Now the cats with jeweled claws and other one-act plays

208 pages Published July 12th 2016 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 Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman’s entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span.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. "This new collection of fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams's most potent, witty and wild late plays written from 1971 to 1982--Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws; a pair of nonagenarians struggle to cope on the Queen Elizabeth II in Lifeboat Drill; the poet Hart Crane makes peace with his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle; and madness bewitches the occupants during a nursing home strike in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom. Previously unpublished late plays include Aimez-Vous Ionesco?, a parody of the Theater of the Absurd; A Recluse and His Guest, a fable about a traveling woman in a dark world who can only go forward, never back; and Ivan's Widow, in which a psychiatrist and his young female patient engage in sexual power play that leads to murder."-- Provided by publisher “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 Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman’s entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span.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.