Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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It was at the age of three that Thomas Lanier Williams, later better known as Tennessee, told his first scary story. As his mother recalls it: "We used to go to North Carolina in the summer. The women folk would gather round the fireplace—it was cool there. We had no radios to entertain ourselves with, so we'd tell stories. Tom, who was quite shy, would hide behind my skirts listening. This one night we said, 'Tom, why don't you tell us a story?' We were sure he'd say no. And you know, that little cherub— he had golden ringlets and big blue eyes—launched forth with a story that went on and on. It was about alligators and the jungle and all sorts of animals. Suddenly he said, 'I can't go on further; it's getting scarier and scarier.' And closing his eyes up tight, he said: 'I'm getting scared myself.' "

Tennessee Williams is now 50, still gets scared ("I am a definition of hysteria''), still tells stories that get scarier and scarier—and tells them so hypnotically that the public pays him over $200,000 a year not to stop. He is the nightmare merchant of Broadway, writer of Orpheus Descending (murder by blow torch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania, homosexuality), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality), Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration, syphilis), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, underwear fetishism, coprophagy).

Many Americans regard Williams as an erotomaniac, for whom the mildest epithets are "sick" and "decadent." Yet taboo has often been the touchstone of drama. In the profoundest play of Greek tragedy, a man kills his father and marries his mother. Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama drip with gore and violence and flaunt unnatural affections. Other critics think that Williams' choice of themes shows America to be —as angry young British Playwright John Osborne puts it —"as sex-obsessed as a medieval monastery." Yet Tennessee Williams fills foreign playhouses from Athens to Tokyo, and his current play, The Night of the Iguana, though it shuns obsession with sex, is a box-office sellout and much the best new American play of the season.

The Beat of Passion. The fact is that Tennessee Williams, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, is a consummate master of theater. His plays beat with the heart's blood of the drama: passion. He is the greatest U.S. playwright since Eugene O'Neill, and barring the aged Sean O'Casey, the greatest living playwright anywhere. Dissenting voices might be raised for a thoughtful and clever shaper of ideas like Jean Anouilh. Yet the 20th century's three greatest playwrights as thinkers—Shaw, Brecht and Pirandello—succeeded less because they brought ideas into the theater than because they squeezed every last drop of passion out of those ideas.

Williams has peopled the U.S. stage with characters whose vibrantly durable presences stalk the corridors of a playgoer's memory: Amanda Wingfield, the fussy, garrulous, gallant mother of Glass Menagerie; Streetcar's Blanche DuBois, Southern gentlewoman turned nymphomaniac, and its Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in a T shirt;