‘Tennessee Williams's mordantly funny and deeply troubled meditation on the desperate dismay of ageing and the iniquities of racial bigotry.’ INDEPENDENT ‘It’s a wonderfully weird play, starting claustrophobic, losing intensity as it introduces the locals… then regrouping for a devastating second half… This unruly, unforgettable play takes its unpredictable course to something that makes you feel afresh our powerlessness against time.’ THE TIMES When Chance Wayne left the small town of St. Cloud, he did so with the ambition of being an actor: now, many years later, he returns as a gigolo and the companion of faded movie star Alexandra del Lago. But can Chance convince the town he did actually make it big and win over his childhood sweetheart? Or will the mistakes of his past punish him still? Sweet Bird of Youth is Tennessee Williams's 1959 Broadway hit that explores the social and political climate of 1950s America, at a time when sexual freedom was a critical issue. This edition includes an introduction by Alison Walls that explores the play's production history as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller. 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers' Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness. Tennessee Williams's steamy and shocking landmark drama, recreated as the immortal film starring Marlon Brando, is one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed A Streetcar Named Desire, you might like The Glass Menagerie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny' Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather 'One of the greatest American plays' Observer

This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Bess Rowen, Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University, US, which looks in particular at the play's treatment of rape, vulnerable people, mental institutions (especially in connection to Williams's own family), sexuality and sexual desire. A Streetcar Named Desire shows a turbulent confrontation between traditional values in the American South - an old-world graciousness and beauty running decoratively to seed - set against the rough-edged, aggressive materialism of the new world. Through the vividly characterised figures of Southern belle Blanche Dubois, seeking refuge from physical ugliness in decayed gentility, and her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams dramatises his sense of the South's past as still active and often destructive in modern America. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: * A chronology of the play and the playwright's life and work * An introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created * A succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece * An analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text * A bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study

The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in classroom editions. Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. This play depicts the conflict between a fading Southern belle and the brash lower-class society of her sister's family.

Tennessee Williams's evocation of loneliness and lost love, The Glass Menagerie is one of his most powerful and moving plays. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Robert Bray. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed The Glass Menagerie, you might like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you might like Williams's The Glass Menagerie, also published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself ... he is, quite simply, indispensable' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Daniel Ciba, which looks in particular at the play as a piece of realism or experimentalism and considers the play through the lens of Queer Identity. The introduction includes discussion of very recent revivals and adaptations of the play across the world. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams' first great popular success and an autobiographical play about his mother and sister, launched the brilliant and controversial career of this ground-breaking American playwright. Set in St Louis during the depression era of the 1930s, it is the poignant drama of a family's gradual disintegration, under pressure both from outside and within. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: · A chronology of the play and the playwright’s life and work · an introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created · a succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece · an analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text · a bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study.

They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life-its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love-into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.

A friendship struck in 1942 would last for forty-one years through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Tennessee Williams's and James Laughlin's letters provide a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.

The Rose Tattoo is larger than life--a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama--it is a love letter from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love or ever will be. Professional widow and dressmaker Serafina delle Rosa has withdrawn from the world, locking away her heart and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rosa. Then one day a man with the sexy body of her late Sicilian husband and the face of a village idiot, Mangiacavallo (Italian for "eat a horse"), stumbles into her life and clumsily unlocks Serafina's fiery anger, sense of betrayal, pride, wit, passion, and eventually her capacious love. The original production of The Rose Tattoo won Tony Awards for best play and for the stars, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. Anna Magnani received the Academy Award as Best Actress for the 1955 film version. This edition of The Rose Tattoo has an Introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley, the author's original foreword, the one-act The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View that was the germ for the play, and an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Jack Barbera.

Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and 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, the play 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 prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." 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." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

This series of plays for the 11-16 age range offers contemporary drama and new editions of classic plays. The series has been developed to support classroom teaching and to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum Key Stages 3 and 4. The plays are suitable for classroom reading and performance; many have large casts and an equal mix of parts for boys and girls. Each play includes strategies and activities to introduce and use the plays in the classroom. "The Glass Menagerie" tells the story of Tom, who is frustrated in his job and distressed at home by the mental withdrawal of his crippled sister. Both of them are intrigued by a set of glass figures. There are four parts, two male and two female.

Reality and fantasy are interwoven with terrifying power as two actors on tour brother and sister find themselves deserted by the trope in a decrepit "state theatre in an unknown state." Faced (perhaps) by an audience expecting a performance, they enact "The Two-Character Play" an illusions within an illusion, and "out cry" from isolation, panic and fear. "I think it is my most beautiful play since Streetcar," Tennessee Williams said, "and I've never stopped working on it....It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work, all life, in a sense is a cri de coeur." In the course of its evolution, several earlier versions of The Two-Character Play have been produced. The first of them was presented in 1967 in London and Chicago and brought out in 1969 by New Directions in a signed limited edition. The next, staged in 1973 in New York under the title Out Cry, was published by New Directions in 1973 The third version (New York, 1975), again titled The Two-Character Play, is the one Tennessee Williams wished to include in New Directions' The Theatre of Tennessee Williams series. It is this version which is presented in this ND paperback."

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. ("The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.") With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: "As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play" (Publishers Weekly).

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 2003-04 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams' 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.

The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carre: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love--both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget. Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carre was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis."

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in matching format the plays of one of America's most persistently influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes for all full-length plays. Now available as a New Directions paperbook, Volume VII: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and Other Plays, contains Williams's shorter plays of the late '50s and '60s, many of them published in Dragon Country in 1970. In "dragon country... this country of endured but unendurable pain," the bar, the hotel lobby, the boarding house, the nursing home or "retirement village" are microcosms of the human condition where we are never, but always, alone. To the plays of Dragon Country are added Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, Lifeboat Drill, and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom. This is an essential collection for all students and fans of the great playwright.

Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, lewd vagrant Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.

Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a short morality play, has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial, the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.

With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer this volume also offers Williams s related essay, The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps, and a chronology of the playwright s life and works.

These three dramatic works by Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by a sense of isolation and regret. 'Suddenly Last Summer' is the starkly told story of Catherine, who seemingly goes insane after her cousin Sebastian dies in grisly circumstances on a trip to Europe. 'The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore' is a passionate examination of a wealthy old woman as she recounts her memories in the face of death, while in 'Small Craft Warnings' a motley group of people - including a blowsy beautician, a discredited alcoholic doctor, a vulnerable waif and two gay men - sit around a seedy bar on the Californian coast, each contemplating their own desperate fate.

For 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.

Loneliness, sexual tension and the need for human kindness pervade these three plays by Tennessee Williams, as their characters rage against personal demons and the modern world. In 'Sweet Bird of Youth', 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. 'Period of Adjustment' tells the story of two young newlyweds who visit the husband's old army friend on Christmas Eve after unsuccessfully consummating their marriage, and unleash forbidden passion, while in 'The Night of the Iguana' a diverse group of people, including a disturbed ex-minister and a troubled spinster, are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel for one eventful night.

The greatest playwright of the American South, Tennessee Williams used his talent throughout his life to create brief plays exploring many of the themes that dominated his best-known works. Here, thirteen never-before-published one-act dramas reveal some of his most poignant and hilarious characters. From the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens to the disheartened poet Mister Paradise, and the extravagant mistress in The Pink Bedroom, these are tales of isolated figures struggling against a cruel world, who refuse to lose sight of their dreams.