Tennessee Williams, one of the leading American playwrights of the 20th century, has often been called the 'national poet of the perverse'. Being a highly sexually active man all his life, he enjoyed writing sex into his plays and considered it beautiful. It is therefore perhaps surprising that the role sexuality plays in his dramatic work has never been researched in detail. This thesis is the first profound study of how sexuality - either overt or covert - affects and dominates Tennessee Williams' dramatic work. Analyzing eight major plays in detail, this study explores how the characters' lived or suppressed (deviating) sexual inclinations and preferences affect their psychological state, their behavior and their relationships with the other characters in the plays. It further demonstrates how sexuality motivates each play in the first place, dominates its plot and finally how the characters' ability to deal with their sexuality leads to either a conciliatory or a fatal, sometimes even a lethal ending. The book points out parallels and differences between the plays as well as Williams' development of sexuality in his drama.

Tennessee Williams, one of the leading American playwrights of the 20th century, has often been called the 'national poet of the perverse'. Being a highly sexually active man all his life, he enjoyed writing sex into his plays and considered it beautiful. It is therefore perhaps surprising that the role sexuality plays in his dramatic work has never been researched in detail. This thesis is the first profound study of how sexuality -- either overt or covert -- affects and dominates Tennessee Williams' dramatic work.Analyzing eight major plays in detail, this study explores how the characters' lived or suppressed (deviating) sexual inclinations and preferences affect their psychological state, their behavior and their relationships with the other characters in the plays. It further demonstrates how sexuality motivates each play in the first place, dominates its plot and finally how the characters' ability to deal with their sexuality leads to either a conciliatory or a fatal, sometimes even a lethal ending. The book points out parallels and differences between the plays as well as Williams' development of sexuality in his drama.

Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has captured both stage and film audiences since its debut in 1954. One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins.

Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carre is not emotion recollected in tranquillity, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes its form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants of 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 a 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, an 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.

Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams’s work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 1940–1980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams’s homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law. Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams’s studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law’s texts with those same topics in Williams’s personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams’s literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work’s multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT TENT WORMS. Billy and Clara are nearing the end of their summer vacation on Cape Cod, as their cottage is being devoured by billions of tent-worms. Worse, Billy has just gotten word from his oncologist that there are no more treatment options for his brain cancer. A darkly humorous exploration of which is more terrifying: bugs or death? (1 man, 1 woman.) DESIRE QUENCHED BY TOUCH. In 1950s New Orleans, a black masseur must account for the disappearance of his favorite white customer. People don’t just vanish inside massage parlors… (3 men.) THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN. Everything in Layley’s life is going according to plan. She belongs to the best sorority at her university and has a devoted boyfriend who could easily become a devoted husband. But Layley suspects that there is more to life than stifling conformity. So she signs up for a poetry class in the hopes of expressing herself. There she meets Dylan, a sensitive poet with whom she enjoys a night of passion that opens up a truly revolutionary prospect: living a life of her own. (3 men, 4 women.) ORIFLAMME. Oriflamme (noun): A red or scarlet banner; a knight’s standard; a rallying principle…Sickly Anna Kimball, on her final day, reaches out for, and becomes, all of these. (1 man, 1 woman.) YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT CENTRALIA. Jim, the Gentleman Caller, leaves the Wingfields’ disastrous dinner party to meet his fiancée Betty’s train. The evening won’t turn out the way either of them expected. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN A VIOLIN CASE AND A COFFIN. Tom and his sister Roe’s childhood comes to a painful end when Richard Miles, who moves in light, arrives in town with his violin in a case. (2 men, 4 women.)

Publisher Description

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne (Amerikanisches Institut), language: English, abstract: In this paper, I will attempt a psychoanalytic reading of the male and the female in a selection of Tennessee Williams’s plays. In my opinion, a psychoanalytic approach is the best way to do justice to Williams’s disturbed characters and to explain the concepts of sex, gender, and culture that are inherent in each of his plays. The interrelation of these concepts will be of the utmost importance in the analysis ofThe Glass Menagerie(1945),A Streetcar Named Desire(1947),Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955),Orpheus Descending(1957),Suddenly Last Summer(1957), andSweet Bird of Youth(1959). However, before turning to the analysis of Tennessee Williams’s plays, I will first delineate the concept of psychoanalysis as such. Since Sigmund Freud, who is conceived of as the father of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis has come a long way, and even though it is today regarded as a somewhat conservative discipline, it still retains a disruptive attitude towards the conventional discourse of gender and sexuality. It furthermore has the capacity to undermine notions of fixed identity, including sexual identity, and although psychoanalysis may not be used as a method of treatment in clinical psychiatry anymore, it still proves successful when it comes to analysing the notion of sex, gender, and culture in literary texts, for instance. I will begin the paper with an outline of Sigmund Freud’s essays on the three stages of psychosexual development of the child and give a brief account on the general workings of human sexuality. Via Freud’s essays, I will show that sexuality is inextricably linked with modern Western society, and that sexual drives are repressed in order to guarantee the individual’s entrance into society and culture. “Seit Freud wird die [...] Entstehung und Funktion moralischer Motive im Individuum und in der Gesellschaft unter Berücksichtigung psychosexueller Entwicklungsphasen aus der Dialektik zwischen der Triebnatur des Menschen und seiner Gebundenheit an kulturelle und soziale Wert und Normsetzungen abgeleitet.”1Human sexuality then turns out to be a cultural product that is based on heterosexual behavior and procreation. Via these aspects, I will forge a link to Williams’s disturbed characters, who fail to associate with normative sexuality. In order to further explore the connection of sex, gender, and culture, I will also take Jacques Lacan’s contribution to psychoanalysis into consideration.

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Tennessee Williams, considered to be among the three foremost playwrights of twentieth-century American drama. Titles in this study guide include A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and The Glass Menagerie. As playwright of the twentieth-century, Tennessee Williams’ plays uncovered a world of grievance in which violence and sex lay just below the surface of romantic glamour. Moreover, his works displayed that simpler times are not always simple, they are simply clearer in hindsight. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Tennessee Williams’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.