It has a way of devouring any future inventiveness that one possesses One breathes fear of change. “Quintero’s success ignited footlights all over the Village,” reported The New York Times “The American theatre expanded some 40 blocks. Critics realised they would not fall into the Atlantic if they ventured south of Times Square.” Quintero himself was to write in his autobiography If You Don’t Dance, They Beat You (1972),The day after Summer and Smoke opened, we became a success. I had never known what success was, but somehow in the United States things happen overnight They give you no time for preparation Let me state here and now that success is a curse.

A year later, with a group of drama students, he established a repertory company, the Loft Players, in Woodstock, New York, where plays directed by Quintero included The Glass Menagerie and Synge’s Riders to the Sea. In 1950 the group moved to New York City and on their small profits converted an unused former night-club, the Greenwich Village Inn, into a theatre in the round which they called the Circle-in-the-Square Theatre.Their first season’s plays included Dark of the Moon, The Enchanted and Yerma, then in 1952 came Summer and Smoke, which established both off- Broadway and Quintero. He entered the University of Southern California as a medical student, but after receiving a letter from his father saying, “I once had a son whose name was the same as the one you bear, but as far as I am concerned, he is dead”, he felt he no longer had to please his family.Seeing a touring version of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green, which he attended every night of its two-week run, awakened an interest in theatre, and he enrolled at the Goodman Theatre Dramatic School in Chicago. “I was taken to a brothel by my father when I was 15,” wrote Quintero, “but I was unable to function sexually.”Planning to become a priest, he was educated at the LaSalle Catholic High School in Panama City, but when he graduated in 1943 with barely average grades he was best known for his ability to decorate altars and his devotion to Bette Davis movies. His father rejected the boy’s attempts to meet his demands throughout his childhood, and later refused to acknowledge Quintero’s homosexuality. “From birth I was branded a disaster,” he later recalled, stating that his father had wanted a daughter, since he already had sons, and also disapproved that the boy’s skin was darker than anyone else’s in the family.

The bond that he was later to display with the works of O’Neill (he directed 19 productions of O’Neill plays) was echoed in the similarities between Quintero’s personality and that of the tortured playwright.Quintero was born in 1924 in Panama City, one of four children of a Spanish businessman. Quintero’s staging of such O’Neill plays as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten has become legendary, and he also had great success with works of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Thornton Wilder. Off-Broadway as a district was centred after the Second World War around Greenwich Village, its appeal parochial and its shows rarely covered by major critics. That changed forever in 1952 when Quintero directed a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which had failed on Broadway.