Customer Reviews (2)

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

This is another classic from my high school days that seems wasted on youth. How can a fifteen-year-old in prep school appreciate the desperation and human frailty of Blanche DuBois? Or the dichotomy inherent in Stanley Kowalski's passionate brutality?

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire--just--Desire!--the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...
STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?
=================================================================================================================

Many will have seen either the stage or film versions of Streetcar, but reading through Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play allows for the depression to really set in. Readers may even recognize qualities in friends and family members approximating those of alcoholism or domestic violence.

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand new outlook on life!
=================================================================================================================

There are so many great dialogue exchanges here, outside of the classic "kindness of strangers" quote. I'll snip a few of my favorites.

=================================================================================================================
MITCH: You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat!
BLANCHE: What a fantastic statement! Fantastic of him to say it, fantastic of you to repeat it!
=================================================================================================================

The abusive domestic relationship seemed a common theme in mid-20th Century America; witness both Streetcar and The Honeymooners. "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser! One of these days Alice, straight to the Moon!"

=================================================================================================================
STANLEY: When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it.
=================================================================================================================

Very easy to get through this in a sitting or two. Very hard not to be emotionally moved, even if the dénouement, vis-a-vis Stanley and Blanche, was not obvious to me after that first reading many years ago.

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour--but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands--and who knows what to do with it?
=================================================================================================================

Postscript: To correct the previous reviewer, this is a paperback, not a movie. Specifically it is a mid-80s Signet printing, and it includes a 4-page Introduction by the author. I will post this review with the current edition for sale: A Streetcar Named Desire.

Leaves something to be desired.
Delivery/purchase and all that was uneventful but the movie itself was a big letdown.It worked fine but the acting was terrible. ... Read more

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

Customer Reviews (3)

Human emotions captured as poetry brought to life in a play
Tennessee Williams (Born Thomas Lanier Williams) has always been one of my favorite American authors.I highly recommend this reading for literature students and blooming actors alike.TW has the ability to add colorful symbolism to real emotions coming out of real people without sounding pretentious.

These books should be required reading in advanced high school.But are probably omitted due to the sexual undertones that are in TWs writing.

Certainly books that can be enjoyed later in life.

THRILLING
In the history of theatre, I am sure that future generations will find that Tennessee Williams was the one playwright who not only wrote of the neuroses and souls of his fellow Americans, but did so with extraordinary beauty and grace.

In this collection one can find three of his most famous plays, two of which, unhappily, do not seem to be revived very often.So although it is always better to SEE a play rather than READ it, that may not be very easy.

"Orpheus Descending" deserves to be rediscovered--a highly poetic, gothic horror story of the battle between art, spirit, soul and sensuality, sexuality.Originally written for the brilliant Italian actress, Anna Magnani, it was in fact played on Broadway by the equally brilliant American, Maureen Stapleton.

"Suddenly Last Summer" was actually the basis for a very long, very self-conscious study I did for a college psych. class.Here in one of Williams most "symbol-laden" plays is his cry for an unfeeling world to accept human beings with all their faults (BECAUSE of all their faults, perhaps?) told through the disturbing memories of a woman whose family wants those memories shut up at any cost.

All three movie versions of these plays are faithful to the originals UP TO A POINT.Try to see the plays, but if that is impossible do yourself a favor:read all of Williams, including his poetry and short stories, and start with this thrilling volume of 3 of his best plays.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

You won't be disappointed OR bored with this volume
The three choices for this volume fit very well together. All threeinclude themes that are so often covered in Williams' work. Bizarre familysituations, unrequitted love and battles within the self are portrayed,often brutally, in these works. For example, the struggle experienced by"Maggie the Cat" in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is a rawblend of self hatred, self love, longing for what can't be mixed with afearsome attempt of "keeping up appearances" within the confinesof a, to say the least, very unhealthy extended family situation. I thinkanother fine example of Williams' flair for the, shall we sayextraordinary, is "Suddenly Last Summer." It's not easilydescribed without giving away many shockers so I won't spoil that here. Ihighly recommend this volume as the two I just mentioned are absolutelyfantastic. Also, don't ever pass up the chance of seeing the film versionsof these (I speak of the originals in this case). ... Read more

Product Description
"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."—Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach PostFor 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

The Sweet Bird Of Youth Gone Awry
The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights.Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

"Suddenly Last Summer is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character Sebastian seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her "genius" son from the world even after his `untimely' death ......last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian's beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian's appetites is to be permanently taken out of the picture in order to keep this world beautiful. Nobody believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the `hope' that there may actually be someone to believe the girl's story before she becomes one more sacrifice to `beauty' in the world.

Not my favorite Williams' play
It's an unusual story, but I don't find it nearly as moving as Streetcar or Night of the Iguana.

