Tennessee Williams may never have been the playwright we thought he was, or, at least, there has always been a Tennessee Williams we knew and understood (or thought we did) and a Williams we didn’t. That division may be between early and late Williams, or between the Actors Studio Williams and a more poetical, lyrical Williams, or between, say, the Williams of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Williams of The Two- Character Play. He was, it seems, always more lyrically Chekov than grittily Zola. His sin, if sin at all, was to have peaked too soon, as Gordon Rogoff reminds us, and thereby to have raised expectations in his audiences and among those handlers on whom theater relies, often strangers upon whose kindness Williams, too, depended (Rogoff, 2000, 59).

Opening a roundtable discussion on Williams's late plays in 2002,1 however, Annette Saddik outlines a continuous thread between Williams's acknowledged successes and what we have come to think of as the later or lesser- known efforts: