The group placed each item in its own case, rendering it a work of art.
The play was regarded as minor Williams when it made its debut 27 years ago -- Walter Kerr found it a work of "obvious immobility" -- and its most remarkable feature, at the time, was the performance by Williams himself in the production as an occasional understudy.
TS Eliot thought it "a work of genius", and that its dense layers of meaning would be pored over in the same way as Pound's Cantos or Joyce's later work, "when [it] is widely enough known".
It would be overstating the case to call it a work of social criticism, but beneath its highly decorated surface is an examination, touched with melancholy as well as delight, of what it means to live in a world governed by rituals of acquisition and display.
The repetitive figurations, jittery thematic lines and obsessive rhythms that abound in his invigorating Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981) would seem to prove the point, though I'd be careful about labeling it a work of Minimalism, at least in the presence of its formidable composer.
Esquire called it a work of genius.
