The Martin Beck Theatre was built to be a home for America’s greatest playwrights, and Tennessee Williams certainly fits that description. By the end of the 1940s, he was a household name and a titan of 20th-century drama. With five plays produced on Broadway over a span of seven years, he pushed theater in new directions, stretching the bounds of modern drama—from his powerful Broadway debut The Glass Menagerie to his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire.

John Lahr:

“What he meant to American theater is really simple to say: He showed a way for the postwar playwrights, how to write both poetically and commercially. As Arthur Miller said, 'He planted the flag of beauty on American theater.' And he showed how to write both internally and externally.”

That’s biographer John Lahr describing Williams in this golden age of his career—from 1945 till about 1962. And it was during this period that three of his plays were produced at the Beck. Now on this podcast, I mainly focus on musicals, but with some amazing playwrights like Tennessee Williams having productions at this theater, I want to spend some time talking about dramatic works as well.

While this episode will focus on one of Williams’ lesser known plays, Orpheus Descending, I need to go back a few years earlier and highlight the importance of his very first play to step onto the Beck stage, The Rose Tattoo. This was one of Williams’ most personal and emotionally charged works, and yet it was a play that almost didn’t happen.

In 1949, Williams was coming off the disappointment of Summer and Smoke, which many critics viewed as a weak follow-up to Streetcar. Exhausted and creatively adrift, he traveled to Europe with Frank Merlo—someone who had recently re-entered his life and quickly became both his companion and emotional anchor. During a visit with Merlo’s extended family in Sicily, Williams became fascinated by the warmth, volatility, and emotional openness of Italian family life. From that experience came the outline for a play about a grieving Sicilian widow unable to move on after the death of her husband. When he came back to the US and shared this with his agent Audrey Wood and Streetcar director Elia Kazan, neither of them really thought much of the idea, so Williams abandoned it and settled into a comfortable home life with Merlo in Key West, Florida.

After a few months, though, Williams thought again of those Sicilian days and was inspired to revisit his idea. He began writing a more complete story, giving passion and poetry to his characters. This time around, Kazan responded strongly to the material and offered extensive structural notes that guided Williams through multiple rewrites. It was a collaborative process Kazan knew all to well from his time working with Williams on Streetcar:

Elia Kazan (from an acceptance speech for Streetcar):

“Tennessee knows as if by instinct that the theater is the collective expression of many arts and crafts and it conveys what it does to the audience through a full repertoire of these means: words of course, but action as much, and also music, props, paint and light, sound and color."

After about 6 to 8 months, Williams had finished another draft and called it The Rose Tattoo. The rose imagery carried multiple meanings: it paid homage to his beloved sister, Rose, the central family in the play all had names based on the word rose, and then the actually tattoo itself that was on the chest of Serafina’s lover, Alvaro. Williams called The Rose Tattoo his “love-play to the world” that was deeply shaped by his happiness with Merlo, to whom he dedicated the play.

And the job of producing this love-play, was placed in the hands of Cheryl Crawford, a theater trailblazer who co-founded the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio. While Kazan was Williams’ first choice to direct, he was busy with the film version of Streetcar, so they reached out to Daniel Mann—a rising talent within the Actors Studio circle who had just successfully directed his Broadway debut, Come Back, Little Sheba.

But they ran into a similar problem casting their leading lady, Serafina Delle Rose. Williams had written the role specifically for Italian film actress Anna Magnani, whose passionate screen presence inspired the character itself. But her English was not strong enough for Broadway. So Harold Clurman suggested a young and largely unknown actress named Maureen Stapleton. Clurman had just directed her in Arthur Laurents' The Bird Cage and was sure she could do the part. And theater professor David Baecker explains why:

“To find somebody to play that role, who could bring the tragedy to it, you know, out of something that's ultimately going to be happy. It really speaks to the kind of, you know, veins of emotion that she had, because Serafina is quite a fiery character—lots of loss, lots of frustration.”

