A Student Handbook To The Plays Of Tennessee Williams

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry. A chronology of the writer's life and work helps to situate all his works in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of Williams' writing, its recurrent themes and concerns and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: * The context * Themes * Characters * Structure and language * The play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations) Questions for study, and notes on words and phrases in the text are also supplied to aid the reader. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Williams' work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Williams' greatest plays.

Provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry.

"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.

Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.

This new volume gathers some of Williams' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Arthur Miller provides the essential guide to Miller's most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on five of Miller's plays: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and Broken Glass. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers want a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Miller's artistry. A chronology of Miller's life and work helps to situate his oeuvre in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of his writing, its recurrent themes and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on the context, themes, characters, structure and language, and the play in production - both on stage and screen adaptations; there are questions for further study and detailed notes on words and phrases in the text. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Miller's work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Miller's greatest plays.

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.

Tennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world, and are staples of the standard American repertory. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as America's leading gay playwright from the repressive postwar period, through Stonewall, to the growth of gay liberation, he represents an important and controversial figure for queer theorists. Gross and his contributors have included all of his plays, a chronology, introduction and bibliography.

From his earliest success in 1945 with the poignant The Glass Menagerie, until his final curtain call with the 1979 production of The Two-Character Play, Tennessee Williams never stopped experimenting with theatrical techniques and striving to explain his richly provocative ideas. This new critical study of Williams traces the shape of the playwright's life and career, both full of wanderings, failures, love, anguish, and unparalleled triumphs. Incorporating much of the new information that is emerging in the recent publication of letters, biographies, and previously unpublished plays, this Student Companion distills a vast body of scholarship to give a fresh and accessible presentation of the key elements of Williams' complicated works. In-depth analysis of 7 of Williams' plays explore the literary styles, themes, and influences Williams drew from poetry, movies, mythology, religion, and personal experiences. This book allows the general reader and theatre enthusiast a glimpse at the shape of his life, his mind, and his work. Readers will come to appreciate why plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) have come to be considered American classics. Following the successful series format, this volume introduces readers to Tennessee Williams with a richly detailed biography, followed by a Literary Heritage chapter. A full chapter is devoted to examining each of his major plays. In addition to analysis of character, plot, themes, and style, each play is also given an alternate reading from formal, feminist, psychological, gay, or theological criticism. The concluding bibliography cites all of Williams' dramatic output, as well as his poetry and prose. It also gives many sources for biographical information, criticism of individual works, and original reviews from the first staging of his plays. Students and their teachers should find this volume interesting and easy to follow.