Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

Tennessee Williams was a true titan of 20th-century American drama. At the height of his success, from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, he wrote a number of critically acclaimed and enduring plays, including “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” His plays were often brutally honest, with characters and themes taken straight from his own life. He explored many weighty aspects of the human experience, including addiction, mental illness, sexuality, loneliness, aging, and death. But Williams was hugely sympathetic to the flawed yet complex characters he created. Upon the playwright’s death in 1983, “The New York Times” perfectly captured his nature in its obituary, calling Williams “a poet of the human heart.”