The Winner

The Theater

For the first time in its ten-year history, the New York Drama Critics' Circle last week chose the season's best American play on the first ballot. The choice, Tennessee Williams' touching picture of a troubled family, The Glass Menagerie (TIME, April 9), easily met the majority requirement with nine out of 14 votes.*

The Glass Menagerie is 31-year-old Playwright Williams' first Broadway production. But he has written eight other plays, including Battle of Angels, which the Theater Guild closed out of town four years ago, and You Touched Me, which Guthrie McClintic plans to bring to Broadway this fall. Though delighted by the award, Williams demurred: "I think The Deep Mrs. Sykes should have gotten the prize." He also doubted whether "the critics will like my future plays as much as this one. In this play I said all the nice things I have to say about people. The future things will be harsher."

Mississippi-born Playwright Williams has done many things besides write plays. Since graduating from the State University of Iowa, he has been a bellhop, an elevator operator, a movie usher, a teletyper, a warehouse handyman, a waiter and spouter of verse in a Greenwich Village nightclub. He has also changed his name, because he thought his real name, Thomas Lanier Williams, "sounded too much like William Lyon Phelps."

*Other votes: two for Harvey; one each for A Bell for Adano and / Remember Mama. One critic voted that no award be made.

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