If you have only seen the several movies made in the 1950's from his plays, reading these will prove a revelation for you. Because of the restrictions put on movies in the 50's, most of his works were deeply expurgated, especially any overt references to homosexuality. So reading the original plays here often reveals underlying previously obscure motivations/conflicts of some of the characters: why, for example, Blanche DuBois had fallen from being a privileged Southern Belle to the pathetic wretch who appeared on Stanley and Stella's doorstep.

Unlike many playwrights, Tennessee Williams tended to give long, detailed stage directions. This gives the reader of the plays a novel-like narrative, making them wonderful experiences for readers who do not ordinarily enjoy reading plays. The sensuous atmosphere, the classical -- almost Greek sense of tragedy that looms in almost all of these plays, and the exquisite use of language make this a unique reading experience. The writers who had influence over Williams's style are never named but seem apparent, at least to this reader. For example, when reading "The Rose Tattoo" I was reminded of the great Spanish poet/playwright Garcia Lorca's "House of Bernarda Alba." The cackling, vicious, vindictive neighbors, like some Greek Chorus, echoed many of the women in Lorca's work.

This volume even includes the play "Not About Nightingales", a play never performed in Williams's lifetime, but which was recently brought to Broadway in a Tony-winning run. "Not About Nightingales" is a stark prison drama that is quite different from the style he eventually developed. Among the "great" plays included here are "The Glass Menagerie", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Summer and Smoke", and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Like all volumes in the Library of America series, this book has been given first-class treatment. Beautiful bindings, ribboned marker, and fine acid-free paper for permanence. It is meant to be owned and treasured forever. You will love this book....


The plays are great, but a misleading description   July 14, 2002
 61 out of 64 found this review helpful

The plays contained in this volume are wonderful and interesting (especially in terms of his development) to any fan of Tennessee Williams... but I purchased the book believing it was the COMPLETE collected plays 1937-1955, which it is not. It is a group of "selected" plays. I bought it hoping to get more of the one-acts and historical oddities. It contains some of these, but mostly consists of his the more well-known plays, which anyone who would buy this book likely already has (e.g. Cat. Streetcar, Menagerie). Perhaps Amazon.com might want to place a line of explanatory commentary to that effect on the product description.


Dragon Country.   June 13, 2004
 23 out of 26 found this review helpful

"It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial," Tennessee Williams wrote in the 1948 essay "The Catastrophe of Success," eventually added as a preface to the "memory play" that catapulted him to stardom, "The Glass Menagerie" (1945). Prophetic words of a man who drew heavily on his own experience, on life in the economically depressed South, homosexuality, alcoholism, physical and mental infirmity, violence, passion, desire, love and loss, but most of all his profound sense of humanity and his understanding of the drama of everyday life to create Dragon Country, that uninhabitable and yet inhabited world, that land of unendurable but nevertheless endured pain (also the title of a 1970 collection of plays) of unforgettable pieces such as "The Glass Menagerie," "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), "Summer and Smoke" (1948), "The Rose Tattoo" (1951), "Camino Real" (1953), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), "Orpheus Descending" (1957), "Suddenly Last Summer" (1958), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), "The Night of the Iguana" (1961) and "Not About Nightingales" (set in 1938 but only brought to the stage 50 years later).

Born Thomas Lanier Williams to an overbearing, hard-drinking, abusive, frequently absent father and a doting mother, Tennessee acquired the sobriquet he later chose as his first name in university, where his Deep South accent made him an easy target for his classmates. A writer since his youth, he saw his first short story ("Isolated") published in a high school newspaper; and after several other prose publications, his second play "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!" was produced by a Memphis amateur company in 1935. (His first play, the unstaged "Beauty Is the Word," had been a 1930 University of Missouri drama class assignment which, submitted to the school's Dramatic Arts Club contest, won the first honorable mention ever to be awarded to a freshman). After a stint with his father's shoe company, where he had gone to work at parental insistence, he graduated from the University of Iowa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938. His big breakthrough came with "A Glass Menagerie;" the story of fading Southern belle Amanda Wingfield (who, like many of Williams's most memorable characters, frantically clings to the illusion of a world gone by), her crippled daughter Laura (the owner of the titular glass figurine collection), "gentleman caller" Jim (Laura's suitor), and Amanda's son Tom, Williams's thinly veiled alter ego who, like the playwright, sees his vocation as a poet crushed under his daily job at a shoe factory. Yet, looking back at his struggling life preceding "Glass Menagerie," Williams later came to regard that time as more real than the life made possible by fame and fortune: in fact, "it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created," he wrote in "The Catastrophe of Success."

