Tennessee Williams

Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths.

In his stories Williams has something rather more rare than mere genius. He has a narrative tone of voice that is totally compelling.

Williams’s ear for dialogue, his eye for character, and his dramatic gifts are as powerful in his stories as they are in his plays.

Actors and audiences alike remain drawn, more 70 years later, to the dark corners and sticky places that Williams so fearlessly plundered, both as a playwright and as a person.

In A Recluse and His Guest, America’s most poetic playwright brings to life an entire relationship of depth and intimacy, from the first meeting to the last, in an astonishingly short amount of time.

The Demolition Downtown wrings laughter from the plight of a couple whose lives have been ruined by a new political order bent upon demolishing, literally and otherwise, the lives of its citizens.

Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths.

I do not want to reveal too many of The Strange Play’s secrets—its embrace of a whimsical, ethereal, and, yes, strange, world is most pleasing when it is a surprise to the audience.

The fact that This Is the Peaceable Kingdom takes place in New York puts a whole different spin on the play and gives the poetry a different kind of starkness.

The Strange Play and Ivan’s Widow make for intriguing theater, both in their own right and as a part of the legacy of Tennessee Williams—a playwright who prowled the world’s dark corners long before, and long after, he shone under the bright lights of Broadway.

Steps Must Be Gentle provides a tantalizing peek into Williams’s preoccupation with death, suicide, and creativity.

This absurdist satire introduces us to New York ladies who lunch. And yet theatergoers will still warmly recognize the unmistakable literary voice in Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws.

From Williams, it seems, there are treasures to be plundered still.

You won’t forget Now The Cats with Jeweled Claws—I’ve seen quite a few late-period Williams curios but this mesmerizing 1981 piece may be the most demented of them all.

In A Recluse and His Guest, Williams skillfully breaks our hearts.

A Recluse and His Guest has remarkable language; indeed one listens for how the Master keeps showing up in late-career scripts.

There are people who think that Camino Real was Tennessee Williams’ best play and I believe that they are right. It is a play torn out of a human soul.

Mr. Williams is a master of the short play

Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws is a loopy send-up of New York society, written in a gleefully absurdist mode.

The novel bears the playwright’s familiar stamp on almost every page. And underlying the novel is Mr. Williams’s message that if people can only find a little love in the dark night—a little warmth, a little kindness, a hand extended across the chasm—they will be saved from the icy world of reason that so oppresses them

Lovely writing. Some of his descriptive passages unfold like dark flowers. There’s charm, grace, beauty here. Moise has the sound and feel of art.

There is no such thing as ‘bad’ Tennessee Williams; only wounded, subtle, sad little songs of defeat like Moise that should jolt adventurous readers everywhere. You might laugh out loud in pleasure at this radical little novel. I sure did

Tennessee Williams’ best play.

Tennessee Williams saved my life.

I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word.

A raw display of private life.

You cannot read these letters without hearing Tennessee speaking them.

There may never be a better biography of Tennessee Williams than the one he inadvertently wrote in his letters.

These letters present a self-portrait of a brave man, harassed by his demons, yet always – in those days, with riveting power – trying to bend them to his artistic will.

Tennessee Williams made much of the atmosphere of family violence that shaped his personality; he said less about the family eloquence that shaped his prose. The Dakins, Ottes, and Williamses who made up his family tree were well-educated and well-spoken. They were talkers. Williams grew up in an environment of fluency, in which Biblical imperative, Puritan platitude, classical allusion, patrician punctilio, and Negro homily were tumbled together in a rich linguistic brew.

A compact and wry political gem, The Municipal Abattoir proves (as he said himself) that Williams was not asleep in the ’60s.

Adam and Eve on a Ferry is delightfully absurd.

Summer at the Lake bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Williams’s style: it is compassionate, vivid, lyrical and true.

And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens… is nothing less than a lost miniature masterpiece.

Mister Paradise is an x-ray look into Williams’ soul – it is acidic, sad, and most moving.

Hilarious, horrible madness, A House Not Meant to Stand is ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ on the Gulf Coast.

A House Not Meant to Stand is a ferocious scalding comedy. Tennessee Williams pushed the boundaries right up to the very end.

Williams’ late experiments in ordered anarchy and avant-garde European aesthetics were … very much earned, very much his distinctive own. Williams’ dramaturgy is still ahead of our time.

Just when I thought I was familiar with Tennessee’s stage work, here comes an entire volume of plays that’s completely new to me. What a windfall!

I yearned for a bad influence as a boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.

Tennessee Williams was the only great playwright America ever produced. I do not think we will ever again have the sort of theater that produced dramatists like Tennessee. I doubt that we will see anything like him again.

Williams is a writer of enormous compassion… a compassion that opens up doors into bleak and empty hearts.

Williams’ writing has the complexity––the dual sexuality––Shakespeare shows so often, in his characters. His plays are poetic, with a strong beauty––I like that.

…Mr. Williams peels off layer after layer of the skin, body and spirit of his characters and leaves their nature exposed in the hideous humor and pathos of the truth.

Mr. Williams is a master of [the short play and these] show his skills at their languid best, as well as those qualities of compassion, sentiment and wry humor that run through all his works like the dominant themes in a symphony.

…the language in his plays is as inventive and evocative as any we’ve had.

Tennessee Williams’ forgotten play turns out to be an absolute corker… Haunting, searing, unforgettable.

Seeing The Glass Menagerie was like stumbling on a flower in a junkyard – Williams had pushed language and character to the front of the stage as never before.

Vieux Carré: Mr. Williams is completely in control here…

I did not think it possible to love or respect Tennessee Williams more than I already did, but his collected poems have proved me wrong. The dramatist would not have existed without the poet; they are both separate and indivisible. His ability to channel pain into beauty and his unflinching (and, for its time, remarkably courageous) honesty are revealed in a new light.

Joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.