Small Craft Warnings is a play by Tennessee Williams, an expansion of an earlier one-act play, Confessional, that was included in the Williams Dragon Country compilation of 1970. It centers on a motley group of people gathered in a seedy coastal bar in Southern California.
The characters include lusty, needy beautician Leona Dawson, trailer park trash who repeatedly plays Jascha Heifetz's recording of Tchaikovsky's Serenade Melancholique on the jukebox; her ne'er-do-well live-in lover Bill McCorkle; Doc, an alcoholic who lost his license to practice medicine but still does; Violet, who risks becoming the target of Leona's wrath when she flirts with Bill; Steve, the middle-aged short order cook who is resigned to his fate slinging hash in a waterfront dive; Monk, the congenial bartender; and two gay men – Quentin, a washed-up screenwriter, and Bobby, a young man bicycling from Iowa to Mexico that Quentin picked up on the road.
The play is scarely plot based, and might be considered more of a kaleidoscopic pastiche of monologues delivered in a spotlight by each of the characters as the action around them becomes frozen and muted. Through them they reveal their loneliness and the emptiness of their existence.
The play premiered on April 2, 1972 at the off-Broadway Truck and Warehouse Theatre. Richard Altman directed a cast that included Helena Carroll as Leona and William Hickey as Steve. During the course of the run, Tennessee Williams himself took over the role of Doc. Candy Darling, an ethereal blonde transsexual performer from the Warhol stable of "superstars," played the role of Violet, a bewitching, trampy girl whom most of the male characters desire.
In his review in the New York Times, Clive Barnes said, "This is almost a dramatic essay rather than a play, a temperature reading of a time and a place . . . This is perhaps best regarded as a play in waiting, a pleasurable and rewarding exercise of style . . . This is not a major Tennessee Williams play, but it will certainly do until the next one comes along, and I suspect it may survive better than some of the much touted products of his salad years."
Famous quotes containing the words small, craft and/or warnings:
“The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“He has more to impart than to receive from his generation. He is another such a strong and finished workman in his craft as Samuel Johnson was, and, like him, makes the literary class respectable.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)