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Small Craft Warnings
Williams sets up camp on O'Neill's turf: a bar at the end of the world, shrouded in ocean fog, in which a collection of misfits huddle like birds evading a storm. Unlike O'Neill's eternally damned pipe-dreamers, Williams' crass menagerie of barflies (an itinerant beautician, her loutish boyfriend, a lovesick short-order cook, the girl he's in love with, and an alcoholic doctor) survive on hope and the possibility of heaven.
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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242 people want to read
About the author
Tennessee Williams
757 books3,730 followersThomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
From Wikipedia
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
From Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 28, 2019
A very talented cast could make this a show worth seeing. I don't believe it could withstand amateur treatment, given the frequent histrionics and numerous drunk monologues.
September 26, 2016
Compared to some of his more famous pre-Seconal and pre-Benzedrine creations, the reading experience itself was 3.5 stars for me. Good, but not great. It sort of felt like I was reading the result of a precocious college freshman's first experience of full freedom in a creative writing class. (E.g., Violet's penchant for giving hand-jobs under bar tables, Leona's screaming "YOU CUNT", and Bill's pride in the size of his penis.) But, seeing it performed by veteran actors as part of the Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts today completely transformed it into a five star experience. Author, author!
May 12, 2012
A great character piece. What still amazes me about this play is how Tennessee filled the quiet and made me love and understand the static of every lonely heart in that bar.
March 8, 2020
I wonder what dramatists like Tennessee Williams think when they write plays like Small Craft Warnings. Does Williams remember his heyday of A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and wince a little when he reflects that this play does not come close to the works he produced at his peak?
Or does he perhaps not discriminate between the plays? Maybe this one seems just as good as any other, a personal outpouring of his own experiences and feelings that offers catharsis for him, and to hell with anyone else’s view. The urge to write is so strong that the artist will carry on making new productions until he is told that he cannot.
Not that Small Craft Warnings is a bad play by any means. It seems strange to think that Williams was still writing long enough to throw in an allusion to Ronald Reagan’s political career, and yet he apparently was.
This particular play has no obvious structure or development. It almost reads like a seedy version of Waiting for Godot, with a series of characters who remain in stasis. Sure, there is some movement. Two characters arrive, and one leaves. One says she is leaving, but who knows? People change their sexual allegiances.
Nonetheless they seem stuck in their rigid patterns of behaviour. They are like the small crafts caught in the storm being pushed around by their own impulses, and failing to get a hold on their life.
There is Leona Dawson, sister to a gay man who died, and now ready to dedicate her life to being a companion to future gay men. These will not include Bobby, the young homosexual who arrives accompanied by the older Quentin. An attempted liaison between the two men has failed because Quentin wanted to seduce a straight man. However Bobby seems resistant to Leona’s attentions.
Leona is in a relationship with Bill, a man who seems very proud of his large penis which he regards as his lunch money. After she catches Bill allowing another woman to give him a hand job under the table, Leona offers to kick the parasitical Bill out.
As for the woman administering this service to Bill, she is Violet. Violet is in a relationship with Steve, who is getting tired of her. She floats through life aimlessly from man to man, and dive to dive, hardly knowing how she got there.
Throw in the friendly landlord Monk and the drunken doctor (who of course has no licence, and is definitely not the man you want handling your pregnant wife), and the cast list is complete.
Here is a set of characters who can go nowhere because they lack the capacity for personal development. They will continue to drift in and out of personal relationships and situations with no self-awareness or seeming ability to change their personalities.
Every so often a spotlight seems to descend on a character, and they are able to give the audience a little more insight into their plight. However none of this makes them more or less sympathetic or identifiable. Their lives lack real meaning, and deeper feelings for them are mere histrionics and drunken self-pity.
The play reaches no climax. There is some fighting at the end, but nothing conclusive. It hardly matters. No crisis could bring an epiphany to anyone here. The result is that the play is interesting, but not especially engaging.
Or does he perhaps not discriminate between the plays? Maybe this one seems just as good as any other, a personal outpouring of his own experiences and feelings that offers catharsis for him, and to hell with anyone else’s view. The urge to write is so strong that the artist will carry on making new productions until he is told that he cannot.
Not that Small Craft Warnings is a bad play by any means. It seems strange to think that Williams was still writing long enough to throw in an allusion to Ronald Reagan’s political career, and yet he apparently was.
