The Todd Collection contains a strong theater component, which is divided into the following categories, with links to finding aids provided for each:  

Playbills [73KB PDF] Included are playbills from rare, early productions such as a signed one from the 1935 production of Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! at the Rose Arbor Playhouse in Memphis, a playbill and ticket to the 1936 performance of Candles to the Sun at the Wednesday Club Auditorium in St. Louis, and an extremely rare playbill for the 1940–41 production of Battle of Angels at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. Also included are playbills for almost all of the Broadway premieres of Williams’s plays, such as a 1945 playbill for the Playhouse Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie, signed by Laurette Taylor. Some of the playbills have notable provenances, such as Truman Capote’s playbill from the 1966 Billy Rose Theatre production of The Rose Tattoo and Audrey Wood’s playbill for a 1957 production of Camino Real at the Phoenix Theatre in London. There are numerous playbills from notable revivals, as well as many from obscure local productions. With a few exceptions, such as a 1953 playbill for The Starless Sky, written by Donald Windham but directed by Tennessee Williams, the playbills are for plays that Williams wrote.

Playscripts and Screenplays [33KB PDF] The playscripts in the Todd Collection came to Todd through vendors from many different directors, producers, actors, actresses, and stagehands involved in productions of Williams’s work. Most are mimeographed and bound in wrappers of the Studio Duplicating Service.

Translated Playscripts and Foreign Adaptations [12KB PDF] Also included in the theater component are translated playscripts and foreign adaptations. Perhaps most significant among these is Jean Cocteau’s French language adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Photographs [22KB PDF] Significant among the theater photographs is a series of images from the George Keathley twentieth-anniversary production of The Glass Menagerie at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 1965 and a series of photographs by French photographer Etienne Weill of French productions of Portrait of a Madonna, The Strangest Kind of Romance, Talk to Me Like the Rain, and This Property is Condemned.

Posters [16KB PDF] There are a handful of theater posters in the original accession from Fred Todd; this part of the collection has been significantly built upon by the more recent acquisition of the Bounomo Collection.

Claire Luce Papers [26KB PDF] Claire Luce (1903–1989), not to be confused with Ambassador and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, was a former Ziegfeld girl and noted actress who in the mid-1960s worked on a spoken-word recording of Williams’s In The Winter of Cities and starred as Flora Goforth in the 1965 production of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. The Clare Luce Papers document her involvement in those two projects.

Gary Tucker Papers [13KB PDF] The Gary Tucker Papers deal with Tucker’s experience directing the 1981 Goodman Theater production of A House Not Meant to Stand. Included in the papers are correspondence and multiple playscripts of A House Not Meant to Stand as well as the one-act play from which it evolved, Some Problems for the Moose Lodge.

Liebling-Wood The Glass Menagerie Clipping File [21KB PDF] The Liebling-Wood The Glass Menagerie Clipping File includes newspaper clippings and press information from the 1944–45 Chicago and New York performances of The Glass Menagerie.