When Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie achieved both popular and critical acclaim in 1945 it was a significantly different play from that which Williams had written. Eddie Dowling's production crucially excised the Expressionist devices of Williams's original script, thus removing the explicitly nonrealistic, innovative elements and transforming the play into an inherently more realistic drama. Undoubtedly this played a large part in the play's immediate success, but it was nonetheless not the play that Williams had originally conceived. When the play was published later in 1945, Williams not only restored the theatrical devices omitted by Dowling, he also prefaced the text with production notes that constitute one of the major dramatic manifestos of twentieth-century drama. In these notes Williams rejects “the straight realistic play” for its superficial representations and its concern with surface appearances. He commits to “a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture” (The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1, New York: New Directions Books, 1971, 131).

In this latest collection of previously unpublished plays edited by Annette Saddik, Williams presents a bolder and more confidently expressionist and nonrepresentational drama, and we see him exploring and enjoying the freedom that plastic theatre allows as he pursues a better exposition of reality. These twelve short plays are an exciting and diverse mixture of themes; some are undoubtedly more successful than others but all have their own fascination. They range from the post-nuclear apocalyptic Chalky White Substance to the wry irony of Sunburst and the complex humour of Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? Williams weaves his familiar themes of otherness, survival and desire into new and often unsettling forms. Saddik's excellent introduction places these later plays firmly within an antirealistic, experimental, Expressionist movement in drama, highlighting links with both European and Japanese theatre, while recognizing the continuity of Williams's concerns and themes:

Saddik draws our attention to the strong vein of comedy that runs through many of the later plays, to the “more anti-realistic, fragmented, and playful type of drama characteristic of the new type of theatre movements of the time” (xxi). These plays rely less on the lyrical poetics and psychological characterization of Williams's early successes, presenting instead a more physical theatre, dependent on the visual and spatial aspects of performance rather than on dialogue and narrative.

New Directions is also publishing in April another play from the same period – the previously unpublished full-length A House Not Meant to Stand. This is one of those rare things, an acknowledged Williams comedy, which the author describes as “a gothic comedy,” “a spook sonata.” This is probably the last play Williams wrote and echoes previous themes and earlier plays: a domineering father, a gay son, a straight son, a daughter incarcerated in a mental institution, a bullied mother, a pregnant wife-to-be and a family inheritance are reminiscent of both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Glass Menagerie, but the treatment here is radically and refreshingly different. The play has comic rhythms, on occasions reminiscent of farce, at other times displaying a rapidity that echoes the incipient madness of the household. But Williams's characters display a wit and tenacity that lift the play far above farce or obvious comedy. Williams's humour is characterized by juxtaposing subtle irony and emotional brutality and the ensuing complexity is both challenging and rewarding. Thomas Keith, in his introduction to this edition, explains some of the difficulties audiences encounter with Williams's humour:

Keith also points out that Williams's style of humour is dependent on performance – that it does not leap out at the reader from the page. Consequently his comedies are at the mercy of both director and cast, and that may well explain the many anecdotal stories of Williams disconcerting audiences by his “inappropriate” laughter during what they saw as “serious” dramas.

These new plays are a very welcome addition to Williams's published work. They are interesting in their own right but, more importantly, they provide a new and more sophisticated perspective on Williams, enabling, even demanding, a re-evaluation of his earlier successful works, exposing hidden complexities there that have hitherto gone largely unnoticed and ignored. Both these publications are of enormous significance to Williams scholars and students of American drama, providing, as they do, a new insight into one of the century's pre-eminent American dramatists.