The Role of Sexuality in the Major Plays of Tennessee Williams
The Role of Sexuality in the Major Plays of Tennessee Williams

Author: Senata Karolina Bauer-Briski

Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783906767970

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Tennessee Williams, one of the leading American playwrights of the 20th century, has often been called the 'national poet of the perverse'. Being a highly sexually active man all his life, he enjoyed writing sex into his plays and considered it beautiful. It is therefore perhaps surprising that the role sexuality plays in his dramatic work has never been researched in detail. This thesis is the first profound study of how sexuality - either overt or covert - affects and dominates Tennessee Williams' dramatic work. Analyzing eight major plays in detail, this study explores how the characters' lived or suppressed (deviating) sexual inclinations and preferences affect their psychological state, their behavior and their relationships with the other characters in the plays. It further demonstrates how sexuality motivates each play in the first place, dominates its plot and finally how the characters' ability to deal with their sexuality leads to either a conciliatory or a fatal, sometimes even a lethal ending. The book points out parallels and differences between the plays as well as Williams' development of sexuality in his drama.

Leading Men
Leading Men

Author: Christopher Castellani

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0525559078

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An expansive yet intimate story of desire, artistic ambition, and fidelity, set in the glamorous literary and film circles of 1950s Italy In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysterious young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives. Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in present-day America, until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only copy of an unknown play--Tennessee's last. What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can't save ourselves? With emotional clarity and grace, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.

Inscapes of Intimacy: Exploring the Dynamics of Relationships in the Select Plays of Tennessee Williams
Inscapes of Intimacy: Exploring the Dynamics of Relationships in the Select Plays of Tennessee Williams

Author: Anik Das

Publisher: BFC Publications

Published: 2023-09-23

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9357647120

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Inscapes of Intimacy: Exploring the Dynamics of Relationships in the Select Plays of Tennessee Williams is an odyssey into the captivating world of Tennessee Williams' literary brilliance as this thought-provoking analysis unravels the intricacies of human connections within his acclaimed plays, The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The book skillfully dissects the complex web of relationships depicted in Williams' plays, through pressing issues like gender and sexuality that form and inform the conceptual matrix of this study. From the lens of feminism, the exploration of man-woman relationships unveils layers of societal dynamics, while a critical assessment of woman-woman relationships offers a fresh perspective on empowerment and camaraderie. Delving into man-man relationships, the book courageously examines the portrayal of the homosexual psyche, shedding light on Williams' bold and groundbreaking portrayals. As the exploration deepens, the spotlight shifts to the theme of women, sexuality, and strangers, illuminating the transformative journeys of female characters in their pursuit of self-discovery and autonomy. Each chapter offers a profound understanding of Williams' multidimensional characters, evoking empathy and recognition of the human spirit within his plays. The book is not just an academic investigation but a profound encounter with the timeless themes of love, desire, and vulnerability that find expression in Tennessee Williams' plays. Delving into the profound insights of the playwright's works, this book presents a compelling tapestry of emotions, drama, and human spirit, leaving readers with a richer understanding of both Williams' genius and the complexities of human relationships. For scholars, theater enthusiasts, and anyone captivated by the power of storytelling, this book offers a deeply rewarding expedition into the heart of Tennessee Williams' enduring artistic legacy.

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

Author: John Lahr

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-09-22

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0393247120

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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
Tennessee Williams

Author: Robert Gross

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1135673543

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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.

Gentlemen Callers
Gentlemen Callers

Author: Michael Paller

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2005-04-16

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9781403967756

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Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America
Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America

Author: Jacqueline O’Connor

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1611478944

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Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams’s work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 1940–1980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams’s homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law. Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams’s studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law’s texts with those same topics in Williams’s personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams’s literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work’s multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.

The Night of the Iguana
The Night of the Iguana

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2009-10-30

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 081121852X

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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

Desire – Six One-Act Plays
Desire – Six One-Act Plays

Author: Elizabeth Egloff

Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published: 2018-02-07

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 0822236737

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ATTACK OF THE GIANT TENT WORMS. Billy and Clara are nearing the end of their summer vacation on Cape Cod, as their cottage is being devoured by billions of tent-worms. Worse, Billy has just gotten word from his oncologist that there are no more treatment options for his brain cancer. A darkly humorous exploration of which is more terrifying: bugs or death? (1 man, 1 woman.) DESIRE QUENCHED BY TOUCH. In 1950s New Orleans, a black masseur must account for the disappearance of his favorite white customer. People don’t just vanish inside massage parlors… (3 men.) THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN. Everything in Layley’s life is going according to plan. She belongs to the best sorority at her university and has a devoted boyfriend who could easily become a devoted husband. But Layley suspects that there is more to life than stifling conformity. So she signs up for a poetry class in the hopes of expressing herself. There she meets Dylan, a sensitive poet with whom she enjoys a night of passion that opens up a truly revolutionary prospect: living a life of her own. (3 men, 4 women.) ORIFLAMME. Oriflamme (noun): A red or scarlet banner; a knight’s standard; a rallying principle…Sickly Anna Kimball, on her final day, reaches out for, and becomes, all of these. (1 man, 1 woman.) YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT CENTRALIA. Jim, the Gentleman Caller, leaves the Wingfields’ disastrous dinner party to meet his fiancée Betty’s train. The evening won’t turn out the way either of them expected. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN A VIOLIN CASE AND A COFFIN. Tom and his sister Roe’s childhood comes to a painful end when Richard Miles, who moves in light, arrives in town with his violin in a case. (2 men, 4 women.)