Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

It was at dusk on an uncommonly breezy autumn day in 1978, as I was walking up the 500 block of Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans without a thought in my head, that I came face-to-face with Tennessee Williams. He was wearing an incongruously bulky fur coat that caught the wind, and was accompanied by a chatty entourage of four or five attractive young men. Somebody had made a joke, and Williams was laughing heartily as I passed. My fleeting impression was that he was happy, healthy, self-possessed. It seemed to me, in that moment, that he felt at home in the city that had embraced him as its most celebrated man of letters, and at home in his own skin. That was the only time I ever saw him, and less than five years later, he was dead.

In the early '90s, I became acquainted with the playwright's brother Dakin, eight years his junior, who was a frequent guest at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. I sat across the table from Dakin—a lumbering, garrulous lawyer—at Galatoire's on Bourbon Street, a stone's throw from the spot where I'd once encountered his brother, listening to stories about the Williams household and Tennessee's intense childhood attachment to their doomed sister Rose. Dakin died in 2008, too soon to witness the new surge of attention that would accompany his sibling's centennial.

That event has brought Tennessee Williams back to life this year not only in New Orleans and Provincetown, where annual festivals investigate and embellish his legacy, but in theatrical centers across the U.S. and beyond. The special section that leads off this issue of American Theatre—"Williams Then & Now"—is devoted to the flurry of productions, publishing, exhibits and special events that the Williams centennial has generated (and will continue to, through the end of this season). It begins with critic Eileen Blumenthal's vivid explication of two radically new incarnations of Williams plays we thought we knew inside and out—the masterwork A Streetcar Named Desire, re-envisioned in a landmark production at the Comédie-Française in Paris by American auteurs Lee Breuer and Basil Twist, and the plaintively autobiographical Vieux Carré, filtered through the media stylings and hothouse sensibilities of the Wooster Group.

Also featured in the special section: Scholars Lonnie Firestone and Thomas Keith authoritatively assay the lesser-known early and late works of Williams; four diverse American playwrights respond personally to aspects of the Williams oeuvre; and curators of major museum exhibits devoted to Williams show off some special treasures. Further along in the issue, Garrett Eisler reviews a trio of new books essential to ongoing Williams scholarship, and the peerless Jeremy Lawrence, whose stage incarnation of Williams is a hot property this centennial year, answers "20 Questions."

Our Williams package doesn't aspire to cover the waterfront—the writer is on too many minds and too many stages this year to make that possible. But this issue is AT's contribution to a rich centennial conversation, one that will continue as long as Williams's plays maintain their fascination—and as long as characters like Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois and Brick Pollitt and Alma Winemuller and Chance Wayne and Hannah Jelkes live on in our imaginations.

—Jim O'Quinn

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