One of the delights of Woody Allen’s recently released memoir, Apropos of Nothing, is its celebration (all too-brief, alas) of Tennessee Williams. “I always wanted to be Tennessee Williams,” Allen writes. “I grew up idolizing [him]. The movie of Streetcar is for me total artistic perfection… the most perfect confluence of script, performance, and direction I’ve ever seen.” I wanted to be Tennessee Williams, too, when I discovered his works at age 18. And I’ve been a Woody Allen fan since seeing the Jazz-age romantic fantasy A Purple Rose of Cairo when it was released a year later, in 1985. Yet only with Blue Jasmine (2013), his homage to A Streetcar Named Desire, did I realize how deep his love of Williams flowed. And only now, upon reading his memoir, do I discover how much Allen consciously strove to channel Williams’s techniques. “I don’t want realism, I want magic,” is how Blanche put it. Looking back on A Purple Rose of Cairo—in which Mia Farrow’s Cecilia so yearns to escape her dismal reality that she …