The Collected Plays

Library of America #120

by Tennessee Williams, Mel Gussow, Kenneth Holditch

In celebration of the Tennessee Williams centennial in 2011, The Library of America presents its acclaimed two-volume edition of his plays in a collector's boxed set. Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the 1980s, this is the most complete collection ever published of the playwright who transformed the American stage. The first volume opens with the rediscovered early plays, Spring Storm and Not About Nightingales, and contains such classics as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as a selection of one acts.
The second volume includes Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, The Night of the Iguana, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Out Cry, and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama, Fiction, Classics

2053 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2011

About the author

Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply stellar. Not a complete collection, to the extent that much of the juvenilia, the dotages, and the one acts are omitted--likely sufficient for a full third volume.

Certain themes and characters and ideas persist from the 30s through the 80s. There's always a concern for presenting the perspective of the outcast, the fugitive, the refugee, the discarded, the accursed. He is easy for a leftist to adore in this respect (and, indeed, Williams voted for socialist Norm Thomas on the occasion that he voted). It is certainly not Sophocles' or Shakespeare's concern for the aristocracy only, and further not a pedestrian concern for regular bourgeois: he's more interested in persons on the margin, shiftless proles, the lumpenized, persons with unlawful professions, persons reduced to unemployability.

And of course there's much sympathetic presentation of persons struggling to live under a sometimes violent regime of heteronormativity, inclusive of the persecution inherent in the enforcement of its strictures. Much sympathetic presentation likewise of mental and physical disease and disability.

That said, one presentation in Williams is the declassed southern planter who is compelled by the inexorable development of capitalism to accommodate to the Real, bringing all of the horrid ideas associated with the southern pseudo-aristocrat into the modern world--and yet it is presented with sympathy: all that is solid melts into air for these people, who include Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and others. Blanche's story is a tragedy, for instance, even if the rape scene in Streetcar had not been written (and I am of two minds whether that crime is aesthetically warranted). When the southern planter (or other wealthy person) is not presented as declassed, they are usually an obnoxious antagonist (the notable exceptions are Milk Train and The Mutilated, wherein the wealthy protagonist is as yet subject to the dramatist's critique, but is presented with an eye sympathetic to her frailty). Starting with Spring Storm, if a character (usually older, usually wealthy) mentions something fascistic about the 'finest blood' or 'pure blood,' we know that the character is coded as an asshole (such as the thuggish politician in Sweet Bird). (This can be a marker of racism, but also more often classism.) This antagonist reaches her highest point in Suddenly Last Summer, becomes a caricature in Eccentricities, and is redeemed in Milk Train to some extent.

Sexual violence appears quite a bit, and I'm not persuaded that it is handled deftly; it may be that it is used simply to characterize the criminal as a criminal; it is not presented as not-crime, however. That said, these criminals are given a perspective and are not subject to unilateral presentation.

These texts may have a problem with race politics; they certainly present racism as a background, and racist slurs litter the casual speech of characters in most plays--these persons are not held out for our emulation, I don't think. But only a couple of the texts take on racism directly. Most of the plays could be cast with persons of color in principal roles, of course. (The only play that openly and directly confronts the race issue is one of the drafts of Orpheus wherein the fugitive protagonist is presented as a defender of African Americans and, designated a northern radical and red, is lynched for it. Sweet Bird and Kingdom have significant racial components, also. Iguana has NSDAP vacationers, weirdly. Camino Real has all kinds of weird, inclusive of multicultural interaction short of racism. Tattoo and Orpheus also both involve nativism as directed at Italians.)

One interest that appears in 1938's Not About Nightingales and persists across the plays through Creve Coeur in 1979 is the interpenetration of carceral and non-carceral space. In the earlier text, prisoners are 'free' by looking at the stars, say, whereas a non-prisoner worker at the prison feels compelled by economic necessity to retain the job even though the state tortures and murders its wards. In the later play, an efficiency apartment is conceived of as "confinement."

Domestic spaces as occupied by their owners are not usually presented; more often the scene is space rented by the characters as an apartment (Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Mutilated, Vieux Carre, Creve Coeur, many of the one acts), or hotels (Camino Real, Iguana, Sweet Bird), or space offered for persons just passing through (Cat, Orpheus, Period of Adjustment), but also taverns (Small Craft Warnings), a theater in an unnamed foreign state (Out Cry), and of course the master space, a prison in Nightingales. In keeping with the interpenetration of carceral space with the non-carceral, where the presentation is of a person's owned residence, it normally is a space from which they want to escape (Eccentricities and its draft, Rose Tattoo, and perhaps most nasty in Kingdom of Earth). People in Williams are on the move, and staying still is a confinement, one marker of modernity, which for some people has arrived too soon. We can feel sympathy for them and their loss, even while hating them and being happy that they are soon to be consigned to perdition.

Good times therefore for all.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Collected Plays Of Tennessee Williams In The Library Of America

The Library of America published this two volume box set of the Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams in 2011 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Williams' (1911 -- 1983) birth. The box set combines the two separate volumes of Williams plays that the LOA published in 2000. Williams scholars Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch selected the contents of the volumes -- which do not include the entirety of Williams' dramas. They also prepared a chronology of Williams' life and notes on the background of each play. The two volumes include 32 plays by Williams.

I loved and revisited Williams' works many times beginning when I was young. John Lahr's recent biography of Williams, "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh inspired me to a large-scale reading of Williams using the LOA volumes. In addition to reading the two volumes in the box set, I viewed several films of Williams' works and read some works the set does not include. There is value in an overview of a substantial body of writing spanning, in these two volumes, the 43 years from 1937 to 1980. I tried to give more specific consideration to Williams' writings in the reviews of each of the two volumes of the box set and in reviews of many of the individual works they include.

Williams had a long career and these two volumes allow the reader to see how the playwright developed, reached his stride, and then, in the opinion of many deteriorated. Williams is best-remembered for three plays, "The Glass Menagerie", "A Streetcar Named Desire", and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" all of which are included in the first of the LOA two volumes. The set shows how these plays fit into the context of Williams output. The volumes show how Williams took short plays he wrote when he was young and continued throughout his life to rework them. For examples, Williams' early failed play, "Battle of Angels" in volume 1 became the play "Orpheus Descending" in volume 2. To take another example, Williams was dissatisfied with "Summer and Smoke", in volume 1, which remains one of his important plays, and reworked it into a different play, "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale", in volume 2 which deserves to be known in its own right.

The plays may be divided into three groups. The first group includes the set of plays in the first volume prior to "The Glass Menagerie". Williams wrote these plays in his salad days before he achieved success. Among other things, these plays show the persistence Williams required in order to succeed in additional to his formidable gifts. Among the best of these early plays is "Not about Nightingales" a drama set in a prison which received its successful world premier in 1998 in London.

The plays Williams wrote in his prime span both LOA volumes. They begin with "The Glass Menagerie" of 1945 and conclude with "The Night of the Iguana" in 1961. ("The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" should be included in this group.) Williams famous plays are included here. They show him as a writer of passion emphasizing sexuality and its repression and conflict with convention. Many of the plays are heavily violence-laden. They are highly lyrical and written in a romantically charged poetical language. Of the lesser-known works in this group, I enjoyed both the play and the film starring Anna Magnani of Williams' beautiful sexually-charged romance, "The Rose Tattoo".

After 1961, Williams went into a long period of decline due in part to substance and alcohol abuse and in part to changing public mores and tastes. Williams continued to write to the end of his life. As with the beginning of his career, it is important to see Williams' persistence and the manner in which he defined himself as a writer throughout his life. John Lahr succinctly describes the difference between Williams' work before and after 1961 with the following observation.

"The mission to which Williams' great plays of the forties and fifties had been dedicated -- the emancipation of desire and the celebration of the wild at heart -- no longer held the same subversive romantic novelty. The underground, in all its political and psychosexual extremes, was now out in the open and making a public spectacle of itself."

The plays in the second LOA volume beginning with "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" are all in a wandering, surrealistic style that differs from the romanticism and storytelling of the earlier plays. These works were failures when they were produced, but critical opinion about some of them may be shifting. I found "Milk Train" and "Small Craft Warnings" the most accessible of these expressivist plays, but each of the works included have had revivals in recent years. The final two plays in the volume, "Vieux Carre" and "A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur" are memory plays recollecting the way that "The Glass Menagerie" was a memory play. Williams returns poignantly to the themes of his early plays and to his younger life.

It is worth pointing out two works not included in this box set that are worth knowing. Williams' 1950 novel "The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone" is among the best of his work and is not included in the LOA set which consists of Williams' plays. Of Williams' later plays, the wildly eccentric short work "The Gnadiges Fraulein" is not included. Lahr praises this odd play highly, and it will interest serious readers of Williams.

I have been moved again by reading Tennessee Williams in the LOA volumes with Lahr's book adding a great deal to my appreciation. The Library of America deserves gratitude for its continued efforts in presenting the best of American writing to readers, including the plays of Tennessee Williams.

Robin Friedman

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

This two-volume set contains thirty-two of Tennessee Williams theater pieces, which is most but not all of them. The world-famous ones are here, such as THE GLASS MENAGERIE, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, also the slightly lesser ones like SUMMER AND SMOKE, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (noticeably different from the movie), and NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. Some later collections and one-acters are included, many of them rarely produced today (and if they are, it's probably because they bore the name of Tennessee Williams). Two volumes, decent quality Library of America binding, but you probably don't want to pay the price for these new unless you're a Tennessee Williams specialist.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tennessee Williams, on his birthday March 26
“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
― Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie; the iconic films which became part of our culture, shaped cinema as an extension of the theatre, and everything that came afterward; this is the Tennessee Williams everyone knows. But there is another, the poet and master of the one act play and short story, the experimentalist always transgressing the boundaries of the tried and accepted. His direct models were Gorky's The Lower Depths and Chekov's The Sea Gull (which he adapted as The Notebook of Trigorin) and indirectly Russian literature and European theatre in general.
His body of work is immense; the short story collections include Hard Candy, One Arm, The Knightly Quest, & Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (which are also published as the 49 stories in The Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams) the once-shocking confessional Memoirs, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, the beautiful volume of poetry In The Winter of Cities, and the entire 17 volumes of his Collected Plays.
Of the non-canonical plays, the ones not made into films, I draw your attention to the prison play, Not About Nightingales, about justice and equality during the depression era, (described on the author website as "Written in 1938 and based on an actual newspaper story, the play follows the events of a prison atrocity which shocked the nation: convicts leading a hunger strike in a Pennsylvania prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death") which makes clear the intent of his art as a force of social transformation.
In the words of Gassner in Theatre at the Crossroads, (as quoted by the Poetry Foundation) Williams "made pulsating plays out of his visions of a world of terror, confusion, and perverse beauty."

[Robert]

Spring Storm
Williams' earliest play demonstrates his themes, settings and willingness to push the boundaries of his contemporary social mores, ready made. It isn't as good as the more famous plays I've read or seen (Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Street Car Named Desire). There's more casual racism than I recall in those and I'm pretty sure the female reactions to male aggression would piss off many contemporary women just as much as the aggression itself.