Baby Doll & Tiger Tail:
A Screenplay and Play
Paperback - 220 pages (July 1991) $9.56
|
Battle of
Angels
Paperback $5.25
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The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams
This wide-ranging volume covers Williams's works,
from his early apprenticeship years through the last play before his death
in 1983. In addition to essays on the major plays, the contributors also
consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical
concerns. Plus, the book features a bibliographic essay surveying major
critical statements on Williams and his work.
Paperback - 275 pages (February 1998) $18.95
|
Camino Real
Paperback (October 1970) $8.76
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Play by Tennessee Williams, published and
produced in 1955. It won a Pulitzer Prize. The play exposes the emotional
lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter
of humble origins. The patriarch, Big Daddy, is about to celebrate his
65th birthday. His two married sons, Gooper (Brother Man) and Brick, have
returned for the occasion, the former with his pregnant wife and five
children, the latter with his wife Margaret (Maggie). The interactions
between Big Daddy, Brick, and Maggie form the substance of the play.
Paperback (September 1989) $4.79
|
Clothes of a Summer
Hotel
Paperback $5.25
|
Collected Stories
Tennessee Williams was famous for insisting
he write every morning. Even during his darkest days, while mourning a
lover, or abusing some substance - and he abused most of them at one time
or another - he'd write. The stories in this volume, arranged
chronologically, are from every period of his long life, and recreate the milieu
Williams knew and chronicled so movingly - from his gypsy youth in St.
Louis and New Orleans to his days of celebrity in Hollywood and New York.
Some are studies for his plays, and like them, their language can suddenly
surprise you with a poetic image that shines like a jewel. This edition
includes a useful publishing history for each of the fifty stories.
"One overpowering impression emerges from
all these stories put together: Tennessee Williams knew more about the
hidden life of far-flung America than any of us really suspected."
(Seymour Krim, Washington Post Book World)
"By turns disturbing, moving, and funny;
these stories help amplify Williams's tragic vision, for like the plays,
they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the
human heart." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
Paperback (November 1986) $5.59
|
Conversations
with Tennessee Williams
Paperback - 369 pages (October 1986) $17.00
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Dragon Country: A Book of Plays
Paperback (December 1970) $9.56
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The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale
Paperback $5.25
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The Glass Menagerie
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of
the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. 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
Paperback 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.
"The
revolutionary newness of The Glass Menagerie . . . was in its poetic lift,
but an underlying hard dramatic structure was what earned the play its
right to sing poetically." (Arthur Miller)
"With
the advent of The Glass Menagerie . . . Tennessee Williams emerged as a
poet-playwright and a unique new force in theatre throughout the
world." (Lyle Leverich, Tom:
The Unknown Tennessee Williams)
Paperback - 105 pages (June 1999) $5.56
|
The Gnadiges
Fraulein
Paperback $3.25 |
Hard Candy: A Book of Stories
Paperback (June 1967) $7.96
|
I Rise in Flame Cried the
Phoenix
Paperback $3.25
|
In the Bar of a Tokyo
Hotel
Paperback $5.25
|
In the Winter of Cities
Paperback (December 1964) $7.16
|
Kingdom of
Earth
Paperback $5.25
|
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur:
A Play in Two Scenes
Paperback - 82 pages (May 1980) $7.95
|
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here
Anymore
Paperback $5.25
|
The
Mutilated
Paperback $3.25
|
The Night of the
Iguana
Paperback $5.25
|
Not
about Nightingales
"Written in 1938 when Williams was 27,
still living at home and a good six years away from Broadway, Not about
Nightingales is as much writing exercise as fully realized drama. It
lacks the originality and depth of The Glass Menagerie, written
only a few years later, and his later masterworks. Nevertheless, it is of
considerable interest, not least because it was inspired by a real
occurrence in which several unruly prisoners were cooked alive as
punishment. And after all, it is Williams' first full-length play and
first play written under the pen name Tennessee, and it sufficiently
impressed Elia Kazan of the Group Theater, to which Williams sent it in
response to a playwriting contest, that he introduced Williams to the New
York agent Audrey Wood, who would make his career. Reading the play, most
of which is in the thuddingly obvious politically conscious style of
Depression-era theater, one notices in brief, brilliant passages and in
the intensity of his characters the Williams to come. And that makes it
worthwhile." (Jack Helbig, American Library Association)
Not
produced until 1998, Not about Nightingales, portrays a
shocking prison scandal in which convicts leading a hunger strike in
prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. Williams
himself later said that he had never written anything to compare with it
in violence and horror. The play indelibly presages the great plays he was
later to write.
