The first thing you should know before reading Battle for Angels is that it was rewritten as Orpheus Descending because it wouldn't be reproduced after its initial failure in Boston. Williams wrote this before he became famous; it was his first play written for the stage. It's one of his more passionate plays, filled with emotional monologues unleashed by desire (although you could make that argument for everything he writes).
A young man escaping the law after being falsely accused of rape comes to a small town in the deep south, where he's crowded by a bunch of gossipy older women that fancy him. He's hired by a woman looking for a way out of her marriage, though she keeps this a secret at first. Things start to go wrong after the intense desire of these women cause them to lose their minds over his raw attractiveness. It makes them do some amusingly girlish things, which had me laughing at times. You'd think Val, the lusty fugitive, is based on Tennessee and his own experiences with women, but it turns out the playwright was openly gay.
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