Suddenly, Last Summer
Love the movie and wanted to read the story in the play form. It is a complex story with many twists and turns.
You wonder about the many references to food. " Her eyes are a delicious color" and such.
After reading the play version you can relate to how the movie was embelished upon to make the story even more complex.

Great!

Unknown binding
Loved the movie and wanted to read the book version.Was disappointed when I received the book and it was the "play" version. Buyer beware.

Beautiful, violent, and disturbing
This play of Williams' (originally presented with the one-act "Something Unspoken" as "Garden District") pulls together a number of themes that ran through his earlier works -- violence,sexual exploitation, cannibalism, alienation -- and combines them in a workthat is both powerful visceral and hypnotically dream-like.The storyconcerns Catherine Holly and the strange story she has to tell about hercousin Sebastian.Her tale wreaks havoc within her family, particularlywith her Aunt Violet, who places the girl in an asylum and wants hersubjected to a lobotomy.However, the action of the play is negligible;where Williams places the chills are in the various stories told by all thecharacters, filling in a portrait of the bizarre, sinister SebastianVenable.The effect is all the more disturbing for the fact that we seethe events in our imaginations rather than onstage.An true original froman American genius. ... Read more

Product Description
The riveting, revelatory, and sole authorized account of the critical first decades of Tennessee Williams's life. Tennessee Williams, author of such indelible masterpieces as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, is considered by many to be the greatest literary artist of the American theater. Tom is Lyle Leverich's definitive account based on his exclusive access to letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and family documents of Williams's early life and of the events that shaped this most autobiographical of dramatists. It tells the story of the marital traumas of his bullying father and overly protective mother, the mental disorders that institutionalized his beloved sister Rose, his stalled academic career, and his confused sexuality and early successes as a writer; and it leaves Thomas Lanier Williams on the brink of fame with The Glass Menagerie and his transformation into the celebrated persona of "Tennessee." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Perhaps THE definitive Tennessee Williams biography
I always thought I knew a little bit about Tennessee Williams, but after reading this, the first of a projected two-volume biography of the man who is arguably one of America's greatest playwrights, I felt like I had spent evenings listening to Williams tell stories or even tap-tap-tapping away on his old manual typewriter in a sweltering apartment in St. Louis or New Orleans.

This biography is massive enough to be an exhaustive portrait and yet intimate enough that, coming away from it, the reader feels like he or she has been a part of Williams' world.

Covering Williams' life up until 1945 when The Glass Menagerie debuted on Broadway, this book provides a look at a gifted young author whose work is just beginning to hit its stride. That Tennessee Williams achieved the acclaim that he did is more surprising given the fractured family life that produced him. A father who could be distant even under the same roof; a mother whose outward sweetness concealed a very real monster; a sister who descended into madness despite her brother's love for her ... all are elements in Williams' life that found their ways into his work are spread out for the reader. Yet despite Williams' flaws - his drinking, his promiscuity, and more - he emerges as a fully realized human in much the way that his greatest characters become real on the stage.

With such a colorful subject as Tennessee Williams, it would be difficult to write a boring biography. In Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, Lyle Leverich has produced a superb biography.

Exhaustive Study, Exhausting Read
Leverich gives us a comprehensive look at Tom Williams before he became the legendary playwright Tennessee Williams.It was not a pretty picture, but it seemed to be well documented and accurate.Leverich's writing is hard to get through because he places the same emphasis on each fact, and they should be weighted differently.How important is it to read several times about his fear of becoming like his mentally ill sister?Quite.Now how important is it to hear that he wrote home for money at least thirty times during the course of this book?Wouldn't it make more sense to have said that throughout his lean years, there were constant pleas for funds from his mother and grandparents, than to go into detail about each one?
A good editor was sorely in need.
On a positive note, Leverich treated Williams with respect, but never let his admiration minimize his shortcomings.

Really, I can't find a thing wrong with this book
Biographer Leverich has given us a true gem with "Tom." While he admits that he was appointed by Williams to be his official biographer, by the time Leverich wrote this, Williams was dead and he could have done anything he wanted as far as the amount of information he included. But the biographer really pulls no punches in this even-handed and extremely informative and almost-gossipy tell-all.

I was truly shocked about a couple of things. First, the excellent quality of the writing just took me totally by surprise. Second, Leverich really covers every base and leaves no stone unturned, the exception being that this bio only covers Williams's life up to his fame with "Menangerie." When I initially purchased this tome, I thought it was going to the the full monty. Turns out most people know, or think they know, about Williams's life after he became famous. He was, afterall, in that same category as Truman Capote, that is to say, he was famous for being famous as well as being a great writer.