This particular play has no obvious structure or development. It almost reads like a seedy version of Waiting for Godot, with a series of characters who remain in stasis. Sure, there is some movement. Two characters arrive, and one leaves. One says she is leaving, but who knows? People change their sexual allegiances.
Nonetheless they seem stuck in their rigid patterns of behaviour. They are like the small crafts caught in the storm being pushed around by their own impulses, and failing to get a hold on their life.
There is Leona Dawson, sister to a gay man who died, and now ready to dedicate her life to being a companion to future gay men. These will not include Bobby, the young homosexual who arrives accompanied by the older Quentin. An attempted liaison between the two men has failed because Quentin wanted to seduce a straight man. However Bobby seems resistant to Leona’s attentions.
Leona is in a relationship with Bill, a man who seems very proud of his large penis which he regards as his lunch money. After she catches Bill allowing another woman to give him a hand job under the table, Leona offers to kick the parasitical Bill out.
As for the woman administering this service to Bill, she is Violet. Violet is in a relationship with Steve, who is getting tired of her. She floats through life aimlessly from man to man, and dive to dive, hardly knowing how she got there.
Throw in the friendly landlord Monk and the drunken doctor (who of course has no licence, and is definitely not the man you want handling your pregnant wife), and the cast list is complete.
Here is a set of characters who can go nowhere because they lack the capacity for personal development. They will continue to drift in and out of personal relationships and situations with no self-awareness or seeming ability to change their personalities.
Every so often a spotlight seems to descend on a character, and they are able to give the audience a little more insight into their plight. However none of this makes them more or less sympathetic or identifiable. Their lives lack real meaning, and deeper feelings for them are mere histrionics and drunken self-pity.
The play reaches no climax. There is some fighting at the end, but nothing conclusive. It hardly matters. No crisis could bring an epiphany to anyone here. The result is that the play is interesting, but not especially engaging.
May 10, 2020
I’d say I’m sure I would enjoy this more on the stage, but I don’t know that I’d want to watch a bunch of barflies being cruel to each other any more than I enjoyed reading it. I think it’s occasionally touching and wise, but overall, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to engage with.
July 31, 2022
Fun, lively and built for performance. Something to be kept in conversation with the likes of Rodney Ackland's "Absolute Hell" and parts of Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal".
October 21, 2014
With this play I've reached the end of Hollywood's marathon of Tennessee Williams adaptations. I've always wondered about his non-adapted work, since I've heard for years that it was just bad and that Williams had lost his touch by then. I guess the box office failings of Boom! and Last of the Mobile Hot Shots permanently scared Hollywood away from him. Anyhow, this was an off-Broadway production and a story that Williams seemed to really care about, if the correspondences in the edition that I read are anything to go by. It doesn't seem like any production got this quite right, with performances and casting being the main issue. I can understand why...this play is extremely dialog-heavy with very little "plot". Nearly every character gets a huge monologue, and since these are personal declarations, a bad (or even "off") actor could kill the effect. I liked this play a lot. The dialog is great, and with Williams free to do what he wants, he gets into some REALLY lurid territory. The gay aspect to his plays is not even hidden here, with two characters going into detail about their lifestyle and Leona bragging about being a "faggot's moll." The characters are interesting and once again there isn't a clear "hero" that we're supposed to root for. I'm looking forward to seeing where his plays go now that he's no longer got his eye on Hollywood and can go in whatever direction he wants.
August 8, 2019
I didn’t think small craft warning was williams’ best written work but I cared about the characters and was more emotionally moved by the play than I have been in while
December 2, 2023
Small Craft Warnings
Tennessee Williams wrote an introductory essay titled "Too Personal" to his 1972 play, "Small Craft Warnings". In the essay, Williams defended the deeply subjective, autobiographically-based nature of his writing. Williams argued that a playwright necessarily put himself, his persona, into his writing. He wrote: "the very root- necessity of all creative work is to express those things most involved in his experience. Otherwise, is the work, however well-executed, not a manufactured, a synthetic thing?" Williams concluded that the artist had the responsibility to universalize his private experience so that it could be shared with others. He wrote.
"In all human experience, there are parallels which permit common understanding in the telling and hearing, and it is the frightening responsibility of an artist to make what is directly or allusively close to his own being communicable and understandable, however disturbingly, to the hearts and minds of audiences."
