Author: Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the second child (of three) of a shoe salesman and a minister’s daughter; his older sister, Rose, two years his senior, struggled with mental illness and had one of America’s first lobotomies. His first success was The Glass Menagerie, which opened on Broadway in 1945 and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A Streetcar Named Desire had its premiere in 1947, followed the next year by Summer and Smoke, a failure that ran only three months. His other plays include The Rose Tattoo (1951); Camino Real (1953); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), for which he received another Pulitzer and Drama Critic Circle Award; Suddenly Last Summer (1958); Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1961). In his later years, Williams struggled with drugs, alcohol and depression. He died in February 1983. In 1998, his play Not About Nightingales had its world premiere at the Royal National Theatre and ran on Broadway. Collections of his plays, stories, poems and letters continue to be published. 

Director: Sheila Daniels recently joined INTIMAN’s staff as its new Associate Director. She has been creating theatre as a director, actor, teacher and producer in Seattle since 1994. She is Co-Artistic Director and Co-Founder of both Theater Under Ground and Baba Yaga Productions, and recently served as the Associate Artistic Director at Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC). From 1999-2002, she was Artistic Director of Theater Schmeater. Since 1998, she has taught Acting and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration at Cornish College of the Arts, where she serves as a Resident Director. Her recent directing credits include Pericles (Seattle Shakespeare Company), Crime and Punishment (Theater Under Ground/CHAC), Rhoda: A Life in Stories (Book-It), God’s Country, Waiting for Lefty, Arcadia (CHAC), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Strawberry Theatre Workshop), Burning Bridget Cleary (Ladykiller Productions), Macbeth (Wooden O), The Last State (On the Boards), Shock Brigades: Women in Combat (Baba Yaga). She will direct According to Coyote for Seattle Children’s Theatre in February 2008.