Reviewed by: Tennesse Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance Felicia Hardison Londré Tennesse Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998; pp. xv + 282. $75.00 cloth. Given the current boom in productions of Tennessee Williams’s plays and a concomitant acceleration of scholarship devoted to them, Philip C. Kolin’s survey of critical responses should find a receptive readership. In his Preface, Kolin calls this collection of contributed chapters “the first scholarly, in-depth study of the state of research as well as a history of performance of the varied Williams canon” (x). For many, the book will indeed prove useful, but those who are drawn to the first part of the title—“a guide to research”—will probably be more rewarded than those interested in “performance.” With the notable exception of the editor’s own essay on A Streetcar Named Desire, which probes that play’s five major roles, most chapters give “character” no more emphasis than any other critical construct. Nor do performance theories find a place here. Thus, the “performance” in the title probably refers to each chapter’s overview of “chief productions,” most of which seem to have occurred in New York or abroad, as there are scant references to American regional theatres. The book offers a stimulating review of interpretations of most of the plays, supplemented by chapters on Williams’s fiction, poetry, and films. The strength of this guide lies in the highly structured format followed in each of the twenty-two chapters that examines one major play or a group of related works. Thus anyone interested in production history, for example, can go directly to each chapter’s section on “chief productions.” Each chapter begins with a section setting the work in a biographical context, and this drives home the point that all of Williams’s writing was intensely personal and frequently autobiographical. The next section, bibliographic history, provides a summary of different versions of the works and their published editions; this is indeed a crucial concern in the light of Williams’s ceaseless revisions even after successful production and publication. Four subtopics comprise the section on critical approaches: themes, characters, symbols, and plot. While these categories may seem simplistic, they are elastic enough that some contributors do reference important feminist, gay, or other criticism. There follow sections on “major problems the work poses for critics,” “chief productions,” “film and television versions,” “concluding overview” and a bibliography of “works cited.” The “concluding overview” allows the contributor to make a personal statement about the work under consideration. In the opening two chapters, Neal A. Lester covers two anthologies of early one-act plays, bringing depth of insight and coherence to the treatment of those many and varied short pieces. Robert Bray’s chapters on Battle of Angels/Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth, Thomas P. Adler’s on The Glass Menagerie, and Patricia Grierson’s on poetry are also outstanding for their balanced assessments and lucid writing. Some treatments seem thin, considering the importance of plays like Camino Real and Vieux Carré. Lumping Vieux Carré into a chapter with two other very compelling works (Small Craft Warnings and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur) while devoting whole chapters to lesser plays like the one-act I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix or The Red Devil Battery Sign (the political ramifications of which are fascinatingly illuminated by Colby H. Kullman) or Period of Adjustment raises questions of proportion, especially since so many plays are omitted entirely: Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, You Touched Me!, Slapstick Tragedy and other late one-acts, as well as the recently-published Notebook of Trigorin and Not About Nightingales. Granted the present book is not supposed to be about Tennessee Williams but about the secondary sources on Williams, one might better countenance the lacunae if there were a publication and production chronology of the plays. Instead, we get a lot of bibliographical redundancy. The bibliography of “works cited” at the end of each chapter is certainly appropriate to the plan of this book, but the additional bibliography...