27 Wagons Full of Cotton

27 Wagons Full of Cotton

27 Wagons Full of Cotton is a 1946 one-act play that Williams referred to as "a Mississippi Delta comedy." Jake, a middle-aged, shady cotton gin owner with antiquated equipment burns down the mill of the Syndicate Plantation, a rival in the cotton business, where Silva Vicarro serves as Superintendent. Being of Latin descent, with an Italian surname, and thus a community outsider, Vicarro, who knows what happened but cannot prove it, seeks revenge by raping Jake's young and voluptuous but childlike and naïve wife Flora. Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 film Baby Doll, which Williams described as a "grotesque folk comedy", was based on this play and The Unsatisfactory Supper, which has two similar main characters. The name and character of Silva Vicarro is used in Baby Doll.