A Streetcar Named Desire

The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play. A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.

Presents a collection of ten critical essays on Williams's play "A Streetcar Named Desire" arranged in chronological order of publication.

The Laramie Project, one of the most-performed theater pieces in America, has become a modern classic. In this expanded edition, it is joined by an essential and moving sequel to the original play. On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of brutality and hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of the town, the event was deeply personal. In the aftermath, Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with its citizens. From the transcripts, the playwrights constructed an extraordinary chronicle of life in the town after the murder. In The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, the troupe revisits the town a decade after the tragedy, finding a community grappling with its legacy and its place in history. The two plays together comprise an epic and deeply moving theatrical cycle that explores the life of an American town over the course a decade.

(Vocal Score). This wonderful new American opera, based on the unforgettable Tennessee Williams play, has been broadcast around the world and recorded live on Deutsche Grammaphon, and it's been a big hit ever since its premiere last year at the San Francisco Opera. Libretto by Philip Littell. Instrumental parts available for rental.

Exhaustively researched and almost flirtatiously opinionated, When Blanche Met Brando is everything a fan needs to know about the ground-breaking New York and London stage productions of Williams' "Streetcar" as well as the classic Brando/Leigh film. Sam Staggs' interviews with all the living cast members of each production will enhance what's known about the play and movie, and help make this book satisfying as both a pop culture read and as a deeper piece of thinking about a well-known story. Readers will come away from this book delighted with the juicy behind-the-scenes stories about cast, director, playwright and the various productions and will also renew their curiosity about the connection between the role of Blanche and Viven Leigh's insatiable sexual appetite and later descent into breakdown. They may also-for the first time-question whether the character of Blanche was actually "mad" or whether her anxiousness was symptomatic of another disorder. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is one of the most haunting and most-studied modern plays. Staggs' new book will fascinate fans and richen newcomers' understanding of its importance in American theater and movie history.

Nicholas Grene explores the subject of domestic spaces in modern drama through close readings of nine major plays.

A Doll's House is a three-act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen. The play is significant for its critical attitude toward 19th century marriage norms. In the central character of Nora, Ibsen epitomized the human struggle against the humiliating constraints of social conformity. Nora's ultimate rejection of a smothering marriage and life in 'a doll's house' shocked theatergoers of the late 1800s and opened new horizons for playwrights and their audiences.

Fifteen distinguished scholars contribute original essays that analyze A Streetcar Named Desire from various critical or cultural stances, methods, or modalities. Represented are the theories of Lacan and Foucault and the tenets of Marxism; the approaches of Feminism, Reader Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, Chaos and Anti-Chaos Theory, Translation Theory, Formalism, Mythology, Perception Theory, and Gender Theory; and the perceptions of Popular Culture, Film History and Theory, Southern Letters, and assorted cultural and regional studies. Viewing the play through multifaceted lenses, the essayists open up the script and expand our awareness of the problems and possibility offered by this great modern classic.

Mary Lawson's debut novel is a shimmering tale of love, death and redemption set in a rural northern community where time has stood still. Tragic, funny and unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leapt to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few. It will be published in more than a dozen countries worldwide, including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. Luke, Matt, Kate and Bo Morrison are born in an Ontario farming community of only a few families, so isolated that “the road led only south.” There is little work, marriage choices are few, and the winter cold seeps into the bones of all who dare to live there. In the Morrisons’ hard-working, Presbyterian house, the Eleventh Commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Emote.” But as descendants of a great-grandmother who “fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning,” the Morrison children have some hope of getting off the land through the blessings of education. Luke, the eldest, is accepted at teachers college – despite having struggle mightily through school – but before he can enroll, the Morrison parents are killed in a collision with a logging truck. He gives up his place to stay home and raise his younger sisters -- seven-year-old Kate, and Bo, still a baby. In this family bound together by loss, the closest relationship is that between Kate and her older brother Matt, who love to wander off to the ponds together and lie on the bank, noses to the water. Matt teaches his little sister to watch “damselflies performing their delicate iridescent dances,” to understand how water beetles “carry down an air bubble with them when they submerge.” The life in the pond is one that seems to go on forever, in contrast to the abbreviated lives of the Morrison parents. Matt becomes Kate’s hero and her guide, as his passionate interest in the natural world sparks an equal passion in Kate. Matt, a true scholar, is expected to fulfill the family dream by becoming the first Morrison to earn a university degree. But a dramatic event changes his course, and he ends up a farmer; so it is Kate who eventually earns the doctorate and university teaching position. She is never able to reconcile her success with what she considers the tragedy of Matt’s failure, and she feels a terrible guilt over the sacrifices made for her. Now a successful biologist in her twenties, she nervously returns home with her partner, a microbiologist from an academic family, to celebrate Matt’s son’s birthday. Amid the clash of cultures, Kate takes us in and out of her troubled childhood memories. Accustomed to dissecting organisms under a microscope, she must now analyze her own emotional life. She is still in turmoil over the events of one fateful year when the tragedy of another local family spilled over into her own. There are things she cannot understand or forgive. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension, her narrative flowing with consummate control in ever-increasing circles, overturning one’s expectations to the end. Compared by Publishers Weekly to Richard Ford for her lyrical, evocative writing, Lawson combines deeply drawn characters, beautiful writing and a powerful description of the land.

Presents a collection of essays on the play that analyze its characters, major themes, and critical history.

A comprehensively revised student edition of this classic play which depicts a turbulent confrontation between traditional values in the American South and the rough-edged, aggressive materialism of the new world.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Tubingen (Englisches Seminar), course: Introduction to Literary Studies, language: English, abstract: "'The marvelous performances in [this] great movie [...] [are] only slightly marred by [a] Hollywood ending.' Tennessee Williams" (cf. Yacowar). Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire" from 1947 was often staged and interpreted. It was also the base of Elia Kazan's famous and remarkable movie from 1951. Since a book allows for interpretation, the movie features a different realization. This paper will contrast the written form with the film version. To illustrate the different realizations there will be a closer look at the two special and important scenes, ten and eleven, which are exemplarily for the differences in the general conversion. The decision for exactly these scenes is founded in the striking differences in conversion and adaptation and by reason of plenty of content rapidly beat down in these scenes. Due to many influences, the film departs in places completely from Williams' original. These influences and differences will be described in the following first part. Particular attention will then be paid to the music and noises, and the moods and emotions caused by these. And, due to being close linked to the adaptation of the whole movie, the effects of censorship will be explained. The impact is to work out in which ways the movie is adapted to the play and where it distinguishes from it.