In the two-act play, "Small Craft Warnings", Williams presents his own feelings of loneliness, need for love, ambivalence about his sexual orientation, and sense of ennui. The play is set in a small southern California bar that fronts on the Pacific Ocean and that caters largely to a group of regulars, mostly poor, lost individuals. The play has little in the way of plot or of dramatic action. Instead Williams tries to understand and project his characters from the inside by showing their relationships to each other. Much of the play consists of lengthy monologues.
The characters in the play include the proprietor, Monk, who lives alone and who tries takes a clear-eyed view of his clientele. The clients include Doc, a physician who has lost his license due to alcohol and substance abuse but who still practices illegally. There are also two semi-paired couples, Leona, a beautician who lives in her own mobile trailer, and her boyfriend, Bill, a self-proclaimed stud whom she is dumping. The other pair consists of Violet, a prostitute who lives above an arcade, and her sometime boyfriend Steve, an aging short-order cook. Throughout the play Williams develops the character of these loners and outcasts and their tensions with each other. Two other individuals figure in the play: Quentin, a middle-aged failed screenwriter reduced to working on blue movies and Bobby, an adolescent who has bicycled from Iowa to California. Quentin has picked-up Bobby in a brief relationship about to end. These two characters provide for Williams' first overt depiction of a homosexual relationship in a play. Quentin has a lengthy monologue in which he laments the sameness and impersonality of his sexual life while yearning for a return of enthusiasm in which a person can say "My God!" rather than "Oh, well" to new experiences.
The play is slow but lyrical and romantic. Williams fulfills the goal stated in the introductory essay, "Too Personal", of making "what is directly or allusively close to his own being communicable and understandable, however disturbingly, to the hearts and minds of all whom he addresses." The play enjoyed a measure or success when produced off-Broadway in 1972. It ran for over 200 performances with Williams directing the rehearsals for a short time. During the run of the play, Williams acted the role of Doc in a passionate, idiosyncratic style. His performance was undoubtedly one to remember. Clive Barnes gave the play a favorable and insightful review in the New York Times. He wrote:
"All the characters seem to be a species unto themselves. Williams is here describing the surviving losers of mankind, the people who pay their dues in suffering and float on life with a modicum of gallant misery. Williams is a writer of enormous compassion- it is a compassion that leads him at times into sentimentality, but it is also a compassion that that opens up doors into bleak and empty hearts." (New York Times, April 3, 1972)
John Lahr offers a thorough discussion of "Small Craft Warnings", its writing, and its autobiographical roots in his 2014 biography: "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh." Lahr describes the play as "a collage of mostly static character sketches: a collection of derelict lost souls who gather in a California seaside bar to drink, carouse, look for love, and flounder eloquently in the avant-garde of suffering." The play is a product of Williams' late years when he was in a long decline. It is not the best of Williams' work, but it is worth reading and getting to know.
Robin Friedman
Tennessee Williams wrote an introductory essay titled "Too Personal" to his 1972 play, "Small Craft Warnings". In the essay, Williams defended the deeply subjective, autobiographically-based nature of his writing. Williams argued that a playwright necessarily put himself, his persona, into his writing. He wrote: "the very root- necessity of all creative work is to express those things most involved in his experience. Otherwise, is the work, however well-executed, not a manufactured, a synthetic thing?" Williams concluded that the artist had the responsibility to universalize his private experience so that it could be shared with others. He wrote.
"In all human experience, there are parallels which permit common understanding in the telling and hearing, and it is the frightening responsibility of an artist to make what is directly or allusively close to his own being communicable and understandable, however disturbingly, to the hearts and minds of audiences."
In the two-act play, "Small Craft Warnings", Williams presents his own feelings of loneliness, need for love, ambivalence about his sexual orientation, and sense of ennui. The play is set in a small southern California bar that fronts on the Pacific Ocean and that caters largely to a group of regulars, mostly poor, lost individuals. The play has little in the way of plot or of dramatic action. Instead Williams tries to understand and project his characters from the inside by showing their relationships to each other. Much of the play consists of lengthy monologues.
The characters in the play include the proprietor, Monk, who lives alone and who tries takes a clear-eyed view of his clientele. The clients include Doc, a physician who has lost his license due to alcohol and substance abuse but who still practices illegally. There are also two semi-paired couples, Leona, a beautician who lives in her own mobile trailer, and her boyfriend, Bill, a self-proclaimed stud whom she is dumping. The other pair consists of Violet, a prostitute who lives above an arcade, and her sometime boyfriend Steve, an aging short-order cook. Throughout the play Williams develops the character of these loners and outcasts and their tensions with each other. Two other individuals figure in the play: Quentin, a middle-aged failed screenwriter reduced to working on blue movies and Bobby, an adolescent who has bicycled from Iowa to California. Quentin has picked-up Bobby in a brief relationship about to end. These two characters provide for Williams' first overt depiction of a homosexual relationship in a play. Quentin has a lengthy monologue in which he laments the sameness and impersonality of his sexual life while yearning for a return of enthusiasm in which a person can say "My God!" rather than "Oh, well" to new experiences.
