The End of Tennessee Williams: In Masks Outrageous and Austere
Let’s hand it to Tennessee Williams: he picked some of the best titles for his plays.
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
The Night of the Iguana,
Small Craft Warnings,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel. The very last of his plays,
In Masks Outrageous and Austere—it had never been produced prior to this recent Culture Project
production, which just closed early due to mixed-to-negative reviews—is no exception; the title comes from a line in an Elinor Wylie poem, and it has both the rhythm Williams generally wanted and the sense, the peacock feathers and the steel. Williams worked on it for fives years, from 1978 to his death in 1983, when it passed into the hands of his friend Gavin Lambert, where it languished until Lambert’s death. Several people, notably Gore Vidal and Peter Bogdanovich, worked to get the play ready for production, and this vital premiere of it at the Culture Project was imaginatively directed by David Schweizer and acted to within an inch of its life by its star, Shirley Knight, for whom Williams wrote
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.
minor Williams is often better than major anyone else
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