Battle of Angels
by Tennessee Williams
“A play about cheap, white trash….indecent and improper….lascivious and immoral.”
— Boston Police Commissioner Joseph F. Timilty, 1940
“Low and common.”
— Joan Crawford (declining the role, which had been enlarged to make the play more attractive to her)
“Putrid.”
- Unnamed (and outspoken) Boston City Councilman
The battles Tennessee Williams fought and lost with Hollywood censors are famous. Displays of a woman’s lust or the outburst of a man’s gay ways were chopped off (despite the author’s protests) in order to release the money-making films adapted from Williams’ Broadway hits: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth.
Battle of Angels is the play that began Williams’ battle with censors. A production of Battle was meant to hit Broadway after a Boston try-out in 1940. Though not exactly banned in Boston, its run was cut short after the Boston City Council demanded an investigation. “Lascivious and immoral” reported Boston Police Commissioner Joseph F. Timilty. The show’s star Miriam Hopkins responded, “The dirt is something in the minds of some of the people who have seen it. They read meanings into it according to their own suppressed feelings.”
For the play to continue in Boston, censors demanded certain lines be cut, including: “All references to [the] deity and Christ,” and “to [the] stigmatae” on the hero’s hands. A painting of the hero which resembled Jesus started a scandal of its own among those in the audience who hadn’t been following the plot and thought a portrait of their Savior was being desecrated. A temporary solution had been to put the painting in a closet. Eventually the painting was changed so it looked nothing like Jesus. Then it could be destroyed in Boston without offense.
When Margaret Webster, the original director of Battle, returned to Boston to watch the censored version in performance she wrote to say she “found a castrated and largely incomprehensible edition of the play dying an inevitable death at the Wilbur Theatre.”
The uncensored text will be presented by Blessed Unrest, directed by Jessica Burr. Blessed Unrest is a subversive physical theater ensemble that has been creating award-winning original theatre in NYC and touring internationally for 20 years.