The story of Blanche DuBois and her last grasp at happiness, and of Stanley Kowalski, the one who destroyed her chance....

This work includes in-depth discussions of Tennessee Williams' great drama. A Streetcar Named Desire quickly became an international sensation when it premiered on "Broadway" in 1947. The play ran an impressive 855 performances and won a Pulitzer Prize before theatres in cities as far flung as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Melbourne began staging their own productions. When the play was adapted to film four years after its premiere, its reputation as one of the most compelling American dramas of the twentieth century was cemented. Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski became iconic characters, and Marlon Brando, a largely unknown actor before "Streetcar", was rocketed to stardom by his compelling performance. This volume in the "Critical Insights" series, edited and with an introduction by Brenda Murphy, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, brings together a variety of new and classic essays on Williams' famous play. Murphy's introduction sets the stage for critical investigations of the play in its description of the delicate negotiations that played out between Williams and Elia Kazan, the play's and film's director, as the two finalized the stage script and, later, the screenplay. A brief biography of Williams and a new essay by "Paris Review" contributor Catherine Steindler discussing Williams' penchant for extreme, nearly mad characters provide further introductory material to Williams' achievement. For readers new to Williams' play, a quartet of original essays provide valuable context. Camille-Yvette Welsch examines the play in light of post-war American culture and censorship and Kenneth Elliott compares Williams' treatment of tragedy with Arthur Miller's in his equally iconic play of the same period, "Death of a Salesman". Neil Heims, in turn, considers how repression drives the play's action, while Janyce Marson reviews a selection of "Streetcar" criticism. Nine previously published essays are also collected here to deepen readers' understanding of the play and its critics. Verna Foster and Britton J. Harwood examine Williams' unique adaptation of the tragedy and tragicomedy to suit the strictures of modern drama and the tastes of contemporary audiences. John S. Bak, Dan Isaac and Anne Fleche offer interpretations of Blanche's rape, while Dean Shackelford discusses the homosexual subtexts of Williams' works. Finally, Linda Costanzo Cahir, Keith Dorwick, and Nancy M. Tischler all examine various "Streetcar" adaptations, from the 1951 film to the 1995 opera. Rounding out the volume are a chronology of Williams' life as well as a complete list of Williams' dramatic, poetic, fiction, and nonfiction works and a lengthy bibliography of critical works for readers desiring to study Williams in greater depth....

Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has captured both stage and film audiences since its debut in 1954. One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins....

Set in St Louis during the depression, the glass menagerie is one of Tennessee Williams' most powerful and moving plays. Abandoned by her husband when he 'fell in love with long distances', Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious, life in blue mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace. Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are finally crushed. Mirroring the quiet despair of the thirties, the "Glass Menagerie" in its nostalgia for a past world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love celebrates, above all, the human need to dream....

Twelve previously uncollected experimental shorter plays: The Chalky White Substance • The Day on Which a Man Dies (An Occidental Noh Play) • A Cavalier for Milady • The Pronoun "I" • The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. LeMonde • Kirche, Küche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) • Green Eyes • The Parade • The One Exception • Sunburst • Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? • The Traveling Companion Even with his great commercial success, Tennessee Williams always considered himself an experimental playwright. In the last 25 years of his life his explorations increased—especially in shorter forms and one-act plays—as Williams created performance pieces with elements of theater of the absurd, theater of cruelty, theater of the ridiculous, as well as motifs from Japanese forms such as Noh and Kabuki, high camp and satire, and with innovative visual and verbal styles that were entirely his own.

Influenced by Beckett, Genet, and Pinter, among others, Williams worked hard to expand the boundaries of the lyric realism he was best known for. These plays were explicitly intended to be performed off-off Broadway or regionally. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes outrageous, quite often the tone of these plays is rough, bawdy or even cartoonish. While a number of these plays employ what could be termed bizarre "happy endings," others gaze unblinkingly into the darkness.

Though several of Williams' lesser-known works from this period have already been published by New Directions, these twelve plays have never been collected. Most of these shorter plays are unknown to audiences and scholars—some are published here for the first time—yet all of them embrace, in one way or another, what Time magazine called "the four major concerns that have spurred Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival."

