SNATCHING AND TEARING, LIVING AN’ DYING
Steps Must Be Gentle provides a tantalizing peek into Williams’s preoccupation with death, suicide, and creativity. The Williams estate has recently reversed its decision and the one-act has been restored to this collection, a compendium of the themes, obsessions, and characters that recur in Williams’s work. Identifying the threads in these one-acts that also run through his better-known plays provides most of the entertainment this show has to offer.
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This story was very meaningful to Williams: in 1981, in a letter to Greg Mosher, then the artistic director of the Goodman Theater, he said that the woman’s story from I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow was a perfect description of how he’d felt since the death of his lover, Frank Merlo, nearly 20 years earlier. Williams felt himself to be wandering in what the woman in the play calls “Dragon Country, the country of pain. . . . Each one crossing through that huge, barren country has his own separate track to follow across it alone.”
