Tennessee Williams

On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show''s thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, ''like a farm boy in his Sunday best''. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain ...