Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws and Other One-Act Plays

This new collection of fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams’s most potent, witty and wild late plays written from 1971 to 1982—Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws; a pair of nonagenarians struggle to cope on the Queen Elizabeth II in Lifeboat Drill; the poet Hart Crane makes peace with his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle; and madness bewitches the occupants during a nursing home strike in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom. Previously unpublished late plays include Aimez-Vous Ionesco?, a parody of the Theater of the Absurd; A Recluse and His Guest, a fable about a traveling woman in a dark world who can only go forward, never back; and Ivan’s Widow, in which a psychiatrist and his young female patient engage in sexual power play that leads to murder.