“All true work of an artist must be personal!” wrote Tennesee Williams, the world’s foremost blogger. His sister’s cruel lobotomy, his fraught homosexuality, his crippling fights with illness, drugs, failure, and success: The events of Williams’s life supplied the substance of Williams’s plays.

All writers ransack their diaries, of course. But with Williams the connection seems especially direct. He called writing “my place of retreat, my cave, my refuge.” You feel that Williams, like the intrepid self-chroniclers of cyberspace, wrote first because of an intense private need, and second because he happened to have an audience. By any fair measure, much of what his unquiet mind sent to the stage shouldn’t have made the trip. A cruel paradox: The playwright who created Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Maggie the Cat, and the Gentleman Caller – our greatest playwright – sometimes had trouble finishing his sentences.

“Five by Tenn,” a night of short plays by the dissipated master, captures its author in ways the organizers did and didn’t intend. While assembling a collection of his poetry, a pair of Williams scholars stumbled upon four previously unseen scripts. Padded out with a fifth play already in circulation, the program opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club last night

Leave aside the academic interest in seeing how young Tom busied himself after moving to New Orleans in his late 20s, rechristening himself Tennessee. “Five by Tenn” has dramatic punch as well, moments that confirm the playwright’s knack for the despairing moment, the proud soul trying not to notice the ground rushing up to meet him. Alas the evening, like the playwright’s career, hardly overflows with such glories. For a pleasanter evening, MTC might have produced “Two or Maybe Three, Tops, by Tenn.”

Director Michael Kahn uses a corny device to link the five plays, one that works beautifully. The lights come up to reveal, at his typewriter, Tennessee Williams. The actor Jeremy Lawrence has enough odd angles about him to conjure the hectic Mississippian. His speeches are deftly drawn from Williams’s memoirs and other sources. They encourage us to see each of the plays as an exercise in autobiography.

“Summer at the Lake,” a slender 1937 work, finds sensitive, anxious Donald Fenway (Cameron Folmar) unsettled at his mother’s lakefront house. Mrs. Fenway (Penny Fuller) bullies and dominates him and demands he stop acting so “queerly.” Though neurasthenic and self-absorbed, she is keeping a keen eye on him, determined to stomp out any incipient flickers of poetry, or man-love. Only 26 when he wrote it, Williams already had a flair for giving actors chances to shine. As Ms. Fuller badgers him, Mr. Folmar gets to shoot sullen looks out the window. He’s having fun.

“The Fat Man’s Wife,” written only a year later, shows real strides in craft. On New Year’s Eve, the young writer Dennis Merriwether (Robert Sella) thinks he has found a soul mate in his agent’s wife, Vera (Kathleen Chalfant). He comes to their apartment and begs her to run away with him on a tramp steamer. She’s tempted but knows better. Williams shows glimmers of his great capacity for understanding human weakness here. He depicts Dennis’s naivete and Vera’s entrapment with a beneficent love. And humor: This is a very funny play, thanks in part to the eager, lovesick Mr. Sella and melancholy, conflicted Ms. Chalfant. Her bass-clarinet voice serves her wonderfully.

Mr. Kahn is careful to let Williams point out he wasn’t purely a writer of roman a clef. Personal writing, Mr. Lawrence says, “doesn’t mean that you are one of the characters in the play. What it means simply is that the dynamics of the characters in the play, the tensions correspond to something that you are personally going through.”

This impulse sounds pretty good, but it had a way of inspiring Williams’s murkiest, most narcissistic work. The last play of the night is the already-extant “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow.” He wrote it in 1970, his best days behind him. Ms. Chalfant and David Rasche play 1 and 2, unnamed characters in a dreamy mess of drama. The play wallows in suffering: Ms. Chalfant clutches her side, Mr. Rasche complains that he can’t finish sentences.

As near as I can figure, this is a playwright in agony giving voice to conflicting impulses in his head – essentially, writing himself a pep talk. Fascinating stuff for the dramatic historian, but for the audience, a nonsensical excruciation. When the play finally ended, and Mr. Lawrence reappeared in his Tennessee Williams guise, it was all I could do not to throw my notebook at him.

And so I recommend the following. If you care deeply about Williams, how he became what he became, arrive on time for “Five by Tenn.” Then, at intermission, leave. You’ll miss Williams’s attempt at cut-rate Beckett, and a woeful scene in which D.H. Lawrence plays Dr. Phil, offering relationship advice to an American fan. But you’ll have seen nearly two hours of illuminating, sometimes engrossing drama.

Most importantly, you’ll see “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens.” It’s the only new play that qualifies as top-drawer Williams, and a rarity, in that it deals explicitly with gay life. Candy (the terrific Mr. Folmar) is a New Orleans drag queen. Coming up on 35 and abandoned by her husband, she tries to convince a bulky, hard drinking sailor, Karl (Myk Watford), to stay. It’s not sex she’s after, it’s companionship. In a Tennessee Williams play, you know that can’t end well.

In her long serenade to the sailor, Candy recites a poem written in her honor. She thinks it’s “lovely, not great, no, but lovely.” The last two stanzas capture the essence of Williams’s plays, and their writer. They show why, for all his failings, you can’t imagine an American theater without him:

I think for some uncertain reason
Mercy will be shown this season
To the lovely and misfit,
To the brilliant and deformed.
I think they will be housed and warmed
And fed and comforted a while,
Before, with such a tender smile,
The earth destroys her crooked child.

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