Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Tennessee Williams’s last play, was first performed by the Jean Cocteau Repertory on August 24, 1981, at The Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York. Eve Adamson, whose company performed several of Williams’s later plays including Suddenly Last Summer, In The Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, and Kirche, Kutchen, Kinder: An Outrage for the Stage, directed the play. Like many of the later plays, Something Cloudy, Something Clear was a critical disappointment. While Tennessee Williams continued to evolve as a playwright in the 1960’s and 70’s, critics rejected his later avant garde work and demanded the Williams of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear shows Williams, embodied by the play’s protagonist August, reconciling...
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Citation: Sanderson, Jordan, Raymond Wachter. "Something Cloudy, Something Clear". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 March 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16712, accessed 05 December 2025.]