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The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author's lifetime is now published for the first time. Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return home one midnight in a thunderstorm from the Memphis funeral of their older son to a house and a life literally falling apart--daughter Joanie is in an insane asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. Cornelius, who has political ambitions and a litany of health problems, is trying to find a large amount of moonshine money his gentle wife Bella has hidden somewhere in their collapsing house, but his noisy efforts are disrupted by a stream of remarkable characters, both living and dead.

While Williams often used drama to convey hope and desperation in human hearts, it was through this dark, expressionistic comedy, which he called a "Southern gothic spook sonata," that he was best able to chronicle his vision of the fragile state of our world. ....

Three timeless works by Tennessee Williams, the foremost American playwright of his time.

Sweet Bird of Youth
The Rose Tattoo
The Night of the Iguana...

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.

This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author’s original Foreword, the short story “The Night of the Iguana” which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch.

“I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this…this…this angry, petulant old man.”
        —The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana ....

The acclaimed classic in a new edition, now with an insightful new introduction, the author's original foreword, and the one-act play, The Enemy: Time, on which Sweet Bird of Youth was based.

Sometime actor and full-time male hustler Chance Wayne returns to the Gulf Coast town of St. Cloud in an attempt to retrieve his lost innocence by reuniting with his high school girlfriend, Heavenly Finley. But Chance arrives there with his current employer, the drug-addicted, over-the- hill movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, who uses Chance, teaches him to use others, and doesn't intend to let him go. Chance learns that when he left St. Cloud years before, he left Heavenly with a crippling venereal disease. Heavenly's brother and her father—the powerful Boss Finley, a politician who has been responsible for local lynchings—have marked Chance as "a criminal degenerate" and plan to castrate him. Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this gritty and wrenching play also reveals the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame by implicating small town injustice, systemic racism, and the depth of suffering that results from personal and public corruption....

"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."—Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post For most of his Broadway plays Tennessee Williams composed an essay, most often for The New York Times, to be published just prior to opening—something to whet the theatergoers’ appetites and to get the critics thinking. Many of these were collected in the 1978 volume Where I Live, which is now expanded by noted Williams scholar John S. Bak to include all of Williams’ theater essays, biographical pieces, introductions and reviews. This volume also includes a few occasional pieces, program notes, and a discreet selection of juvenilia such as his 1927 essay published in Smart Set, which answers the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?”

Wonderful and candid stories abound in these essays—from erudite observations on the theater to veneration for great actresses. In “Five Fiery Ladies” Williams describes his fascinated, deep appreciation of Vivien Leigh, Geraldine Page, Anna Magnani, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom created roles in stage or film versions of his plays. There are two tributes to his great friend Carson McCullers; reviews of Cocteau’s film Orpheus and of two novels by Paul Bowles; a portrait of Williams’ longtime agent Audrey Wood; a salute to Tallulah Bankhead; a political statement from 1972, “We Are Dissenters Now”; some hilarious stories in response to Elia Kazan’s frequent admonition, “Tennessee, Never Talk to An Actress”; and Williams’ most moving and astute autobiographical essay, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair.”

Theater critic and essayist John Lahr has provided a terrific foreword which sheds further light on Tennessee Williams’ writing process, always fueled by Williams’ self-deprecating humor and his empathy for life’s nonconformists. ....

Here are four plays by one of the giants of 20th-century American drama......

Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 3 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer....

Tennessee Williams was famous for insisting he write every morning. Even during his darkest days, while mourning a lover, or abusing some substance -- and he abused most of them at one time or another -- he'd write. The stories in this volume, arranged chronologically, are from every period of his long life, and recreate the milieux Williams knew and chronicled so movingly -- from his gypsy youth in St. Louis and New Orleans to his days of celebrity in Hollywood and New York. Some are studies for his plays, and like them, their language can suddenly surprise you with a poetic image that shines like a jewel. This edition includes a useful publishing history for each of the fifty stories.
"One overpowering impression emerges from all these stories put together: Tennessee Williams knew more about the hidden life of far-flung America than any of us really suspected." -- Seymour Krim, Washington Post Book World
"By turns disturbing, moving, and funny; these stories help amplify Williams's tragic vision, for like the plays, they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the human heart."
-- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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