The final image in The Glass Menagerie is that of Laura, alone, illuminated by the candles which, for all that they are the Gentleman Caller's "favorite kind of light," will bring no warmth to the girl…. The quiet, almost sentimental quality of that final speech, of the play as a whole, masks the fact that Menagerie ends with the starkest picture of loneliness in the Williams canon. The heroines who follow tend to have more Amanda than Laura in them. The specter of separateness haunts them too, but, whether lyric victims or comic grotesques, beset by violence or desperation or plain indifference, they manage a kind of vitality which insists that they try to escape, to outsmart, to smother the loneliness that Williams sees as central to the human condition.

Now, almost thirty-five years after Laura's disappearance into darkness, Williams is back [in A Lovely Summer for Cr...