The Lost Plays of
Tennessee Williams

Every now and then, the muses perform a mitzvah, just to remind audiences how miraculous pure theater can be. The blessings currently on view at the Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center, “The Lost Plays of Tennessee Williams,” are three brief but absorbing portraits of double identity — souls both liberated and trapped by their dreams.

Williams described these recently discovered one-acts as “the little glass slippers lost in my midnight scramble down the stairs,” and in this intimate, seductive production, his Cinderella selves rush fevered from the ball even while knowing their futures are about to be squashed.

We start in a New Orleans flophouse to meet “Mister Paradise.” It’s 1942, and a Manhattan bluestocking (Melissa Lechner) has tracked down a reclusive poet (Jack Heller) surviving on smokes and anonymity. Intent on restoring the writer to his former glory through a series of lecture tours, she’s stunned when he rebuffs her plan. “Gabriel has not yet blown his horn,” he explains, and the two create a fragile space where death and hope yield to each other in surprising ways.

In “The Palooka,” a veteran boxer (Timothy V. Murphy) bonds with an up-and-comer (Jason Lopez) over a mutual crush on a legendary fighter long gone from the ring. Both need to believe in a man so celebrated that women would crowd him on the street just to pull souvenir buttons from his coat. This short scene, not part of the Actors Studio workshop production last year, needs to find intentions as cogent as those driving the two other plays.

“And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens,” the evening’s longest piece, diagrams the transactions between Delaney, a wealthy, aging French Quarter drag queen (Brian Foyster, astonishing) and a beefy sailor (Chris Rydell). The two perform a riveting dance of self-awareness and self-flight, each character using the other to block a reality he cannot bear. On some level, this is Williams’ defense of gays, radical when penned in 1959 but now—at least superficially—a cultural given. “Just imagine this country without queens,” chirps Delaney, remarking on the limits of heterosexual design sense and suddenly channeling Carson Kressley. In less-disciplined hands, “Queens” could be cringe-inducing, but director Jack Heller and cast find all the colors—eroticism, grotesquerie, power, humor—in each beat.

Like every great writer, Williams has to be constantly rediscovered. He’s always inches from parody, what with his humid universe of pajama-clad cripples and colored lampshades. Broadway’s current African American production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” has restored some of the claws to the classic’s languid purr, and it’s finally the tension between the lyrical and the opportunistic—a perpetual face-off between the playwright’s inner Blanche and Stanley—that propels Williams’ vision.

This production needs to work out a couple of bumps. The sound cues are more distracting than evocative, and the small theater can get as hot as a New Orleans summer night. But overall, the directors and casts work in impressive tandem, creating a coherent, resonant evening. Even the deft set shifts are fun to watch, as a stale, shabby boxing gym becomes a tarted-up French Quarter apartment. The show’s pleasures speak to the double-edged bliss that Williams, and theater itself, perpetually offers: transformation—which can never last.