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This book explores Williams' late plays in terms of a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter.
"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.
This is a book-length study of the intense creative relationship between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan.
In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri. The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.
THE STORY: The action takes place in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, shortly before the First World War. Alma Winemiller, a sensitive and lonely young woman, has become increasingly restive and disturbed by the fear that she will remain a spinster. Hem
Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams’s work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 1940–1980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams’s homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law. Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams’s studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law’s texts with those same topics in Williams’s personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams’s literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work’s multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.
ATTACK OF THE GIANT TENT WORMS. Billy and Clara are nearing the end of their summer vacation on Cape Cod, as their cottage is being devoured by billions of tent-worms. Worse, Billy has just gotten word from his oncologist that there are no more treatment options for his brain cancer. A darkly humorous exploration of which is more terrifying: bugs or death? (1 man, 1 woman.) DESIRE QUENCHED BY TOUCH. In 1950s New Orleans, a black masseur must account for the disappearance of his favorite white customer. People don’t just vanish inside massage parlors… (3 men.) THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN. Everything in Layley’s life is going according to plan. She belongs to the best sorority at her university and has a devoted boyfriend who could easily become a devoted husband. But Layley suspects that there is more to life than stifling conformity. So she signs up for a poetry class in the hopes of expressing herself. There she meets Dylan, a sensitive poet with whom she enjoys a night of passion that opens up a truly revolutionary prospect: living a life of her own. (3 men, 4 women.) ORIFLAMME. Oriflamme (noun): A red or scarlet banner; a knight’s standard; a rallying principle…Sickly Anna Kimball, on her final day, reaches out for, and becomes, all of these. (1 man, 1 woman.) YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT CENTRALIA. Jim, the Gentleman Caller, leaves the Wingfields’ disastrous dinner party to meet his fiancée Betty’s train. The evening won’t turn out the way either of them expected. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN A VIOLIN CASE AND A COFFIN. Tom and his sister Roe’s childhood comes to a painful end when Richard Miles, who moves in light, arrives in town with his violin in a case. (2 men, 4 women.)
This is a collection of thirteen original essays from a team of leading scholars in the field. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors cover a healthy sampling of Williams's works, from the early apprenticeship years in the 1930s through to his last play before his death in 1983, Something Cloudy, Something Clear. In addition to essays on such major plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Companion also features a chapter on selected key productions as well as a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams.
The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life—its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love—into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.