript’s nearly identical to the 1964 published text. It would certainly be in keeping with Williams’s practice to have reworked his new play over a decade. It’s on record, to be sure, that Williams had begun Summer and Smoke, originally entitled A Chart of Anatomy, in St. Louis as early as February or March 1944. He continued to work on it in Mexico in 1945 (where he went to recuperate from one of a series of cataract operations); in New Orleans; in Taos, New Mexico; on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in 1946 (where he shared a cottage with Carson McCullers while she dramatized The Member of the Wedding); and on until after its successful Dallas première. A typescript of Summer and Smoke in the Billy Rose Collection is labeled “Rome Version (March 1948)” and hand-annotated “Produced by Margo Jones at the Music Box Theatre, 6 October, 1948.” If he reworked a “successful” script for four years, why not a “failed” one for a decade? It’s not inconsistent, surely, and he did, indeed, furnish typed additions to the script of Eccentricities for a 1979 New Jersey production, three years after the Broadway outing. Even if Williams didn’t see the revision of Summer and Smoke for a decade after 1951, he clearly worked over the new play between at least 1961 and the performance in 1964.

In any event, New Directions scheduled publication of Eccentricities in a single volume with Summer and Smoke for October 1964. The New York Times’ June 1964 announcement of the forthcoming publication noted that the new play would receive its première later in June in Nyack, New York, but in a February 1965 review of the book, eight months after the première had closed, theater writer George Freedley, the first Curator of the New York Public Library’s Theatre Collection since 1938, noted that his “own researching shows” that Eccentricities “has not been seen on any stage.”

On 2 June 1964, the New York Times announced the imminent première, something over three weeks before it opened, and the New York Herald Tribune covered the opening on the day of the performance. Edie Adams, the widow of Ernie Kovacs and already an accomplished star of television (The Ernie Kovacs Show, 1952-53, 1956; Here’s Edie/The Edie Adams Show, 1963-64) and musicals (Wonderful Town, 1953; Li’l Abner, 1956), was to play Alma Winemiller in the summer-stock production directed by George Keathley at Bruce Becker’s Tappan Zee Playhouse. Eight years earlier, Keathley, a friend of Williams and fellow Key West resident, had directed The Enemy: Time, the one-act version of Sweet Bird of Youth, at Studio M, Keathley’s theater in Coral Gables, Florida. That production starred Alan Mixon, who played John in the première of Eccentricities. (Mixon had so impressed Williams that the playwright sent the young Floridian to his own agent, Audrey Wood, who convinced the actor to move to New York. He’d go on to play many Williams roles both before and after John Buchanan, Jr.)

Local coverage began three days before the opening with an announcement in the Rockland County Journal-News of Adams’s impending appearance on the Nyack stage, though the paper made its own mistake by stating that Eccentricities would be Adams’s “east coast stage debut.” That certainly had occurred at least on 25 February 1953 at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre when she opened in Wonderful Town. The première of Eccentricities was seen as such a major event in Nyack that “Miss Adams and the cast, subscribers, New York and local celebrities” were bidden to a “Special Buffet” at the St. George Hotel after the début. Proclaiming, “Many top celebrities have been invited to the opening,” the Journal-News noted that after other opening nights, the “meet-the-cast party” would be at the YMCA.

The Journal-News made much of Adams’s “returning to her home area”--she had grown up in nearby Tenafly, New Jersey, and attended New York City’s Juilliard School of Music--and her original intention to become, like Alma Winemiller, a music teacher. Adams saw the production as an opportunity to stretch her dramatic muscles, acknowledging, “I had to fight to get away from the dumb blond parts. And I did. I was the ingenue and dumb blond so long that nobody thought I could do anything else.” Declaring, “This one’s for me. . . . It’s a rewrite, all on the girl. You’re on stage expounding for two and half hours,” Adams suspended her busy schedule of “singing, dancing and frothy musicals” to do the production, which New York’s Morning Telegraph still called Summer and Smoke, as “part of her education as an actress.” Explaining that working in material like Eccentricities, was necessary to establish a reputation and talent for serious acting, Adams observed that “if I wanted to do summer stock shows and make money I could do that. . . . But I wouldn’t be proving anything. I’d just be away from home.”

Announcements and festive plans, of course, aren’t proof that a performance took place. Neither are press releases or program booklets, which can be published before a performance which doesn’t occur. This, we’ll see, was the basis for the claim made by both the British and Long Island productions.

