Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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parked cars, once were shot at by a blowzy landlady while making a 4 a.m. getaway without paying for their pad. But Williams was a fastidious hobohemian who sent his laundry home to mother and was regularly bailed out of total penury by $10 bills in letters from his grandmother. While in California, Tennessee got a telegram announcing that he had won the New York contest and a prize of $100. "I remember," says Parrott, "that he had a handful of letters from agents asking to handle his writing and he took them and went 'eeny, meeny, miney, mo.' " Mo turned out to be Audrey Wood, a shrewd New York agent who has been a devoted godmother to Williams ever since.

A Burned-Up Audience. In a little more than a year, a full-length Williams play, Battle of Angels, opened in Boston. For a third-act climax, a zealous stagehand had overstocked his smudge pots to simulate a stage fire, and smoke billowed out over the footlights to choke the audience—but it hardly mattered; they were already burned up. The Theatre Guild, which had produced Battle, shot off an unprecedented letter of apology to its subscribers and closed the play. In the next four years, Williams collected the job labels that are pasted on the luggage of itinerant U.S. writers. He worked as a restaurant cashier, usher in Manhattan's Strand Theater, Teletype operator, apartment-house elevator operator, and as a poetry-reciting waiter in Greenwich Village's Beggar Bar—where he wore a black eye patch with a libidinous white eye painted on it; he had undergone the first of four eye operations. Moving on to Hollywood, he wrote unused film scripts for MGM, until he was fired. One of the scripts was titled The Gentleman Caller, which became The Glass Menagerie.

Menagerie, with its tender burden of Williams' life and family confidences, opened on Broadway one night in the spring of 1945, and since that moment the front rank of U.S. playwriting has been wherever Tennessee Williams stood. Laurette Taylor, making a comeback as Amanda, became the first and greatest of the actresses—Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, Barbara Bel Geddes, Geraldine Page, Margaret Leighton—to play one of Williams' incomparable theater roles for women.

After Menagerie, Williams went on to his biggest hit, 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire. Powerfully directed by Elia Kazan, it marked the beginning of the dynamic Williams-Kazan entente that would dominate Broadway for more than a decade. Ups and downs of critical approval never dampened the excitement of a Williams opening: 1948's Summer and Smoke, 1951's The Rose Tattoo, 1953's Camino Real, 1955's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957's Orpheus Descending, 1958's Garden District, 1959's Sweet Bird of Youth, and 1960's Period of Adjustment.

When Iguana opened in late December 1961, Williams proved to be in his best dramatic form since Streetcar, with the debatable exception of Cat. By echoing a strain of gentleness unheard since Menagerie, Iguana served to bracket the whole range of Williams' achievement, a body of work so substantial that it now casts a larger shadow than the man who made it. In that shadow lies a form of theater as well as a series of plays, the theater of Chekhovian sensibility mated with the Freudian irrational unconscious. The champion of the rival Ibsenite theater of social