By the time he wrote The Night of the Iguana , in 1961, Tennessee Williams was increasingly favouring "fantastic" modes of presenting reality, relying on the more expressionistic and "plastic" kind of theatre that he had called for, as early as 1944, in his production notes to The Glass Menagerie . Williams's interest in the fantastic modes of representation characteristic of German expressionism, in particular, along with his exaggerated, grotesque, and dream-like portrayal of Germans as symbolic characters in Iguana and several plays that would follow, shows that he was beginning to engage more fully a German sensibility that he would continue to develop in his later work. In The Gnädiges Fräulein (1966), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), and Kirche, Küche, Kinder (1979), for example, Germans also function as grotesque comic figures: perverse, darkly humorous, excessive, and bawdy. The German characters in Williams's plays are inspired by an aesthetic rooted in the traditions of German expressionism and Romanticism that influenced his writing, as he fused these styles with related sensibilities - the carnivalesque, the grotesque, camp - that are associated with the resistance and rebellion typical of his late plays.