For the opening of a new play by one of America’s most renowned and respected playwrights, Eccentricities received scant attention outside Nyack. The New York Herald Tribune, while reporting that Adams had no plans to perform the show anywhere else--it wasn’t a tour as Contemporary Authors recorded-- suggested that “she has not ruled out carrying the play further at a future date.” The Herald Tribune later stated that the summer production had been a “pre-Broadway test.” Nonetheless, though the New York Times and the Herald Tribune both announced the performances, neither reviewed the opening on 25 June 1964. (Ironically, both papers covered the closing.) In fact, the only New York City paper which did review the Tappan Zee production was the New York World-Telegram and Sun. After quoting Williams’s statement--composed at the time of the play’s publication and restated in nearly every program and most production reviews--that Eccentricities was a new play and better than Summer and Smoke, reviewer Norman Nadel complained in the World-Telegram that “‘Summer and Smoke’ never looked better than it does in comparison with this revision” and that Williams “has made Alma and the play more, rather than less melodramatic.” He blamed “backstage blundering” for “a production that ranged from indifferent to catastrophic,” specifically citing miscues in Clifford Ammon’s lighting that caused inappropriate laughter when lights went on or off at the wrong times, destroying “what might have been moving moments.” Nadel went on to conclude that casting Adams was a “conspicuous error.” Though he praised “some excellent supporting performances,” particularly Alan Mixon’s, he wrote:

All Miss Adams has done is to superimpose patterned eccentricities on a kooky and rather pitiful young woman who, toward the end of the play, abruptly becomes as overtly sexy as a TV actress doing cigar commercials. Alma in this new version is neither as complex nor as sensitive a character as Williams wrote for “Summer and Smoke,” but her complexity and sensitivity go far beyond Miss Adams’ ability to communicate them more than momentarily.

Nadel’s cigar-commercial reference was to Adams’s appearances as television’s skimpily-costumed “Muriel Cigar girl” from 1962 until 1976. He summed up both the play and the performance by proclaiming, “Subtlety and tenderness have been sacrificed all along the line.”

Nyack’s Rockland County Journal-News touted the “excitement” of seeing “variations on a familiar theme” in Williams’s new version of Summer and Smoke with the “added fillip” of “a new play, still in try-out.” To this was added the appearance of Edie Adams, fresh off her Thursday-night ABC variety show that had finished a six-month run the previous March. Reviewer Mariruth Campbell confirmed that Eccentricities was, indeed, “a very odd little play”; the Nyack production was the only one that ever carried Williams’s subtitle as it appears on the typescript.

Campbell did object that the play was “over-long” and noted, “Unfortunately the on-stage figures moving scenery amused the audience, breaking the continuity of mood for which Williams aimed.” She praised Patricia Nielsen’s set in general, however, and attributed the lighting and staging style--”no curtain, changes in lighting to designate scene changes”--to “ancient oriental stage techniques.” Campbell, in contrast to Nadel, pronounced Adams’s performance “splendid,” and applauded the rest of the cast who “[a]ll worked valiantly to breathe life” into the play, though she did observe that “[m]any of the most important line[s] never were clearly heard.” Blaming some of the “dreariness” on Keathley and the company, she complained, “In real life, words spoken under great stress may be without force, may be whispers; in the theater, those same wor[d]s must be in ‘stage whispers’, reaching the last row.”

The ten-day run of Eccentricities, which launched the 1964 summer season at the Tappan Zee Playhouse, was scheduled to close on Saturday, 4 July. Sadly, early in the morning of Saturday, 27 June, just two days after the opening, a fire broke out in the theater. Discovered just before 3 a.m. by house manager Bob Olson, the fire damaged the dressing rooms. Though the New York Times reported that the blaze destroyed props and costumes, the Journal-News stated that neither the props nor the lighting instruments were damaged. Separated from the backstage area--a nineteenth-century livery stable to which the theater was added in 1903--by a thick brick wall, the auditorium suffered mostly water and smoke damage. The fire, contained by 125 local firefighters, singed the edge of a drape and the firemen had had to cut into the roof. In its report on the fire, whose origin wasn’t determined, the Times quoted some prescient lines from the script’s last scene:

ALMA: Where did the fire come from?
JOHN: No one has ever been able to answer that question.

Ironically, since the text of Eccentricities hadn’t yet been published, someone at the Times seems to have been present at a performance in order to have noted these lines. Apparently, the Times didn’t deem the production worthy of a published review, despite Williams’s prominence and the intimations that the production had been a Broadway try-out.

