Festival Spotlight - Stairs to the Roof
“I'm just as hungry for things to believe in as you are.”
Stairs to the Roof is a full-length Science Fiction Fantasy play written by Tennessee Williams. The “Stairs” of the title lead to the roof of an office building in downtown St. Louis. A bearded man in a starry robe appears on that roof in a puff of smoke and—with a wave of a wand—dispatches an inventory clerk to colonize a new planet. The night before his teleportation the clerk discovers a ghostly carnival in the city’s Forest Park. And he discovers love. Our production with music and dance is performed by an ensemble from the Republic of Cyprus, directed by Marios Mettis, who brought joy to the 2022 Festival with The Magic Tower.
Stairs to the Roof was written at roughly the same time as The Glass Menagerie—1940 to 1945— the years of American involvement in the second World War. Both plays are set in St. Louis. The action of The Glass Menagerie keeps to an apartment in the Central West End neighborhood, but other places in the city mentioned in The Glass Menagerie—the park and an office building downtown—are onstage locations for several scenes in Stairs to the Roof. The two plays shadow each other in a number of ways. “The more I’ve discovered of Williams’s other youthful writings, I’ve come to appreciate that Stairs to the Roof was not just a momentary thematic exercise, but grew out of feelings that existed deep in the playwright’s core,” reflects Tom Mitchell, who directed the play in 2000, the first production since 1947. “It is a perfect companion-piece to The Glass Menagerie: sprawling where the other is intimate, overflowing with action where the other communicates in silences.”
As he was working on Stairs and Menagerie, Williams was also writing a short story in which a clerk commits suicide by jumping off the roof of the downtown St. Louis building where he works. The option of a new planet in Stairs to the Roof offers another way to quit a job – or life on earth. As the hero of the play explains…The roof is only the jumping-off place to a man with my ambitions.
Note the parallels of escape into space in Stairs to the Roof and the attempted escape by sea in The Glass Menagerie when an inventory clerk (whose mother suggests he go to the moon), joins the merchant marines. Sea and space, and the potential for freedom, fuse together in several Sci-Fi fantasies performed at the Festival this year: the levitating ship of The Strange Play, the mysterious voyage of The Men from The Polar Star, the departure of the unnamed Saint in “Chronicle of a Death,” the frozen bay of A Recluse and his Guest.
Stairs to the Roof premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse, March 25, 1945, in a little-noticed black box production a week before The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Encouraged by the commercial and critical success of The Glass Menagerie, which ran for eighteen months on Broadway, the Pasadena Playhouse mounted a full production of Stairs to the Roof on February 3,1947. Stairs met with a tepid reception in Pasadena and wasn’t performed again until 2000, when the text was published by New Directions. Tom Mitchell’s production in 2000 was staged at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014 Abrahamse and Meyer staged the play for the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. As Fred Abrahamse says, “Williams’ work allows you the freedom to lose all the trappings of realism and really get to the heart of the human condition he is trying to explore in his plays.”
