SOUL SKETCHES.

By his own admission, Tennessee Williams was a hysteric; his oeuvre is perhaps the world's greatest testament to the hysteric's autoeroticism. "For love I make characters," he said. Williams's involvement with his fantasy world was so intense that sometimes, according to his friend Gore Vidal, who on occasion wrote in the same room with him, he would react out loud to the events taking shape on his typewriter. At the opening of "Five by Tenn" (at City Center), an evening of short plays, two of which have never been staged, Williams (Jeremy Lawrence) stands in front of the audience and drawls, "My characters build the play about them like spiders weaving their webs, sea ...