Along with his assertion that no production of Eccentricities had been staged by the play’s publication, George Freedley’s Morning Telegraph book review in February 1965 also quoted Williams as stating that there’d been no production of the play, but that statement had been part of his “Author’s Note” for the published edition, prepared in May 1964, before the première. In it, Williams wrote, “This radically different version of the play has never been produced.” This statement, part of the description in New Directions’ advance catalogue, was circulated with review copies of the book. It was amended in August 1964, however, prior to publication and after the stage debut had occurred, to include the words “on Broadway,” and that’s how it appears in the 1964 published text and all subsequent editions. Apparently Freedley, despite his critical and curatorial credentials, accepted Williams’s advance statement as still valid in February 1965, overlooking that a production had occurred in the meantime.

Both the British and Long Island producers gave the same justification for their claim that they were staging premières of Eccentricities. Ronald Hastings, for example, reported in London’s Daily Telegraph that “on what should have been the opening night of ‘Eccentricities,’ the [Tappan Zee Playhouse] building burned down, so the play has never been performed.” Then, in May 1968, the Theatre Society of Long Island declared that the “production scheduled for the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack was cancelled [sic] when the theatre burned down two summers ago.” The Theatre Society of Long Island’s assertion even had the time-frame wrong: the fire had been nearly four years earlier, of course, not two.

None of the published reports of the fire and the closing of the theater indicated that the theater had “burned down,” or that Eccentricities had failed to get on the stage. Becker, who had gone to New York City with his wife and co-producer, Honey Waldman, after the second performance of Eccentricities, believed he could reopen the Playhouse in two weeks or less. On Monday, 6 July, ten days after the fire closed it down, the Tappan Zee Playhouse did, in fact, reopen, using trailers as temporary dressing rooms. Becker had broken a hole in the 14-inch wall to give the actors access to them, but the production that reopened the theater was Preston Sturges’s Strictly Dishonorable. Eleven years later, after several fires severely damaged it in the early 1970s, the historic Tappan Zee did close for good.

In her opening-night review, Campbell, too, quoted ironic lines from the play: “The fire has gone out, nothing will revive it.” The Eccentricities of a Nightingale’s première production stood at two performances. Still, it was a fully union-accredited, professional production of the first performance of a new play. Duly recorded in press reviews, both locally in the Journal-News and in New York City in the World-Telegram and Sun, and in after-the-fact reports of its closing in the Journal-News, the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune, the Nyack Eccentricities fulfilled all the requirements for an official world, American, and New York première, denying the 1967 Guildford and 1968 Mineola productions the right to claim those titles. The Guildford show, of course, remains the British première, but the Theatre Society of Long Island mounted merely one of several revivals in the 1960s.

Furthermore, even if we discount the Tappan Zee production somehow--and there seems no reason to do so--there were at least two productions between the ones at Nyack and Guildford which would have earned the designation of première. First, on 20 April 1966--a year and a half before the production in Guildford and a little less than two years before the one in Mineola--Eccentricities opened at the Washington Theater Club in the District of Columbia as “the major city premiere,” which it was. This production, which ran until 15 May, can arguably be written off as a semi-professional staging. The director was the Theater Club’s artistic director, Davey Marlin-Jones, later the theater and film reviewer for WUSA-TV in the District, and the only name in the cast that might be recognized today was John Hillerman. It was a light-weight production, perhaps, but the one that followed isn’t so easily dismissed.

Between 13 January and 5 February 1967, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago presented its revival of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, nine months before the British première and 15 months before the Long Island revival. The Goodman, one of this country’s most highly regarded companies, surely can’t be ignored in a play’s production history. In addition, the Goodman’s production of Eccentricities included a curious historical footnote--possibly even a unique occurrence. Directed by Bella Itkin, the cast included Lee Richardson as John. Richardson, who in 1952 went by the name Lee Richard, played the same character in the landmark Circle in the Square production of Summer and Smoke.

The next significant productions of Eccentricities after 1968 didn’t occur until the end of the 1970s, starting with its “Theatre in America” telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service’s “Great Performances” on 16 June 1976 with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella and the belated Broadway première which opened at the Morosco Theatre with Betsy Palmer and David Selby on 23 November. On 15 February 1979, the German première (and the only foreign-language production on record as of 2000) opened under the title Die exzentrische Nachtigall (The eccentric nightingale) at the Kammerspiele in Düsseldorf. Two productions in October that year, one by BergenStage in Teaneck, New Jersey, and the other by the Westchester Regional Theater in Harrison, New York, were the latest documented professional stagings at the time I did my research.

