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Final curtain?

1. When “The Glass Menagerie” opened on Broadway in March 1945, the actress cast as Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield got so drunk before the show that a bucket was placed in the wings so she could throw up between scenes.

Seated six rows from the stage was the 34-year-old playwright, Tennessee Williams, who was struck by Laurette Taylor’s “supernatural quality on stage.” When the final curtain came down, the cast took 24 curtain calls to thunderous applause, and Williams, wearing a gray flannel suit with a missing button, mounted the stage to repeated cries of “author, author.”

John Lahr, the former chief theater critic for The New Yorker, begins his definitive new biography of the great American playwright with this vivid anecdote, then manages (for the most part) to sustain the momentum for the next 600 pages.

The culmination of 12 years of work, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” is a dazzling, deeply sympathetic and psychologically acute look at the life and work of a tortured genius who rocketed to fame after World War II with a new kind of play that reflected his “haunted interior”: dreamy and poetic, passionate and tender, sensual and spiritual, desperate for recognition and more than slightly tinged by the family madness. “On stage and off it,” Lahr writes, “hysteria was Williams’s idiom.”