I read much of The Glass Menagerie, and some fellow students in an acting class did a long scene from it—where the shy girl presents some feller with a member of her glass menagerie as a "keepsake," right? Maybe a unicorn with a busted horn? I don't want to criticize something that did someone else good, but I found it manipulatively sentimental and pathetic. But maybe I missed something fundamental that you're picking up. It's possible that the reason a lot of people watched his stuff is that he did have something on the ball sometimes. But as you gather, it went by me.
I also watched more of Camino Real than I care to remember, and it was leeringly creepy and perverse in all the usual boring ways. And there are other works of his that I no doubt have successfully forgotten. I just think his point of view was generally weakening, destructive, and off.
The poetic, dream-like atmosphere of TGM was something entirely new in American drama. I don’t know how it’s manipulative since it’s very understated. Camino Real is not good TW.