Williams unleashes his call to revolt in a lyrical nocturne of music and mayhem. 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.
At home, families are crushed beneath the financial burdens of life, and there is no escape. Human value is reduced to supply and demand-this is the reality of Continental Shirtmakers. Workers move with robotic precision, executives grind the life from their employees. Ben was part poet, part revolutionary, and all Williams Ben’s world, though, was unlike anything Williams had ever penned. Murphy, an office worker for the Continental Shirtmakers. To exorcise those memories, Williams recreated himself in the play’s hero: Benjamin D. 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. Said about as well as I am able to say it right now.” But it remained one of his most cherished pieces: “It is all I really have to say. The young Tennessee confessed to his diary that he was doubtful the play would succeed.
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. In them, phantasmagoric characters burst onto the stage, throwing the play’s ordered world into disarray. They contain Williams’s hallmark style-a magical blend of realism and poetry. It would be hard to tell who wrote Stairs to the Roof if these scrawled out scenes had actually been removed from the script. 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. These gray marks are valuable bits of graffiti: they show the young playwright’s struggle as he searched for his voice. An angry pencil has scratched out huge chunks of Tennessee Williams’s manuscript for Stairs to the Roof.
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