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As one of the 20th century’s most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams penned popular works at the very pinnacle of US theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Years before his almost unparalleled Broadway triumphs, however, the aspiring writer then known simply as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays as he struggled to find a breakthrough. One is The Strangers, a supernatural tale offering glimpses into the accomplished wordsmith that Williams would become, and published for the first time this week in the literary magazine Strand.
It is a “significant find” according to scholars of Williams’s early days and upbringing in Missouri.
“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” said Andrew Gulli, the publication’s managing editor.
“A storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings … as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.”
The Strangers never made it to Broadway, and is believed to have enjoyed only a single performance on a rural radio station in Iowa as part of a short-lived series called Little Theater of the Air in 1938.
But the script’s dark themes, characters and plot twists provide a fascinating, albeit limited glimpse at the style Williams was honing on his way to the big time with plays exploring repression, desire and loneliness. It was written as part of his coursework at the University of Iowa, where he was studying for an undergraduate English degree.
“It is unusual as a radio play,” said Tom Mitchell, a Williams biographer and expert who was not connected to Strand’s acquisition of the work from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It is significant as a ‘find’ insofar as it is one of the many examples of Williams’s writing that hasn’t been published yet [and] is among a number of stories that fit into the category of weird tales, ghost stories, exotic mysteries, science fiction, time travel, etc.
“It’s a fairly standard scary tale, but it’s fun and spooky, and even more fun when read aloud.”
The plot centers on an elderly couple and their spinster houseguest on a stormy night on the New England coast, where the rotating beam from a nearby lighthouse provides sporadic relief from the darkness and the presence of supernatural beings known as “the strangers”.
A series of distressing events leaves listeners wondering if the beings are “a materialization of the occult, or projections of the characters’ unravelling minds”, according to John Bak, professor of literature at Wits University and the Université de Lorraine, who wrote an analysis of the play for Strand.
At the time he wrote it, Bak said, “Williams was still trying, unsuccessfully, to land work in either federally funded theatre or radio broadcasting, but that failure would prove fortuitous, both for him and for American theater, for Tom Williams was on his way to becoming Tennessee Williams.
“Like many of his early experiments, The Strangers, with its portrayal of isolation, fear, psychological ambiguity, and the possible mental unraveling of its characters, does more than reveal an emerging artist: it foreshadows so many of the themes that would define Tennessee Williams’s most enduring works.”
In 2021, Gulli uncovered another previously unpublished work by Williams, his 1952 short story The Summer Woman, found in archives at Harvard University’s Houghton Library.
By that time Williams, who died in 1983 aged 71, had found success, writing the story eight years after his breakout play The Glass Menagerie, and almost midway between publication of two of his biggest successes, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
