Tennessee Williams

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years—the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003–2004 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams&rsquoi; essay “Person-to-Person,” Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

No play in the modern theater has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. As Williams's first popular success, it launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career, of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, Menagaerie has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." (back cover)

The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’ essay “The World I Live In.” It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the ’40s and ’50s.

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

A drifter, Chance Wayne, returns to his home town with an ageing movie actress in search of the girl he loved in his youth, but with terrible, violent results.

Las piezas de TennesseeWilliams (1911-1983), sensuales y cargadas con una atmósfera tan especial, transformaron el teatro norteamericano a través de su pasión, exotismo y esos vibrantes caracteres que luchan contra sus demonios personales y el mundo que los rodea. En un tranvía llamado deseo (1958), Blanche Dubois, una belleza sureña en decadencia, ve sus románticas ilusiones sacudidas; súbitamente el último verano (1958) es una violenta mezcla de poesía y horror; mientras que lo que no se dice (1958) constituye una viñeta casi chejoviana sobre ilusiones frustradas.

Kerr, in the NY Herald-Tribune, describes: "This, says Mr. Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, 'is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true-or at least curiously and suspensefully possible-by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. Anne Meacham, as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, Miss Meacham slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness.of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language.and the spell is cast."

Tennessee Williams’s sensuous, atmospheric plays transformed the American stage with their passion, exoticism and vibrant characters who rage against their personal demons and the modern world. In A Streetcar Named Desire fading southern belle Blanche Dubois finds her romantic illusions brutally shattered; The Glass Menagerie portrays an introverted girl trapped in a fantasy world; and Sweet Bird of Youth shows how we are unable to escape ‘the enemy, time’.