America: Boom, Bust, and Baseball Guide: A Surreal Prayer, Tennessee Williams’s Stairs to the Roof

An angry pencil has scratched out huge chunks of Tennessee Williams’s manuscript for Stairs to the Roof. These gray marks are valuable bits of graffiti: they show the young playwright’s struggle as he searched for his voice. The artist who had yet to give us The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was wrestling with inner demons, fighting the words he had just written.

It would be hard to tell who wrote Stairs to the Roof if these scrawled out scenes had actually been removed from the script. They contain Williams’s hallmark style-a magical blend of realism and poetry. In them, phantasmagoric characters burst onto the stage, throwing the play’s ordered world into disarray. When he rejected the play, legendary producer David Merrick wrote to the fledgling playwright, “I don’t think a producer would be likely to risk a more than average amount of production money on a fantasy.” Merrick’s criticisms were unsurprising to Williams. The young Tennessee confessed to his diary that he was doubtful the play would succeed. But it remained one of his most cherished pieces: “It is all I really have to say. Said about as well as I am able to say it right now.”

When he wrote Stairs to the Roof in 1940, Williams was reflecting on what he described as eighteen months spent in hell, trapped inside the celotex interior of the Continental Shoemakers offices. To exorcise those memories, Williams recreated himself in the play’s hero: Benjamin D. Murphy, an office worker for the Continental Shirtmakers. Ben was part poet, part revolutionary, and all Williams; Ben’s world, though, was unlike anything Williams had ever penned.

Workers move with robotic precision, executives grind the life from their employees. Human value is reduced to supply and demand-this is the reality of Continental Shirtmakers. At home, families are crushed beneath the financial burdens of life, and there is no escape. This is how Williams opens Stairs to the Roof, and it is from these heavy, opening moments that Williams’s play cuts loose from reality.

Williams unleashes his call to revolt in a lyrical nocturne of music and mayhem. A joyous carnival spills onto the stage as Ben breaks away from job and family. Throughout this all-night extravaganza, masked players and wild animals run amok and awkward lovers become animals of grace and beauty. The play is Williams’s “prayer for the wild at heart that are kept in cages,” and its surreal chaos reveals what Williams values above all else-freedom. It is ironic that Williams offered to eliminate this revelation in order to appease the financial interests of producers.

Preparing potential producers for the manuscript, Williams prefaced his pencil-marks with an apology: “I know that there is a good deal of didactic material in this play, some of which will probably burden the reader. I have [indicated] some parts which might be cut, when and if the play is ever produced.” He then cut his lyrical carnival. The lights, the music, the phantasmagoric characters: gone.

The ruin of Williams’s edits is instantaneous. Without the whimsy of his nocturnal adventure, Ben’s heroic revolt dwindles into a tantrum. In order to get his play produced, the young Williams strangled his voice; however, his talent was not unnoticed. In his letter turning the play down, Merrick included the following: “I don’t think I should advise you to write about more commercial subjects because I feel that you write so well and with so much genuine feeling in your present form. Let’s just hope that soon they’ll get around to wanting something better.” They eventually did: two years later, in 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago. Its success confirmed Williams’s ability as a writer, and made him a national sensation.

When it was finally produced in 1945, Stairs to the Roof was actually staged in its entirety. Benjamin D. Murphy was the revolutionary that Williams intended, and his rebellion exploded onto the stage. That rebellion is a fury of action that is unlike any other in all of Williams’s work: it is one of youthful hope. It is a call for change, and one that rings so loudly and clearly that Williams himself nearly silenced it.

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