Playing opposite Stapleton was Eli Wallach, making his Broadway debut as Alvaro, and he brought a slightly offbeat energy to the rehearsal process, which began in the fall of 1950. They proved to be intense, emotionally charged, and yet highly collaborative as well. Stapleton later recalled that Williams was incredibly sympathetic, gentle, and supportive toward the actors in the rehearsal room. He created a safe space for them to experiment with the raw emotional demands of his text that constantly shifted between tragedy and comedy, poetic language and earthy realism.

David Baecker:

“She served his material very well, and it seemed that they personally understood each other. You know, I think they were both people who were hurt in some ways. They were people who were sensitive in other ways and understood that about one another.”

By the time Rose Tattoo premiered in Chicago for its out-of-town tryout on December 29, 1950, Stapleton was slowly settling into her long and exhausting role that rarely left the stage. Wallach was also discovering the humor and gentleness that countered the play's heavier themes of grief and loss. And this proved a crucial shift as Williams continued to refine the play. In the original version Serafina had rejected Alvaro, and the play ended with her alone in mourning. But during the Chicago run, the play became a celebration as Serafina turns away from grief and chooses a future with Alvaro instead.

Meanwhile producer Cheryl Crawford ran into a problem. In early January 1951, she realized that the original Broadway theater would not be large enough for Boris Aronson’s expansive scenic design. So she reached out to Louise Heims Beck and made arrangements to open at the much wider and more modern Beck stage instead. And it’s worth nothing that this wasn't just another business deal; it was a cultural milestone. You see, in 1951, having a notable production like this led by two women—one a lead producer and the other a theater owner—was quite rare compared to the male-dominated Broadway that was so deeply-ingrained at the time.

Because these two women believed in Williams’ work, The Rose Tattoo had a successful opening on February 3rd. Still, the critics were divided as some said the play descended into “cheap farce” and said the dialogue was “endlessly chatty and repetitious.” But Brooks Atkinson of the NY Times was the most exuberant in praising Williams for creating “the most beautifully written American play of the season, he writes like a man who is free and refreshed.” And yet, during the run he was still giving actors notes on their performances.

When the Tony Awards came around, it led all plays with four wins. Williams got his first Tony for Best Play, Stapleton and Wallach took home acting awards, and Aronson was honored for his scenic design. Rose Tattoo kept audiences coming back for 306 performances, closing on October 27th. All this seemed to validate Williams’ talent and the production’s ability to bring his play to life.

And yet, despite the acclaim, Williams never fully believed The Rose Tattoo had succeeded. He felt the play lacked the tension and emotional intensity he originally imagined for it, and he blamed it on the absence of Elia Kazan. Williams believed that had Kazan directed The Rose Tattoo, it would have become “the smash hit it just missed being.” That lingering dissatisfaction—and Williams’ need for collaborators to affirm his work—contributed to a deeply-rooted anxiety that he brought into his next major project, Orpheus Descending, a play he spent nearly twenty years trying to get right.

“Welcome to Season 3 of Closing Night, a theater history podcast about famous and forgotten shows that closed too soon. I'm Patrick Oliver Jones, and I’ll be your guide this season as we focus on the Martin Beck Theatre—a home for serious plays, musical hits, and glorious flops—revealing just how unpredictable and unforgiving the path to Broadway can be.”

By the mid-1950s, playwright Tennessee Williams was at the height of his popularity. He had just won a second Pulitzer Prize for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, film studios were rapidly adapting his plays for the screen, and his first original screenplay, Baby Doll, had further cemented his reputation as a gifted and provocative writer. But even with so much success, Williams remained deeply insecure about his own talent. Every new production brought with it the fear that the “Tennessee Williams” persona might eventually outgrow the man himself.

Tennessee Williams (1958):

“All reputations in the theater are inflated reputations … I mean, nobody is as good as publicity makes him appear. And if he's reasonably objective with himself, he knows that that's true. And it gives him an awfully shaky feeling. And this increases with each production as the reputation grows, and as he becomes more conscious of the discrepancy between the reputation and the actual self.”