The third element of this bio that intrigued me, was Leverich's equal treatment of those interviewed. One of my favorite examples includes an interview with someone who attended college with Williams and didn't care for his work or think he showed much promise. And this interview was done after Williams was dead! Leverich goes on to point out that the woman also wrote a paper titled "What I DIDN'T learn in college," or some such paraphrase. While the biographer certainly gives the naysayers their moment in the sun, he also points out that they're not some of the brightest people.

Another aspect of this great book is the openly discussed theme of sexuality and how it played out in Williams's life. This is especially interesting for someone who lived at home, on and off, until he was almost thirty. Leverich claims that Williams did not have any sexual experiences until he was twenty-five, and while this is hard to believe, the fact that Leverich covers the topic of Williams's promiscuity heavily when he finally does come out, gives credibility to this story.

I haven't looked to see if there is a part two written by this biographer, although I believe he mentions that intent on the flap, but if there is, I'll be buy it soon.

Also really enjoyed Christopher Isherwood's Diaries Diaries: Volume 1, 1939-1960 which is a long book, but goes by quickly, and Kate Remembered which, though in a totally differnt tone and class, is a fun read. If you truly enjoy biographies, you need to read more than one on any particular individual. Another I'd suggest would be Diaghilev: and his Friends Again, in a different style all together, and none of these are in the same league as "Tom," they are nevertheless good bios to have.

Interesting information
This is a very thorough, fact-filled biography - up to THE GLASS MENAGERIE of 1945. Leverich approaches his subject in a business-like manner, generally sacrificing artistic concerns for factual ones. Some of these interesting facts include:

Williams spent his childhood with his grandparents in Clarksdale, MS
Went to the U. of Missouri to study journalism
Hated his father till the end of his life when he learned his mother was actually "the villain"
Often broke
His sister was schizo, like Blanche in STREETCAR
Loved to swim
His homosexual lifestyle was pretty sordid
Met D.H. Lawrence in Taos
Laurette Taylor, star of GLASS MENAGERIE on Broadway, was ill on opening night and would be throwing up while off stage during the performance

Anyone interested in Tennessee Williams will find much to think about and be fascinated with in this biography. Recommended.

Well Written and Superbly Researched
This was the most interesting biography I have ever read.I found that I was even reading the footnotes and bibliography!

The book begins with a delve into Tennessee Williams' genealogy (including a chart, which I referred to frequently while reading the book).The author goes on to describe Tennesee's formative years, home life, and young-adulthood.The book takes the reader up through Tennessee's overwhelming success with "The Glass Menagerie."

I found the book (and, therefore, Tennessee Williams) so interesting that I began researching Williams' works and also his favorite writers (Hart Crane, DH Lawrence).I call a biography a complete success that could have such an effect as it has on me.

I look forward to the next edition, though I wonder if it will ever be in print. ... Read more

Product Description
This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment. "The innocent and the damned, the lonely and the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless . . . (Williams) brings them all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion."--Newsweek. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Let's Hear It For The B-Team
Tennessee Williams is so well-known for other plays like "The Glass Menagerie" and "Streetcar Named Desire" that one like me not terribly familiar with him, except via his reputation for overwrought Southern Gothic drama, approaches this collection of Williams' lesser-known plays from his major period with trepidation.

"Four Plays" is pretty Gothic, and sometimes overwrought, but it makes for a pretty immersive read, not to mention a tough-love rollercoaster for the human condition.

Up first is "Summer And Smoke" (1948), a tale of a raucous young medical student and the girl next door who has pined for him since childhood. Right away you get that you are in the hands of an unusual playwright in Williams, who gives very detailed instructions on dressing the set, including which constellations should be projected on the overhead cyclorama during evening scenes and what colors the actors should wear.

Williams is just as controlling with his characterizations. Alma is a sincere, spiritually-inclined woman who tries to bring order to her household, hostage to a crazy mama who spitefully embarrasses Alma and her minister father. John also teases Alma, with talk of sex, yet a curious qualm holds him back from the ravishment he knows could be his at his pleasure: "Many's the time I've looked across at the Rectory and wondered if it would be worth trying, you and me..." That yard's worth of distance is the substance and the tragedy of this curious, arresting play.

The other three plays develop similar dialogues between intimacy and loss. Nowhere in this book does that come out more hot and heavy than "Orpheus Descending" (1957), a play which Williams in an introduction explains was a decades-long labor of love which he never gave up on. In a small southern town, gossip travels quickly, especially when a mysterious man takes a job at a general store owned by a dying man and his wife, who suspects her husband had something to do with the long-ago murder of her father. It all boils up rather quickly and unconvincingly, even for Williams where a certain suspension of disbelief is helpful. Still, you keep reading.

"Suddenly Last Summer" (1958) is the most recognized title, though more for me from the Motels' hit song in 1983. It's a more subtle but just as ripping dramatic piece as "Orpheus". A batty rich widow tries to have her niece lobotomized to destroy her memory of how the widow's son died in Mexico. "My son, Sebastian, was chaste," she declares. "I was the only one in his life who satisfied the demands he made of people."

