On his way up, in the 1940s, he spent some time in Provincetown, where he met Frank Merlo, the man who would become his longtime - and long-suffering - companion. Lahr, however, deems it Williams’s most underrated play of that decade: “a surrealist romp, which plunders the freewheeling presentational style of the newly fashionable theater of the absurd.” In it, he adds, “Williams’s sense of persecution is reimagined as comic pandemonium his public collapse is turned into the symbolic triumph of the pratfall.”īut before Williams’s collapse came his ascent to the pinnacle of American theater. Williams wrote “The Gnadiges Fraulein” (1966) while on amphetamines, and if that information makes you say “Aha!,” you are not alone. He later referred to the period as his “Stoned Age,” as if his abuse of alcohol and pills had ended then. Williams spent the 1960s drunk, drugged, and in precarious-to-shattered mental health, his hits mostly behind him.
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