Something Cloudy, Something Clear

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is, as Tennessee Williams stated, one of the most personal plays I’ve ever written. Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, in 1940, the play records Williams’ experiences during that pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing up. On the brink of becoming a successful playwright, Williams was also to come thoroughly out of the closet and meet Kip, his first great love. Something Cloudy, Something Clearbrilliantly reimagines that long ago time, now recollected through the filter of all the playwright’s successes and failures, joys and regrets. Eve Adamson, director of the original 1981 production, provides an insightful introduction in which she captures the play’s heart-breaking appeal: It is a delicately woven tapestry of past and present, vulnerability and toughness, impetuous action and mature insight. It seeks a reconciliation between love and art, life and death, and-to use two phrases which recur in the play–exigencies of desperation and negotiation of terms. The cloudy and the clear.