The most dismaying thing about Tennessee Williams's pursuit of the poor, sad ghosts of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "Clothes for a Summer Hotel," is the fact that Mr. Williams's personal voice is nowhere to be heard in it. It is as though the playwright's decision to deal with actual people—not only the Fitzgeralds but Ernest Hemingway and the Gerald Murphys as well—had momentarily robbed him of his own imaginative powers….

[We] feel no personal contact between this Scott, this Zelda. Both are nearing the end of their lives; the past is irretrievable….

[We] bide our time, knowing that in this variant on the memory-play we'll be dipping back into earlier, somewhat saner years, years when communication must have been possible. We do dip back, only to discover that nothing has changed….

[There's] no growth, no change, no flow of life anywhere for us to piece together...