Hot Tin Roof Research Articles

The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (review)

Reviewed by: The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia Mark Zelinsky The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004; pp. xxix + 350. $89.95 cloth. This collection of some 150 entries includes four general areas of focus: individuals, places, works, and concepts that relate to Tennessee Williams's life and texts. The book fills a critical niche in scholarship and research. Its very existence attests to the growing appreciation and influence of Williams's expansive canon, which includes approximately seventy plays, two novels, dozens of short stories, five screenplays, two volumes of poetry, a collection of essays, a memoir, and thousands of letters and journal entries. While "the largest number of entries" concern Williams's works, "perhaps the heart" of the volume is devoted to concepts; these, in turn, are among the most helpful offerings in the encyclopedia (xii and xiii). Although even a casual acquaintance with Williams's dramas reveals his focus on religion, Thomas P. Adler's essay on the topic provides a thoughtful analysis of the motif. Adler astutely notes, "[f]or Williams, it might be said that hell is the self, while God is the other, and so to deny the other is to deny God" (214). Penny Farfan's article on music helps one reconsider a recurring element frequently overlooked in Williams's plays. Among the best contributions in the encyclopedia are John M. Clum on gender and sexuality and Brenda Murphy on politics. Both provide comprehensive and well-organized discussions that inspire the reader to further investigation. To my mind that is precisely what a superior encyclopedia article should do—promote additional research. Of the many entries on Williams's works, those offering new insights and fresh analysis are represented by the following: George W. Crandell's [End Page 162] piece on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Allean Hale's articles on Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, and Stairs to the Roof; Thomas Keith's entry on A House Not Meant to Stand; Brian Parker's discussion of The Rose Tattoo; and Robert Bray's offerings on the Collected Stories, The Night of the Iguana, and Vieux Carré. Annette J. Saddik argues that I Can't Imagine Tomorrow (published 1970) "is a pivotal work in Williams's movement from realism to a minimalist, antirealistic exploration of a private world of fear, panic, alienation, and death" (97). The encyclopedia is the only source I know of that discusses Williams's journals in a unique entry by Margaret Bradham Thornton. According to Sarah Miller at Yale University Press, Williams's journals are now due to be published in fall 2006. Cathy Henderson's work on manuscript collections offers website addresses by which to access the various archives, a great help to the serious researcher (139). The entry on the playwright's poems by Nicholas R. Moschovakis serves as a valuable discussion of works too commonly ignored. Generally, the entries on people and places are less helpful; nevertheless, many offer valuable insights and tidbits of interesting facts. For example, Richard E. Kramer persuasively argues that Clifford Odets "paved the road from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams" (181). Sidney Berger offers some delightful anecdotes about Edward Albee and Williams, and Hale provides a wonderfully compact retelling of the importance of St. Louis in the playwright's life, noting that "Before [Williams] died, he confessed that the St. Louis years were 'like the irritant in the oyster shell.' They had made him a writer" (241). Despite many fine essays, The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia suffers from serious typographical and factual errors (I counted twenty-six) and self-contradiction. The chronology that precedes the main text incorrectly states the number of performances enjoyed by Sweet Bird of Youth in its initial run, an error corrected later in John Rindo's excellent discussion of the play (xxvii and 265). A more serious factual error includes the twice-repeated claim that Elia Kazan directed the 1957 production of Orpheus Descending and the 1960 production of Period of Adjustment (88 and 108). Both errors are corrected later in entries noting that Harold Clurman directed the former and George Roy Hill the latter (183 and 191). Other mistakes: The Night of...

Critical companion to Tennessee Williams

One of the greatest American dramatists of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams is known for his sensitive characterizations, poetic yet realistic writing, ironic humor, and depiction of harsh realities in human relationships. Williams drew on his own troubled early life to depict the loneliness, fear, and sexual anxiety of such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. His work is frequently included in high school and college curricula, and his plays are still produced today. Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams includes entries on all of Tennessee Williams's major and most minor works, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menageric, a novel, a collection of short stories, two poetry collections, and personal essays; places and events related to his works; major figures in his life; his literary influences; and issues in Williams scholarship and criticism. Appendixes include a complete list of Williams's works; a list of research libraries with significant Williams holdings; and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

The Naming of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The Naming of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello in Tennessee Williams's <i>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</i>

Elia Kazan's first testimony to the house committee on Un-American activities, executive session, 14 January 1952

The controversy surrounding Elia Kazan's testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in particular in 1999 when Kazan was awarded a Life Achievement Award at that year's Academy Awa...

Service innovation in a heated environment: CATS on a hot tin roof

Over the past few years, numerous articles have highlighted the strain on (and drain of staff from) our specialty. Many general adult psychiatrists are developing bleak views of themselves, the world and the future. Encouragingly, consultants such as Hampson (2003) are structuring their roles with some success. However, we are going through a major overhaul of the model of delivery of care and need to adapt our roles accordingly. Although tuning a Triumph Spitfire might make it run more smoothly for a while, it is still an inferior beast compared with a modern car and might be better on the scrap heap. A more radical approach is needed, which we outline in this article. One of the authors (G.I.) has experience of working as a consultant psychiatrist in Australia, where the state of Victoria changed the model of delivery of general adult psychiatric services to adopt a superior American model, leading to improved patient and carer satisfaction (Joyet al, 2001). The same model has been adopted by the UK government (Department of Health, 2001) through the creation of crisis assessment and treatment services (CATS), assertive outreach teams, and specialist community and in-patient services. Consultant psychiatrists are challenged to adapt their practice accordingly. The Royal College of Psychiatrists has recently set up a Working Group to address this issue (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2004).

