Blanche and Beyond

January 7 – 9, 2027

Waterfront Playhouse, Mallory Square, 407 Wall Street

The Spotlight Series continues with Blanche and Beyond, Steve Lawson’s one-man play assembled from Tennessee Williams’s own letters. It’s the sequel to Lawson’s A Distant Country Called Youth, which drew on the early correspondence; this one covers 1945 through 1957, the stretch that produced A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The letters are by turns funny, obscene, and unguarded, and they catch Williams in the middle of something he never quite adjusted to — going from unknown to internationally famous in the space of a few years. He writes about Brando, Jessica Tandy, Elia Kazan, David O. Selznick, Laurence Olivier, and Vivien Leigh, and about the plays still forming in his head.

Williams was living in Key West through most of the years these letters cover. He bought the Duncan Street house in the late 1940s and kept it until his death.

Blanche and Beyond opened the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival in 2006, in a production directed by Lawson and performed by Richard Thomas. Three performances only in Key West.

Schedule subject to change. Information courtesy of Waterfront Playhouse — visit waterfrontplayhouse.org for tickets and complete details.