Sebastian wasn't exactly Ivory Snow-pure, of course, and in the widow's many daiquiri-fueleddiscursions there's both poignancy and hilarity. Definitely surreal, "Suddenly Last Summer" probably plays better on the page than the stage, as the major plot comes entirely in eyewitness narrative.

"Period Of Adjustment" (1960), the final and last-written of these plays, is my favorite in the crowd, a Christmas tale of domestic dysfunction that plays out as a subdued comedy of manners. A newlywed couple shows up at the door of the groom's Air Force buddy. The honeymoon, it turns out, was over before it started.

Williams sets up a rich satire of middle-class life. The groom fantasizes about raising Texas longhorn cattle, not for beef, but for herding on television. His pal is on the outs with his own wife for a variety of reasons, including the fact he fears she is raising their son to be a sissy by buying him dolls. Williams plays against his M.O. by showcasing a talent for lower-register exposition, realistic dialogue instead of soliloquy, and gentle, effective comedy throughout.

There may not really be a Williams M.O. Sure, there's neurotic women and beefy satyr-like men on display here, but reading these four plays reveals a master of multiple facets, too virtuosic for easy stereotyping. Flawed as they may be, "Four Plays" presents a pretty strong argument for people like me to take Tennessee more seriously.

The Great Williams lesser knows gems
How beautiful is Tennessee Williams? Consider his affections for his characters. Consider his appreciative and sensuous representations of his Southerness. Consider his status as a male writer whose female characters are the ambitions of American actresses. Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard, all members of the select American Giants Canon, cannot say so much. Edward Albee and Eugene O'Neill also gift wonderful women's parts, but nobody shares the trauma of fagility in a bruising world like Tennessee Williams.
This collection of some of his lesser known works serves as a wonderful entrée to his milieu and brilliance.
Summer and Smoke is a classic of his lesser known plays; a lifetime's changes for Alma and John takes place over a year, where the longings and passions of two people diametrically driven by the spirit and the flesh are danced about: bad timing, self-hatred, the tasks of responsibilities to one's parents, all serve as a foil for something marvelous, and in so doing illuminate the simple and monumental difficulties of love and hope.
Orpheus Descending is the tale of Val Xavier's perilous trip into the fiery heart of a Southern small town, where outsiders are not welcome and sexuality will be burned by the fears of a violent community. Val's stimulation of the hatred and passion inside Lady and the sensuous inspiration of Carol spark the town's leading "citizens" to attack and subdue the whimsy of youth and the hopefulness of true connections. Highlighted by a very expressionistic set design, Williams offers his characters up as martyrs to the truth and the risk of emotional attachment.
Suddenly Last Summer is a shorter piece, a long lone-act that proves a swift example of everything Williamsian. Essentially an expositional exercise in suspense, its tale is of a young doctor's visit to the estate of a wealthy Southern matron (Aunt Venable), who wants to endow the doctor's experiments with lobotomies. Her niece has been acting out and spreading a horrible story about Aunt Venable's son Sebastian and the trauma of the tale is enough to propose a lobotomy for Catherine, her erratic niece. Ultimately the horrific story is revealed, and presents Williams' penchant for extreme people in extreme circumstances and the volatility of being openly and actively indifferent to society's norms and codes of silence.
Period of Adjustment is an odd piece, even for Williams. Of all the plays of his I've read (which is not all of them), it's the only full length piece that has a happy ending. Ironic too as it is about two married couples (never a sub-cultural group to fare well in his work) and the crossing dialogues of a husband from one and a wife from another, frequently about the loathing they feel for their mates. It is subtitled ;or, High Point over a Cavern, no doubt a metaphor for the nature of romance and relationships, marriage and fidelity. It would be a treat to see this performed, as it features a smaller cast than a usual Williams play and has an air of mild charm infused with the banter of tense marriages, and doesn't have the frequent emotionally broken, clipped-wing dreamers associated with the mighty Tennessee.
This publication's plays are not necessarily the same as the Dramatists Plays or Samuel French series, as those represent productions scripts, are usually cut and feature stage directions and set designs that may be specific to that rendering.
Also included in the collection are essays on Summer and Smoke's evolution from Eccentricities of a Nightingale to it's final version. There is also an essay on Williams and another on Battle of Angels becoming Orpheus Descending.
Essential reading for actors, directors and lover of great American literature. Williams is a giant and needs to be read, if one cannot see his art live on stage.

A lovely collection
Although I bought this book just for a quick read of Suddenly Last Summer but found all of the other plays in this volume to be delights in their own respect. Each has their ups and downs, but all are undeniably in the style of Tennessee Williams. I think this book is a must read for any true Tennessee fan as it give any reader a fuller look into the style that is Tennessee.

