Williams claimed that fame ultimately brought him “spiritual dislocation.” Its presence was profound, both positively and negatively. Or as Williams’ friend, novelist Gore Vidal, observed, this formed the playwright’s “basic repertory company.” His plays make “a spectacle of his haunted interior,” one inhabited by his family. He was the most autobiographical of playwrights, and, as he confessed to drama critic Brooks Atkinson, the thing that drove his writing was a desperation. The art follows for better and worse, but always true and answerable, to the internal drama within Williams himself. The life roars and ranges where it must, defying limits. It is opening night of The Glass Menagerie at the Playhouse Theatre “on the unfashionable side of Broadway.” In the audience sits Williams’s “chic, diminutive agent Audrey Wood,” the agent who believes fiercely, instinctively in his work, the agent who represents the likes of William Inge, Carson McCullers, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman the agent whom Williams will unceremoniously dump thirty years later in a fit of drug-induced panic over the staging of a late play. To have Lahr writing on Williams is a match made in heaven and a magnificent example of the role a critic can play in articulating and interpreting the creative life of a major artistic figure.
Tennessee Williams, on the other hand, is arguably America’s greatest playwright. Perhaps best-known internationally as senior theatre critic for The New Yorker for some two decades, John Lahr is the author of 18 books and is a double winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
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