About the Author
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi won Pulitzer Prizes for his dramas, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and Night of the Iguana. He also wrote a number of one-act plays, short stories, poems and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moishe and the Age of Reason. He died in 1983 at the age of 72.
In this 1952 recording, Williams reads sections of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, several poems, mostly short, and a wicked little story about a preacher's daughter gone bad. His voice is rich, his accent pleasant, even charming, and his lisp pronounced, which takes some getting used to. He has an actor's command of emotional inflection, but with no self-indulgence; he moves everything along with unsentimental briskness. In MENAGERIE, he sometimes gives speaker ascription, sometimes not, which also takes getting used to, but it works. In fact, he's better at the dialogue than the soliloquies, which could do with a little hamminess. Williams's idiosyncratic reading would entertain even if it didn't arouse interest as the author's take on his own creations. W.M. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