Paperback - 163 pages (June 1998) $10.36
|
The Notebook of Trigorin:
A Free Adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull
Near the end of his life, Tennessee Williams' chance to interpret The
Sea Gull was realized at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, where a production which brought Chekhov's buried conflicts to
the surface was produced in 1980. Williams' genius, combined with the
powerful Russian classic by Anton Chekhov, creates a daring new concept
for today's American theatre.
A life-long admirer of Russian playwright Anton
Chekhov, Tennessee Williams often thought of directing a production of
Chekhov's The Sea Gull. His chance to interpret the play finally
was realized near the end of his life. Williams's genius combined with the
powerful Russian classic creates a daring new concept for today's American
theatre.
Paperback
- 98 pages (November 1997) $7.96
Hardcover - 98 pages (November 1997) $19.95
|
One Arm and Other Stories
Paperback (June 1970) $9.56
|
Orpheus
Descending
Paperback $5.25
|
A Perfect Analysis Given
by a Parrot
Paperback $3.25
|
Period of
Adjustment
Paperback $5.25
|
The Red Devil Battery Sign
Paperback
- 94 pages (June 1988) $6.95
Hardcover
- 94 pages (May 1988) $14.95
|
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
Paperback - 111 pages
Reissue edition (September 1993)
|
The Rose
Tattoo
Paperback $5.25
|
Small Craft Warnings
Paperback (November 1972) $7.95
|
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
Williams spent his last 20 years scribbling
eccentric little "chamber pieces," most of them lacking the
focus, depth, and scope of his earlier, more operatic plays. This play
from that late period is full of painfully obvious symbolism and dramatic
moments deflated by characters overexplaining themselves, yet it has some
power, and images from it linger after the final scene. It concerns an old
writer, lost in his thoughts, who relives a key moment in his past--the
time when he met and fell in love with a dying dancer named Kip.
Structurally, the play flits from 1941 to 1981 and back with fascinating,
disorienting ease. Williams aficionados will also appreciate the
promiscuous use of autobiographical material: the main character is
clearly a stand-in for Williams, and Kip was the name of the great, lost
love of Williams' life.
Paperback
- 85 pages (September 1996) $7.96
Hardcover
- 85 pages (September 1995) $19.95
|
Spring Storm
When Tennessee Williams read Spring Storm
aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was
met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C.
Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all
have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that
the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable
for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully
naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness -
particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own
sexuality - would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically
radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as
"simply a study of sex - a blind animal urge or force (like the
regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a
tangle of cruel and ugly relations." But the solid and deft
characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine - the
sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles,
Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the
repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur - are archetypes of
characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in
scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm
created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a
staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This
edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac
who initiated the Octoberfest production.
Paperback - 160 pages (November 1999) $10.36
|
Stopped
Rocking and Other Screenplays
Paperback - 384 pages (August 1984) $9.95
Hardcover
- 384 pages (October 1984) $24.95
|
A Streetcar Named Desire
Play in three acts by Tennessee Williams, first produced and published in
1947 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama for that year. One of the
most admired plays of its time, it concerns the mental and moral
disintegration and ultimate ruin of Blanche DuBois, a former Southern
belle. Her neurotic, genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh
realities symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
Paperback - 142 pages (August 1989) $3.99
|
Suddenly Last
Summer
Paperback $5.25
|
Summer and
Smoke
Paperback $5.25
|
Sweet Bird of Youth
Paperback (September 1989) $7.96
|
Tennessee Williams:
Four Plays
This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's
most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly
Last Summer and Period of Adjustment.
"The innocent and the damned, the lonely and
the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless . . . (Williams) brings them
all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion."
(Newsweek)
Paperback (August 1992) $5.56
|
Three by Tennessee Williams
This book contains Sweet Bird of
Youth, The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana
Paperback Reissue edition
(August 1992) $5.56
|
Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton
Paperback 3 edition
(February 1966) $8.76
|
Two-Character Play
Paperback (April 1985)
$7.16
|
Where I Live: Selected Essays
Paperback - 171 pages
(November 1978) $7.96
|
