Portrait of a Madonna by Tennessee Williams. Short summary

5 seconds

Miss Lucretia Collins lives in her inadequate reality. An old maid, no one wanted, creates a world of love and compassion in her fantasies.

1 minute

A short one-act play with only one protagonist, Miss Lucretia Collins. She is an old maid, with no relatives or friends.

At first there is a sense of the heroine’s complete inadequacy. She wanders around in a ball gown and felt boots, sometimes sitting on a closet. She talks to a wooden angel hanging from a withered Christmas tree.

Gradually, however, Lucretia’s monologue takes over. Yes, the old maid lives in an imaginary world. But if you take away the fact that the Puritan woman is raped every night with fierce passion by an unknown man, Lucretia’s fantasies evoke compassion, not mockery.

The woman is simply trying to escape the terrible real life into a beautiful fiction. And she lives in it. And with such dignity and such faith that the fantasy seems more real than reality. At the end of the play, however, Miss Collins is placed in a psychiatric hospital.