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unprepared into Boston and disaster!”

    Miriam Hopkins, star of
Battle of Angels
    Battle of Angels
had had only one day’s rehearsal in the theater before it opened. Added to “a not very satisfactory cast,” according to Webster, were the technical glitches of a complex production—the most bedeviling of which was the apocalyptic blaze at the finale, in which the dry-goods store is torched. Williams’s script only suggested, with the flourishing of a blowtorch, the conflagration that razed the store—the fire played as a representation of both mob violence and romantic purification. The Boston premiere, however, required the illusion of an actual blaze. At the technical rehearsal, at the last moment, when Val and Sandra exchange their final lines of dialogue before being consumed by the flames, there was a mere whiff of smoke. “The store would not, it absolutely would not, catch fire,” Webster recalled, adding, “After the final dress rehearsal the technical staff took solemn oaths on Bibles that it absolutely should catch fire, even if it meant self-immolation.”
    According to Williams’s account of the opening night, things went fairly well for the play until it became clear that a character, Vee, a mystic and painter, had portrayed Val as Jesus in one of her visionary canvasses. “Up and down the aisles the ladies and gentlemen began to converse with sibilant whispers,” Williams said. “Subdued hissings and clucking were punctuated now and then by the banging up of a seat.” At the finale, the over-primed smoke pots began to fill the stage with “great sulphurous billows” that “coiled over the footlights.” “Outraged squawks, gabbling, sputtering spread through all the front rows of the theatre,” Williams said. The torching of the store became “like the burning of Rome.”
    “To an already antagonistic audience this was sufficient to excite something in the way of pandemonium,” Williams said. The first six rows were filled with acrid smoke. Theater-goers fainted, panicked, and bolted for the exits “like heavy heedless cattle.” “Nothing that happened on the stage from then on was of any importance,” Williams said. The last poetic moments of catharsis between Val and Sandra went unheard. At the curtain call, according to Williams, Hopkins, “gallantly smiling and waving away the smoke with her delicate hand,” took her bow to the backs of the bolting audience. After the orchestra had emptied, Williams recalled some scattered applause issuing from the balcony.
    If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco, history does not record it.
Battle of Angels
set a kind of high-water mark for disaster. “The bright angels were pretty badly beaten in Boston,” Williams wrote to a friend. Even the audience in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1896, which booed Anton Chekhov’s
The Seagull
so loudly that the actors could not hear themselves speak, stayed to the finale to vent its hate. Williams left his opening night stunned and speechless, according to his friend, the poet William Jay Smith. “He appeared so suicidal that I could not leave him alone,” Smith recalled. Back at the hotel, Smith read the poems of John Donne to the disconsolate author for several hours.
    The next morning, Williams and Wood, already well aware of their public humiliation in the press—“The play gives the audience the sensation of having been dunked in mire” (
Boston Globe
)—crossed the Boston Common for a postmortem at the Ritz-Carlton with the producers and the production team. A young boy, brandishing a cap pistol, jumped into their path and fired at them. There was a sudden pop, “which seemed to us the roar of a cannon,” Wood recalled. Instinctively, Wood and Williams recoiled and clutched each other. “It’s the Guild. They’re after me!” Williams said. “We both rocked with laughter because we knew in a few minutes it was all about to begin and there wasn’t time