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The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer: these plays are considered among the classics of twentieth-century American theatre. Their author, Tennessee Williams, while benefiting from the success of these works during his lifetime, also suffered from their collective interpretation. Concentrating on the less than noble side of human emotions--rape, incest, self-delusion, homosexuality, drug abuse, cannibalism, castration, and murder among them--critics maintained that the plays were largely influenced by the playwright's own life in the American South, and theatergoers--used to the discrete sexuality and proper language common in the 1940s and 1950s--were shocked. Another aspect of Williams' life also affected his plays' reception. While openly admitting to being a homosexual since the 1950s, he focused many of his plays on sexual energy within a wide variety of human relationships, imbuing his plots with ambiguity and often leaving the sexual orientation of his characters open for interpretation.
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