(Paul Taylor’s article appeared in the Independent, 3/25; The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore with Olympia Dukakis has been extended at the Roundabout in NY until April 10.)
Tennessee Williams – arguably the greatest of American dramatists – would have notched up his 100th birthday on 26 March. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of an Episcopalian minister, his father, Cornelius, was a womanising and hard-drinking travelling salesman for a shoe company. History does not record how the birth went, though it is a fair bet that the occasion was more elevated than the master playwright's less than ideally dignified demise some 71 years later.