And in 1957, that discrepancy came into full view as Williams realized that even his most Herculean efforts could not protect him from failure. Orpheus Descending became a turning point in his life and career. It was a play that went through many changes and hardships, much like the playwright himself.

BEGINNINGS

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911. His father, a traveling salesman, was rarely home and for many years the family lived with his mother's parents. As a result, the young boy developed a close relationship with his grandfather, and also his older sister, Rose. Williams' family life was never a happy one. His parents were resentful of each other, his mother once describing her husband as "a man's man" who loved to gamble and drink. He was also a man who regarded his son's perceived effeminacy with disdain, often calling him Miss Nancy. When his father got a position at a shoe factory, the family moved to a crowded, low-rent apartment in St. Louis, Missouri. Williams grew to hate St. Louis. He and his sisters were often ridiculed by other students because of their Southern accent. He also skipped school regularly and did poorly in his studies, preferring instead to escape into the world of reading and writing.

At the age of sixteen Williams published his first story in the magazine Weird Tales. Throughout the 1930s he bounced around to different colleges, and began writing plays and short stories. Williams would later admit, "Theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." It was around 1938, he began using Tennessee Williams as his professional name, in acknowledgement of his family's Southern roots from that state. The following year, one of his plays Battle of Angels won a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and was sent to a prominent critic and teacher named John Gassner—who also worked with the Theatre Guild.

The play centered on Valentine Xavier, a virile young drifter and aspiring writer, as he arrives in a repressive Mississippi town. He begins a doomed affair with Myra Torrance, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a dying, tyrannical storekeeper. As their passion ignites the town’s latent hypocrisy and violence, the story spirals toward a tragic and symbolic ending on Good Friday—filled with adultery, arson, and murder.

At the time, the Guild was looking to nurture young American dramatists who could push the boundaries of sophisticated, intellectual theater. They were struck by the beauty and "guts" of his dialogue, which felt groundbreaking compared to standard Broadway fare. And so Battle of Angels became Williams' first play to be professionally produced. Williams wrote the character of Myra Torrance for Tallulah Bankhead, because she was the definitive Southern actress of the era. It was during their 1940 meeting in her home that she gave her now infamous rejection, saying, “The play is impossible, darling, but sit down and have a drink with me."

While he stayed for that drink, the Theatre Guild reached out to film actress Miriam Hopkins for the lead role, due to her big-name appeal and Broadway roots. Plus, she was known for being unafraid of controversial or morally compromised roles. The premier tryout began in Boston on December 30, 1940, at the Wilbur Theatre, a place frequently used by the Guild as a litmus test for new works by emerging writers before bringing them to Broadway. The choice of Boston, however, proved disastrous. And Williams’ literary agent Audrey Wood was there:

“Then at the end there was a fire, not in the theatre, but in the play. And there were many smoke pots which make fire in the theatre, and in the curious way of bad luck, when things go bad in the theatre, they go very bad. The smoke pots miscarried and all the fumes and smoke came out of the audience. And so you had all the Theatre Guilders and the little ladies who know the little black ribbons, huffing and puffing and try to get out of the theatre, you know, going up with tears running down their face. This is the way we started. You could not have started in a worse way.”

The biggest controversy came when the Boston City Council and the Police Commissioner did not approve of the play’s message and labeled it "lascivious and immoral" for its integration of sexual desire with sacred symbols. And this integration was no mistake, Williams purposefully weaved the two together. Take the name of his protagonist, for example, Valentine Xavier—“valentine” means love, and Xavier is a not-so-subtle reference to Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. Well, in order for the play to continue in Boston, censors demanded the removal of all references to the deity and the stigmata. So Williams had to make extensive changes to save the production from both political bad press and the growing moral outrage.

