Please complete the quiz on
The Glass Menagerie this morning. When you have completed your quiz, please learn more about Tennessee Williams at these links (please use headphones as peers may still be finishing their quiz...):
Things to know about
Tennessee Williams. Please watch this short documentary student film about the playwright.
Tennessee Williams "was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honor of his Southern accent and his father's home state. Williams's father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams's mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman's daughter prone to hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina's parents in Mississippi.
In 1918, the Williams family moved to St. Louis, marking the start of the family's deterioration. C.C.'s drinking increased, the family moved sixteen times in ten years, and the young Williams, always shy and fragile, was ostracized and taunted at school. During these years, he and Rose became extremely close. Edwina and Williams's maternal grandparents also offered the emotional support he required throughout his childhood. Williams loathed his father but grew to appreciate him somewhat after deciding in therapy as an adult that his father had given him his tough survival instinct.
After being bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness, Williams grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing. At sixteen, Williams won a prize in a national competition that asked for essays answering the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” His answer was published in Smart Set magazine. The following year, he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri to study journalism. While in college, he wrote his first plays, which were influenced by members of the southern literary renaissance such as Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, and Thomas Wolfe. Before Williams could receive his degree, however, his father forced him to withdraw from school. Outraged because Williams had failed a required ROTC program course, C.C. Williams made his son go to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.
After three years at the shoe factory, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown. He then returned to college, this time at Washington University in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced two of his plays, The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. Further personal problems led Williams to drop out of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, Rose, who had begun suffering from mental illness later in life, underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery). The event greatly upset Williams, and it left his sister institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite this trauma, Williams finally managed to graduate in 1938.
In the years following his graduation, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York. His literary influences were evolving to include the playwright Anton Chekhov and Williams's lifelong hero, the poet Hart Crane. He officially changed his name to Tennessee Williams upon the publication of his short story “The Field of Blue Children” in 1939. During the early years of World War II, Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and also prepared material for what would become The Glass Menagerie.
In 1944,
The Glass Menagerie opened in New York and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, catapulting Williams into the upper echelon of American playwrights. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theater in New York City. The play, set in contemporary times, describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois.
A Streetcar Named Desire cemented Williams's reputation, garnering another Drama Critics' Circle Award and also a Pulitzer Prize. Williams went on to win another Drama Critics' Circle Award and Pulitzer for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
Much of the pathos found in Williams's drama was mined from the playwright's own life. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness, and insanity were all part of Williams's world. His experience as a known homosexual in an era unfriendly to homosexuality also informed his work. Williams's most memorable characters, many of them female, contain recognizable elements of their author, Edwina, and Rose. His vulgar, irresponsible male characters, such as Stanley Kowalski, were likely modeled on Williams's own father and other males who tormented Williams during his childhood.
Williams's early plays also connected with the new American taste for realism that emerged following the Depression and World War II. The characters in
A Streetcar Named Desire are trying to rebuild their lives in postwar America: Stanley and Mitch served in the military, while Blanche had affairs with young soldiers based near her home.
Williams set his plays in the South, but the compelling manner in which he rendered his themes made them universal, winning him an international audience and worldwide acclaim. However, most critics agree that the quality of Williams's work diminished as he grew older. He suffered a long period of depression following the death of his longtime partner, Frank Merlo, in 1963. His popularity during these years also declined due to changed interests in the theater world. During the radical 1960s and 1970s, nostalgia no longer drew crowds, and Williams's explorations of sexual mores came across as tired and old-fashioned.
Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a medicine-bottle cap in an alcohol-related incident at the Elysée Hotel in New York City. He was one month short of his seventy-second birthday. In his long career, he wrote twenty-five full-length plays (five made into movies), five screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir. The mark he left on the tradition of realism in American drama is incredible.
Check out these other Williams' films:
Most of Williams' plays (as well as his films) revolve around a central secret: something terrible or haunting or degenerate that a protagonist desperately tries to cover up. Williams' women are often unhappy, the men brutish and insensitive. Oh, where will it lead but to modern American drama!
We can learn a lot about playwriting from Tennessee Williams. A character in pain or conflict lies at the center of his plays. The use of a "secret" allows appropriate tension and rising conflict until a climactic scene reveals the truth. Learn from this.
Our next example of Williams' work is the play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), adapted into a film in 1958. Here's some information about the film:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
"Shortly after Menagerie closed, [Tennessee Williams] went to work on a new piece..., producing his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Another Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, followed in 1955. The crux of this latter work concerns the conflicts of a Mississippi family following the diagnosis of its patriarch, Big Daddy's, stomach cancer and the revelation of his darling alcoholic son's homosexuality. Cat premiered in New York under the direction of Elia Kazan, who revised the third act to give the play a more redemptive resolution. In 1958, director Richard Brooks adapted Cat" into a popular film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Judith Anderson, and Burl Ives. "To Williams's dismay, Brooks excised all explicit references to Brick's homosexuality in deference to the studio censors."
The play involves the following characters:
Brick (Paul Newman): a former football star and favorite son of Big Daddy, he has some issues.
Maggie "The Cat" (Elizabeth Taylor): Brick's lonely wife.
Big Daddy (Burl Ives): Brick's father; recently diagnosed with a "spastic colon" as opposed to the truth.
Big Mama (Judith Anderson): Big Daddy's wife; the matriarch of the family.
Gooper (Jack Carson): Brick's older brother.
Mae (Madeleine Sherwood): Gooper's pregnant wife and busy body.
Reverend Tooker (Vaugn Taylor): A guest and friend of the family, a reverend.
Doctor Baugh (Larry Gates): Big Daddy's physician & friend of the family.
Children: Mae and Gooper's clan of brats.
Please learn the following basic film vocabulary. See the handout for details. As you watch the film, note how the cinematographer uses some of these film elements. More on film later in this course.
HOMEWORK: None. If you didn't finish
The Glass Menagerie, this is your last chance to read it. Many students have work that is missing or late. This needs to be completed and turned in for minimal credit.
