In Masks Outrageous and Austere

With In Masks Outrageous and Austere, Tennessee Williams continues to explore the passionate obsessions that made him famous in the early masterworks –the impenetrability of the human heart, the futility and hypocrisy of denying or displacing physical attraction, the power of love and its tyranny–while employing the dramaturgical freedom and aesthetic daring he discovered in his later plays. And all of this he does with the provocative wit and lyricism that was his hallmark.