About the Play:

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is a full-length drama by Tennessee Williams. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through 'the long run of life.'

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur explores the journeys of four women whose survival depends upon their intrinsic love and respect for one another. The time is 1935, the place St. Louis, where Dorothea, a youngish high school teacher, rooms with Bodey, a plain but kind-hearted German-American spinster. Hopelessly romantic, Dorothea dreams of marriage with her sometime beau, the principal of the school, and Bodey, in an attempt to spare her feelings, hides the morning newspaper, which carries a notice of the principal's engagement to another. Bodey also hopes to make a match between Dorothea and her fat, cigar-smoking brother, and tries to persuade Dorothea to join them for a picnic at Creve Coeur, a nearby amusement park. Their departure is delayed by the arrival of Helena, a snobbish, tart-tongued art teacher, who wants Dorothea to share an apartment with her in a better part of town. Inevitably, a struggle evolves between Bodey and Helena, with Dorothea, lost in her dream world, caught between them. In the end reality shatters Dorothea's fond hopes, and brings her rudely back to earth — but not without clear evidence that, somehow, she will find the strength to recover and go on. This touching, probing play marks a return by Tennessee Williams to the poetic naturalism which first established him as a major artist.

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur was presented first at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina and then produced in New York by the renowned Hudson Guild Theatre.

Cast: 4 women

What people say:

"Williams has rarely been funnier, or, for that matter, more compassionate." — New York Post

"As the title indicates, this is a play about heartbreak, about a house where dreams are as fragile as a glass menagerie." — New York Times

"Williams, as always, writes with poetic compassion … a series of moving and engrossing moments in the theatre." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St. Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evening writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.