Director Margaret Webster described the censored version as a “castrated and largely incomprehensible edition.” Recognizing that the play was both a technical embarrassment and an artistic shell of its former self, the Guild announced it would close at the end of its scheduled two-week Boston run, canceling the planned Broadway transfer. Williams was then given a subsidy of $200 and told “to get off somewhere and rewrite the play”—which he would do for the next 17 years.

During this period, his career followed a rather circular and indirect path, one that he called ”success though failure, failure through success. East by way of west.” His journal entries show a writer who was constantly fighting off the “blue devils of defeatism” every time something went right for him. The answer, he believed, was simply to keep writing—to move constantly between new works and various projects. It was an idea he put forth in one of his poems titled “Orpheus Descending” from 1955 that offered a bit of prophetic advice:

for you must learn, even you, what we have learned,

that some things are marked by their nature to be not completed

but only longed for and sought for a while and abandoned.

After the break, Tennessee Williams gives Battle of Angels a new life and a new name.

ORPHEUS ASCENDS

For years, Tennessee Williams could not let go of Battle of Angels, even through the highs and lows of his Broadway plays in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of The Rose Tattoo came the disappointing Camino Real, which was a surreal dream-like play set in a timeless netherworld, and it was absolutely butchered by the critics. But that was followed up with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955—and its Pulitzer Prize cemented his status as America’s most celebrated playwright.

So with the wind in his sails, Williams believed he now had the commercial leverage to seek a production of his failed, problematic play. He considered Battle of Angels to be this emotional blueprint for his entire career. And so, after years of growth as a playwright, he wanted to prove that his original vision—that of a wild-spirited man vs. a repressive community—was also a masterpiece rather than a misguided mistake.

Williams had refined and rewritten Battle of Angels five times—line by line, scene by scene—and the title had even changed to Something Wild in the Country. This wasn't going to be just another play; it was a personal quest for redemption. So Williams sent his revised script to producer Robert Whitehead and his Producers Theatre, because of their highly regarded reputation on Broadway for supporting plays that were intelligent, passionate, but not always commercial. Whitehead accepted the project, not because it was a guaranteed hit, but because he believed in the quality of Williams' writing and the poetic tenderness of the story. Plus, the chance to revive a long-abandoned early work by America's greatest living playwright was an irresistible artistic opportunity.

To head up the production, Whitehead brought in Harold Clurman, a director known for his passionate and collaborative style of directing. They also brought back two Tony-winning artists from The Rose Tattoo: scenic designer Boris Aronson and actress Maureen Stapleton. Her character was now named Lady Torrence, and opposite her would be Robert Loggia as Val Xavier. He was an up-and-coming actor who had just made his film debut and starred Off-Broadway in the title role of The Man with the Golden Arm earlier that year.

The rest of the cast consisted of established stage veterans, prolific character actors, and rising stars, many with strong ties to the Actors Studio or to Clurman himself. Most notable was Lois Smith, who had already done three Broadway shows and gained attention for her performance in Elia Kazan's 1955 film East of Eden, opposite James Dean. Now, another important element of this production was music…

In addition to incidental music composed by jazz guitarist Chuck Wayne, the play also featured a song called “Heavenly Grass” composed by Paul Bowles, who was known for his emotive melodies, with lyrics by Tennessee Williams. Now, if you’re like me you may not have known that he was a prolific lyricist and had been crafting poems for decades—often with Bowles. And so, Loggia was given this Bowles/Williams composition to sing in the play—contrasting Val’s idealistic nature with the corrupt world around him. While there is no known recording from the original Broadway production, this later interpretation of ‘Heavenly Grass’ gives a sense of the haunting tone it brought to the play.

“Heavenly Grass”

“My feet took a walk in heavenly grass

All day while the sky shone clear as glass”

As rehearsals and scene work began, Williams noted a distinct difference in acting methods between the two main actresses. He described Smith as ethereal and a restless, free spirit, while Stapleton was someone who hugs the earth and clenches her hands to remain present. And Stapleton later admitted that a paralyzing fear had caused her to "pull inward" during early rehearsals, making her unreachable to both the director and fellow actors. Clurman had to repeatedly challenge her to "let the audience in" and stop retreating into herself. She described the process as "scaring the shit" out of her before she eventually opened up and found the character. This was a process that Clurman recognized when it came to some actors, and as a direct he’d learned to adjust to it..