The present compilation, one of two volumes in the magnificent "Library of America" series, brings together the more significant works of Williams's early years and of his peak as a playwright through 1955, including inter alia his two Pulitzer Prize winners ("A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), the only recently-rediscovered "Spring Storm" (1938) and "Not About Nightingales," the initial, unsuccessful version of "Orpheus Descending" ("Battle of Angels," 1940), as well as excerpts from the one-act play collection "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" (originally from 1945, augmented and republished 1953), among them the collection's title piece plus "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "Something Unspoken," "This Property Is Condemned," and others. The second Library of America volume covers Williams's creative period after 1955. Neither tome is all-inclusive; a fully comprehensive compilation would easily have required three volumes for the plays alone, not to mention his poetry and prose; and a 1955 caesura certainly does make sense. Still: completists will have to look elsewhere in addition. Among the more significant omissions in this first volume are "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!" (which I would have liked to see included if only because it was his first-ever staged play) as well as the modestly successful "American Blues" (1939) and the remaining one-act plays from "27 Wagons Full of Cotton." Volume 2 similarly focuses on Williams's more significant later plays; omitting, e.g., "Gnaediges Fraeulein," "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel," "The Red Devil Battery Sign," "The Notebook of Trigorin" - his adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "Seagull" - and his infamous "Baby Doll" screenplay, as well as its stage adaptation "Tiger Tail."

Although many of Williams's works reached audiences not only on stage but also on the silver screen, beginning in the 1950s he came under increased scrutiny due to his unconventional lifestyle. Even in his plays' most successful screen adaptations, the more controversial elements, such as Brick's unavowed homosexuality in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and the sexual tension between Stanley and Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire," were either muted or censored entirely; and particularly in later years, criticism leveled against his plays was often truly motivated by objections against the man himself. - "The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is ... the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis," Williams wrote in a stage direction in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." But while his own life's thunderstorm did eventually prove fatal (he choked to death on a medicine bottle cap in 1983), over the course of his life he revolutionized Southern drama in a way only comparable to Faulkner's impact on literary fiction, and set a shining example for generations of later playwrights. All-encompassing or not: the Library of America's collection of his works is an excellent place to begin a journey of appreciation into his Dragon Country.

Also recommended:
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 Two-Disc Special Edition / Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958 Deluxe Edition / Sweet Bird of Youth / The Night of the Iguana / Baby Doll / The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone)
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
The Rose Tattoo
Suddenly, Last Summer
Baby Doll
This Property Is Condemned
Tennessee Williams' Dragon Country (Broadway Theatre Archive)


Plays exploring human passion   February 8, 2001
 17 out of 19 found this review helpful

Tennessee Williams wrote plays exploring human passion with an unflinching and iconoclastic candor, shattering conventional proprieties and transforming the American stage of his day. This outstanding, two-volume series from The Library Of America showcases Williams' extraordinary range and achievement as a playwright with 32 of his works, including recently rediscovered plays of his early career (Spring Storm; Not About Nightingales). All of his works from the years 1937 through 1980 are here, including his world renowned plays The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire; Orpheus Descending; Suddenly Last Summer; Sweet Bird Of Youth; The Night Of The Iguana; and his Pulitzer- Prizing winning Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. This two volume collection is further enhanced with a chronology of Williams' life, explanatory notes, an essay on the tests of the plays, and cast lists of many of the original productions. Tennesse Williams: Plays, Volumes 1 & 2 is an essential addition to personal, scholarly, and theatrical history collections.


