Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays

by Tennessee Williams, Thomas Keith (Editor)

“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays―like firecrackers in a rope.” ―Tennessee Williams This new collection of fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams’s most potent, comical and disturbing short plays?Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in  Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws , while the poet Hart Crane is confronted by his mother at the bottom of the ocean in  Steps Must Be Gentle . Five previously unpublished plays include  A Recluse and His Guest , and  The Strange Play , in which we witness a woman’s entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span. This volume is edited, with an introduction and notes, by the editor, acting teacher, and theater scholar Thomas Keith.

Genres: Plays

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 5, 2016

About the author

Thomas 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

Reviews

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

& perhaps the reason these were produced way after the playwright died is because, well, they aren't too good. Yeah, the same discordant dialogues from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "Streetcar Named Desire" are here, painting with abstract paintbrushes a scene and action(s). Motifs like octogenarians, disembodied voices, impending danger, handbags... Tennessee Williams is a maestro. But in these little morsels, it really is hit-or-miss. The titular play is perhaps the most interesting & actually worthy of interpretation. The others really are kind of like afterthoughts, sketches. He wrote 'em between the larger, more impressive works of course.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

These one-act plays span across the last century, from the 1930s to as late as 1982 (a year before Mr. Williams' death). Some of them took me by surprise. Fans of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" will not find any similarities in them but there's a very slight similarity to "Not About Nightingales" in "This Is the Peaceable Kingdom". People are confined physically or mentally without any hope of "getting out." Reading the text notes in the back will help to clarify the significance behind each of the plays held within. Definitely worth a read for Williams fans and/or actors.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit average. I would say overall, I disliked more of these plays than I liked them, but I've always had difficulty reading plays. It doesn't change my overall opinion on Tennessee Williams though, so at least there's that!

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice collection of lesser known plays by Tennessee Williams.

[Jojo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is just a rating for the title play (Now the cats...). I just thought it was quite weird.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are apparently mostly Tennessee's not-yet-ready-for-the-stage works. However, most of them were thought-provoking, if sometimes scattered or catty or surreal. One or two were worthy of the rest of his extraordinary canon.