SYNOPSIS
Black Butterflies tells the story of Tennessee Williams’s sister
and muse.

In the play, as in her life, Rose Williams is a gifted, complex, and enigmatic person. The audience learns that Rose’s “true life story” is told not only in the innocent, self-conscious character of Laura in the Glass Menagerie but also in the desperate, seductive character of Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire. Unlike the many characters Rose spoke through in Tennessee’s plays, in Black Butterflies she tells her story from her own perspective.

As the older, more dynamic of the two Williams siblings, Rose creates a safe and idyllic childhood for herself and her shy and sickly brother, Tom. But the children’s world is suddenly changed when their father, a hard-drinking, womanizing, traveling salesman, moves the family from their peaceful home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where they lived with their maternal grandparents, to the “dreadful” Northern city of St. Louis.

As Rose and Tom struggle to cope with their puritanical mother and tyrannical father, and their own emerging sexual identities, the very underpinnings of their symbiotic relationship begin to crumble. Tom eventually escapes the oppressive household through his writing, while Rose, who is has a lobotomy at age 34, remains imprisoned behind what will one day become a terminal wall of silence. The shared past profoundly shapes both their lives – hers tragically, his creatively.

Black Butterflies not only depicts the deep love and ultimate betrayal between a fascinating, silenced woman and her famous brother, it gives Rose the opportunity to tell her story for the first time.
Black Butterflies tells the story of Tennessee Williams’s sister
and muse.

In the play, as in her life, Rose Williams is a gifted, complex, and enigmatic person. The audience learns that Rose’s “true life story” is told not only in the innocent, self-conscious character of Laura in the Glass Menagerie but also in the desperate, seductive character of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Unlike the many characters Rose spoke through in Tennessee’s plays, in Black Butterflies she tells her story from her own perspective.

As the older, more dynamic of the two Williams siblings, Rose creates a safe and idyllic childhood for herself and her shy and sickly brother, Tom. But the children’s world is suddenly changed when their father, a hard-drinking, womanizing, traveling salesman, moves the family from their peaceful home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where they lived with their maternal grandparents, to the “dreadful” Northern city of St. Louis.

As Rose and Tom struggle to cope with their puritanical mother and tyrannical father, and their own emerging sexual identities, the very underpinnings of their symbiotic relationship begin to crumble. Tom eventually escapes the oppressive household through his writing, while Rose, who is has a lobotomy at age 34, remains imprisoned behind what will one day become a terminal wall of silence. The shared past profoundly shapes both their lives – hers tragically, his creatively.

Black Butterflies not only depicts the deep love and ultimate betrayal between a fascinating, silenced woman and her famous brother, it gives Rose the opportunity to tell her story for the first time.

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