The play is slow but lyrical and romantic. Williams fulfills the goal stated in the introductory essay, "Too Personal", of making "what is directly or allusively close to his own being communicable and understandable, however disturbingly, to the hearts and minds of all whom he addresses." The play enjoyed a measure or success when produced off-Broadway in 1972. It ran for over 200 performances with Williams directing the rehearsals for a short time. During the run of the play, Williams acted the role of Doc in a passionate, idiosyncratic style. His performance was undoubtedly one to remember. Clive Barnes gave the play a favorable and insightful review in the New York Times. He wrote:
"All the characters seem to be a species unto themselves. Williams is here describing the surviving losers of mankind, the people who pay their dues in suffering and float on life with a modicum of gallant misery. Williams is a writer of enormous compassion- it is a compassion that leads him at times into sentimentality, but it is also a compassion that that opens up doors into bleak and empty hearts." (New York Times, April 3, 1972)
John Lahr offers a thorough discussion of "Small Craft Warnings", its writing, and its autobiographical roots in his 2014 biography: "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh." Lahr describes the play as "a collage of mostly static character sketches: a collection of derelict lost souls who gather in a California seaside bar to drink, carouse, look for love, and flounder eloquently in the avant-garde of suffering." The play is a product of Williams' late years when he was in a long decline. It is not the best of Williams' work, but it is worth reading and getting to know.
Robin Friedman
October 27, 2022
Small Craft Warnings is set in a desolate and vaguely squalid beachfront bar called Monk's Place, on the California coast near the Mexican border. Set on a foggy night (the source of the warnings of the title), the play introduces us to the denizens of this saloon, each of whom, we are told, is in need of refuge from life's storms. On hand this (and probably every) evening are Bill, a gigolo nearing the end of his prime; Steve, a dull and slow-witted fellow who works as a short order cook; Doc, a middle-aged physician whose addictions to alcohol and pills have cost him his medical license; and Violet, the faded but not-so-fragile girl who lives over an amusement arcade and has, in the words of another character, "a kind of religion in her hands" that earns her a paltry living among the sailors and other men she encounters. Overseeing this rather pathetic lot is the world-weary bartender Monk.
But dominating the place is Leona Dawson, a whirlwind of a woman well into middle age, a beautician who lives in a trailer that she calls her "home on wheels." Leona decides this night to evict Bill after having supported and lived with him for six months; we suspect that her discovery of Violet's hand in Bill's lap is only the most obvious reason for her decision.
Loud and brash and coarse and difficult, Leona is indeed a piece of work; but she's survival incarnate, self-reliant and street-smart in spite of the sadness and loneliness that gnaw at her. She's a spectacular creation, set apart from the rest of Williams's heroines by her indomitable brio. Her raw lust for living makes her indestructible: "I never just said , 'Oh, well'," she tells us, "I've always said 'Life!' to life."
Offering stark contrast to Leona is Quentin, a middle-aged gay screenwriter for whom bitter cynicism has become a way of life; it is he who says "Oh, well" to the world, as he explains in the play's most emphatically lyrical monologue. Quentin has stopped in for a brief drink with Bobby, a strapping Iowa teenager whom he picked up hitchhiking and with whom he has had an unhappy encounter--unhappy because it turns out that Bobby is gay, but Quentin only likes "straight trade." Williams's juxtaposition of Quentin, who refuses to embrace a possibility for love right under his nose, with Leona, who refuses to deny possibility, ever, feels tellingly autobiographical: it gives Small Craft Warnings an unexpected potency, one that makes the play vivid and essential, even as it falters into the weird blend of experiment and mean-spirited grotesqueness (not to mention the self-loathing homophobia of Quentin) that characterizes so much of Williams's later work.
But dominating the place is Leona Dawson, a whirlwind of a woman well into middle age, a beautician who lives in a trailer that she calls her "home on wheels." Leona decides this night to evict Bill after having supported and lived with him for six months; we suspect that her discovery of Violet's hand in Bill's lap is only the most obvious reason for her decision.
