Abstract
In September 1941, Tennessee Williams returned to New Orleans. “The second New Orleans period here commences,” he wrote in his journal. Nineteen months had passed since his first, abortive, visit: That period had lasted a scant two months, January and February, in 1939. In the intervening months, Williams had experienced the exhilaration of seeing Battle of Angels optioned and staged by the Theatre Guild, the “prestige” theatre of Broadway, and suffered the humiliating nightmare of its frigid reception in Boston. The few audience members who remained when the curtain came down after the first performance sat in hostile silence. A week later, Battle of Angels closed. It did not come to New York.1
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Notes
Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995) 420.
Ibid., 285; Don Lee Keith, “New Tennessee Williams Rises from ‘Stoned Age,’” in Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. by Albert J. Devlin (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. 1986. 151.
Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 12.
Ibid., 308; Donald Windham, ed., Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965 (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), 9–10.
Donald Windham, “Tennessee Williams: Humpty Dumpty Before, During, and After the Fall,” Christopher Street, Issue 94, 1985, 50–1.
Tennessee Williams, “Mornings on Bourbon Street,” in The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, ed. by David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2002), 72.
W. Kenneth Holditch, “The Last Frontier of Bohemia: Tennessee Williams in New Orleans,” Southern Quarterly 23:2 (Winter 1985), 12.
Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume. 1991. 15.
Donald Vining, A Gay Diary, 1933–1946 (New York: Hard Candy Books, 1996), 283.
Eric Bentley, The Brecht Memoir (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 112–113; Eric Bentley to Michael Paller, interview, June 6, 1997.
Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending. In The Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 3 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 271, 305.
Louis Kronenberger, “A Triumph for Miss Taylor,” New York News PM, April 2, 1945
Burton Rascoe, “‘The Glass Menagerie’ An Unforgettable Play,” New York World-Telegram, April 2, 1945
Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., “The Theatre at Its Best,” New York Herald Tribune, April 2, 1945
John Chap-man, “‘Glass Menagerie’ is Enchanting Play, Truly Hypnotic Theatre,” New York Daily News, April 2, 1945, all qtd. in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 1945, pp. 234–7.
Roger Boxill, Tennessee Williams (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 69.
Ruby Cohen, “The Garrulous Grotesques of Tennessee Williams,” in Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 59.
Leverich, Tom, p. 174; Robert Rice, “A Man Named Tennessee,” New York Post, May 4 1958, M-2.
Tennessee Williams, “The Catastrophe of Success,” in The Theatre of TW Vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 140.
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of TW Vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 143. Further references are in the text.
Mark Lilly, “The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. by Mark Lilly (London: Macmillan, 1990), 153–63.
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 63.
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© 2005 Michael Paller
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Paller, M. (2005). The Signs Are Interior. In: Gentlemen Callers. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979148_2
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