The best of the best
Tennesse Williams has become of my favorite authors, partially due to this book.I have long been a fan of the movie adaptations of his work, but they come nowhere near to the superb quality of the written word.In allof his plays you can get a sense of what the characters are feeling.Inmost cases those feelings are angst and despair."Suddenly LastSummer" is by far the best play in this book, but the others are notfar behind.The characters in these plays are easy to "see",thanks to Williams' wonderful development.As with every Williams' play,these have surprising twists and revelations throughout.I highlyrecommend these, and all other Tennessee Williams plays.

It was amasing.
Of the plays that I read, I found them all to have real life aplications.One of the suprising things was that his works were written several years ago but there are still points that he raises that are aplicable to today.Honestly I could not go to bed until I found out how he resolved his conflicts.I will have to read more of his work.He is not that bad for being an english paper topic. ... Read more

Product Description

The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work.

Customer Reviews (3)

all times classique edition
The edition was as expected: traditional, simple with no annoying comments. Though, I would prefer a more extended introduction.
As for Amazon's services, I was amazed by its reliability. Thanks guys!

Early Plays from a Great Playwright
The first professional performance of a play I ever saw was A Streetcar Named Desire.The first major part I ever acted in a play was in The Glass Menagerie.The largest city near my hometown when I was growing up was St. Louis.So I have a close connection to Tennessee Williams and I admire him very much as a playwright but I had never read these short plays of his until now.There are some wonderful things here.

Nearly all the plays here are quite interesting, my favorites of these play being the simplest ones where two or three characters are having conversations: "Talk To Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen...," "This Property is Condemned," "Auto-Da-Fe" and "Something Unspoken."Slightly more complex but still plays with depth and interest are the title play ("27 Wagons Full of Cotton"),"The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "Portrait of a Madonna" and "The Strangest Kind of Romance."

If there is a problems with some of these plays, it is the difficulty in staging them; certainly with the kind of detail that Williams specifies in the stage directions.Many of the theatre companies I work with simply do not have the resources to create the kind of wonderful images Williams describes.I loved reading "The Purification"--a lovely verse play--but I thought it incredibly difficult to stage, which is too bad.

Even if you aren't considering staging the plays, however, they are worth reading.It is easy to see from these early plays how Williams was developing the ideas that would become some of his greatest characters, particularly Blanche from Streetcar.If you have any interest in Williams as a playwright, this is a book that should definitely be read.

These short works by Williams are definitely worth reading.
This collection contains 13 short works by Williams.This work draws me to it because of the poetic style that Williams uses.Not only the dialogue, but the moods and situations are both poetic--both subtle anddynamic at the same time.These short plays may not be crafted as well assuch masterworks as -Streetcar- and -Menagerie-, but Tennessee wasdefinitely on to something when he wrote them.They are strange, butWilliams doesn't seem to be contriving strange things for the sake of beingstrange or making spectacle.The power in these works reminds me of thepower of the contemporary poet Louise Gluck;I can't really understand whyLouise's poetry or Tennessee's short works are so strong because they seemso simple and sparce.I am an aspiring writer and director--for someoneheading in either of those directions, this book is a must read.It willmake you think.You must be prepared to not really understand the works,but that hazy quality makes them all the more wonderful.It's as ifWilliams knows the language of feelings and doesn't employ the language ofthe mind with which we're so familiar. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

It's about time!
I have been a big fan of Williams' work for years, and have been waiting for someone to champion the later plays.While Saddik's argument acknowledges that not all of Williams' later plays were as sophisticated as the earlier ones, she acknowledges his right to experiment and very intelligently analyzes the form of some of his best later work.Bravo!

Brilliant and touching, a true masterpiece.
This book presents Williams' later works in a completely different light, for they are seen as a progression ofa genius, not as a stifling of one. It is only unfortunate that Williams himself is not around to read thisdeeply insightful piece of work.

Truly outstanding and educational
Informative piece of writing giving a whole new and different outlook on Tennessee Williams' later works. Dr. Saddik is able to give a in depth perspective on the later works of the playwright. Often misunderstood bycritics and never quite reaching the acclaim of his earlier works, thisbook is able to show the reader just what was happening throughout thisfamous playwright's life. An excellent read!

Extremely informative and interesting
This was an exceptionally interesting book about both Tennessee William's life andwork and the theater world at the time. It provides an insightful discussion of how expectation shaped the career of a great author, as wellas fascinating autobiographical details. A fun read! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Greatest American playwright of all time.
I love these collections of Williams plays. I have both volumes and they include all his plays. Still small enough to carry around as the pages are very thin but this is not in anyway bothersome. His writing has changed my life. Such compassion and understanding of human need and pain. I never tire of reading his works. Williams writing is a must for anyone, even if you are not in the theatre world. His plays are timeless and genius. He is the such a beautiful, poetic playwright.

