Lahr’s book tells the stories of these alliances from Williams’ letters and journals and makes clear that once the writer got over his sexual repression, he made up for lost time. Williams was a virgin until 26, then had many male liaisons and affairs and a few long-term relationships. Williams’ younger brother Dakin was “sexually inexperienced” until his marriage at age 37. Williams’ older sister Rose, the model for Laura in “The Glass Menagerie,” was hospitalized for nervous and emotional problems and a lobotomy was performed on her when she was 28. “The horrible family atmosphere was also a recipe for madness,” Lahr writes. Neither parent was physically affectionate and Williams and his two siblings were thus deprived of affection and sexually immature until adulthood. “We’d run out in the streets and the neighbors would take us in,” Williams remembered.

Before that, when Edwina allowed her husband marital privileges, her screams were so loud that the children were terrified. Williams said his mother, Edwina, considered the model for Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” was a “monolithic Puritan.” Sex was a banned subject in the Williams household, just as Williams’ father Cornelius Coffin or CC, had been banished from the marriage bed from 1918 on. Lavey asked Lahr to talk about Williams’ early family life with its repressed sexual character. The subtitle-“Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh”-is a quote from Williams’ own writing. The result is a deeply researched, vividly written story of the life, both private and public, of one of our greatest writers. Lahr decided to start at the beginning of Williams’ life, rather than writing the second volume of the Leverich version. Lahr received “seven FedEx boxes and 70 untranscribed tapes” of material. In brief, he inherited the responsibility from Lyle Leverich, who published the first volume of a Williams biography before his death. Lahr, theater critic and writer for the “New Yorker” for 21 years, talked about how he came to write the Williams biography when there are already many Williams biographies. He wrote some 70 plays including masterpieces such as “The Glass Menagerie”, “Streetcar Named Desire”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “The Night of the Iguana”, “The Rose Tattoo” and “Summer and Smoke”. Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911, adopted the name Tennessee early in his writing career. She asked short, pointed questions and let Lahr warm to his subject.

Lahr and Martha Lavey, “Steppenwolf” artistic director, were seated on a stage dressed for the cluttered Irish bachelor-hoarder’s apartment for the current Steppenwolf production, Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive.” Lavey was prepared with her own advance copy of the book stuffed with fuchsia post-it notes.

Tennessee Williams by John Lahr