It takes a special kind of playwright to unequivocally love Tennessee Williams’s most cherished plays. I am not one of them. But then, in my defense, neither was Williams. In his long-obscure but now famous essay “The Catastrophe of Success,” Williams pours forth his misgivings about the early work that brought him fame and fortune, and forever saddled him with expectations to make merely more plays in the vein of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “I got so sick of hearing people say, ‘I loved your play!’ that I could not say thank you anymore. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it.” But we don’t need secondary sources to know about Williams’s mixed feelings—there’s sufficient evidence in the scripts.
Back when I used to teach playwriting (back when I used to write plays), I would dedicate an entire class to the subject of stage directions…