Harold Clurman:

“The director comes out and he's a magician and … I make beautiful poetic speeches--I have it all prepared in my mind. I've written things and so forth. And I said, "My God, I'm a genius." You know, it was wonderful, the actors say. And then two days later, nothing. Zero. Terrible. Everybody. Geez, after that, look what I'm doing. Nothing. I said yes, you'll do what I said, more or less. After five weeks of rehearsal, three weeks on the road. And when you come to New York, you'll do it.”

ORPHEUS ONSTAGE

However by February 1957, Clurman realized his leading man wasn’t doing it. With the show in Washington, DC for its first out-of-town tryout, he felt that Loggia came across as too naive and young—unable to fully capture the world-weary intensity of Val. So as the cast was rehearsing in the lobby, Loggia’s agent called him to relay the bad news that he was being replaced. Despite the firing, Williams reportedly wrote Loggia a heartfelt letter of apology, though the actor remained deeply hurt by how the decision was handled.

Regardless, Cliff Robertson was brought in to take over—he had been the understudy for Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Clurman and the producers thought he would better capture the persona of a Val with his stoic and exotic seductiveness. Now, besides the obvious dynamic shift as he joined the cast, Robertson also had to integrate the guitar-playing and singing into his performance, leading the creative team to recalibrate the hypnotic balance of music in the show.

Onstage, the rest of the cast was adjusting to Boris Aronson’s set, navigating a multilevel structure with moving platforms and lifts. This open setting he designed shifted between the realistic store and the otherworldly memories and fantasies. All this worked in tandem with hundreds of lighting cues and silhouettes to create a shadowy offstage world. The complexity of such a set was reportedly disorienting for the cast—with its transparencies that often felt more like glass cages. This was all happening as changes to the script were being made as well.

Initially, the first act was significantly longer and more talkative. But by their next stop in Philadelphia, Williams had cut substantial portions of the expository dialogue to speed up the arrival of Val. He also trimmed several of the lyrical, long-winded monologues to keep the play from becoming too heavy, too soon. This ultimately led him to change the title of the play to Orpheus Descending. By explicitly naming Orpheus, Williams signaled a purposeful shift toward Greek tragedy. Williams was now highlighting the poetic story he envisioned, with Val as the legendary musician descending into the "Hades" of small Southern town to rescue his Eurydice, embodied by Stapleton’s Lady Torrence.

The show arrived at the Martin Beck Theatre on March 21, 1957 with significant revisions as well as technical adjustments for the Beck Theatre’s acoustics and sightlines. Opening night was a moment of intense anxiety for Williams and strained optimism from the cast and creatives. The NY Times only added to the pressure by writing that Williams’ play “offers one of the last rays of hope to this season's disappointed theatregoer” because according to the Times only three plays of high quality had opened on Broadway that season.

Well, with the 17-year journey of Orpheus to Broadway finally over, everyone hoped for the best as the reviews came out. The NY Journal-American was rather taken with it: “Because of the power and the brilliance and the humor of his writing, it emerges as a consistently moving and captivating experience…the author has done a masterful job of getting inside his characters.” But we all know which review really matters, the NY Times, so here is what Brooks Atkinson had to say:

“The rewriting is not a thorough success. Orpheus Descending is a loosely woven play -- overwritten in some of the scenes, uncertain at times in its progressions...But it seems to this playgoer that Mr. Williams has his story less thoroughly under control this time, and his allusive style has a less sturdy foundation...Although the script flies off at tangents frequently, Miss Stapleton and Mr. Robertson always keep their parts in focus. Lois Smith gives a stunning performance...Again, Mr. Williams' magic style of writing and his instinct for theatre have created a world that is entirely his own...But this time he has not ordered his world as decisively as usual.”