Loud and brash and coarse and difficult, Leona is indeed a piece of work; but she's survival incarnate, self-reliant and street-smart in spite of the sadness and loneliness that gnaw at her. She's a spectacular creation, set apart from the rest of Williams's heroines by her indomitable brio. Her raw lust for living makes her indestructible: "I never just said , 'Oh, well'," she tells us, "I've always said 'Life!' to life."
Offering stark contrast to Leona is Quentin, a middle-aged gay screenwriter for whom bitter cynicism has become a way of life; it is he who says "Oh, well" to the world, as he explains in the play's most emphatically lyrical monologue. Quentin has stopped in for a brief drink with Bobby, a strapping Iowa teenager whom he picked up hitchhiking and with whom he has had an unhappy encounter--unhappy because it turns out that Bobby is gay, but Quentin only likes "straight trade." Williams's juxtaposition of Quentin, who refuses to embrace a possibility for love right under his nose, with Leona, who refuses to deny possibility, ever, feels tellingly autobiographical: it gives Small Craft Warnings an unexpected potency, one that makes the play vivid and essential, even as it falters into the weird blend of experiment and mean-spirited grotesqueness (not to mention the self-loathing homophobia of Quentin) that characterizes so much of Williams's later work.
March 26, 2023
I originally wrote this review in November 2020:
In summary, I would consider this play to be a window into one of many evenings surrounding several miserable people discussing their woes in a bar. Outside of the occasionally unintentionally funny fight scenes or odd line, I found this piece to be quite entertaining, as we learn more about these questionably bad people, figuring out our opinions about whether they are truly awful people or just misguided. The character writing is quite well done, each of the characters feel like they could exist in real life, but that's all that really surrounds this piece, the characters. Not much happens narratively during this piece, it kind of ends how it begins, with the characters changed a little bit, but that's what I feel it is meant to be like. This play is no ground-breaking epic with a constantly changing narrative that effects the casts lives forever, its just a snippet of their lives, showing their bonds, anguishes and personalities over an evening of drinks. Any change that happens to the characters is quite minimal, meaning their isn't really much to discuss, outside of the fact that I enjoyed this piece and found it to be interesting, and that's sometimes all you need in a story.
In summary, I would consider this play to be a window into one of many evenings surrounding several miserable people discussing their woes in a bar. Outside of the occasionally unintentionally funny fight scenes or odd line, I found this piece to be quite entertaining, as we learn more about these questionably bad people, figuring out our opinions about whether they are truly awful people or just misguided. The character writing is quite well done, each of the characters feel like they could exist in real life, but that's all that really surrounds this piece, the characters. Not much happens narratively during this piece, it kind of ends how it begins, with the characters changed a little bit, but that's what I feel it is meant to be like. This play is no ground-breaking epic with a constantly changing narrative that effects the casts lives forever, its just a snippet of their lives, showing their bonds, anguishes and personalities over an evening of drinks. Any change that happens to the characters is quite minimal, meaning their isn't really much to discuss, outside of the fact that I enjoyed this piece and found it to be interesting, and that's sometimes all you need in a story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2025
Summary: Taking place in a local bar in a coastal town, there's an array of characters that frequent the place. You've got the drunk doctor, who despite losing his license apparently still practices; there's Leona, a rather imposing woman who lives in a trailer van; Violet, who seems to be the kinda "town slut"; Bill, who has been staying with Leona for months but is not faithful at all....then a couple of men arrive. Quentin has picked up Bobby and brought him along to the bar. Leona tries to convince Bobby to stay with her as she has kicked Bill out. Leona gets into it with just about everyone and then the cops are called on her but Monk (the owner of the bar) hides her. The doctor goes to deliver a baby but the baby is premature and both woman and baby die. He is warned that he probably should get out of town. The end sees Violet asking to stay at Monk's and him accepting.
Review: So yeah I didn't love this one but it wasn't terrible...there' a lot going on kinda but also not really much happens at the same time. lol I realize that sounds like a contradiction. I was sickened by some of the townies response to the drunkard doctor like what is wrong with these people?! Anyway, overall I thought it was alright.
Grade: C
Review: So yeah I didn't love this one but it wasn't terrible...there' a lot going on kinda but also not really much happens at the same time. lol I realize that sounds like a contradiction. I was sickened by some of the townies response to the drunkard doctor like what is wrong with these people?! Anyway, overall I thought it was alright.
