Tony Award-winning writer and longtime theater critic John Lahr has written an authoritative biography on the life and work of playwright Tennessee Williams. Using new and revelatory information, Lahr paints a vivid portrait of one of the most brilliant playwrights of the 20th century. Lahr will also discuss the subject of his first biography -- actor Bert Lahr, his father, who is fondly remembered as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. And John Lahr will share what it was like to collaborate with the late Broadway star, Elaine Stritch.

Read an excerpt from Lahr's book.

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh 

by John Lahr

 

CHAPTER 1

Blood-Hot and Personal

 

Into this scene comes the man of truth—awkward, timid, inept, even with an almost idiotic side. But he is the bringer of truth, the man from whom progress grows. He creates or destroys, there is no middle ground or compromise in him.
—Clifford Odets,
The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets

I suspect my only influences were Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence—and my life.
—Tennessee Williams

On March 31, 1945, at the Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eighth Street, on the unfashionable side of Broadway, in New York City, the curtain rose on the sold- out opening night of The Glass Menagerie ten minutes late, at 8:50 p.m. Tennessee Williams, the show’s thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat in the aisle seat on the left side of the sixth row. Wearing a gray flannel suit with a button missing, a water- green shirt, and a pale conservative tie, he seemed, according to one paper, “like a farm boy in his Sunday best.” Beside him was his friend, and cruising sidekick, Donald Windham, with whom he was collaborating on the romantic comedy You Touched Me! A few seats away in the same row, his chic, diminutive agent, Audrey Wood, sat clutching the hand of the renowned set designer Robert Edmond Jones, her escort for the evening. At the clumsy dress rehearsal the day before, an aphorism of William Liebling, her husband and business partner, kept playing through her mind—“You’re only as good as the night they catch you.” At the dress rehearsal, as the cast got their notes, the play’s tyro producer Louis Singer slid beside her. “Tell me—you are supposed to know a great deal about theater—is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you’ve seen in your life?” he said. Words, for once, failed Wood. She nodded a vigorous yes.

Wood fiercely believed in Williams and in her own instincts. Her father, William Wood, a theater manager, had exposed her at a young age to the art and business of vaudeville and theater; the agency that she founded with Liebling in 1937 would come to represent some of the most influential theatricals in the industry: William Inge, Carson McCullers, Robert Anderson, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan among them. But Williams, her client of six years, had not yet known success. On April Fool’s Day, 1939, tipped off to his talent, Wood had written the unknown author, “It seems to me, from what I’ve heard about you, that you may be exactly the kind of author whom I might help.” She judged him “not a finished dramatist” but “highly promising.” By May of that year, Williams had joined forces with Wood, who promptly sold one of his short stories to Story magazine. “You are playing a very long shot when you take an interest in my work,” Williams wrote her. So it had proved. More than anyone in the Broadway audience that opening night, Wood understood the precariousness of his situation. “I’d reached the very, very bottom,” Williams said, recalling his state of mind. “I couldn’t have gone on with these hand-to-mouth jobs, these jobs for which I had no aptitude, like waiting on tables, running elevators, and even being a teletype operator. . . . I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.”

Read more of Chapter One.

Excerpted from Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. Copyright © 2014 by John Lahr. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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