Something Cloudy, Something Clear

by Tennessee Williams

Overview

Tennessee Williams returns to a pivotal moment in his stormy youth in Something Cloudy, Something Clear, which introducer Eve Adamson calls "a delicately woven tapestry of past and present, vulnerability and toughness, impetuous action and mature insight."

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is, as Tennessee Williams stated, "one of the most personal plays I’ve ever written." Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, in 1940, the play records Williams’ experiences during that "pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing up." On the brink of becoming a successful playwright, Williams was also to "come thoroughly out of the closet" and meet Kip, his first great love. Something Cloudy, Something Clearbrilliantly reimagines that long ago time, now recollected through the filter of all the playwright’s successes and failures, joys and regrets. Eve Adamson, director of the original 1981 production, provides an insightful introduction in which she captures the play’s heart-breaking appeal: "It is a delicately woven tapestry of past and present, vulnerability and toughness, impetuous action and mature insight. It seeks a reconciliation between love and art, life and death, and-to use two phrases which recur in the play––exigencies of desperation and negotiation of terms. The cloudy and the clear."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822214755
Publisher:	Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/01/1996
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.

Editorial Reviews

...Williams' plays are carved in the cavern of his soul and in the caves of his own experience.

NY Post

...the playwright is back writing about a protagonist he really knows—himself.

NY Times

This previously unpublished autobiographical playit is based on Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (LJ 11/1/75)was written late in Williams's life and is now being published through his trust. Williams offers a fictionalized remembrance of the pivotal 1940 summer at Provincetown, Cape Cod, where he retreated to rewrite a play intended to be his Broadway debut. While there he had an affair with a Canadian draft-dodger/dancer, Kip, who later died of a brain tumor. Eve Adamson, director of the original 1981 production, maintains in the introduction that the play "seeks a reconciliation between love and art, life and death, and to use two phrases which recur in the playexigencies of desperation and negotiation of terms." Unfortunately, a thin plot and weak characterizations make it a minor work in Williams's dramatic canon. However, as one of his most personal plays, bearing the mark of Williams's poetic beauty and pathos, it is recommended for all academic and large public libraries.Ming-ming Shen Kuo, Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.

Library Journal