The Broadway première had something of a curious history itself. Betsy Palmer and David Selby headed the cast of a summer-stock production of Eccentricities. Originally directed by Jeffrey Chambers, this production had problems with its design, direction, and some of the supporting cast. Neal Du Brock, Executive Director of the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, took over for the last month of the tour. “The play was being buried under props and scenery,” Du Brock complained. He repackaged the production with the same stars but replaced half the supporting cast and remounted the production at the Studio Arena from 8 October to 6 November 1976. Du Brock brought in Edwin Sherin to replace Chambers and a Broadway-quality design team to redo the sets and costumes. When he turned the direction over to Sherin, Du Brock ordered, “[T]hrow it all out and do it on an empty stage.” The producer wanted “to let the actors speak and not have all that other stuff cluttering things up,” and the result was a spare, almost minimalist production. Sherin, harking back to his 1968 attempt on Long Island, averred, “I think some vibrations are set off, and the play’s effects are felt years and years later.” He came to Buffalo, he said, to take up the challenge of a play he had “failed to ignite the first time around.” Sherin admitted, “It’s bothered me ever since. But now it’s exactly the way I wanted to do it.” Williams, who attended rehearsals and opening night in Buffalo, is reported to have “loved this concept.” Reviewers in Buffalo apparently agreed, though the New York press found the production “skimpy.” The Broadway production closed on 12 December after only eight previews and 12 regular performances.

The record, then, is unambiguous: The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premièred on 25 June 1964 at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York. This was incontrovertibly the New York, American, and world première. The production mounted at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in October 1967 was the British première. Intervening and subsequent U.S. productions, regardless of quality or other distinctions, were merely revivals or narrowly-defined premières.

[There were a few singularities among some of the subsequent revivals. On 15 April 1977, a production of Eccentricities opened in Williams’s hometown at the Greene Street Theatre in Key West; Williams attended the opening performance and gave it his own favorable review. For a production on 26-29 October 1978 at the nineteenth-century Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, the Collingwood Repertory Company commissioned the original Suite from The Eccentricities of a Nightingale from composer Joseph Bertolozzi; the score, in manuscript, is in the collection of the American Music Center in New York City. The above-mentioned 1979 revival by BergenStage (in which I played Roger Doremus) incorporated not only material cut from the official acting edition of the text, but typed additions supplied by Williams, himself.]

A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt

Between September 1996 and September 1997, I was engaged in extensive research on Tennessee Williams’s plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale for a forthcoming reference book, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Toward the end of this work, I consulted the chapter on Summer and Smoke of Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (1961) in which Nancy M. Tischler quotes a letter that she asserts Williams wrote to columnist Irving Hoffman of The Hollywood Reporter. She cites the playwright's complaint of the “exorbitant demands which are made by critics who don’t stop to consider the playwright’s need for a gradual ripening or development . . . a degree of tolerance and patience in his mentors during this period of transition.” Williams blamed the critics for the “failure of Summer and Smoke” on Broadway in 1948, Tischler states, and was “crushed” that they had “turned against him” after their support of The Glass Menagerie. She quotes Williams further:

Painters have it better. They are allowed to evolve new methods, new styles, by a reasonable gradual process [sic]. They are not abused for turning out creative variations of themes already stated. If a certain theme has importance, it may take a number of individual works to explore it fully. . . . It would help enormously if there were professional theatre centers outside of New York, so that the playwright would not always be at the mercy of a single localized group.

Seven years later, J. William Miller also quotes some of these same passages in Modern Playwrights at Work, directly connecting the letter to Williams’s bitterness about the reception of Summer and Smoke. I felt that I ought to see the whole letter in case it revealed information about Summer and Smoke useful to my research, so I began to look for it.