American theater in the culture of the Cold War: producing and contesting containment, 1947-1962

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce McConachie uses the primary metaphor of containmentOCowhat happens when we categorize a play, a television show, or anything we view as having an inside, an outside, and a boundary between the twoOCoas the dominant metaphor of cold war theatergoing. Drawing on the cognitive psychology and linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, he provides unusual access to the ways in which spectators in the cold war years projected themselves into stage figures that gave them pleasure.McConachie reconstructs these cognitive processes by relying on scripts, set designs, reviews, memoirs, and other evidence. After establishing his theoretical framework, he focuses on three archtypal figures of containment significant in Cold War culture, Empty Boys, Family Circles, and Fragmented Heroes. McConachie uses a range of plays, musicals, and modern dances from the dominant culture of the Cold War to discuss these figures, includingaThe Seven Year Itch, aCat on a Hot Tin Roof;aThe King and I, A Raisin in the Sun, aNight Journey, andaThe Crucible.aIn an epilogue, he discusses the legacy of Cold War theater from 1962 to 1992.Original and provocative, aAmerican Theater in the Culture of the Cold Warailluminates the mind of the spectator in the context of Cold War culture; it uses cognitive studies and media theory to move away from semiotics and psychoanalysis, forging a new way of interpreting theater history.

Editorial Comment

What are the conditions that enable meaning production? This is a question that the five essays contained in this general issue engage from divergent directions. For each, this question raises issues of context, as the authors ask us to consider not only the contexts for the dramatic texts, the performances, and the theatre histories that they examine, but also the analytical contexts in which they situate these works. For John Bak in "'sneakin' and spyin" from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity, Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism," it is a matter of viewing sexuality in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof through an unconventional theoretical lens. Meanwhile, Jody Enders's examination of French medieval theatre history not only elucidates a significant historical incident, but also advocates for a reconsideration of the processes through which meaning is made and in which history is gathered. The last essay, Yong Li Lan's thought-provoking "Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona, Ugliness, and the Intercultural Performative," moves this debate over meaning-making to the contested space of intercultural performance. Thus, when read together, the purposefully divergent articles of this issue offer a dynamic, polyvocal dialogue on the conditions critical to our collective project of meaning production and interpretation as theatre scholars, artists, and historians.

The Family in Hollywood Melodrama: Actual or Ideal?

This paper suggests that 1950s movie melodrama highlights the gulf between the experience of an actual family and its members’ belief, implicit and sometimes explicit, in Family as an idealised Platonic form. At the dénouement, the transcendental ideal of the latter entity is maintained despite the unsettling experiences of a particular family, or the discovery of a superior version of family, in the preceding narrative. Melodrama’s apparent celebration of familial ideology, and of the mythology which makes the bourgeois patriarchal family so ‘natural’ that it marginalises all rival versions, could be viewed as reactionary in terms of sexual politics. Perhaps, though, the very exposure of the consequences of Family mythology could be thought to be at least potentially ‘progressive’. An especially succinct exemplfication of the process whereby a particular family fictionalises itself into a closer approximation to the ideal is provided by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Several other movie melodramas of the 1950s are also brifiy explored, however, to show that reluctance to jettison family, as long as there is belief in Family, is widely shared.

Magical muse: millennial essays on Tennessee Williams

In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage. Like Faulkner before him, Tennessee Williams gave universal appeal to southern characters and settings. His major plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie to A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana, continue to capture America's popular imagination, a significant legacy. Though he died in 1983, only recently have Williams's papers become available to the public, bringing to light a number of intriguing discoveries--letters, drafts, and several unpublished and unproduced plays. These recent developments make a reassessment of Williams's life and work both timely and needed. The essays in this collection originated as presentations at the 27th annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at The University of Alabama in 1999. The book addresses a wide range of topics, among them the influence of popular culture on Williams's plays, and, in turn, his influence on popular culture; his relationship to Hollywood and his struggles with censorship, Hollywood standards, and the competing vision of directors such as Elia Kazan; his depictions of gender and sexuality; and issues raised by recently discovered plays. Anyone interested in American literature and drama will find this collection of fresh, accessible essays a rewarding perspective on the life, work, and legacy of one of the bright stars of American theatre.

Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

"Echo Spring": Reflecting the Gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, no less than in other works such as Batlle a/Angels (Orpheus Descending), The Glass Menagerie. A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweet Bird of Youth , The Night of the Iguana, and The Two-Character Play. Tennessee Williams draws upon mythological analogues to illuminate characters and to underscore thematic parallels. Myles Raymond Hurd points out. for example, that the idealized friendship between Achilles and Patroclus in Homer's Iliad conceals a possible homosexual relationship that sheds light on the "equally ambiguous" relationship between Brick and Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . On the other hand, Robert Hethmon suggests that the idealistic Brick more nearly resembles Hippolytus, someone who, like Brick. enjoys "the company of other young men, and the delights of athletic contests." Surprisingly, however, these and other critics have neglected to consider the similarities between Brick and Narcissus, the mythological figure whose name now denotes a psychological disorder, the kind of illness particularly appealing to Tennessee Williams, whose plays have often been noted for their psychological realism.

"Echo Spring": Reflecting the Gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

"Echo Spring": Reflecting the Gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Elia Kazan and Richard Brooks do Tennessee Williams: Melodramatizing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Stage and Screen

Elia Kazan and Richard Brooks do Tennessee Williams: Melodramatizing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Stage and Screen

The Applicability of Linguistic Politeness Studies to Translation: A Case Study

The present paper picks up on some aspects of a complex attempt to approach politeness studies from a new angle: translation. The most relevant approaches to the study of politeness agree on its two-sided character, which entails, on the one hand, linguistic meaning and, on the other, social meaning. This twofold concept of politeness determines the close relationship between its linguistic expression and the cultural context within which such expression is used. The cultural-relativistic stand that this assumption implies in some ways contradicts or, at least, partly questions, the universal character ascribed to linguistic politeness by one of the seminal - theories in the field: the framework of Politeness theory devised by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1978, 1987). In my view, politeness theory and the discussion about what is universal and what is culturally-determined in politeness can benefit from contrastive studies in the field of translation, and translation can also profit from insights into the study of linguistic politeness, as it is my intention to illustrate here with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and La gata sobre el tejado de zinc caliente as corpora.

The Cambridge companion to Tennessee Williams

List of illustrations and acknowledgements Notes on contributors Chronology Introduction Matthew C. Roudane 1. Early Williams: the making of a playwright Allean Hale 2. Entering The Glass Menagerie C. W. E. Bigsby 3. A streetcar running fifty years Felicia Hardison Londre 4. Camino Real: Williams's allegory about the fifties Jan Balakian 5. Writing in 'A Place of Stone': Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Albert J. Devlin 6. Before the fall - and after: Summer and Smoke and The Night of the Iguana Thomas P. Adler 7. The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth John M. Clum 8. Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories Nancy M. Tischler 9. Seeking direction Brenda Murphy 10. Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the evolution of the adult film R. Barton Palmer 11. Tennessee Williams: the last two decades Ruby Cohn 12. Words on Williams: a bibliographical essay Jacqueline O'Connor 13. The Strangest Kind of Romance: Tennessee Williams and his Broadway critics Jacqueline O'Connor Index.

A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

Any attempt to sequence the manuscript evidence behind Suddenly Last Summer must be even more tentative than previous stemmata for The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because not only are extra drafts for the play sure to surface in the next few years (as with the other plays), but the evidence for Suddenly Last Summer also presents problems of its own. Like the other three plays, Suddenly Last Summer shares the difficulties of Williams's obsessive rewriting and accretive mode of composition. His habit was to work by the intuitive "feel" of a situation rather than by a detailed outline, compulsively typing new drafts at great speed, then revising by hand, often independently, on the many working carbons or mimeograph copies he made for each draft; constantly fidgeting with details but, more characteristically, rewriting in larger scenes or whole acts, then fitting various sections of separate drafts together experimentally like mosaics. During rehearsals, tryouts and even Broadway performances he would continue vigorously "workshopping" his scripts in response to suggestions from his actors and director, often continuing to revise (as in this case) after a play had been favourably reviewed, was already in print, and had been released as a very successful movie. Moreover, he rarely dated drafts, frequently returned to material from superseded versions (so that there is never a simple, straight line of development to trace) and had a habit of mixing revised pages with pages from earlier drafts that needed no change, then collecting the various stages of discard together into large undifferentiated piles.

The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and Social History in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and Social History in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

Forthcoming: The Roger L. Stevens Collection at the Library of Congress

Roger Stevens has always been a visionary. His career began in real estate, where he gained national recognition for buying the Empire State Building for $51.5 million—at the time the highest price ever paid for one building—and selling it three years later for a ten-million dollar profit. As he expanded into theatre, he quickly became one of the nation's foremost producers on Broadway, producing more than 200 shows over the last half century, including West Side Story, A Man for All Seasons, Bus Stop, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Deathtrap, and Mary, Mary. He “discovered” playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and Terence Rattigan for New York audiences, and he has worked closely with others, already established, such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Jean Giraudoux, and T.S. Eliot Three United States presidents have depended on Stevens for their arts and humanities policy, and the American theatrical community has benefitted from his intuitive vision.

A Preliminary Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955)

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Preliminary Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955)Brian ParkerBrian Parker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 90, Number 4DECEMBER 1996 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.90.4.24304888 Views: 3Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 1996 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Tom: the unknown Tennessee Williams

An insight into the life of American playwright, Tennessee Williams, author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.