Tennessee Williams' characters set the stage for their own dramas. Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire), arrived at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props. Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) directed her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams' entire oeuvre: each play stages the process through which it came into being--and this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter takes a detailed reading of one play and its variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.

Now available as a paperbook, Volume VIII adds to the series' four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life.

Poems deal with truth, religion, nature, thought, the role of poetry, death, visions, age, and the past.

The essays in this volume were all written by David Kaplan in conjunction with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, of which he is the curator and a co-founder. They are organized in two sections. The first section consists of ten essays written for each year of the Provincetown Festival, most included in the Festival catalogue for the year indicated. Those essays focus on each year’s thematic selection of Williams plays—and other dance, music, and theater events—as well as some aspect of Williams’ plays not always obvious in the text but essential to understanding the plays in production. The second section includes seven occasional essays, written for productions of Williams plays associated with the Festival. All the essays relate, in one way or another, to the story of what happened to the playwright during the last twenty years of his life and how his reputation is evolving since his death.

Now available as a paperbook, Volume VIII adds to the series' four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life.

The World of Tennessee Williams offers a survey of the life and career of one of America¿s greatest dramatists from his birth in 1911 to his death in 1983. Richard Leavitt was in a unique position to create such a volume since he was a friend of Tennessee¿s and followed his career closeup. Kenneth Holditch, who has undertaken the task of completing the text was a friend of Leavitt¿s and knew Tennessee Williams. It has been his desire to carry to fruition the original plan Dick Leavitt conceived in the 1970s and augmented in 1983 when Williams died.