Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

"Yes, yes, yes. Lahr makes the case, and I don’t think it’s a far-fetched claim, that sexuality and human relationships were at the heart of his theatrical output. Lahr goes through Williams’s relationships with his family: his parents, his sister Rose—who we haven’t talked much about, but who was a central figure in his life and whom Blanche and Laura were directly based on. Lahr is a consummate biographer. Before this book, he had already tackled Joe Orton’s life in Prick Up Your Ears . So this book is the product of a man who is deeply ingrained in transatlantic theatrical culture. He doesn’t deliver a milquetoast, paint-by-numbers portrait, he gives a very deep, rich, well-resourced and authoritative outlook on Williams’ biography. From a purely technical level, it’s a brilliant book. You can see the mechanics of how a good biographer works, how he ties all these threads together into a grand and tightly controlled tapestry. It’s just exhaustive in the best possible sense, everything that you would want to know about Williams, his relationships, his standing in American drama and culture. The beauty of Lahr’s biography is that it doesn’t give you the sense of Williams as this perennial, untouchable, canonical playwright. It shows you Williams the man, a man who was struggling with what he termed the ‘catastrophe of success.’ He was well-travelled, a global icon, and then in the 1970s and 1980s, it just fizzled out into nothing. He died in a very indecorous, even tragic manner which mirrors his tragic characters. It’s an incredibly poignant and informative documentary. For anybody who wants to go beyond the Williams of the stage, and towards Williams as a human, you will find that in Lahr’s biography."