Blanche du Bois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but for the Shakespeare Theatre’s artistic director Michael Kahn, it was the kindness of scholars that landed him first dibs on 15 of Tennessee Williams’ unpublished one-act plays.
“Finding these plays is a testament to listening to your voice messages,” says Mr. Kahn during a break in rehearsals for “Five by Tenn” last week. “If I had gotten an e-mail it might have been a different story — I can never get caught up.”
The plays, four of which are world premieres, open the Kennedy Center’s summerlong Tennessee Williams Festival, which started Wednesday. Three of the one-acts — “These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch,” “Escape” and “And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens” — were discovered by local scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis in 2000 while they were rifling through Mr. Williams’ papers at the University of Texas in Austin and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The fourth world premiere, “The Municipal Abattoir,” was given to Mr. Kahn by composer Lee Hoiby (Mr. Williams left the script in his guest room), and the final play in the evening, “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow,” was staged by Mr. Kahn in 1986.
“We were doing research on a book of Williams’ collected poems and came across these scripts in a box,” says Mr. Roessel. “They piqued our interest, because no one had mentioned these plays. I remember reading the first play — ’The Palooka’ — and taking it over to Nick because I didn’t know what to make of it.”
Mr. Roessel, who teaches at Georgetown University, immediately thought of Michael Kahn. They transcribed and photocopied the plays (“The librarians started giving us looks,” Mr. Moschovakis says) and called Mr. Kahn when they returned to Washington.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” says Mr. Kahn, who was a close friend and collaborator of Mr. Williams. “I have many of the later plays of Tennessee’s that have never been produced — crazy plays that might be best suited for a midnight cabaret at Cherry Red — but not any of his early works. I took a look at them and picked three out of the 15 that I thought best expressed the various stages of Tennessee’s personality.”
One of the plays, “These Are the Stairs You Got To Watch,” Mr. Kahn originally dismissed outright. Written around 1941, the play depicts a boy’s loss of innocence when he takes an usher job at a going-to-seed movie theater. “I’m not totally sure everything a writer does should be shown,” says Mr. Kahn. “I wasn’t attracted to ’Stairs’ the first time I read it, but then I looked at it again and noticed all the tiny nuances of the boy’s encounters, and I was impressed with what Tennessee did there.”
“Escape,” written in the 1930s and detailing a sticky and strange bond between mother and son, foreshadows Amanda Wingfield and Tom in “The Glass Menagerie.” “This is a mature work about a mother who has her own problems, not the least of [which] is a ’sensitive’ son who writes poetry,” says Mr. Kahn. “You can see Tennessee Williams grappling with the mother-son relationship.”
Upon discovering “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens,” Mr. Roessel believed this one-act would have the greatest importance to Williams scholars, due to its overtly homosexual subject matter. It is the only one of these plays actually referred to by Mr. Williams, who mentioned it during an interview with Rex Reed in the 1970s.
“For me, the interest is not just because it is a ’gay’ play, but because it is a tragi-comedy about a drag queen that is very dear and very aware,” says Mr. Kahn. “It is such a touching story about an incredibly lonely man — or lady, as the case may be.”
Not many people think of Mr. Williams as a political writer, but he remarked to Mr. Kahn once that Bertolt Brecht was one of his favorite writers and referred to “Mother Courage” as a treasured play. These seemingly out-of-character leanings away from the Southern Gothic are expressed in “The Municipal Abattoir,” which Mr. Kahn describes as “a political metaphor for not standing up for what you believe is right.”
Mr. Kahn holds a particular fondness for “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow,” a pain-etched exchange between a middle-aged man and woman. “It is about the most essential things — love and death — and his language is so exquisite, as is the imagery,” he says. “This play is a masterpiece that belongs with Tennessee’s other great plays.”
The five plays are far-flung in theme and scope, but what connects them is “the depth of Tennessee’s compassion and imagination, and of course, his wit,” says Mr. Kahn. “His characters transcend the period he wrote them in. Look at Blanche du Bois — you don’t think of her as a 1950s character. She could be anywhere, any time.”
The experience of finding the plays and scouring the Williams archives has made true believers out of Mr. Roessel and Mr. Moschovakis. “There’s a humanity there that sometimes isn’t pretty but is always honest,” says Mr. Moschovakis. “And he’s a fun person you want to spend more time with — you can’t say that about many authors.”
WHAT: “Five by Tenn” by Tennessee Williams
WHEN: April 21 to May 9
WHERE: Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
TICKETS: $35 to $60
PHONE: 202/467-4600
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