Grade: C
June 8, 2023
Williams moves the action to a bar in Southern California: I'm not sure why. Is it because the rather open queer talk would be more acceptable/believable if set in California? Anyway, the queer talk is on the dark side ("He'll roll the faggot...") perhaps because in the real world, at the time, it had to be (and are we heading back?). Lots of histrionics here leading to not much at all.
October 23, 2024
Far from his best work, Williams' late-period 'Small Craft Warnings' (1972) includes (boring/cardboard) explicitly gay stereotypes...an advancement, I suppose, over some of his earlier works where the "faggotry" was much more oblique. But, generally, the plot just revolves around a bunch of loser drunks arguing in a working-class generic Southern California bar.
September 14, 2025
I'm in love with evey single one of tennessee williams stage directions
March 8, 2015
In my opinion one of Williams' best plays. Setting is simpler compared to his other plays (which I prefer, compared to the plastic theatre he was attempting to portray in other plays). This short piece focuses more on its characters than on progressing a plot -- if there is any in the first place aside from the passing of time. The characters, in their own unique and melancholic lives, take turns forlornly expressing their circumstances through monologues that oscillate from speaking to the other characters and the audience about their sympathetic views on loneliness and emptiness. Setting is simpler compared to his other plays (which I prefer, compared to the plastic theatre he was attempting to portray in other plays).
May 24, 2017
This late play is set a marina bar that’s a “refuge for vulnerable human vessels,” and described by the author as, “my god, this is a play about groping.” It's full of lonely people who “don't remember and don't dare look forward neither.” As usual the Tennessee seems to be feeding lines from his own heart to his characters like Cyrano de Bergerac:
“In a forest you’ll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that’s scarred, that’s blazed by lightning, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment any more but just go on, continue for two or three hundred years more?”
I really hope I get a chance to see this on the stage one day.
“In a forest you’ll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that’s scarred, that’s blazed by lightning, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment any more but just go on, continue for two or three hundred years more?”
I really hope I get a chance to see this on the stage one day.
January 4, 2016
I first heard about this play while watching a documentary about one of Warhol's transgender muses, Candy Darling, whom the character Violet was inspired by and created for. While "Small Craft Warnings" is not as strong as classics like "A Streetcar Named Desire," it was still interesting and had all the tenets of a Tennessee Williams play. I would love to see this performed live (especially when Candy Darling starred in it, but I'll take what I can get) and I will most likely read it again. A must-read for anyone remotely interested in any of the icons tied to this amusing and heartbreaking tale.
September 18, 2011
Don't read many plays but have always found Williams so moving and so thought provoking in the theater. This one was short, a set piece, little plot; 5 or 6 characters in a seedy seaside bar shining their own personal light on loneliness, loss, and waste; as in wasted life or self-respect. I might have titled this play, "Set adrift."
The characters are all deep in lost lives that some of us only flirt with, and they're not moving out, they only move on. No hope here, just resignation and flares of moving oration. Bright warning signals from living death ships.
Glad I read it.
The characters are all deep in lost lives that some of us only flirt with, and they're not moving out, they only move on. No hope here, just resignation and flares of moving oration. Bright warning signals from living death ships.
Glad I read it.
June 9, 2016
I read this at the end of a marathon of becoming reacquainted with Tennessee Williams and it may have been I had overdosed by the time I turned the last page. I felt it lacked the fluidity of most of his writing. The melancholy background music that you can almost, but not quite, hear that seems to run through all his plays, was (for me) lacking. That said, it is well written and I will put it away for a few months then give it another go.
July 25, 2016
Very stagey later Williams - probably most notable for casting Candy Darling as Violet (a promiscuous woman whose entire character arc is crying and locking herself in the bathroom). The only interesting plot line is the C-plot about the effete homosexual picking up trade that turns out to be gay and brings him to the bar in order to abandon him because, as we all know, it's not hot if trade is actually gay. Lots of gay pessimism there.
January 4, 2015
Great monologues. Read it for that. The story is fine, but the simple structure allows a fluidity to the piece that seems to ebb and flow like the tides, and elevates this play above some of his earlier works. With the right actors, this could be an amazing production.
November 5, 2014
Excellent play.
March 8, 2015
Ever want to know the real stories behind all the loud and obnoxious people you've ever wanted to avoid? Thought so.
October 24, 2015
Great monologues. Not much action, but plenty of Williams' complex characters and speeches.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews