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Out Cry
Out Cry by Williams, Tennessee
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
2 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Tennessee Williams
754 books3,693 followersThomas 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 8, 2023
Tennessee Williams regarded "Out Cry" as his best and most personal play after "A Streetcar Named Desire", but there have been few who have agreed with him. Williams worked on the play and revised it incessantly over many years. It failed badly when it opened in New York in its final form in 1973, causing Williams to go into a deep depression. Williams paranoia over the play led to an angry outburst and a break with his longtime agent, Audrey Wood. The breach between the two never healed.
"Out Cry" is a strange work for Williams in that it is written in an experimental, minimalist style. The play is endlessly self-referential in that it is a play within a play and moves back and forth between the inset play and its setting. There are only two characters in the play: Felice, an aging playwright and his sister Clare, an actress. The play is set in a strange, cavernous theater in an unspecified locality. Felice and Clare discover that the acting company with which they have been touring has abandoned them on the more than plausible grounds that the two are insane. The two are left to put on a play by themselves. Clare wants to back out but Felice insists on going forward. They present a play that Felice has written that they have performed many times before titled "The Two Character Play", which was Williams' original title for the play that became "Out Cry". There is no audience in the house. The play goes forward anyway.
The two characters in the inset "Two Character Play" are also Felice and Clare. It is set in a small town in the deep South called New Bethesda in a creaking old Gothic house. Felice's and Clare's astrologer father has killed his wife and his children's mother and then killed himself. Felice and Clare struggle over what to do and how to support themselves. The "Two Character Play" written by Felice seems bereft of an ending and the play moves back and forth between the inset play and Felice and Clare playing themselves before the non--existent audience.
The play is heavily autobiographical. Felice is drawn from Williams himself and shows his anger over the apparent drying up of his creativity and the rejection of his work. Clare is Williams' sister Rose who was permanently institutionalized early in the 1940s after undergoing a lobotomy. Williams himself was institutionalized in the late 1960s. Both Felice and Williams in the play have deep emotional problems and had been institutionalized at various times. They also both are heavily addicted to substances. The play blurs the distinction between appearance and reality or between life and drama on the stage. The characters, and the viewers or readers, are caught in their parts. Still, the play recognizes the power and forth of imagination and the necessity to persevere in life with one's dreams and goals. The play rises above its narrow, autobiographical basis in its focus on imagination and on what Williams' described in a short Foreword as the cry "en avant".
After its opening string of failures, "Out Cry" has had several revivals. This difficult play has risen somewhat in its critical reception. In 2013, for example, the play was performed by theater companies in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. to favorable critical reviews. Williams thought that the play would survive its initial rejection and that it would come to be regarded as one of his best. The latter prediction has not come to pass. But, as with so many of Williams' late works, "Out Cry" has survived its apparent failure. The play is included in the second of the two Library of America volumes devoted to the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Robin Friedman
"Out Cry" is a strange work for Williams in that it is written in an experimental, minimalist style. The play is endlessly self-referential in that it is a play within a play and moves back and forth between the inset play and its setting. There are only two characters in the play: Felice, an aging playwright and his sister Clare, an actress. The play is set in a strange, cavernous theater in an unspecified locality. Felice and Clare discover that the acting company with which they have been touring has abandoned them on the more than plausible grounds that the two are insane. The two are left to put on a play by themselves. Clare wants to back out but Felice insists on going forward. They present a play that Felice has written that they have performed many times before titled "The Two Character Play", which was Williams' original title for the play that became "Out Cry". There is no audience in the house. The play goes forward anyway.
The two characters in the inset "Two Character Play" are also Felice and Clare. It is set in a small town in the deep South called New Bethesda in a creaking old Gothic house. Felice's and Clare's astrologer father has killed his wife and his children's mother and then killed himself. Felice and Clare struggle over what to do and how to support themselves. The "Two Character Play" written by Felice seems bereft of an ending and the play moves back and forth between the inset play and Felice and Clare playing themselves before the non--existent audience.
The play is heavily autobiographical. Felice is drawn from Williams himself and shows his anger over the apparent drying up of his creativity and the rejection of his work. Clare is Williams' sister Rose who was permanently institutionalized early in the 1940s after undergoing a lobotomy. Williams himself was institutionalized in the late 1960s. Both Felice and Williams in the play have deep emotional problems and had been institutionalized at various times. They also both are heavily addicted to substances. The play blurs the distinction between appearance and reality or between life and drama on the stage. The characters, and the viewers or readers, are caught in their parts. Still, the play recognizes the power and forth of imagination and the necessity to persevere in life with one's dreams and goals. The play rises above its narrow, autobiographical basis in its focus on imagination and on what Williams' described in a short Foreword as the cry "en avant".
After its opening string of failures, "Out Cry" has had several revivals. This difficult play has risen somewhat in its critical reception. In 2013, for example, the play was performed by theater companies in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. to favorable critical reviews. Williams thought that the play would survive its initial rejection and that it would come to be regarded as one of his best. The latter prediction has not come to pass. But, as with so many of Williams' late works, "Out Cry" has survived its apparent failure. The play is included in the second of the two Library of America volumes devoted to the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Robin Friedman
November 5, 2022
Theatre blurs into life. We are abandoned/scared on a stage, playing/trapped-in a part that has no end even after the audience/meaning has left.
May 1, 2024
“The sentence was passed such a long time ago that the dread of execution is worn out. Fear does have a limit.”
One of the more interesting late-Williams experiments. I don’t rate it as highly as Streetcar, or Night of the Iguanas; Williams does his best work when he’s intimating the kindness of strangers. By contrast, these later plays, when they’re interesting enough to hold my attention past the first two pages, are relentlessly meanspirited, not to mention poorly titled, saved, kind of, maybe, by Williams’s incorporations of postmodernist and kabuki techniques, and the foregrounding of his literary materials. Taken on the whole, these items were noticeably thrown on just out of the door and fit Williams about as well as tourist attire could ever be made to fit; but at best, by blurring the lines between internal and external theatrical movement, he gives us works that are more arresting than they would have otherwise been had we never been made to remember that we are indeed watching a play.
With that all said, I can’t rate Out Cry that highly. Unlike the great Williams plays, Out Cry is simply too fast-paced and too cold to register very strongly. By design, I’m sure, but even so I would have preferred Williams to muster a little more pathos than for one of the two characters (yes, there are only two characters in the play, and it does lack texture as a result) to simply state that he feels, . The audience hopes a playwright of Williams's talents could give us more to chew on than this limp-on-the-couch nihilism.
The most interesting features of this play are that the trademark shocking Williams ending and that the play within this play If you’re a connoisseur of metafiction, or if you’re interested in understanding the full scope of Williams’s creativity, this play is worth considering, if only because it won’t take very long.
One of the more interesting late-Williams experiments. I don’t rate it as highly as Streetcar, or Night of the Iguanas; Williams does his best work when he’s intimating the kindness of strangers. By contrast, these later plays, when they’re interesting enough to hold my attention past the first two pages, are relentlessly meanspirited, not to mention poorly titled, saved, kind of, maybe, by Williams’s incorporations of postmodernist and kabuki techniques, and the foregrounding of his literary materials. Taken on the whole, these items were noticeably thrown on just out of the door and fit Williams about as well as tourist attire could ever be made to fit; but at best, by blurring the lines between internal and external theatrical movement, he gives us works that are more arresting than they would have otherwise been had we never been made to remember that we are indeed watching a play.
With that all said, I can’t rate Out Cry that highly. Unlike the great Williams plays, Out Cry is simply too fast-paced and too cold to register very strongly. By design, I’m sure, but even so I would have preferred Williams to muster a little more pathos than for one of the two characters (yes, there are only two characters in the play, and it does lack texture as a result) to simply state that he feels, . The audience hopes a playwright of Williams's talents could give us more to chew on than this limp-on-the-couch nihilism.
The most interesting features of this play are that the trademark shocking Williams ending and that the play within this play If you’re a connoisseur of metafiction, or if you’re interested in understanding the full scope of Williams’s creativity, this play is worth considering, if only because it won’t take very long.
January 8, 2018
Loved the play. I love the fact that one does not know when the play begins and when the reality sets in. In certain parts it does become more evident that they are outside of the play.The insanity of it all and commitment reminds me of myself when I act out in real life and do comedic bits with people also known as trolling. Clare kept calling Line! but no one ever gave her the line. The siblings were both pronounced insane by the company that abanonded them; they retaliated performing the play to an empty house in an unspecfied and unheated location. It seems that the touring company was right in their conclusions. I am sure the statue that resides right in the middle of the stage symbolises to Williams something in his own decline of creativity and downward slope of his career. Felice wrote the Two-Character Play that they commitingly played throughout. I am assuming that there are autobiographical inspirations in one’s work. I wonder what happened to Felice and Clare’s actual parents. Did their father murder their mother? Or did the mother shoot the father in self defense. Was is a struggle?
Hopefully I get to see this play live, or do it myself in class or on stage.
Hopefully I get to see this play live, or do it myself in class or on stage.
November 8, 2015
I actually liked this play very much - it surprised me at how tight it was in presenting a complex self-referential postmoderny theme. As anyone who has the slightest inkling of Williams' life, his family life, especially his sister, was a goldmine of material. The play carves out a space that Williams uneasily inhabited between writing about his sister/remembering his sister/and producing a play about his sister - all these "planes" are present in this play.
On the page, it is relatively easy to figure out when the actors are playing the play, playing the actors playing the play, and playing the drama behind the writing of the play. On the stage - it might be a confused mess unless done really well. As it is, it was a refreshing way to think about the act of creation.
On the page, it is relatively easy to figure out when the actors are playing the play, playing the actors playing the play, and playing the drama behind the writing of the play. On the stage - it might be a confused mess unless done really well. As it is, it was a refreshing way to think about the act of creation.
May 21, 2017
This play seems to me to be Williams response to Beckett. Two playwrights lost within a play itself representing the insane world of the theater and the author: I wrote it when I was approaching a mental breakdown and rewrote it after my alleged recovery," Williams wrote. While it contains some of the finest sections of his writing to be found anywhere, I think it suffers a bit on the page vs. the stage due to its experimental and self-referential nature. The brother/sister partnership at the center of the play seems to be a "dramatic metaphor" (to crib an expression from this symbol-laden work) for his own relationship with his sister, who inspired The Glass Menagerie.
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February 23, 2022Even Tennessee Williams at his "this play was cancelled"* worst is way more interesting than Death of a Salesman, The Iceman Cometh, A Delicate Balance, etc.
*cancelled in the sense that the play's initial run was considered a failure, not cancelled in common contemporary parlance.
*cancelled in the sense that the play's initial run was considered a failure, not cancelled in common contemporary parlance.
January 17, 2013
To use the words of the man himself, this is 'a great work of great power and darkly subjective meaning'.
March 14, 2018
Ένα εξαιρετικό θεατρικό κείμενο για τον εγκλεισμό μέσα την ίδια τη ζωή. Από τα ωραιότερα έργα του Ουιλιαμς. Ο τρόπος γραφής δεν μοιάζει με το στυλ του συγγραφέα, θυμίζει περισσότερο ίσως θεατρικό του Μπεκετ. Οι ήρωες, αδέρφια και ηθοποιοί μιλούν εκ μέρους του δημιουργού του εκφράζοντας προβληματισμούς του ίδιου, μα ίσως τελικά όλων μας. Η λεπτή αυτή ισορροπία μεταξύ πραγματικότητας και φαντασίας είναι ο βασικός πυρήνας του έργου, που μεταφράζεται ελεύθερα απο το καθένα.
June 8, 2023
More experimental/existential/ultra-meta than anything else: two characters can't leave a house for various (internal mental) reasons but ultimately their fate is controlled by a massive sunflower in the front lawn. As the final line goes: "Magic is the habit of our existence..." Style over substance.
September 25, 2024
"To be your own enemy is to have against you the worst, the most relentless, enemy of all."
December 27, 2021
"The Two-Character Play is a tour de force, it's more like an exercise in performance by two star performers, than like a play, a real play" -Clare, Out Cry
"If we can imagine more summer, we can imagine more light" -Felice, Out Cry
"Out Cry" is a re-work of Tennessee William's "The Two-Character Play" that he himself held in high regard. Calling it "his best work since Streetcar". I can't say that I agree with him as his early work "The Glass Menagerie" still remains my favorite. I can't help but feel I came away from this missing something. As the quote alludes, I might have a better appreciation for it had I seen it live and not read it, or if I had the prior knowledge of the play's history and read it in its original form. As it stands, Out Cry is a haunting and intricate play within a play about two siblings abandoned by their troupe putting on one last show. The lines between reality and fiction are blurred as the warm intimacy and cold strangulation between the two takes form. As the curtain descends on them for the final time, it is left unclear if the theatre the characters find themselves trapped in is real or a prison of their mind. Brilliant stuff, though it reeks of Tennessee aping Samuel Beckett. Whos work in absurd, obscure theatre is legendary. I hear a lot of Tennessee Williams' later work draws much inspiration from Beckett, which is a shame as Tennessee has a fine voice for wounded souls trying to find their way and I think that's where he is at his best.
"If we can imagine more summer, we can imagine more light" -Felice, Out Cry
"Out Cry" is a re-work of Tennessee William's "The Two-Character Play" that he himself held in high regard. Calling it "his best work since Streetcar". I can't say that I agree with him as his early work "The Glass Menagerie" still remains my favorite. I can't help but feel I came away from this missing something. As the quote alludes, I might have a better appreciation for it had I seen it live and not read it, or if I had the prior knowledge of the play's history and read it in its original form. As it stands, Out Cry is a haunting and intricate play within a play about two siblings abandoned by their troupe putting on one last show. The lines between reality and fiction are blurred as the warm intimacy and cold strangulation between the two takes form. As the curtain descends on them for the final time, it is left unclear if the theatre the characters find themselves trapped in is real or a prison of their mind. Brilliant stuff, though it reeks of Tennessee aping Samuel Beckett. Whos work in absurd, obscure theatre is legendary. I hear a lot of Tennessee Williams' later work draws much inspiration from Beckett, which is a shame as Tennessee has a fine voice for wounded souls trying to find their way and I think that's where he is at his best.
June 29, 2016
I did like this better than its predecessor, Two Character Play, but I found my mind wandering at times while reading. Maybe it's one you just have to see performed.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews