Tennessee Williams returns to a pivotal moment in his stormy youth in Something Cloudy, Something Clear, which introducer Eve Adamson calls ‚a delicately woven tapestry of past and present, vulnerability and toughness, impetuous action and mature insight.‘

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is, as Tennessee Williams stated, ‚one of the most personal plays I’ve ever written.‘ Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, in 1940, the play records Williams’ experiences during that ‚pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing up.‘ On the brink of becoming a successful playwright, Williams was also to ‚come thoroughly out of the closet‘ and meet Kip, his first great love. Something Cloudy, Something Clearbrilliantly reimagines that long ago time, now recollected through the filter of all the playwright’s successes and failures, joys and regrets. Eve Adamson, director of the original 1981 production, provides an insightful introduction in which she captures the play’s heart-breaking appeal: ‚It is a delicately woven tapestry of past and present, vulnerability and toughness, impetuous action and mature insight. It seeks a reconciliation between love and art, life and death, and-to use two phrases which recur in the play––exigencies of desperation and negotiation of terms. The cloudy and the clear.‘

Über den Autor

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.