For the most part, theatergoers agreed and ultimately stayed away from the play's slow pacing and poetic symbolism. Unlike The Rose Tattoo, which had a joyous, healing ending that audiences embraced, Orpheus was seen as a bleak nightmare to a 1950s audience immersed in the optimistic "Golden Age" of the American musical. As a result ticket sales suffered, and the theater was often significantly under capacity during the final weeks of the run, which ended on May 18, 1957 after just 68 performances.

THE AFTERMATH

Williams admitted he was “terribly shocked by its reception.” The quick closure of his play, combined with the unfortunate death of his father a few days later, sent him into a deep depression. As he once wrote, “a failure of a play is one of the world's most agonizing adventures.” And he did whatever he could to get through such an ordeal. For years he had been using drugs and alcohol to manage his constant anxiety, but the failure of Orpheus began a steady increase in his daily intake. And yet he continued to work and rewrite Orpheus until its publication, a year later.

However, for all the work invested in the production, only the sets and costumes were nominated for Tony Awards, while the acting and creative efforts were completely ignored. And the struggles of Orpheus Descending went beyond Broadway as well. The 1960 film adaptation, retitled The Fugitive Kind, also suffered at the box office. Critics often compared it unfavorably to his other celebrated works. And this was the unfortunate consequence of his success—constantly being compared to it.

Tennessee Williams (1982):

“My work I know that I could not have--I could not do another Menagerie, nor another Streetcar or Cat, and I don't think I should be asked to. You know, I can still function as a playwright, and I can still give them innovative, experimental work, which interests me and interests them. If they're permitted to, if the critics will permit me to continue to practice it.”

Williams was a man who wrote every single morning. Whether he was in a villa in Italy or his modest home in Key West. Even after the failure of Orpheus Descending, even after critics began turning against him, he continued working on new plays, poems, rewrites, and experiments. Because as tough as closing nights were for him, they also meant a new beginning and another chance to get it right.

Closing Night is a production of WINMI Media, with me Patrick Oliver Jones as executive producer and host, with Dan Delgado as co-producer and editor. Theme music is by Blake Stadnik. Be sure to join me next time as another show makes its way to closing night.

Wallace/Williams Interview 1958 (Bonus Outro)

Mike Wallace: In Orpheus Descending, Tennessee, one of the main characters says, "Nobody ever gets to know nobody. We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life. We're under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skin for as long as we live." How much of Tennessee Williams is talking here?

Tennessee Williams: I think about ninety percent. I believe a lot of that. I think there are moments when we can get out of it, and those are the great moments in life, the moment we must wait for, the moments when we escape from the prison of our skin.

WALLACE: Would you help me to understand a little bit more of what you mean when you say, "escape from the loneliness, the solitary confinement of our skin"?

WILLIAMS: Well, we can feel, truly and deeply and passionately for another person. That's what I mean.

WALLACE: The communication for another.

WILLIAMS: Yes, it rarely happens, it does happen. Even for a person as introverted as I am, it can happen occasionally.

WALLACE: You've also told me, and I think that you have demonstrated it here that for a long time, that you were a lonely man and rather afraid of friendship.

WILLIAMS: Uh, not afraid of it, but suspicious of it. I’m never certain whether they are liking Tom Williams or Tennessee Williams. And I didn't used to be like that. And I deeply resent the fact that becoming prominent as a playwright has made me like that.

WALLACE: Well, why? Why, because you became a celebrated person, because you became a prominent playwright, did that necessarily make you peculiarly a more lonely man?

WILLIAMS: Well, I don't know. For one thing, it, uh, made me a target for a great many insincere, you know, approaches from people—people that hoped that, uh, you know, that I—well, you know, the moment you become prominent in any field, what happened, and that happened. And my problem is to, you know, get back to being Tom Williams again.

WALLACE: Are you solving that problem?

WILLIAMS: I think so. I hope so.