One of the funniest, strangest, most neglected and most moving of Tennessee Williams’s later plays, The Mutilated takes place on Christmas Eve in New Orleans in the late 1940s. Trinket Dugan (Stole), a Texas oil heiress and cancer survivor, is hiding away at the Silver Dollar Hotel with a painful secret; and her buxom buddy Celeste Delacroix Griffin (Arcade), a vagrant, shoplifter, an over-the-hill (though always hopeful) prostitute is Trinket’s only real friend and the only person who knows her secret. But their friendship has been pushed to the limit; Celeste wants money, a free meal, a jug of California tokay wine, and takes anything she can bully, bribe or blackmail from Trinket. When Trinket finds out Celeste has humiliated her by broadcasting her secret around the Quarter, the battle is on and they fight cruelly among the singing “Quarter Rats†— con men, hookers, cops, freaks, sailors, and drunks — until they find a way to resuscitate their friendship just in time to share a mystical experience that changes their lives.
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