Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton

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Summary: Early Plays from a Great Playwright
Review: The first professional performance of a play I ever saw was A Streetcar Named Desire. The first major part I ever acted in a play was in The Glass Menagerie. The largest city near my hometown when I was growing up was St. Louis. So I have a close connection to Tennessee Williams and I admire him very much as a playwright but I had never read these short plays of his until now. There are some wonderful things here.

Nearly all the plays here are quite interesting, my favorites of these play being the simplest ones where two or three characters are having conversations: "Talk To Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen...," "This Property is Condemned," "Auto-Da-Fe" and "Something Unspoken." Slightly more complex but still plays with depth and interest are the title play ("27 Wagons Full of Cotton"), "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "Portrait of a Madonna" and "The Strangest Kind of Romance."

If there is a problems with some of these plays, it is the difficulty in staging them; certainly with the kind of detail that Williams specifies in the stage directions. Many of the theatre companies I work with simply do not have the resources to create the kind of wonderful images Williams describes. I loved reading "The Purification"--a lovely verse play--but I thought it incredibly difficult to stage, which is too bad.

Even if you aren't considering staging the plays, however, they are worth reading. It is easy to see from these early plays how Williams was developing the ideas that would become some of his greatest characters, particularly Blanche from Streetcar. If you have any interest in Williams as a playwright, this is a book that should definitely be read.

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Summary: These short works by Williams are definitely worth reading.
Review: This collection contains 13 short works by Williams. This work draws me to it because of the poetic style that Williams uses. Not only the dialogue, but the moods and situations are both poetic--both subtle and dynamic at the same time. These short plays may not be crafted as well as such masterworks as -Streetcar- and -Menagerie-, but Tennessee was definitely on to something when he wrote them. They are strange, but Williams doesn't seem to be contriving strange things for the sake of being strange or making spectacle. The power in these works reminds me of the power of the contemporary poet Louise Gluck; I can't really understand why Louise's poetry or Tennessee's short works are so strong because they seem so simple and sparce. I am an aspiring writer and director--for someone heading in either of those directions, this book is a must read. It will make you think. You must be prepared to not really understand the works, but that hazy quality makes them all the more wonderful. It's as if Williams knows the language of feelings and doesn't employ the language of the mind with which we're so familiar.