Overview

"A play's not stopped by a curtain, I mean if it's a true thing it continues after the curtain the way life does after sleep."

I Never Get Dressed . . ., like many of Williams's one-acts, appears to be an early investigation of what would eventually become the full-length work, Vieux Carre . It is the last rehearsal before previews of a play featuring Vieux Carre's Jane – a fallen Yankee society girl dying of Leukemia – and Tye – a vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker. Williams challenges the boundaries between the tragedy of any particular drama and the apparent comedy of its development, as the script bounces back and forth from the fictional couple's painful, seemingly hopeless life together to heated quibbles about the script among the director, playwright, actors (out of character), and stage manager.

A part of the collection The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays.