Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm at the National Theatre

Spring-storm-001
A scene from Spring Storm at the National Theatre

Spring Storm 
by Tennessee Williams
National Theatre of Great Britain
Directed by Laurie Sansom

Not out or proud.

In his mid-twenties Tennessee Williams went to a playwriting workshop in Iowa and produced a nearly three-hour-long drama that was caustically received by his tutor and fellow students. Chagrined, he consigned it to the bottom drawer while mining many of its motifs for his acknowledged masterpieces, The Glass Menagerie

 and A Streetcar Named Desire. Nothing more was heard of Spring Storm (1937) until twenty years after Williams’s piteous accidental death in 1983. Salvaged from his archived papers, the play was given a reading in New York and a couple of regional stagings, to no great acclaim. Critics called it intriguing juvenilia.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller