Tennessee Williams Plays | Explore His Works

Tennessee Williams didn’t just write plays—he crafted emotional landscapes, rich with longing, fragility, and raw human truth. From the faded grandeur of A Streetcar Named Desire to the delicate heartbreak of The Glass Menagerie, Williams gave voice to characters who live on the edge of desire and despair. His work peels back the surface of Southern gentility to expose the passion, pain, and poetry simmering beneath. Let’s explore Williams’s legacy, starting with some of his most iconic works.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Photo by Marc Brennar, 2025 Brooklyn Academy of Music production

In one of the most renowned plays of the American theatre, Blanche DuBois, a schoolteacher from Mississippi, arrives in New Orleans and takes a streetcar named “Desire“ to the French Quarter, where her sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, live barely above squalor. Blanche’s affectations of refinement set her immediately at odds with blue-collar Stanley, who is further incensed when he learns his wife’s aristocratic inheritance—?the family esta—?has been forfeited to creditors. Believing that Blanche has sold the estate for personal profit and is swindling Stella and Stanley from sharing in the proceeds, Stanley disdains and demeans Blanche, who fights back in the only way she knows: with her genteel femininity. The Kowalskis’ Elysian Fields apartment becomes a pressure cooker of sensuality and class tensions, until ultimately erupting in some of the most iconic dramatic moments seen on the modern stage.

The Rose Tattoo

Photo by Sara Krulwich, 2019 Broadway production

Serafina Delle Rose is a restless widow whose intense and absorbing instinct for love drives everything before it. The figure of this extraordinary woman dominates the small town where she and her friends are living and embodies the exultation and danger of unbridled passion. Her story, and that of the lover she chooses and the daughter she denies, are forged into a play of power, humanity, and soaring emotion. Set among a colony of Sicilian fisher-folk on the American Gulf Coast, The Rose Tattoo is the story of a woman for whom love was stronger than death.

The Night of the Iguana

Photo by Sara Krulwich, 2023 La Femme Theater production

T. Lawrence Shannon was once a man of the cloth, but escaped from what he considered the hypocrisies of that life and instead moved to Mexico, where he now scrapes together a living by giving tours to American church groups. When an entanglement with a very young woman on his latest group has her chaperone threatening to report him and all his (numerous) vices, Shannon shacks up at the Costa Verde hotel, the preferred locale for his mental breakdowns. When a spinster artist and her poet grandfather arrive seeking shelter, the isolated cleric and lonely artist glimpse a gossamer hope of mutual understanding and future companionship.

Camino Real

Photo by Liz Lauren, 2012 Goodman Theatre production

The dream-like setting is a walled community, from which the characters ceaselessly try to escape, without success. Only Don Quixote, who calls himself “an unashamed victim of romantic folly,” has access to the outside. Kilroy is a central figure, an ex-boxer, always the Patsy, the fall guy, who asks so little and always gets short-changed, but he never quits hoping to see the outside. The other principal story is a romance between the aging, hunting Camille and the fading Casanova, who yearns now only for tenderness and faithfulness. There are subdued sequences of tenderness and pathos as well as scenes of cataclysmic violence: the near escape of Kilroy the battle to ride the escape plane; and the wild fiesta to crown the “tired old peacock,” Casanova.

The Glass Menagerie

Photo by Johan Persson, 2022 West End production

Amanda Wingfield is a faded remnant of Southern gentility who now lives in a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, who has a physical handicap and debilitating shyness. The father has left home; Tom supports his mother and sister with a shoe-factory job he finds unbearable. When Amanda convinces Tom to bring home from his workplace a “gentleman caller” for Laura, the illusions that Tom, Amanda, and Laura have each created in order to make life bearable collapse about them.

Orpheus Descending

Photo by Gerry Goodstein, 2023 TFANA production

A handsome, stoic musician, Val Xavier, descends on a repressive Southern town. He finds work in a dry-goods store owned by the tyrannical but terminally ill Jabe Torrance; the store’s daily operations are overseen by Jabe’s wife, Lady. Tragedy in Lady’s past drove her to Jabe, and her life since the marriage has been one of desperate loneliness. Val, with his exotic seductiveness and undeniable talent, might offer Lady an escape route to a happier future—if the town doesn’t destroy them both first.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In a plantation house, a family celebrates the sixty-fifth birthday of Big Daddy, as they sentimentally dub him. The mood is somber, despite the festivities, because a number of evils poison the gaiety: greed, sins of the past and desperate, clawing hopes for the future spar with one another as the knowledge that Big Daddy is dying slowly makes the rounds. Maggie, Big Daddy’s daughter-in-law, wants to give him the news that she’s finally become pregnant by Big Daddy’s favorite son, Brick, but Brick won’t cooperate in Maggie’s plans and prefers to stay in a mild alcoholic haze the entire length of his visit. Maggie has her own interests at heart in wanting to become pregnant, of course, but she also wants to make amends to Brick for an error in judgment that nearly cost her her marriage. Swarming around Maggie and Brick are their intrusive, conniving relatives, all eager to see Maggie put in her place and Brick tumbled from his position of most-beloved son. By evening’s end, Maggie’s ingenuity, fortitude and passion will set things right, and Brick’s love for his father, never before expressed, will retrieve him from his path of destruction and return him, helplessly, to Maggie’s loving arms.

Sweet Bird of Youth

As Newsday (NY) describes: “Its two central characters are the Princess, an aging motion picture actress in flight from her latest screen disaster, and Chance Wayne, a young hustler whom she has picked up. Taking advantage of her drunkenness and his youth and good looks, he manages to lure her to the Southern town of his birth in order to see again a young girl with whom he has had an affair and whom he still loves. Word of his arrival spreads like contagion through the small town. Boss Finley, a political despot and father of the young girl, is especially interested. What Chance does not know is that unwittingly he has infected the girl and ever since the Boss, his sadistic son and his toadies have lain in wait for his return and for their revenge. Chance’s scheme is to use the Princess to promote a motion picture career for himself and his girl. Naturally this falls afoul and in the end the avengers are about to close in on the passively waiting Chance, who has been deserted by his patroness and far worse, by his youth.”

Suddenly Last Summer

The New York Herald-Tribune writes: “This, says Mr. Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, ‘is a true story about the time and the world we live in.’ He has made it seem true—or at least curiously and suspensefully possible—by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. A girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin’s unbelievably shocking death is brought into a ‘planned jungle’ of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, the girl slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness…of the sudden snapping of that spider’s web that is one man’s life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language…and the spell is cast.”

Summer and Smoke

Alma Winemiller, a timid, high-minded young woman, is trapped under the overbearing weight of her minister father and mentally ill mother. Hers is a soul that gazes to the stars, but her life is pinioned by the Puritanical values of her household and community. The return to town of a childhood friend, now a talented, promising young doctor, offers Alma a glimpse into a different way of being—but his recklessness and womanizing threaten to destroy them both if they acknowledge their mutual longings.