"The play is memory . . . the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy." (Tom Wingfield, The Glass Menagerie)

The words of Tom Wingfield could easily have been spoken by the Writer, narrator and lead character of Tennessee Williams' later, more experimental and less renowned Vieux Carre (1978). Imagine the Great Depression in New Orleans, a place of world- renowned celebration in a time when going to bed at night was a celebration of having merely made it through another day. Now picture a single room in a dilapidated boarding house of the French Quarter, where rickety crackling footsteps sag into the scratched and stained wood floor. Two deluded bag ladies wail and coo the downfall of their societal positions, while a "true" Southern gent shouts through wheezing coughs at the travesty of his being accused. Finally the mindless dribbling of small talk is drowned out by the deranged orders of a frail old lady on the brink of sanity having just poured boiling water into a hole in the floor searing the neighbors below. Now picture a woman cruising through this scene, humming effortlessly to the tune of "In the Garden". Like many of his plays, the explosive contrast of humor and beauty with pain and anger characterize the poetic song that is Vieux Carre.

Expectations of plot will remain unfulfilled by the romantic imagery of Williams' Vieux Carre. The play translates visually more like a collection of tattered portraits painted from memory than a fluid motion picture. Like Picasso's violent and emotive Guernica of the same period, Williams Vieux Carre experiments with form and structure to paint a portrait of intense emotional conflict in a dark and vacuous time. The characters of Vieux Carre struggle desperately in the dimness of economic and emotional disadvantage, lit only by the faintness of their hope.

Photograph by David Perez