The Metatheater Of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams' characters set the stage for their own dramas. Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire), arrived at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props. Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) directed her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams' entire oeuvre: each play stages the process through which it came into being--and this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter takes a detailed reading of one play and its variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.

Tennessee Williams' characters set the stage for their own dramas. Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire), arrived at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props. Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) directed her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams' entire oeuvre: each play stages the process through which it came into being--and this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter takes a detailed reading of one play and its variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.

Now available as a paperbook, Volume VIII adds to the series' four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life.

Poems deal with truth, religion, nature, thought, the role of poetry, death, visions, age, and the past.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. The first five volumes of this ongoing series contain Williams's full-length plays through 1975 and, in addition to the texts themselves, include original cast listings and production notes. Volumes 6 and 7 contain Williams's collected shorter plays. Now available as a paperback, Volume 8 adds to the series four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams's life.

The essays in this volume were all written by David Kaplan in conjunction with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, of which he is the curator and a co-founder. They are organized in two sections. The first section consists of ten essays written for each year of the Provincetown Festival, most included in the Festival catalogue for the year indicated. Those essays focus on each year’s thematic selection of Williams plays—and other dance, music, and theater events—as well as some aspect of Williams’ plays not always obvious in the text but essential to understanding the plays in production. The second section includes seven occasional essays, written for productions of Williams plays associated with the Festival. All the essays relate, in one way or another, to the story of what happened to the playwright during the last twenty years of his life and how his reputation is evolving since his death.

The World of Tennessee Williams offers a survey of the life and career of one of America¿s greatest dramatists from his birth in 1911 to his death in 1983. Richard Leavitt was in a unique position to create such a volume since he was a friend of Tennessee¿s and followed his career closeup. Kenneth Holditch, who has undertaken the task of completing the text was a friend of Leavitt¿s and knew Tennessee Williams. It has been his desire to carry to fruition the original plan Dick Leavitt conceived in the 1970s and augmented in 1983 when Williams died.

Presents a collection of critical essays on Williams and his works, arranged in chronological order of publication.

The plays of Tennessee Williams are some of the greatest triumphs of the American theatre. If Williams is not the most important American playwright, he surely is one of the two or three most celebrated, rivaled only by Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. In a career that spanned almost five decades, he created an extensive canon of more than 70 plays. His contributions to the American theatre are inestimable and revolutionary. The Glass Menagerie (1945) introduced poetic realism to the American stage; A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) explored sexual and psychological issues that had never before been portrayed in American culture; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) dared to challenge the political and sexual mores of the Eisenhower era; and his plays of the 1970s are among the most innovative works produced on the American stage. But Williams was far more than a gifted and prolific playwright. He created two collections of poetry, two novels, four collections of stories, memoirs, and scores of essays. Because of his towering presence in American drama, Williams has attracted the attention of some of the most insightful scholars and critics of the twentieth century. The 1990s in particular ushered in a renaissance of Williams research, including a definitive biography, a descriptive bibliography, and numerous books and scholarly articles. This reference book synthesizes the vast body of research on Tennessee Williams and offers a performance history of his works. Under the guidance of one of the leading authorities on Williams, expert contributors have written chapters on each of Williams' works or clusters of works. Each chapter includes a discussion of the biographical context of a work or group of writings; a survey of the bibliographic history; an analysis of major critical approaches, which looks at themes, characters, symbols, and plots; a consideration of the major critical problems posed by the work; an overview of chief productions and film and television versions; a concluding interpretation; and a bibliography of secondary sources. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography and a comprehensive index.