Home
News
In Focus
Business
Metro
Nation
World
Sports
Feature
Opinion
View more »Opinion Columns
Wan LixinOpinion deputy editor of Shanghai Daily
Forum emphasizes BRI cooperation between China and Arab countries
Rights to lower sleeper berths should be softened by empathy for fellow passengers
Sunday
- Subscribe
Brilliant biography of a tortured genius
Print Edition
WHEN “The Glass Menagerie” opened on Broadway in 1945, the actress cast as Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield got so drunk before the show that a bucket was placed in the wings so she could throw up between scenes.
Seated six rows from the stage was the 34-year-old playwright, Tennessee Williams, who was struck by Laurette Taylor’s “supernatural quality on stage.” When the final curtain came down, the cast took 24 curtain calls to thunderous applause, and Williams, wearing a gray flannel suit missing a button, mounted the stage to cries of “author, author!”
John Lahr, the former chief theater critic for the New Yorker, begins his definitive new biography of the great American playwright with this vivid anecdote, then manages to sustain the momentum for the next 600 pages.
The culmination of 12 years of work, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” is a dazzling, deeply sympathetic and psychologically acute look at the life and work of a tortured genius who rocketed to fame after World War II with a new kind of play that reflected his “haunted interior”: dreamy and poetic, passionate and tender, sensual and spiritual, desperate for recognition and more than slightly tinged by the family madness.
“On stage and off it,” Lahr writes, “hysteria was Williams’ idiom.”
Beginning with the opening night of “Menagerie,” Lahr moves back and forth in time to chart Williams’ sensational rise and agonizingly long and humiliating decline, exacerbated by pills and booze, beginning around 1961, when he had his last hit on Broadway, “The Night of the Iguana.”
We meet the leading men with whom he conducted tempestuous and ultimately unhappy love affairs; Elia Kazan, his most important collaborator; and an A-list of actors who starred in his dramas, including Marlon Brando, who read for the Stanley Kowalski part in “A Streetcar Named Desire” when he was just 23.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
