Description
Book SynopsisBrenda Murphy is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. Besides her many books and articles on American theatre, she is the editor of the Student Edition of
After the Fall by Arthur Miller (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2011).
Trade Review[Murphy] brings together ... useful information from Williams' work, writings and correspondence to make this a valuable academic work for anyone studying the playwright or American theatre ... A useful and well-written work -- David Chadderton * British Theatre Guide *
Brenda Murphy’s
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams is a thoroughly enjoyable read. The book describes the genesis and major themes of all of Williams’s best-known plays and many of those that are less familiar; it provides, as well, an illuminating account of the plays’ first productions and the ways in which they were inflected by their cultural contexts. Murphy writes with lucidity and an eye for the engaging detail, the telling quotation that will appeal to a broad audience. Her book serves as both a useful guide to Williams’s work and an important contribution to the ongoing re-evaluation of that work -- Verna A. Foster, Loyola University * Modern Drama *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1 The 1930s Plays:
The Magic Tower,
Candles to the Sun,
Fugitive Kind,
Not About Nightingales,
Spring Storm,
Stairs to the Roof 2
Battle of Angels and
Orpheus Descending 3
The Glass Menagerie 4
Summer and Smoke and
Eccentricities of a Nightingale 5
A Streetcar Named Desire 6
Camino Real 7
Cat on Hot Tin Roof 8
Suddenly Last Summer and
Sweet Bird of Youth 9
The Night of the Iguana 10 The Later Plays, 1961-1983:
The Two-Character Play/Outcry,
The Gnädiges Fräulein,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel,
The Mutilated,
Small Craft Warnings,
Vieux Carré,
Something Cloudy, Something Clear 11. Critical Perspectives All in the timing: the meanings of
Streetcar in 1947 and 1951 by Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburgh, USA) A broken romance: Tennessee Williams and America’s mid-century theatre culture by John S. Bak (Université de Lorraine, France) ‘A vast traumatic eye’: culture absorbed and refigured in Tennessee Williams’s transitional plays by Felicia Hardison Londré (University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA) ‘There’s something not natural here’: grotesque ambiguities in
Kingdom of Earth,
A Cavalier for Milady, and
A House Not Meant to Stand by Annette Saddik (City University of New York, USA) Chronology Further reading Index Notes on contributors
