Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

 Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is known widely as one of America’s finest playwrights. He penned
 numerous award-winning plays between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, including The Glass
 Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
These plays, known for their realistic characters and tragic themes, blended poetic language with theatrical wit and are now considered American masterpieces.
Tennessee Williams’ literary style was lyrical, with aspects of the Southern Gothic Style integrated. The Southern Gothic style sometimes entails rendering southern literary icons such as the Nobel hero or the attractive heroine imperfect or monstrous in character.
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Marlon Brando’s famed yell of “STELLA!” initially bounces across a Broadway stage on December 3^rd, 1947, exciting the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the grand opening of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire.
The 23-year-old Brando as Stanley Kowalski, a raw, working-class American whose violent encounter with Blanche DuBois, a Southern belle with a dark background, is central to Williams’ legendary drama. Blanche visits her sister Stella, Stanley’s wife, at their house in New Orleans’ French Quarter; she and Stanley immediately dislike one other. Stanley rapes Blanche in the climax scene, forcing her to lose her poor grasp on sanity; the play finishes with her being brought away in a straitjacket.
The play was ambitious, provocative, sensuous, and sexual in nature. Greek tragedies included murders, incest, and infanticide, and in Streetcar Williams gave American audiences a tragedy on a scale with the Greek masters, filled with rape, homosexuality, and the tragic hero. Blanche Du Bois, who was gloriously destined.
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
The Glass Menagerie is a “memory play” in which Tom reminisces about his adolescence during the Great Depression. It depicts his mother, Amanda, attempting to retain a lost gentility in the midst of severe poverty and persuading her children to accept her vision of happiness. Tom also has a disabled elder sister, Laura, who is fragile, and recalls her collection of glass animals. Tom works at a shoe factory to help support his family while aspiring to be a poet. At his mother’s desire, he invites a colleague home as a possible partner for Laura. Laura’s beau went to high school with her. He is the only boy she has ever felt feeling for.
While Tennessee William’s play The Glass Menagerie is one of his most renowned, it has been one of his least distinctive. The play is both vulnerable and compelling. Although the scenery and people are realistic, the entire play has a sense of unreality about it, similar to many of our experiences. In this play, Williams introduces a key recurrent theme: “What place in the modern society can be found for ‘lost souls’- the artists, the natural man, the aristocrat?” His characters are nearly always outside of conventional standards and typically utilize something- sex, drugs, alcohol- to escape an unpleasant present or to resurrect a definite past. (Laura’s glass collection).
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
In terms od dramatic technique, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is another contemporary or perhaps post-modern play. Some of the technical features include the author’s extensive use of unconventional commentary, mythical allusions related to the characters and their roles and relationships, through use of surrealistic imagery and symbolism in its setting and actions, the necessary “mystery” about the characters and theme, and the use of light and sound as dramatic devices to reinforce the meaning and efficacy.
As a result, the drama is more radically innovative in terms of dramatic technique than it is in terms of subject and theme.
Williams’ most noteworthy skills are his ability to explain events gradually, little by bit, in a climax of meaning and importance. We are pushed into a narrative just as it is about to reach an explosive climax or finale. The chronology of prior events seeps out gradually, and the history is usually not complete until the conclusion of the second act. The rest of the play is an inexorable unfolding of the outcomes.
Besides the narrative aspect, the play is developed via the evolution of the characters and their relationships, which is an original theatrical style. This style is Chekhovian in the sense that the climaxes are psychological, and the rhythm of the play is established not by external events, or accidents, but by building relationships between individuals or an individual character’s rising self-awareness.
In short, the sentences are concise and effective in invoking the many themes of illusion and disillusionment, disappointment and frustration, sincerity and insincerity, passion and detachment, greed and isolation, contempt, greed, and so on. There are extended, aimless sentences and extensive personal reminiscences in William's conversation. The vocabulary, like the play itself, is a blend of realism and imagination, a customized interpretation of a real American dialect.