Clothes for a Summer Hotel

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Clothes for a Summer Hotel is a 1980 play by Tennessee Williams about the relationship between novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. A critical and commercial failure, it was Williams' last play to debut on Broadway during his lifetime. The play takes place over a one-day visit Scott pays the institutionalized Zelda at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, with a series of flashbacks to their marriage in the twenties. Williams began work in 1976 on what he envisioned as a "long play" about the Fitzgeralds (he eventually cut it down), and had Geraldine Page in mind to play Zelda from the start.^[1]

Williams biographer Donald Spoto has argued that Scott's visit to Zelda was a "clear" representation of the playwright's frequent visits to his mentally incapacitated sister, Rose, in mental hospitals.^[2] Williams himself admitted a close identification with Fitzgerald, saying, "At one point I went through a deep depression and heavy drinking. And I, too, have gone through a period of eclipse in public favor....[The Fitzgeralds] embody concerns of my own, the tortures of the creative artist in a materialist society....They were so close to the edge. I understood the schizophrenia and the thwarted ambition."^[3]

After an unsuccessful out-of-town tryout in Washington, Clothes for a Summer Hotel opened at Broadway's Cort Theatre on March 26, 1980, with José Quintero directing and Page and Kenneth Haigh leading the cast. The play was interpreted by critics as a literal biography of the Fitzgeralds "that got its facts wrong" rather than a metaphorical play that alluded to Williams' life.^[4] Walter Kerr of The New York Times even faulted the play for "the fact that Mr. Williams's personal voice is nowhere to be heard."^[5] In addition to receiving poor critical notices, the play opened at the same time that New Yorkers were dealing with a heavy blizzard and a transit strike, and subsequently closed after fourteen performances.^[6] As a result of the play's critical failure, Williams vowed that he would "never open a play in New York again....I can't get good press from the New York Times, and [critics] Harold Clurman, Brendan Gill and Jack Kroll hate me....I put too much of my heart in [my plays] to have them demolished by some querulous old aisle sitters."^[7]

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• Spoto, Donald (1985). The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little Brown. ISBN 0-306-80805-6. 

[edit] External links

• Clothes for a Summer Hotel at the Internet Broadway Database

v • d • e Plays by Tennessee Williams
Apprentice plays	Candles to the Sun (1936) • Spring Storm (1937) • Fugitive Kind (1937) • Not about Nightingales (1938) • Battle of Angels (1940) • You Touched Me (1945) • Stairs to the Roof (1947)
Major plays	The Glass Menagerie (1944) • A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) • Summer and Smoke (1948) • The Rose Tattoo (1951) • Camino Real (1953) • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) • Orpheus Descending (1957) • Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) • Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) • Period of Adjustment (1960) • The Night of the Iguana (1961)
Later plays	The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963) • The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968) • In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) • Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969) • Small Craft Warnings (1972) • The Two-Character Play (1973) • The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975) • This Is (An Entertainment) (1976) • Vieux Carré (1977) • Creve Coeur (1979) • Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) • The Notebook of Trigorin (1980) • Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) • A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
Other	One act plays by Tennessee Williams