When Jack Heller was a student living in New Jersey, he happened to be walking through Manhattan one day in 1959 when he chanced upon a theater presenting a new play by Tennessee Williams: "Sweet Bird of Youth." And the playwright himself was standing outside.
"I said, 'Mr. Williams, I'm a student, I don't have much money and would love to see this play,' " Heller recalls.
Williams let Heller in to the play. Heller had been a fan of Williams ever since he saw the movie version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" when he was 13. "It just blew me away," he says. "It was amazing."
More than half a century later, the playwright still has that effect on Heller -- who acts in one and directs another of three recently discovered plays by Williams. Called "The Lost Plays of Tennessee Williams," the trio opens on Thursday at the Coast Playhouse, after having had its West Coast premiere at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center's Tomlin/Wagner Cultural Arts Center.
"These are little lost jewels, gems, as timely as ever," says producer Jon Imparato. "We haven't updated them. It's like finding lost treasure in your attic. The actors are giving tour de force performances."
Williams, who died in 1983, was best known for such works as "The Glass Menagerie," "A Streetcar Named Desire," "The Rose Tattoo" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," but he left behind more than 70 unpublished plays, many of them one-act studies. "The little glass slippers lost in my midnight scramble down the stairs," Williams called these works.
As an actor and director, Heller never lost his fascination with Williams. He even portrayed the playwright in "Tennessee in the Summer" in 2000 at the Egyptian Arena in Hollywood.
Five years later, Heller picked up a copy of "Mister Paradise and Other One-act Plays," a newly published collection of 13 works never produced during Williams' life.
"I've always admired Williams," says Heller, who is working on a project to create a Williams festival in L.A. "Why not do an evening of these plays?"
"Lost Plays" lasts just about 90 minutes -- yet it manages to run a gamut of themes and moods, from bitter disappointment to unrequited longing, from a writer's study to a boxing locker room and the gay demimonde of New Orleans.
The first play, "Mister Paradise," which was written around 1942, stars Heller as a drunken, has-been writer, reveling in his own failure and fending off the proffered help of a young acolyte.
