Williams’ Work in Provincetown

The work Williams created while living in Provincetown is rich and varied. He arrived at the Cape in June 1940 to prepare for his Broadway-bound play Battle of Angels. He was 29. His play would flop, but evolved over years into Orpheus Descending and eventually the film titled The Fugitive Kind. That same first summer in Provincetown Williams worked on a short play about his family, then called Stairs to the Roof. In the summer of 1941 he returned to Provincetown to write plays, poetry and short stories.

In the summer of 1944 Williams returned to the Cape to turn his screenplay The Gentleman Caller into the full-length play The Glass Menagerie.

By 1947, Williams was in Provincetown for one last summer, transforming a play called The Poker Night into A Streetcar Named Desire. Late that August, Williams began adapting his short story titled Night of the Iguana into a play.

Throughout these years Williams was intermittently revising versions of A Chart of Anatomy, a play that would later become Summer and Smoke, and eventually Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Williams dramatized his experience in Provincetown in a play titled Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer, a story he returned to 37 years later as Something Cloudy Something Clear.

Williams’ Life in Provincetown

Williams met the loves of his life in Provincetown, beginning with the dancer Kip Kiernan, whose brief affair with Williams haunted the playwright for decades.

In August 1947 Williams met Frank Merlo at Provincetown’s Atlantic House. By the fall of the following year Merlo and Williams were living together: an intimate relationship that would last until Merlo’s death in 1963. In Provincetown, Williams’ sexuality was accepted without comment, and he acted on a robust appetite without shame or secrecy, something unthinkable in the other places he had lived before then, including New York and Los Angeles.

Williams' understanding of himself was formed by his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta, and transformed by his move to libertine New Orleans, but it was not until he left the South and came to Provincetown that he was free to become what he knew himself to be as an artist and as a human being.