Just what he asked for.
This ws purchased as a gift and the recipient was quite pleased.This book did not contain "Night of the Iguana" which was on his list with some other stories, so I purchased it separately.This was just what he wanted, and he is very pleased.

One of the greats
Tennessee Williams is in the top ranks of American playwrights. His works are a MUST for serious students of the American theatre. Moreover, they are wonderful works for actors to read and learn from -- some of the finest characters, most poignant scenes, and brilliant insights on human nature AND theatrical staging that you can find anywhere. Cheerful? No. Uplifting? Usually not. Brilliant, stageworthy and gripping? Always. This collection, both volumes, gives you all the plays, plus some very worthwhile notes and prefaces from Williams himself.

Dragon Country.
"It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial," Tennessee Williams wrote in the 1948 essay "The Catastrophe of Success," eventually added as a preface to the "memory play" that catapulted him to stardom, "The Glass Menagerie" (1945).Prophetic words of a man who drew heavily on his own experience, on life in the economically depressed South, homosexuality, alcoholism, physical and mental infirmity, violence, passion, desire, love and loss, but most of all his profound sense of humanity and his understanding of the drama of everyday life to create Dragon Country, that uninhabitable and yet inhabited world, that land of unendurable but nevertheless endured pain (also the title of a 1970 collection of plays) of unforgettable pieces such as "The Glass Menagerie," "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), "Summer and Smoke" (1948), "The Rose Tattoo" (1951), "Camino Real" (1953), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), "Orpheus Descending" (1957), "Suddenly Last Summer" (1958), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), "The Night of the Iguana" (1961) and "Not About Nightingales" (set in 1938 but only brought to the stage 50 years later).

Born Thomas Lanier Williams to an overbearing, hard-drinking, abusive, frequently absent father and a doting mother, Tennessee acquired the sobriquet he later chose as his first name in university, where his Deep South accent made him an easy target for his classmates.A writer since his youth, he saw his first short story ("Isolated") published in a high school newspaper; and after several other prose publications, his second play "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!" was produced by a Memphis amateur company in 1935. (His first play, the unstaged "Beauty Is the Word," had been a 1930 University of Missouri drama class assignment which, submitted to the school's Dramatic Arts Club contest, won the first honorable mention ever to be awarded to a freshman).After a stint with his father's shoe company, where he had gone to work at parental insistence, he graduated from the University of Iowa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938.His big breakthrough came with "A Glass Menagerie;" the story of fading Southern belle Amanda Wingfield (who, like many of Williams's most memorable characters, frantically clings to the illusion of a world gone by), her crippled daughter Laura (the owner of the titular glass figurine collection), "gentleman caller" Jim (Laura's suitor), and Amanda's son Tom, Williams's thinly veiled alter ego who, like the playwright, sees his vocation as a poet crushed under his daily job at a shoe factory.Yet, looking back at his struggling life preceding "Glass Menagerie," Williams later came to regard that time as more real than the life made possible by fame and fortune: in fact, "it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created," he wrote in "The Catastrophe of Success."

The present compilation, one of two volumes in the magnificent "Library of America" series, brings together the more significant works of Williams's early years and of his peak as a playwright through 1955, including inter alia his two Pulitzer Prize winners ("A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), the only recently-rediscovered "Spring Storm" (1938) and "Not About Nightingales," the initial, unsuccessful version of "Orpheus Descending" ("Battle of Angels," 1940), as well as excerpts from the one-act play collection "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" (originally from 1945, augmented and republished 1953), among them the collection's title piece plus "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "Something Unspoken," "This Property Is Condemned," and others.The second Library of America volume covers Williams's creative period after 1955.Neither tome is all-inclusive; a fully comprehensive compilation would easily have required three volumes for the plays alone, not to mention his poetry and prose; and a 1955 caesura certainly does make sense.Still: completists will have to look elsewhere in addition.Among the more significant omissions in this first volume are "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!" (which I would have liked to see included if only because it was his first-ever staged play) as well as the modestly successful "American Blues" (1939) and the remaining one-act plays from "27 Wagons Full of Cotton." Volume 2 similarly focuses on Williams's more significant later plays; omitting, e.g., "Gnaediges Fraeulein," "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel," "The Red Devil Battery Sign," "The Notebook of Trigorin" - his adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "Seagull" - and his infamous "Baby Doll" screenplay, as well as its stage adaptation "Tiger Tail."

