Category: Tennessee Williams

BABY DOLL, began its life as a film in 1956, written by Tennessee Williams. It was Directed by Elia Kazan as ‘a black comedy’. It was shaped from two one act stage plays by Williams: 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON (1945) and THE LONG STAY CUT SHORT or THE UNSATISFACTORY SUPPER (1946). Tennessee Williams adapted the screenplay as a play, himself, under the title TIGER TALE in the 1970’s, but this work at the Ensemble Theatre has been made by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann – long time collaborators at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, New Jersey. The film…

Part way through Act One of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Tennessee Williams, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Directed by Kip Williams (and it was probably only twenty minutes or so into the text), I knew that I was having an experience in the theatre that was what I recognise as an experience of Grand Theatre. Watching this production of Kip Williams was the equivalent to me of what I have often experienced in the three hour or more in a Wagner Opera experience – a “Grand Olde Opry” experience, one that through its writing and the endurance…

The Belvoir production of Tennessee William’s THE GLASS MENAGERIE, is the third major production of that play that I have seen in the last four years. This production, unusual to the recent Belvoir general aesthetics – has stayed faithfully to the text as written, using even the American dialect. Eamon Flack, an Associate Director of the Belvoir, last year Directed ANGELS IN AMERICA and there, too, respected the writer’s work, and the audience’s intelligence, to the production’s and play’s ultimate great acclaim. This, THE GLASS MENAGERIE, is an Australian production of a great American classic, without re-writes (STRANGE INTERLUDE), or edits…

THE GLASS MENAGERIE was Tennessee Williams’ first success on Broadway. It was in 1944, and catapulted Mr Williams into the rarefied sphere of iconic artists, which he ably affirmed again and again, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1948, Pulitzer Prize) and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1955, Pulitzer Prize) were to come. Laurette Taylor, the original interpreter of Amanda, in that production, built a legendary aura around that role, and it has been, subsequently, the object for actors of a certain age, to pursue. On my last visit to New York I saw the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of THE…

Dear Diary, Please view the Belvoir promotional clip, below, before you begin this ‘epic’ entry. (oh, Puleeease, even if it is tongue in cheek, it epitomises some of the attitude in approaching these works that give me an artist, even, moral, pause. Or, is it just my generational elderliness showing, here? I am just not hip.) CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF by Tennessee Williams (1955) is another production of a classic American work directed by Simon Stone for the Belvoir Theatre. STRANGE INTERLUDE by Eugene O’Neill and THE DEATH OF A SALESMAN by Arthur Miller were presented last year. Mr Williams…

THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago on December 26,1944. The following year it opened on Broadway and played there for nearly two years. “It would be performed all over America and abroad, and Hollywood would film it. Next to OUR TOWN it would become the best-known American play. When the New York Drama Critics gathered in the Algonquin Hotel on April 10,1945, they took just fifteen minutes to award nine of their fourteen votes to THE GLASS MENAGERIE and acclaim it the best play of the 1944-45 season.”1 It is regarded, today, as the first of Tennessee Williams’ great contributions…