A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1980
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811207577

In this masterful play, Tennessee Williams explores the meaning of loneliness and the need for human connection through the lens of four women and the designs and desires they harbor--for themselves and for each other.

The Red Devil Battery Sign

The Red Devil Battery Sign
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1988
Genre: American drama
ISBN: 9780811210478

This book is William's symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials to assassination plots directed against those who won't play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots.

Clothes for a Summer Hotel: Play

Clothes for a Summer Hotel: Play
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1983-06-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0811225895

This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The late Tennessee Williams’s Clothes for a Summer Hotelmade its New York debut in 1980. Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of a single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other. Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this "ghost play" begins several years after Scott’s death of a heart attack in California. But the past is "still always present" in Zelda, and Williams’s constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said in the Author’s Note to the Broadway production: "Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character." Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda’s demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal––emotional, creative, sexual––destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda’s life.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1971
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811214759

Now available as a paperbook, Volume VIII adds to the series' four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life.

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams
Author: Stephen Bottoms
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1472528727

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry. A chronology of the writer's life and work helps to situate all his works in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of Williams' writing, its recurrent themes and concerns and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: * The context * Themes * Characters * Structure and language * The play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations) Questions for study, and notes on words and phrases in the text are also supplied to aid the reader. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Williams' work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Williams' greatest plays.

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1980-05-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0811225410

In this masterful play, Tennessee Williams explores the meaning of loneliness and the need for human connection through the lens of four women and the designs and desires they harbor—for themselves and for each other. It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

Camino Real

Camino Real
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2008-10-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0811226239

Now with a new introduction, the author's original Foreword and Afterword, the one-act play 10 Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Michael Paller. In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature—Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron—inhabit a place where corruption and indifference have immobilized and nearly destroyed the human spirit. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives—a sailor and all-American guy with “a heart as big as the head of baby.” Celebrated American playwright John Guare has written an illuminative Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams’ original Foreword and Afterword to the play, the one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Michael Paller.

The Traveling Companion and Other Plays

The Traveling Companion and Other Plays
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2008
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811217088

"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.

A House Not Meant to Stand

A House Not Meant to Stand
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2008
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811217095

The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author's lifetime is now published for the first time.