![]() ![]() Lahr's opening gambit is revealing about how this biography works, in three related ways.įirst, it's a microcosm of Lahr's method, on display in many of the long theater profiles he has written for The New Yorker, in which Lahr routinely jumps forward and backward in time - a technique that works particularly well with a writer like Williams, who was forever haunted by the past. Rather than open his biography by slogging through those early years - which Lahr rightly recognizes are covered in detail in "Tom," Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams through 1945 - Lahr begins with the landmark Broadway opening that year of "The Glass Menagerie," the play that made Williams by putting his family drama on stage. It's no secret that Williams' troubled family - including an abusive and alcoholic father, an emotionally distant mother and a mentally unstable sister - shaped who he was and what he wrote. As Lahr also makes clear, the wonder is that this bird ever flew at all - and stayed aloft for so long before falling. ![]() ![]() In a beautiful passage in Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending," a broken desperado imagines life as a mythical bird capable of flying forever - and therefore never touching down on a corrupting earth until it's time to die.Īs John Lahr recognizes in his magnificent "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" - one of the best written and most extraordinary biographies I've ever read, in any field - Williams' metaphor describes his own quest for creative freedom. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |