Epilogue

Abstract

In Williams’s one-act play that was originally to be part of Vieux Carré, I Never Get Dressed Till after Dark on Sundays, the playwright offers these final words:

A play’s not stopped by a curtain, I mean if it’s a true thing it continues after the curtain the way life does after sleep. It comes out of the night stop and goes into the next day. And maybe it goes on in the minds and hearts of the audience after […].¹

Williams’s curtain never descended that tragic night in February 1983. While it did come down for a long while, when Maria St Just was still alive and ruled the Williams Estate with an iron fist, that pause proved only to be an entr’acte, or, as Williams would have preferred, an intermezzo. He left behind him a rich theatre legacy, whose centennial was recently celebrated by academics throughout the world in cities as far as New Orleans and Narni (Italy), Clarksdale and Cáceres (Spain), and St Louis and Nancy (France); but he also bequeathed the world numerous unpublished or recently published plays, stories, poems, film scripts, and paintings that are now enjoying the life denied them in Williams’s final years alive.