As with so many other desperate Williams’ heroines, the play ends with Bertha — who has by this time reluctantly crawled out of bed and half-sat, half-writhed on the floor in torment — sitting huddled and defeated, descending into madness as she cries out for her savior/ex-lover/brother/john/pimp/father to rescue her, demanding that a fellow tenant/prostitute (the lovely, cynically resigned Jovanka Clares) take a letter she dictates for him. The would-be recipient is a man she still loves and once “worked for” in another town, and Bertha, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, feels confident that he will send for her at once when she hears of his plight. The play ends as she waits for the authorities to come, once again declaring her undying, unrequited love for her long-lost would-be savior.

Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? written in 1935 when the author was in his early 20s, is staged for this production in the 1920s, when Williams would have been either a young child or teenager — way too young to escape his dysfunctional home environment. In it, Mrs. Yorke (played brilliantly by Susan Capra) is The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda incarnate, while Lily (played on alternate nights by Christie Booker and and Christina Christman) is her bookish, somewhat defiant but helpless teenage daughter. The young Williams is not a participant in the action here, but rather a “silent” observer of the psychotic dynamic between a controlling, deluded “fading southern belle” of a mother and her deeply troubled young sister.

(It is worth noting that despite William’s unabashed exploration of the depths of human suffering and “vice,” the only thing that could possibly offend a 2007 audience was the fact that Lily chain smoked onstage, and caveats were posted in the lobby and in the program to that effect.)

The Turtle’s Shell Theater is a small venue, and I was seated in the front row, no more than a foot or two from the front of the small stage where Booker's fidgety, twitching, tightly wound Lily was so close that I could have easily grabbed a cig from her crumpled pack and joined her as she puffed away throughout the play. This intimate staging served the production well, since one could not help but feel that one was, like the young Williams, a silent and powerless observer who was nevertheless a mere arm's length away from the action and the characters being brought to life. As the “unseen, unheard” child, Williams would forever remain the third inhabitant of that same “room” in his memory — desperately but helplessly invested in the events unfolding and their ultimate outcome.

Mrs. Yorke, who is seen preparing for an evening out as the play opens, will leave Lily mercifully alone to her own devices — in this case, her cigarettes and her books — for a few hours. Nevertheless, she can’t resist nagging Lily not only about her compulsive smoking but about her apparent refusal to engage the attentions of suitable young men. She reminds Lily of the opportunity she missed on a recent cruise which was also attended by a number of charming young bachelors. Lily, however, was well aware that these bachelors were eminently unsuitable since they were, in fact, all homosexual.