Description
Book SynopsisSaddik explores Williams' later plays (196182) in the context of what she terms a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Grounding the plays in the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik analyzes recent productions that successfully captured the playwright's late aesthetic.
Trade Review'Annette J. Saddik's lucid and vital assessment of the misunderstood, mysterious later plays of Tennessee Williams opens the door for a new generation of appreciation for the entire body of his work. A wonderful and eye-opening achievement for those of us passionate about the plays that poured out of him in the twenty years of life that remained after his last 'so-called' success, Night of the Iguana.' John Guare, author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation
'Annette Saddik midwifes the rebirth of Tennessee Williams as poet and avant-garde icon, as she rehabilitates the soul and honor of America's greatest playwright.' Lee Breuer, Mabou Mines Theater Company
'In her groundbreaking new book, Annette Saddik proves that Tennessee Williams is the greatest unknown playwright America has produced. She demonstrates so beautifully and persuasively that for the length of his career, Williams was a writer less of lyrical realism, than the grotesque. His later works, on which her book focuses, are thus not aesthetic failures but richly imagined, experimental plays written for an experimental theatre. By so rethinking the whole of Williams's career, Saddik sheds a different light on his most popular plays and reveals to us a new and thrilling Tennessee Williams.' David Savran, City University of New York
'Annette Saddik is a rare scholar. Not only does this book demonstrate her qualities as a meticulous theatre historian and Tennessee Williams specialist, but every page bristles with ideas. This book is of utmost importance for understanding the development of Williams' dramatic output and of the confluence of twentieth-century American and European performance.' Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 'sicker than necessary': Tennessee Williams' theatre of excess; 1. 'Drowned in Rabelaisian laughter': Germans as grotesque comic figures in Williams' plays of the 1960s and '70s; 2. 'Benevolent anarchy': Williams' late plays and the theater of cruelty; 3. 'Writing calls for discipline!': chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a Summer Hotel; 4. 'Act naturally': embracing the monstrous woman in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, and The Pronoun 'I'; 5. 'There's something not natural here': grotesque ambiguities in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady and A House Not Meant to Stand; 6. 'All drama is about being extreme': 'in-yer-face' sex, war, and violence; Conclusion: 'the only thing to do is laugh'.
