Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2017

The 2017 issue showcases the exciting results of the journal’s newly expanded scope, beginning with a study of Anna Magnani’s acting style and performance of ethnic otherness as collaborative contributions to the film adaptations of The Rose Tattoo and The Fugitive Kind. The notorious “underwear anecdote” that dogged Williams in late life (and inspired two other playwrights to write about the episode) provides a springboard for a painstakingly researched biographical essay about Williams’s time in Vancouver.

Interviews and letters, published and unpublished, provide important details about Williams’s late career, and together the facts and the fictions shed new light on the playwright’s creative process. Finally, a reading of The Glass Menagerie’s treatment of queerness, identity, disability, and difference reveals subtle forms of agency and desire, making a much-studied text new again.