A theatrical genius!
It's been 27 years since America's greatest gothic playwright died, but Tennessee Williams' marvellous characters live on in the deepest unspoken part of us. Williams, who once admitted "every part of me is chronic", was a man of endless vices from sex to drug addiction. For better or worse, he was one of the greatest playwrights the world has ever known creating timeless insatiable characters through five decades of writing over 70 plays for the theatre including classics A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, The Rose Tattoo, Night of the Iguana, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, Suddenly Last Summer, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Dramaturge David Mamet said that Williams' works represent "the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language".

Born in Columbus, Mississippi, Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams was amply prepared for writing about society's outcasts. His mother was an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living. His father, a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, was at turns distant and abusive. His older sister, Rose, was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions. He remained aloof from his younger brother, Dakin, whom his father repeatedly favoured over both of the older children. Who could have foretold that this shy, sickly, confused young man would become one of America's most famous playwrights.

The conflicts between sexuality, society, and Christianity, so much a part of Williams's drama, played themselves out in his life; he spent almost all of his life as a wanderer, a sexual and religious outcast. Williams, never judgmental of people in fiction or reality, could “see and feel his characters before he wrote them” hear their "mad music”. Streetcar 's Blanche Dubois was the paradoxical Williams drawn to the seedy underbelly of life, yet fearing it. He created many strong fictional women, his favourite - sexually latent Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke. His tyrannical mother Miss Edwina is the seething Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer. The Rose Tattoo and I Can't Imagine Tomorrow were tender dedications to Williams' great love Frank Merlo, and his beloved sister Rose for whom he wrote all his plays, is immortalized as Laura in The Glass Menagerie. With their emphasis on the irrational, the desperation of humanity in a universe in which cosmic laws do not work, and their tragi-comic examination of the conflicts between the gentility of old Southern values and the brute force of new, Northern values, Williams's plays fit nicely into a genre critics call "Southern Gothic." Thomas Lanier Williams better known as Tennessee Williams once said that life was one long nervous breakdown.

The Glass Managerie: a masterpiece!
Of The Glass Menagerie , Harris Yulin, the award-winning stage director says: "Few plays in modern theatre have captured the imagination and heart of the American public as this American masterpiece. It is the story of failed expectations, false hope and heartrending desolation." The Glass Menagerie is accounted by many to be an autobiographical play about Williams's life, the characters and story mimicking his own more closely than any of his other works. Williams (whose real name is Thomas) would be Tom, his Mother, Amanda, and his sickly and (supposedly) mentally ill sister Rose would be Laura (whose nickname in the play is "Blue Roses", a result of an unfortunate bout of pleurosis as a high school student). It has been suggested as well that the character of Laura is based upon Williams himself, referencing his introvert nature and obsessive focus on one part of life (writing for Williams and glass animals in Laura's case. Set in 1930s America, the play is a four-character memory play, and as such it is not realistic, as our memories select only what they want to remember. It was originally written as a screenplay for MGM in 1941. The play actually staged in Chicago in 1944 and in 1945 went on to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award; it was Williams' first successful play.

This PIER 21 Productions presentation features Lisa Giannini (who personified magnificently Serafina Delle Rose in a PIER 21 production of Williams' The Rose Tattoo), Vincent Benvenuto, Milva Franzini and Leo Primerano.