As long as there are active actors in the world, the works of Tennessee Williams will endure. The authoritarian power of fluctuating taste will have no place in his case; his writing, his heroes, and his theatrical persona are unique and as permanent in the theatrical vision of this century as the stars in the sky.

We often forget what a revolution his first major success marked for the theater of New York. The Glass Menagerie immediately elevated lyricism to the highest level of our theatrical history and pioneered in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his poetic insistence that form serves content rather than overpowering or distorting it.

In this American theater, he perhaps found for the first time vividness and breadth of emotion. And encouraging this newly rediscovered lyrical verse was a kind of emotional heroism; Tennessee Williams wished not to endorse or condemn but to touch the seed of life and honor it with the beauty of words.

His subject is the most prevalent in American literature, where people essentially lose the battle just in the shadow of the mountain from the top of which they could have a clear image of God. It is the romance of the lost yet sacred deviants, who exist to remind us of our trampled instincts, our abandoned tenderness, the sacredness of the human spirit.

His audience remained vast, throughout the world. Hundreds of productions of his works are staged every year – but not on Broadway, where Williams's presence had glorified it. Yet it would end as it began, being outside and looking in – as he once put it, "scratching the glass." But of course, beyond the pain, the work remains, the work for which he lived his life, the gift he gave to his actors, his country, and the world.