Although many of Williams's works reached audiences not only on stage but also on the silver screen, beginning in the 1950s he came under increased scrutiny due to his unconventional lifestyle.Even in his plays' most successful screen adaptations, the more controversial elements, such as Brick's unavowed homosexuality in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and the sexual tension between Stanley and Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire," were either muted or censored entirely; and particularly in later years, criticism leveled against his plays was often truly motivated by objections against the man himself. - "The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is ... the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis," Williams wrote in a stage direction in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."But while his own life's thunderstorm did eventually prove fatal (he choked to death on a medicine bottle cap in 1983), over the course of his life he revolutionized Southern drama in a way only comparable to Faulkner's impact on literary fiction, and set a shining example for generations of later playwrights.All-encompassing or not: the Library of America's collection of his works is an excellent place to begin a journey of appreciation into his Dragon Country.

Also recommended:
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 Two-Disc Special Edition / Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958 Deluxe Edition / Sweet Bird of Youth / The Night of the Iguana / Baby Doll / The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone)
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
The Rose Tattoo
Suddenly, Last Summer
Baby Doll
This Property Is Condemned
Tennessee Williams' Dragon Country (Broadway Theatre Archive)

Tennesse Williams: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Tennessee Williams is one of my favorite playwrights, and he was one of America's best. I think he was clearly also one of the 20th Century's best. Wonderful poignant tragic storyteller with memorable characters, like the frail southern belle Blanche in his classic play "A Streetcar Named Desire", or Stanley her uncouth brother-in-law who destroys her last shot at happiness. Another great play is "The Glass Menagerie", his first hit, which was an enormous success and catupulted him instantly into the forefront of emerging young playwrights at the time. It's a very entertaining story, very readable, I highly recommend you read it. Another is "The Rose Tattoo"--also see the film of the same name. And Williams' last great play was "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Short Stories By The Playwright
'One Arm & Other Stories' (1950) is a collection of eleven short stories by the noted gay dramatist Tennessee Williams and it is a collection that proved well worth this reader's time.Here, Williams reveals his gay themes and lifestyle with a much greater candor and straightforwardness than tend to appear in his plays.Like most quality collections each story in this book is wonderfully evocative of some slice of reality and quickly draws in the reader.At least that was true of this reader.My two favorites in the collection are the title piece 'One Arm', about a one armed hustler on death row, and especially the headbreaking & exquisite tale 'The Angel in the Alcove' about a sick artist in The French Quarter of New Orleans.The latter one will absolutely break your heart.I found it so moving.

I was impressed overall with the stories, some more than others but that may have been more the result of personal resonance.Some just really struck a chord.If you're a fan of the playwright of 'A Streecar Named Desire, 'The Rose Tattoo', 'The Sweet Bird of Youth', 'The Glass Menagerie', and so many others as I am - then 'One Arm and Other Stories' is an amazing window to greater understanding into the troubled gay genius behind the dramatist supreme.As a huge admirer of the man's work I found it an endlessly fascinating glimpse into the human spirit...and a view through some of the especially dark windows. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a collection of thirteen original essays from a team of leading Williams scholars. This wide-ranging volume covers Williams' works, from the early apprenticeship years through to his last play before his death in 1983. In addition to essays on the major plays, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams also features a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (121)

Five stars for this American classic
I loved it.I bought it about two weeks ago because I was going to see the play at my university with a friend.That production, unfortuntately, wasn't that great, and the Hollywood Brando version was much better, but Tennessee's script is so incredibly creative and complete.Read the play first if you can!

Sick! Sick! Sick!
"STELLA!" This was probably the most memorable line of this movie which was not, to state it diplomatically, one of Tennessee Williams' best works. Marlon Brando was at his worst in acting, as was the case with Vivian Leigh. The French Quarter of New Orleans never looked worse, and the story-about a school teacher who had an illicit affair with one of her students- was also sick. I saw it once and regretted having done so. For many reasons it's far from being recommendable.

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

This is another classic from my high school days that seems wasted on youth. How can a fifteen-year-old in prep school appreciate the desperation and human frailty of Blanche DuBois? Or the dichotomy inherent in Stanley Kowalski's passionate brutality?

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire--just--Desire!--the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...
STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?
=================================================================================================================

Many will have seen either the stage or film versions of Streetcar, but reading through Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play allows for the depression to really set in. Readers may even recognize qualities in friends and family members approximating those of alcoholism or domestic violence.

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand new outlook on life!
=================================================================================================================

There are so many great dialogue exchanges here, outside of the classic "kindness of strangers" quote. I'll snip a few of my favorites.

=================================================================================================================
MITCH: You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat!
BLANCHE: What a fantastic statement! Fantastic of him to say it, fantastic of you to repeat it!
=================================================================================================================

The abusive domestic relationship seemed a common theme in mid-20th Century America; witness both Streetcar and The Honeymooners. "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser! One of these days Alice, straight to the Moon!"

