The playwright intimately understood the conflict between self-sacrifice and self-gratification he had seen it enacted by his parents in a miserable domestic drama whose main message to their children was, “You cannot have the feelings you have.” He always believed that his sister Rose’s lobotomy was prompted primarily by their mother Edwina’s horror at the sexually frank comments her mentally ill daughter made to shock her. This lyrical play, narrated by a man desperate to escape family obligations and fulfill his own dreams, was in the advance guard of a “cultural journey to the interior” that Lahr believes defined the postwar era, as well as Williams’ creative process.
In his empathetic, probing biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr elucidates shape and significance in Williams’ disordered life, linking it to the new epoch in the American theater launched with The Glass Menagerie in 1945.
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