Williams’s “wrath broke into print,” writes Tischler, and Miller asserts Williams “denounced the critics . . . in a letter in Irving Hoffman’s column, ‘Tales of Hoffman’. . . ,” indicating that the columnist had published the letter. Neither Tischler nor Miller, however, give the precise source of the letter, published or otherwise, and no other writer quotes the letter, though a few refer to it. The only Williams bibliography that even mentions the letter, George W. Crandell’s Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography, does so as part of the description of Miller’s book; no other reference work lists a letter to Hoffman or any column by Hoffman in which it might have been printed. Other references to the letter--for example, Signi Falk’s Tennessee Williams--cite Tischler’s book, not any primary source. Neither the letter nor any mention of it is in any file at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Billy Rose Theatre Collection, including files and scrapbooks on Williams, Summer and Smoke, The Hollywood Reporter, or Irving Hoffman.

I was certain that if one of America’s most famous playwrights, the winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize in drama (for A Streetcar Named Desire), had written such a bitter, complaining letter to a Hollywood gossip columnist, Hoffman would have published it immediately. That was his job, after all. Taking as my only lead the facts that Williams had written the letter after Summer and Smoke opened on Broadway on 6 October 1948, that the reviews began to appear on 7 October, that Williams had left for North Africa in December, and that Summer and Smoke had closed on 1 January 1949, I began searching through back issues of The Hollywood Reporter for that period at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Nothing turned up, however, in Hoffman’s daily column. I had noticed, though, that the issue of 13 October contained no “Tales of Hoffman,” so I flipped back to see why. I found that the issue had been mutilated--someone had slit out the page on which Hoffman’s column always appeared. Because this was just about a week after Hoffman’s own review of Summer and Smoke had appeared (7 October), and because I had run into previous instances of material pertaining to Tennessee Williams having been similarly removed from books and journals, I was convinced that this column contained the elusive letter and had been cut out by a souvenir-hunting researcher.

I set about in search of a complete copy of the 13 October 1948 Hollywood Reporter, but no one in New York City had back issues that old. I could not obtain a copy of the issue or the column in question through interlibrary loan or any other process, including a pleading letter fired off to the Los Angeles Public Library, so it took me months--until I was in Washington and paid a visit to the Library of Congress--to discover that my deduction had been wrong. “Tales of Hoffman” was there, all right, but it dealt with something entirely unrelated to Williams or Summer and Smoke. That left me with no clue to when this letter might have been written or published. I contacted The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles directly in the hope that they kept an archive or maintained an in-house index, but they had no records or archives at all and could not help. My only recourse was to conduct an issue-by-issue search, so on subsequent trips to Lincoln Center on other business, I usually requested additional volumes of The Hollywood Reporter (which are stored off site and require a delivery request in advance) and browsed through Hoffman’s columns one by one, a few volumes at a time. I went up through the end of 1950 before I decided that Williams was unlikely to have written a letter about Summer and Smoke so long after it had closed, and gave up looking. My deadline had arrived some time before this, and I had sent off my copy to my editor without ever seeing the letter, but my scholarly curiosity was still piqued.

A few months later, frustrated that I had failed to find this elusive document, I attempted to locate the letter in the various Tennessee Williams archival collections around the country. I wrote to all of them that I could identify, but those that responded said they had no record of such a letter and could find no reference to it in their files. On a whim, I decided to try to track down Tischler, and found that she was on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University. (It turned out that she had retired a few months earlier but, after several abortive attempts, my letter to her was eventually forwarded.) After I reached her, Tischler wrote me that she could not locate a copy of the Hoffman letter or remember where she had originally seen it. She surmised that she may have learned about the letter in an interview, presumably of Williams, “back in the fifties.” She was, however, in the process of editing a collection of Williams’s letters for publication, and she had on hand a letter Williams wrote to New York Post columnist Max Lerner. She sent me an excerpt from this letter, written on 21 March 1951, which had language identical to that quoted in both her book and Miller’s. Tischler suggested that Williams may have quoted his own letter to Hoffman when he wrote a similar one to Lerner. From this suggestion, I determined that the letter to Hoffman would have had to appear in The Hollywood Reporter a little before he wrote to Lerner, so I once again leafed through back issues, from the date in 1950 when I had previously left off up to May 1951, the end of the bound volume that contained March. There was no letter from Williams, and I again assumed I had come to a dead end. I was ready to argue that Williams never wrote to Hoffman at all, that Tischler had made a mistake or been misled, possibly in that interview with Williams in the 1950s, and that Miller, using Rebellious Puritan as his source, had perpetuated Tischler’s error.

