THE STORY: As described by The New York Times critic Clive Barnes: “Superficially the play is about the painter—famous, rich and lost—and his wife, who find themselves in a Tokyo hotel. The wife, wildly promiscuous, tries to seduce the Japanese barman in the hotel bar. The artist is in his room, naked on a canvas with a spray-gun, trying to develop a new technique, almost confident that he has invented color. Almost confident, but not quite, for he lacks confidence the way an anemic man lacks blood. The artist, in the final stages of some spiritual or physical dissolution, at last joins his wife in the bar. But she has sent to Manhattan for his picture dealer and friend. She then goes out, presumably to find a man. A few days later the dealer arrives in Tokyo. The wife, determined to be free, tries to persuade the friend to take the artist back to New York, under sedation if necessary. But the artist foils her plans by dying. Suddenly, with the bleakness of loss, she finds that she too has nowhere to go."
This characteristically forceful and affecting play reveals, with unstinting honesty, the deep personal agonies of creative expression and the awful isolation and estrangement that this can demand of the artist.
“…there is gold, gossamer and fire here, and there are bursting sharp exchanges of dialogue that recall
The Glass Menagerie in their suddenly poignant pertinence.” —The New York Times.
“Tennessee Williams, the dramatic poet of lost souls, is the most distinguished American playwright since O’Neill…” —New York Post.
“…all the elements of fierce drama…” —Cue Magazine.
