According to the paper, novelist and playwright Gore Vidal, a friend of the late Williams, is working to complete In Masks Outrageous and Austere for a production that would be directed on stage by Peter Bogdanovich, the respected film director.

The project is said to have the backing of the production company The Halcyon Company, which recently acquired the rights to the "Terminator" movie franchise. A film version of the play is a future hope of those involved. Halcyon's partners are Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek.

The play, variously reported over the years as having the title Of Masks Outrageous and Austere and In Masks Outrageous and Austere was apparently written in the late 1970s or early '80s, around the time of Williams' final Broadway production, Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). The main character of Masks is said to be a billionairess.

Playbill.com could not immediately learn more about plans for the project.

A major production of a shelved Williams play is not unheard of. His early work, Not About Nightingales, set in a stifling prison populated by brutes, was unearthed, revived in London and then moved to Broadway, where it was Tony Award-nominated for Best New Play in 1999. Trevor Nunn directed. Williams, author of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, died in 1983.

In 2008 Off-Broadway's The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) will offer a rare New York City revival of Williams' 1976 Broadway play, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, elements of which were seen in his 1948 Broadway play, Summer and Smoke. Williams had said he preferred Eccentricities over the earlier-produced play. Both plays take place in Glorious Hill, MS, before World War I.