A week or so later, I had an opportunity to look up Max Lerner in one of the Williams bibliographies, John S. McCann’s The Critical Reputation of Tennessee Williams: A Reference Guide, which are in a different building in a different part of Manhattan from the Theatre Collection, and found that he had written a New York Post column on 16 May 1951 called “Letter From A Playwright.” The description matched the letter whose excerpt Tischler had sent me. I found the column--in yet another New York Public Library facility--and, indeed, it was the same letter from which Tischler had sent me the excerpt, and was identical in every way to the passages quoted in her book and Miller’s. As far as I was concerned, this was unquestionably the letter from which Tischler and Miller had drawn the quotations and that someone had erred regarding the attribution.

(Ironically, a clipping of this column is in one of the Tennessee Williams files at the Billy Rose Collection, but as it is under Lerner’s byline in the 1950-1956 folder--and in bad condition; I never would have located it, or recognized it if I had found it. I was still looking for an Irving Hoffman column from 1948-1949 concerning Summer and Smoke. I found the clipping in the Williams file much later, after I already knew what it was. The fact that the New York Public Library theater files, including The Hollywood Reporter, are in the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center at 65th Street and Broadway--which covers productions but not plays and playwrights, which are considered literature in NYPL’s taxonomy; the two books in question here and the newspapers on microfilm are in the History and Social Sciences Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue--where the materials on literature, including playwrights, are housed; and the bibliographies are in the Mid-Manhattan Branch at 40th Street and 5th--the main circulating branch containing the largest literary reference collection outside HSSL--helped protract my search. This accounted for my having searched The Hollywood Reporter after learning of the Williams-Lerner letter but before locating Lerner’s column. As a result, I searched the wrong issues of The Hollywood Reporter for the Hoffman column that I eventually found, delaying the discovery about a week.)

The text of the letter Lerner published in his New York Post column contains language identical to that quoted first by Tischler and then by Miller. Except for the switch from the Post’s American spelling of ‘theater’ to Tischler’s British ‘theatre,’ both she and Miller reproduce sections of this letter exactly, including the strange grammatical construction “reasonable gradual process,” instead of “reasonably gradual process.” It seemed odd that Williams, a poet and a playwright renowned for his lyrical language, would write such an awkward phrase. It was even odder that, if he had rewritten the same letter first to Irving Hoffman and then to Max Lerner, that he would repeat this infelicitous wording. It is well known that Williams was an inveterate rewriter: all his plays exist in several versions, the products of his constant revising. It turns out that he also does this with his correspondence. Tischler sent me an earlier version of the letter Williams wrote to Lerner, this one dated 19 March, which contains very different language from that in the 21 March letter. It also became obvious, once I saw the entire letter and the column in which Lerner published it, that Williams had written it specifically to Lerner. It also clearly had nothing to do with Summer and Smoke, which both Tischler and Miller maintain and which assertion set me on the search to begin with. The columnist had written an earlier piece entitled “Number One Boy” (6 March 1951) in which he used the recently-opened Rose Tattoo “as a jumping-off point” to discuss the critical treatment of successful artists. In his preface to Williams’s letter, Lerner explained, “I pointed out that we generally have some leading playwright who is our Number One Boy.” In that first column, which is oddly also absent from the major bibliographies of Williams despite its discussion of both the playwright and The Rose Tattoo (which had opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on 3 February 1951), Lerner had written:

Every play of theirs must be a hit, every effort must strike twelve and keep chiming even beyond that. If they once falter, it is a sign of inner decay. There are few areas where the pressures on the successful are as merciless as in writing for Broadway. . . . But every one seems grimly to set standards for the Number One Boy to fulfill.

Wolfe Kaufman, press agent for Rose Tattoo producer Cheryl Crawford and the press representative for the play, had sent “Number One Boy” to Williams in Key West. (Apparently, Lerner also sent Williams his column, but it arrived after Kaufman’s clipping.) The playwright responded enthusiastically to Lerner’s opinions, which he saw as a reflection of his own, even though Lerner thought The Rose Tattoo was “overrated” by most critics (and “underrated” by “one or two” others). The letter that Lerner published on 16 May, and which Tischler and Miller quote, was not a letter discussing general ideas that Williams might have sent off to several correspondents. “I think that you, for the first time to my knowledge, have placed your finger directly on the most demoralizing problem that the American playwright has to face,” applauded Williams early in his letter (the emphasis is mine). He later added, “As far as I know, you are the first to reflect in print on the exorbitant demands made by critics . . . .” This very unambiguously speaks directly to Lerner about ideas he, alone, raised in “Number One Boy.”

