Editor's Note

The 2023 issue of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review showcases the depth and variety of the scholarly work devoted to the works and life of the playwright who arguably commands more popular and scholarly interest than any other figure from the postwar Broadway revival. Interestingly enough, the conscious performance of gender roles in Provincetown has much in common with the Japanese premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1953, as Takashi Sakai relates in his essay on the now-iconic interpretation of Blanche DuBois established by Haruko Sugimura, one of Japan's leading film and stage performers. Streetcar also finds its way into the essay by Stephen Cedars, who seeks to shed light on a function of that play and others by comparing Williams's treatment of filth and perversion with that of the lesser-known playwright Charles Ludlam, one of the most interesting of the on-the-margin gay artists active when Williams was floundering (in terms of professional success and financial reward) in the second half of his career. The established playwright's eagerness to sustain his status and income while seeking to represent uncomfortable truths and life through his art led him to an unstable compromise with the filthy city, which offered him a utopie vision of human possibility more complicated than ideas of right versus wrong, clean versus dirty, straight versus deviant.