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.

Understanding Tennessee Williams

Understanding Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Alice Griffin
Publisher:
ISBN:
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. --from publisher description.

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.

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811220753
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

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.

Bloom's How to Write about Tennessee Williams

Bloom's How to Write about Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Jennifer Banach
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438127677
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Tennessee Williams and lists sample topics.

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 Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia

The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia PDF Author: Philip Kolin
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Tennessee Williams is synonymous with 20th-century theatre. For nearly half a century, he wrote plays that transformed stages and amazed audiences around the world. This reference is a comprehensive guide to his life and works. Included are roughly 160 alphabetically arranged entries on topics related to Williams and his writings. Individual entries treat his works, his family members and acquaintances, places central to his writings, and such topics as music, race, religion, art, and politics. Entries cite works for further reading and are written by expert contributors, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Through roughly 160 alphabetically arranged entries, the encyclopedia identifies major figures in his life; names his characters and specifies their significance; summarizes his plays, stories, and poems; discusses his sources and publications; provides performance histories; and surveys important film adaptations. Entries are written by expert contributors and cite works for further reading, while the encyclopedia concludes with primary and secondary bibliographies.

A Student's Guide to Tennessee Williams

A Student's Guide to Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Spring Hermann
Publisher: Enslow Publishing
ISBN: 9780766027060
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the life and work of Tennessee Williams, one of the most important American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams PDF Author: Kate Rhodes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description