Overview
On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on
Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass
Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old
playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one
paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere,
which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing
twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an
American public, Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal -
pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American
theatre. Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts,
acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his
work, as well as the America his plays helped to define.