Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams
While the chronology is somewhat convoluted as the text occasionally skips around grouping some similar events (such as two trips to New York City), if you follow along, the script depicts Williams’ steady rise to success in the six years before "Menagerie" landed on Broadway. Many of the anecdotes are amusing, others are surprising tales of little known facts (a trip to Europe with his grandfather, meeting D. H. Lawrence’s widow on a trip to Taos, New Mexico.) Always engrossing, always believable, "Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams" accomplishes in spades what it sets out to do: revealing the trials and tribulations of a great playwright on the verge of his first success. [more]