=================================================================================================================
STANLEY: When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it.
=================================================================================================================

Very easy to get through this in a sitting or two. Very hard not to be emotionally moved, even if the dénouement, vis-a-vis Stanley and Blanche, was not obvious to me after that first reading many years ago.

=================================================================================================================
BLANCHE: Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour--but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands--and who knows what to do with it?
=================================================================================================================

Postscript: My own copy is the mid-80s Signet printing, which includes a 4-page Introduction by the author.

Abusive man alert
I'm not generally impressed with plays and movies of this era, as they portray a time when it was considered acceptable for men to treat women as property. Women endured physical as well as emotional and psychological violence, without a inkling that something may be wrong about that. When Blanche encourages Stella to leave Stanley after he hits her after the poker game, I agreed very firmly with her. I was amazed that Stella returns, and that she still stays with him after what he does to Blanche near the end of the play. Blanche is written as flighty and slutty and her final fate is galling because I believe she's the only character in the play with a lick of sense. I found myself reading this quite quickly because I just wanted it over with. The whole thing repulsed me.

One of the best 20th century plays
"A Streetcar Named Desire" is one of Tennessee Williams' signature plays that has propelled his reputation and made him into a household name. The play deals with a culture clash between two iconic characters, Blanche DuBois, a fading relic of the Old South, and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, urban working class. Their gender and ethnic differences also feature prominently, and are a source of lot of tension throughout the play. Setting the play in New Orleans adds to the colorfulness of characters and situations, and the title of the play is a reference to a particular tram line in that city. All of the characters in this play are very developed, and their oversized passions and outbursts are extremely entertaining to follow. The play has a quality of a train wreck, and we are simultaneously attracted to the scenes and appalled by their over-the-top shenanigans. The play appears as fresh as when it was originally written over sixty years ago, and reading or watching it is a pleasure. ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Fickle Bird Of Youth
The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights.Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

"Sweet Bird Of Youth" is a case in point. Not for the first time, a seemingly 1950's style All- American boy Chance who has left his hometown, his home town girl and his roots behind to drift in that endless spiral toward fame- Hollywood and the movies, naturally- comes back to claim what is his by right. On this little hometown reunion Chance is in the service of one aging and fretful actress who has her own issues with that elusive `bird of youth'. In his return to town it appears that Chance has stirred up a hornet's nest with the local political establishment in the person of one red-neck preacher turned politician in order to better do "god's work", old Tom Findley. The object of this dispute is one Heavenly Findley, old Ton's daughter and Chance's left behind paramour who is now the subject of some scandal (due to the amorphously stated need for female-related medical treatment due to Chance's irresponsibility). Along the way we get to see how political power is distributed in a small Southern town as well as the inevitable tempting of the fates by Chance in order to win the `brass ring' before it is too late (apparently somewhere over thirty, by my reckoning). At play's end though, where he is between a rock and a hard place, Chance may not get the chance to be Chance at thirty. Oh, that fickle bird of youth. Still, Chance, go for it.

Ahh Youth, Wasted and Wondered On....
I'd like to see this play. Why? Because there is an incredible amount of angst, self-pity, self-agrandizment, posturing, emoting, and innocent awe. It is also short, surprisingly too.
Chance is a hyper-sexual ne'r' do'well whose coupling with Princess, a hyper-vain Hollywood Queen suffering from lose of face after an amazingly bad "come-back" film, lands them in Saint Cloud, Chance's old stomping grounds, and perhaps some sort of symbolic nowhere town, dead to the world and quite possibly changeless. His appearence is bad news, as he generally is bad news. Princess, who is significantly older is so wrapped in her vanity and stardom, or there-lack-of, has latched onto Chance, because they are similar and desperate for what each other has.
Sweet Bird of Youth is not a nice play. These are people who are not likeable, nor funny, and their desperation almost defines them. I say almost, because they are also passionate and hopeful, even in round about ways. They are symbols of Time's heavy hand, extravegance, unfortunate fame, addicts, wayward souls.
Sweet Bird of Youth belongs in the second tier of Williams' plays. After Streetcar, Cat, Glass, and with The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly, Last Summer, and Orpheus Descending. Full of loud, troubled people on point of hysteria, whose sexual, or emotional hunger is suicidal and beyond reason. But lacking in broad connection to the world, in familial dynamics and struggle. In that way I recommend Sweet Bird of Youth for the Williams' lover or admirer, not someone who wants to know his best work.

Like the rest of Williams' writings- absolutely brilliant
Don't see the movie instead of reading the play, in fact, don't see the movie at all, because it is TERRIBLE. It changes the ending completely, and lacks the overall spirit of the play. With "Sweet Bird of Youth," Williams has created something touching and brilliant. If you like Williams' other plays, you will like this, but if not, you won't. A wonderful dramatic landmark. Amazing. ... Read more