Unit - VII :

Chapter - 9

A Street car Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

Question- "Tennessee Williams was an American playwright of 20th Century of American drama." Write a note on it.

Or
"Tennessee Williams was a tormented playwright of American drama". Explain this statement.

Answer -

Tennessee Williams is considered one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century. A master tragedian with a strong sense of the poeticism of the Southern Gothic, Williams's work has been widely performed on stage for decades and many of his plays were turned into critically acclaimed films. Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 February 25, 1983) known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries, Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th century American drama.

As American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility. Williams became interested in playwriting while at the University of Missouri Columbia and Washington University (St. Louis) and worked at it even during the bepression while employed in a St. Louis shoe factory. Little theatre groups produced some of his work, encouraging him to study dramatic writing at the University of Iowa, where he earned a BA in 1938.

His first recongnition came when American Blues (1939); a group of one Act plays, won a Group Theatre Award. Williams, however, continued to work at jobs ranging from theatre Usher to Hollywood Scripwriter until success came with the Glass Menegerie (1944). In it, Williams portrayed a declassed a Southern family living in a tenement Williams's next major play, A streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a study of the mental and moral ruin of Balance Dev Bois, another former Southern belle, whose genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brutish brother in law, Stanly Kowralske.

In 1953, Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical, microcosmic town whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a commercial failure, but his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955); which exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southearn planter, was awarded a Pultizer Prize and was successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguna (1961), the story of a defrocked minister turned sleazy tour guide, who finds God in a cheap Mexican hotel. Suddenly Last Summer (1958) deals with lobotomy, pederasty and cannibalism and in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), the gigolo hero is castrated for having infected a Southern politician's daughter with venereal disease.

Williams was in ill health frequently during the 1960s, compounded by years of addiction to sleeping pills and liquor, problems that he struggled to overcome after a severe mental and physical breakdown in 1969. His later plays were unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They include "Vieux Carre" (1977), about down-and-outs in New Orleans; "A Lovely Sunday for Cueve Coeur" (1978-79) and Clothes for a Summer Hotel" (1980). Centring on Zelda Fitzgerlad, wife of novelist. F. Scott Fitzgerlad, and on the people they knew.

Williams also wrote two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975); essays, poetry, film scripts, short stories and an autobiography memoirs (1975). His works won four Drama Critics awards and were widely translated and performed around the world.

"Tennessee Williams, A tormented playwright who unzipped his heart." Between 1948 and 1959 Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959, he had earned two Pultizer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards and a Tony Award.

Critics and audiences alike failed to appreciate Williams's new style and the approach to theatre he developed during the 1970s. In 1974, Williams received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1979, four years before his death, he was introduced into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

Williams is among the most quotable to American playwrights and he remains widely celebrated for the unique language he brought to modern. theatre. He introduced to dramatic literature a cast of remarkable, memorable characters and turned his attention and sympathy toward people and subjects that, before his time, had been considered beneath the concern of serious authors with "distinctive dramatic feelings."

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