THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES: (1959)
is a visionary text kept in reserve by Tennessee Williams, not offered for public viewing or publication during his lifetime. As per the author's instructions: paintings are created and destroyed in the course of a performance, the bodies of the performers are painted, and the setting is made of paper. Directly influenced by Butoh dance and Yukio Mishima, to whom the work was dedicated, the context is a Happening, with echoes of Kabuki and the anarchic Gutai art movement of 1950's Japan . A wry Mishima stand-in reflects on sex as power as a famous American painter - and the woman who is his mistress -- argue violently in a Tokyo hotel room, make up, make love, and betray each other. A decade later Williams would write a realistic play for these characters – with a different story set in the downstairs bar. THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES is something unexpected from the author of The Glass Menagerie : non-Aristotelian, its imagery lifted of off Jackson Pollock, who Williams had befriended in 1940.

CHICAGO READER CRITIC'S CHOICE:

Williams's obsession with the destructive power of love and his terror of artistic decline come through powerfully in this anguished and sometimes harrowing work. Director-designer David Kaplan's staging—enhanced by Megan Tracy's paintings and Lou Harrison's brilliant music—features intense performances by Steve Key and Jennie Moreau as the lovers and Gerson Dacanay as the Asian narrator. - Albert Williams