Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi, with all the proper psychological accoutrements to become a great writer. His family was abysmally dysfunctional, his mother a narcissist with a streak of snobbery, denial and grandiosity (much like the mother in The Glass Menagerie), and his father an often-absent, smalltime businessman with a temper, active fists and an aversion to his delicate son, who, as we all know, was destined to grow up to be a homosexual, a tough row to hoe in the deep South.

When Williams was five he developed diptheria and Bright’s disease, which kept him in bed for a year. (Just as a pertinent sidenote, National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, accustomed to interviewing acclaimed artists and writers, once noted that a large percentage of future brilliant creators spent time as children disabled and removed from the general population. Could this accentuate the outsider status that accompanies the artist’s interior life and, removed from the conventional world, encourage him to develop original ideas and behaviors?)

In Williams’ case, his bedridden time was ameliorated by his mother reading to him from Dickens and Shakespeare, an early introduction to the inspired language that was to come as easily to Williams as the intake and outtake of breath.

Currently at the Vineyard Playhouse, director Joann Green Breuer has selected four of Tennessee Williams’ one-act plays (he wrote more than 70 in his lifetime) to celebrate the centennial of his birth and the historical unfolding of his art, starting with three pieces written in the early 1940s, and a longer but nonetheless short play (55 minutes) composed in 1973.

The first of the early one-acts, The Dark Room, was never expanded into a full-length play, although it certainly carries forward the full freight of Williams’ specialties: family secrets, dysfunction, the tragedy of poverty and the vulnerability it creates and, finally, mysteries of the human heart that will never be fully disclosed or understood. This cautious critic will say no more: To specify the details of the story would be to ruin it for fresh viewers. Let us leave it with the notion that the end will haunt audience members in that Tennessee Williams’ southern gothic way.

Panic, written in 1945, we can discern immediately as the early etching for the full-blown canvas of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even the name Blanche is already assigned. The other characters bear different names from the ones we’ll come to know in the full-length play, but their personality traits are already painstakingly molded, and their sharp desires ready to be thwarted. With this piece of work, Williams gave himself a finely constructed outline.

The Pretty Trap, written in 1944, involves a mother who is a southern belle with ambitions of steel and a morbidly timid daughter. “You’re almost as pretty as I used to be,” the mother tells her daughter. (Could there be a larger demographic of mothers with narcissistic personality disorders in the South?) A perfectly sane son is caught in the midst of family madness, and a pal of his from work, a “gentleman caller” arrives at the door. Once the daughter shares a piece from her glass menagerie, the jig is up: Williams has drawn another outline from which will flow another masterpiece.

All of Williams’ great plays – many of them made into major motion pictures starring the likes of Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor – were produced in the 1940s and 50s. After that came a string of Williams’s plays in the 60s and 70s that invariably received poor notices. And yet he kept writing, handicapped by alcohol and substance abuse.

The fourth of the one-acts currently showing at the playhouse is I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays. We see a new, nihilistic side of the despairing Williams, willing to mock himself as an out-of-date, purple-prose-laden playwright, besieged by an annoyed female director and two jaded actors, a man playing a striptease entertainer on Bourbon street in New Orleans, and his lady friend, who both want him gone and still can’t get enough of his silken skin and sweet caresses. It’s interesting to hear Williams interject more modern argot. In his famous plays originating in an earlier time, we’re accustomed to a language that’s both beautiful and yet sometimes stilted. This is captured in I Never Get Dressed when the actress stops in her tracks after a particularly purple-prosy monologue to demand of the playwright, “Who talks like that?”

Actor Scott Barrow plays the gentleman caller, the future Stanley Kowalski role, and the stripper/stud with a versatility that’s truly impressive. Dee Nelson plays a strong yet ambivalent future Stella and a delicate, yearning Laura. Peter Stray enacts the bombastic narrator in the first three acts, and emerges as a tender, confused, yet still driven Tennessee Williams in the longer second act. Sheila Stasack is a Tennessee Williams’ lost femme in all her roles: As the mother in the first, creepy exercise in Southern secrecy, as the future demented and poignant Blanche DuBois, and as the phonily charming battle-ax mother in the birthing of The Glass Menagerie.

Director Joann Green Breuer has chosen an excellent method of exposing us to Tennessee Williams without resorting to the overdone resurrection of his greatest hits (not that we don’t love to check in with them now and again.)

The sets by Mac Young and Ms. Breuer involve a seamless repositioning of wicker furniture and flowing drapery. Atmospheric lighting is courtesy of Fred J. Hancock, New Orleans-flavored music is by Adam Lipsky, and sound by the ever-remarkable Jim Novack (Vok to his old friends). An amazing range of period costumes were devised by Amy Elizabeth Sabin. Stage manager is Timothy Toothman. M.J. Bruder Munafo, executive and artistic director of the playhouse, has done it again. (That’s an old joke in theatre circles, because it can be taken either way, but this time it’s intended as purely positive.)

Tennessee Williams: Original Acts will run through August 6. For times and reservations, call 508 696-6300 or log on to vineyardplayhouse.org.