Black Butterflies is a poignant and poetic account of Tennessee Williams’ older sister and creative muse, Rose. Marylou DiPietro gives Rose her overdue “me, too” moment and releases her long quieted voice in this lovely play. I was honored to have been a small part of the play’s journey at The Road in Los Angeles.

– Riley Steiner, Director of the first West Coast reading of Black Butterflies by Marylou DiPietro

In Black Butterflies the characters come alive, the scenes are beautifully selected and dramatized, the final push of the play, toward the catastrophe, is genuinely frightening. Ms. DiPietro’s rendering is truthful, deep, and beautifully written. I am looking forward to seeing the remarkable production I believe it deserves to have.

– Austin Pendleton

Such a great reading of Black Butterflies at the Peter Sharp Theater last night! The play brilliantly explores the relationship between the members of Tennessee Williams’ family. Marylou DiPietro writes about family dysfunction with brutal honesty and compassion.

– Sally Cook, Writer

I was immediately drawn in by Marylou DiPietro’s intriguing, poetic play about the enigmatic Rose Williams. Those of us who know and love the plays of Tennessee Williams know about Rose and her importance in her brother’s life. However, not until my involvement with Black Butterflies did I learn that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t as much the shy, “crippled” Laura Wingfield who was modeled after Rose Williams (that character was actually more representative of young Tom Williams) as it was the beautiful, tragic, Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire.

Black Butterflies tells the true story of Rose for the first time. Rose tells us, in her own voice, what happened in her childhood house and why her mother and father wanted so desperately to “cut out the truth.” Rose’s story is so important because we know aspects of her tragic life from her famous playwright brother’s plays and also because this depiction is so fundamentally distorted. Painstakingly researched, the facts of the real life story provide a guiding through-line for the play. The challenge is to turn those facts into a theatre piece. I believe that Marylou, in her play, has drawn the characters with clear, vivid strokes and has presented their story in a truly dramatic way. At this creative juncture, I believe her choices — the themes of the play, the characters – their objectives, needs, and desires, – the action of the scenes, and how conflicts are addressed and resolved — are ready to be tested and executed so that she may achieve her vision for this play.

– Nat Warren-White, director of Staged Readings of Black Butterflies at The Boston Playwrights’ Theater and The Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Black Butterflies a brilliant play and a story that needs to be told.

– Bess Miller, actor

Marylou has spent many years exhaustively researching the subject matter: the life of Tennessee Williams’ only sister, Rose. Her writing is poetic and moving, with great heart for Rose’s tragic struggle. Black Butterflies is a theatrically imaginative and dramatically rich play that peels off the layers and exposes the close and tragic relationship of Tennessee Williams and his sister Rose.

– Buzz McLaughlin, author of “The Playwrights Process”

Big thanks to Frank Collison, Jessie Einstein, Laura Gardner, Kyle Hall, Alex Smith, Tim Wardell, and Jessica Suzanne Wierzba for making Black Butterflies come alive on stage.