Understanding Tennessee Williams

Understanding Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Alice Griffin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611170061
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Alice Griffin offers an in-depth evaluation of the nine plays that established Tennessee Williams as America's greatest lyric dramatist. Describing him as the first playwright writing in English to combine full-blooded characters, theatricalism, and poetic dialogue, Griffin considers Williams both as a literary figure and as a stage innovator. Griffin analyzes the language, characters, dramatic effects, and staging of these classic plays, and she calls attention to Williams's unique gift for creating dialogue as lyrical poetry yet as authentic as everyday conversation. She reveals the importance of symbolism in his work, uncovers his often overlooked humor, and explains his insistence on "plastic" presentations. Griffin also chronicles the resistance that Williams met when he tried to bring his revolutionary staging ideas to the commercial theater. Griffin viewed the plays as originally staged and discussed them with the playwright, the directors, and the actors. From her association with these initial productions, Griffin shares her knowledge of Williams's frustration with the presentation of his work. She remedies what she considers to be misguided interpretations of those early productions by measuring the original stage productions against Williams's stated aims.

Understanding Tennessee Williams

Understanding Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Alice Griffin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611170061
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alice Griffin offers an in-depth evaluation of the nine plays that established Tennessee Williams as America's greatest lyric dramatist. Describing him as the first playwright writing in English to combine full-blooded characters, theatricalism, and poetic dialogue, Griffin considers Williams both as a literary figure and as a stage innovator. Griffin analyzes the language, characters, dramatic effects, and staging of these classic plays, and she calls attention to Williams's unique gift for creating dialogue as lyrical poetry yet as authentic as everyday conversation. She reveals the importance of symbolism in his work, uncovers his often overlooked humor, and explains his insistence on "plastic" presentations. Griffin also chronicles the resistance that Williams met when he tried to bring his revolutionary staging ideas to the commercial theater. Griffin viewed the plays as originally staged and discussed them with the playwright, the directors, and the actors. From her association with these initial productions, Griffin shares her knowledge of Williams's frustration with the presentation of his work. She remedies what she considers to be misguided interpretations of those early productions by measuring the original stage productions against Williams's stated aims.

Blue Song

Blue Song PDF Author: Henry I. Schvey
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274579
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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.

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh PDF Author: John Lahr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
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.

The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams

The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811215084
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A collection of poetic works by the eminent playwright features substantial piece variants, poems from his plays, and accompanying explanatory notes, in a volume that is complemented by a CD recording of the author's reading of his "Blue Mountain Ballads" and other works.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811211963
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
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.

Hard Candy

Hard Candy PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811202213
Category : Short stories, American
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description


Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Ronald Hayman
Publisher: Yale University Press UK Sr
ISBN: 9780300054149
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A biography of the American playwright portrays him as a troubled artist who coped with his insecurities through the daily discipline of writing

New Selected Essays

New Selected Essays PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217286
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

Follies of God

Follies of God PDF Author: James Grissom
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101972777
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.

Notebooks

Notebooks PDF Author: Margaret Rose Thornton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300116823
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description
Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.