What is the provenance of the text?
In the UCLA library there is a folder, deposited in 1970, with unnumbered pages, marked in Tennessee Williams’ handwriting “The Day on Which a Man Dies, an Occidental Noh play dedicated to Yukio Mishima. Finished 1960. The American scholar Allean Hale, her interest piqued by a throwaway comment Williams made in an interview that he had written a Noh play, tracked down the text and first wrote about it in 1991. A later version of the text — dated 1971 with significant differences — was circulated by Williams’ agents in the ’70s and performed in 2001 at the White Barn Theater in Connecticut. The 2007 Chicago production of The Day on Which a Man Dies is the world premiere of the original UCLA text, edited by Annette Saddik, which will be published by New Directions in the spring of 2008.
