The action in the text is a lover's quarrel. The main characters are The Man, an acclaimed painter now mocked for his new technique of applying paint with spray-guns; The Woman, the painter's sharp-tongued companion for eleven years, has lost faith in him and lost faith in his work. The man and woman argue violently, make up, make love, and betray each other. Written at the time Williams began psychoanalysis (with dubious results) the text dramatizes his fear of having lost the source of inspiration. Clasping his hands violently to either side of his head the distraught painter whistles for his lost visions as if they were run away dogs. The man's suicide follows soon after: the ceremony of dying is his crashing and crawling through three increasingly larger paper screens on which the woman's body has been painted.

Williams subtitled the text An Occidental Noh Play. Noh plays are ghost plays, and the ghost evoked in Williams' play is Jackson Pollock. Pollock's pursuit of new forms beyond the safety of convention represented for Williams a stage-worthy image of a romantic artist – writer or painter -- damned for pursuing his visions.

Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author of voluptuous excess and precision, also haunts this text. It was Mishima's "modern Noh plays" and a visit to Mishima in Tokyo in 1959 that lent Williams a dramatic form with which to embody self-willed damnation. For The Day on Which a Man Dies Williams created a third role: a self-mocking “oriental” narrator, a Japanese law student (from the same school as Mishima) with a law degree from Harvard. The “Oriental” explains to listeners the difference in the Japanese and Western laws of killing oneself, a subject that fascinated Mishima. A shape-shifting stage servant completes the cast, whose role of self-effacing enablers is taken from the conventions of Kabuki.

Following Mishima's own suicide in 1971 Williams attempted to re-write THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES. That 1971 version has been performed once – but the 1959 version, cataloged in Williams' handwriting as "finished,” is very different – and completely unknown outside a few people. It is 40 pages in manuscript, perhaps 75 minutes in performance. It will be published by New Directions in late spring 2008.

Above Departure performed by Saburo Murakami
Below Challenge to Mud performed by Shiraga Kazuo

Above, a Saburo Murakami Departure

From the "The Secret Script of Tennessee Williams"
By Allean Hale in The Southern Review (1991):

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, who aired publicly the most intimate details of his life, left behind one play that is so private it may never be performed. Locked in a California library, it remains secret because of its form-an experiment few critics would accept-its subject, the playwright's fear of madness and suicide, and because it involves a fellow playwright who did commit suicide in a violently sensational way: Yukio Mishima.

The script that ties these two real-life characters together is called The Day on Which a Man Dies (an occidental Noh Play). Under the title Williams has written: "For Yukio Mishima in token of long friend­ship and much admiration." The manuscript was in a box of original drafts sold by Williams to UCLA in 1970 to finance an Asian trip for his friend Oliver Evans who was ill and down on his luck. Its forty un­numbered pages were in three kinds of type, indicating different places and times of composition, although dated 1960. Williams often scattered his pages over the floor as he wrote and assembled them later, so there was no sure way of knowing if these were in the order intended.

stage direction from DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES :

...the man, an artist, works at his painting: it is a room whose effect of violence and disorder, fearfully subjective, is expressed by great stretched canvasses stacked about the walls, all painted in primary colors in abstractions that seem to utter panicky cries

The Man, the artist, stands over a canvas stretched at his feet: he is holding a spray-gun with which the paint is applied to the canvas: his is breathing as heavily as if he had been in fierce physical combat with the demon inhabiting the canvas beneath. He wears flesh-colored tights on which are painted in color his anatomical details : pink nipples, blue outlines of skeletal prominences, arteries and musculature, blond hair at arm-pits. A vivid green silk fig leaf covers his groin. He is still young, his physique muscled and tendoned as if his work was a laborer's: his face is ravaged by the rage apparent in the canvasses.