Tennessee Williams Introduction

Playwright Tennessee Williams was a titan of American theatre. 

Think you don't know him? Think again. This guy penned A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, to name a few. His plays are considered enduring classics of American theatre, and we'd bet dollars to doughnuts you've heard this choice quote before. 

Yup. We had a feeling you knew him. We'll be expecting our doughnuts in the mail. 

Williams's plays effortlessly combined beautiful language with a willingness to explore themes no one else wanted to talk about—addiction, madness, sexuality, streetcars...

Well...maybe not streetcars. But the other ones are valid. 

The New York Times wrote after his 1983 death that, "he was a poet of the human heart,"¹ not because he wrote a bunch of weird poems about ventricles and aortas, but because no one dug into the grittiness of real life quite like Williams. He was quoted as saying that he could, "only write about what [he] experience[d]—intuitively or existentially."²

Appropriately, the issues found in his works are ones he wrestled with in life. The archetypes of his plays—domineering Southern matriarchs, emotionally absent fathers, child-like women lost in madness—are modeled after his own fun-filled family members. He lived openly as a gay man when few people did. He spoke frankly about his mental fragility and substance abuse. He was candid about how streetcars are the biggest threat facing Americans today...

Okay, fine, he didn't say that. But he did once say that each of us is a prisoner confined within our skins, and that art was his way of calling out to the inmate in the next cell. 

And what cries they were.