In a program note [to "Clothes for a Summer Hotel"], Mr. Williams writes: "Our reason for taking extraordinary licence with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds, liberties of this kind are quite prevalent; and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is the truth of character."

The central subjects of this dramatic exploration are the now legendary couple Zelda and her husband, writer Scott Fitzgerald, fragments of whose fractured lives and relationships have been assembled in a kaleidoscopic montage….

As the play opens, ghosts of the past emerge in a swirl of mist and disappear as the action centers on a sobered Scott Fitzgerald … come to visit his mentally disturbed wife. With the belated arrival of Zelda … the once golden couple of the '20s resumes what clearly has been an ongoing battle of recrimination and acrimony. It is a histrionic tour de force … but it grows wearisome before Mr. Williams introduces the series of flashbacks which probe the sources of the tragedy to come.

[Like "The Glass Menagerie,"] "Clothes for a Summer Hotel" is a play of memory as well as of ghosts. The specters come vividly, at times touchingly, to stage life as the action recalls earlier, if not happier, days….

Nor surprisingly, the dialogue abounds in tapestried eloquence, flights of lyricism, and a humor that can be delicate or ironically biting….

The conspicuously lacking element in "Clothes for a Summer Hotel" is any real suggestion of the glamourous people the Fitzgeralds had once been….

"Clothes for a Summer Hotel" is a bleak play, a play of defeat and dejection. One cannot help wondering whether this plunge into a ghostly purgatory was worth all the trouble it has taken.