Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
2 - Entering The Glass Menagerie
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
In The Seagull Chekhov's Trepliov insists that “We need new art forms . . . and if they aren't available, we might just as well have nothing at all.” The statement is not without its irony given Trepliov's own incapacity, but it carried the force of a playwright who was himself dedicated to such innovation. Fifty-five years later, and in a world as much in transition as Chekhov's, Tennessee Williams was conscious of trying to create just such a new form, a “plastic” theatre which owed something, indeed, to the Russian writer for whom a detailed realism was never really a primary objective. As Stanislavsky had remarked of Chekhov's work, “At times he is an impressionist, at times a symbolist; he is a 'realist' where it is necessary.” A tracery of the real was an essential scaffold for his exploration of character and subtle recreation of mood, but his characters inhabit more than a tangible world and reach for something more than the merely material.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams , pp. 29 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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