Showing results by author "Tennessee Williams" in All Categories

With Emmy, Grammy, and six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald as Blanche DuBois alongside Carla Gugino as Stella, O’Hara takes a fresh and visceral look at the emotionally charged relationship between these two iconic sisters. Haunted by her past, Blanche seeks refuge with Stella and Stanley (Ariel Shafir) in New Orleans, where she wrestles with the nature of her sister’s husband, her sister’s denial, and her own unraveling mind.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tennessee Williams is one of the three most important American dramatists of the 20th century, alongside Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill. Acclaimed for their lyrical language, dark themes and vivid portrayal of the American South, his works have spawned several Oscar-winning films and been translated and performed worldwide. Collected here are some of the best, beginning with the play that launched Williams' career: The Glass Menagerie.

Tennessee Williams' iconic play tells the story of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly on the doorstep of her sister, Stella, and her explosive brother-in-law, Stanley. Over the course of one hot and steamy New Orleans summer, Blanche's fragile façade slowly crumbles, wreaking havoc on Stella and Stanley's already turbulent relationship....

At the core of the drama is Brick, an alcoholic son mourning the death of his friend, Skipper, and his strained marriage to Maggie. Maggie, resilient yet desperate for love, grapples with Brick's emotional withdrawal. The family is entrenched in mendacity, with each member harboring secrets, particularly about Big Daddy's terminal cancer.

Tom shares the cramped and claustrophobic tenement home with his overbearing mother, Amanda, and painfully shy sister, Laura. He works in a warehouse but dreams of becoming a poet, escaping his mundane life. Laura hides at home, lacking the confidence to engage meaningfully with the outside world, preferring instead to lose herself in her collection of fragile glass animals. Amanda sells magazine subscriptions over the phone and commits herself to finding a match for her daughter. One day, Tom succumbs to his mother's pressure and brings home a gentleman caller....

Caedmon is proud to release this archival full-cast recording of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister Stella's New Orleans apartment seeking refuge from a troubled past but her ethereal spirit irks Stella's husband, the loutish Stanley Kowalski. Crudely, relentlessly, he unmasks the lies and delusions that sustain Blanche, until her frail hold on reality is shockingly severed.

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media - though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by the New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. It is the story of a 50-ish wealthy American widow who was most recently a famous stage beauty but is now drifting after the death of her husband. With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister, Laura.