Negative Positive
Title: Beautiful, violent, and disturbing
Review: This play of Williams' (originally presented with the one-act "Something Unspoken" as "Garden District") pulls together a number of themes that ran through his earlier works -- violence, sexual exploitation, cannibalism, alienation -- and combines them in a work that is both powerful visceral and hypnotically dream-like. The story concerns Catherine Holly and the strange story she has to tell about her cousin Sebastian. Her tale wreaks havoc within her family, particularly with her Aunt Violet, who places the girl in an asylum and wants her subjected to a lobotomy. However, the action of the play is negligible; where Williams places the chills are in the various stories told by all the characters, filling in a portrait of the bizarre, sinister Sebastian Venable. The effect is all the more disturbing for the fact that we see the events in our imaginations rather than onstage. An true original from an American genius.
Is the review positive or negative? 