Battle of Angels

Tennessee Williams

This play was substantially rewritten and published as Orpheus Descending.

Battle of Angels deals with the arrival of a virile, young drifter, Val Xavier, in a sleepy, small town in rural Mississippi. He takes a job in the dry goods store run by a love-starved woman whose husband lies dying upstairs. His smouldering, animal magnetism soon draws from her a latent sexual passion. As was bound to happen, their liaison soon sets tongues wagging and invokes the scorn and jealousy of the townspeople, male and female alike. Probing ever more deeply and poignantly into the troubled psyches of its main protagonists, a sense of inevitable tragedy grows leading to a dénouement of overwhelming and chilling intensity.