All this suggested to me that Lerner’s column, not anything by Hoffman, was the source for the letter, that Williams wrote it to Lerner, not Hoffman, and that he had probably not copied his own letter and sent it to a second correspondent. The truth is very simple, as it turns out. Ironically, had I requested one more volume of The Hollywood Reporter and paged through the May issues, I would have uncovered it weeks earlier.

Just to be certain that Hoffman did not publish a similar letter from Williams, now that I knew when Lerner had published his, I did search further into back issues of The Hollywood Reporter. There it was at last! On 23 May 1951, Hoffman had reprinted Lerner’s entire Post column under the subtitle “Letterature.” Williams had, indeed, never written this letter to Hoffman; he wrote only to Lerner. Hoffman, like a good gossip columnist, simply reran something of interest to his readers from another writer’s column, spreading the news. Hoffman clearly gave Lerner full credit: “Post columnist Max Lerner published the following in his syndicated column last week. I thought you’d be interested in it, so I reprint.”

So the chronology of the elusive Tennessee Williams letter is thus:

• 3 February 1951: The Rose Tattoo opens on Broadway.

• 6 March: Max Lerner writes “Number One Boy,” a column about Rose Tattoo.

• Between 6 and ca. 16 March: Wolfe Kaufman sends Lerner’s column to Tennessee Williams. Later Lerner sends a copy, too.

• 19 March: Williams drafts an appreciative letter to Lerner. 21 March: composes a final version which he sends the columnist.

• 16 May: Lerner publishes Williams’s letter in a New York Post column called “Letter From A Playwright.”

• 23 May: Irving Hoffman republishes Lerner’s New York Post column with Williams’s letter in his Hollywood Reporter column, “Tales of Hoffman,” under the subtitle “Letterature.”

• 1961: Nancy Tischler publishes Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, the first book-length study of Williams’s work. She cites Williams’s letter in the chapter on Summer and Smoke, writing that the playwright wrote it to Hoffman.

• 1968: J. William Miller publishes Modern Playwrights at Work and cites the Williams letter, repeating Tischler’s assertions.

• 1998: After 37 years of references continuing to cite the erroneous origin of the letter, the facts are sorted out.

• 11 April 2009: This writing is the first public attempt to correct the record.

Clearly, this resolves the confusion over the “missing” Williams-Hoffman letter and explains why no bibliography or library had any record of it: that letter does not exist. Tischler’s attribution of the letter to Hoffman was probably the result of an erroneous reference to his 23 May Hollywood Reporter column as the original source of what was actually the 21 March Williams-Lerner letter, first published in the New York Post on 16 May. Unfortunately, because of the second publication of the letter--and possibly influenced by something Williams had told her--Tischler cited it as one Williams sent to Hoffman and Miller picked up her mistake and restated it in his book. Why the letter, regardless of its recipient, was linked to Summer and Smoke is not clear. Tischler properly points out in a letter to me that “the issues . . . were continuing concerns for Williams,” but he did not write the letter until over two years after Summer and Smoke closed. Nevertheless, later writers accepted these assertions and, with no primary source to consult, gave Tischler or Miller as the provenience. Once published, the misattribution became “fact” and part of the record. Of course, the original source should have been the letter Williams wrote Lerner on 21 March 1951, or Lerner’s 16 May New York Post column.

Altogether, this search took eight months, though it was far from a full-time pursuit, particularly after my Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale copy had been submitted in November 1997. I continued to search for the letter in the hope that, if it turned out to be relevant, I might be able to slip a mention of it into the chapter in proofs. It is also fair to say that I wanted to pin down this reference for the scholarly satisfaction of getting it on the record somehow. All my efforts and deductions--most of which turned out to be wrong--would have been for naught, however, had I not reached Nancy Tischler and had she not provided me with the final clue to the whereabouts of, first, Lerner’s New York Post column and, then, the Hoffman column that followed from it. It is ironic that my search--which has ended up being no more than a scholarly treasure hunt since it was irrelevant to Summer and Smoke, my research subject--began with Tischler’s 1961 book and ended with her 1998 project, the publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. (If she had not been working on the letters, she would not have had Williams’s letter to Lerner at hand.) Tischler, as it were, initiated my frustration and then resolved it. It is also ironic that, though Tischler and I had been in correspondence over this letter and all it engendered, we had spoken by telephone only once and had never met until June 1999, when she came to New York City to see Not About Nightingales on Broadway.