Grimy and one-dimensional.   January 28, 2005
 16 out of 102 found this review helpful

Tennessee Williams was familiar to me only as the name behind some movies adapted from his plays and a fairly frequent mention in some literature/drama classes from college. I recently read his collected works in these 2 volumes from the excellent Library of America series and his plays are totally different in tone and content than his movies which have been adapted, cleaned up and given happier endings.

So here are my impressions. First, Williams' range is extremely limited with almost all his plays based on the grossest immorality and exploitation. In one essay entitled "Something Wild", Williams admitted his purpose was for a play to be a "punch to the solar plexus". In other words, he aims to offend people. (In today's PC-speak, it is called making the public "think" - but it still comes out the same.)

Most of Williams' plays are autobiographical so they involve dysfunctional families, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and sexual exploitation and perversions ranging from pedophilia to homosexual behavior. With almost no exceptions, these plays should not be read by high school or younger children.

Williams is a good writer and his plays are often gripping and his characters are unique and fascinating in a voyeuristic sense.

Now I will list his works and what they are about so you can decide if this is material you wish to read.

--Orpheus Descending - Young drifter falls for married woman, gets caught and lynched.

--Suddenly Last Summer - Relatives fight over inheritance of homosexual child molester who was savagely murdered by his victims.

--Sweet Bird of Youth - Ne'er-do-well gigolo returns to hometown where he is hated due to the human wreckage he has caused.

--Period of Adjustment - 2 newlywed couples work out married life.

--The Night of the Iguana - Ex-minister turned seducer of underage girls hooks up with sugar mama who owns a seedy tourist hotel in Mexico.

--The Eccentricities of a Nightingale - Minister's daughter becomes town prostitute.

--The Milk Train Doesn't Sop Here Anymore - Young gigolo interacts with dying old film star.

--The Mutilated - Aging whore with one breast comes to terms with aging.

--Kindom of Earth - Aging showgirl on her honeymoon with a dying homosexual husband who she thought was rich, dumps him while he is dying for his scumbag half-brother who is real inheritor of estate.

--Small Craft Warnings - Promiscuous bi-sexual losers in a bar use each other.

--Outcry - Unintelligible.

--Vieux carre - Autobiographical play of sexual deviants in run-down New Orleans boarding house.

--A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur - Social climber dumped by her lover settles for boorish borther of her roommate.

--Battle of Angels - 1st version of Orpheus Descending. Past of rapist catches up with him.

--Not About Nightingales - Abused prisoners revolt against warden.

--Spring Storm - Unrequited love leads to tragedy.

--I Rise in Flame Cried the Phoenix - 1 scene play of DH Lawrence's death.

--27 Wagons Full of cotton - Businessman trades his wife's sexual favors to cover up his arson of a competing business.

--The Lady of Larkspur Lotion - Aging prostitute and starving author fight against landlady. (Larkspur was used to treat lice)

--The Last of my Solid Gold Watches - Aging salesman relives past.

--Portrait of a Madonna - Aging spinster spins dream of rape by an old love and is taken to the asylum.

--Auto da Fe - Guilty homosexual self-immolates.

--Lord Byron's Love Letter - Aging spinster sells glimpses of a love-letter from her childhood seducer, Lord Byron.

--This Property is Condemned - Younger sister of recently deceased whore takes over the business.

--The Glass Menagarie - Warehouseman who wishes to be a poet, looks back on the family he abandoned - an aging mother who lives in the past and a handicapped sister who is extremely isolated.

--Something Wild -Essay complaining that community theater had polite, well-dressed people instead of long-haired perverted addicts.

--Talk to me Like the Rain - One-scene converstaion between boyfriend who cheats, boozes and steals and his despairing girlfriend.

--Camino Real - Various characters from Casanova to Kilroy interact in a New Orleans-like hell. Makes no sense.

--Something Unspoken - 2 old maids have something unspoken between them. What? Your guess is as good as mine.

--A Streetcar named Desire - Aging older sister who has run through her inheritance moves in with her married younger sister and is raped by that sister's ape of a husband.

--Summer and Smoke - Earlier version of "Eccentricities of a Nightingale". Male character is sleazier in this version.

--The Rose Tatoo - 15 yr.old daughter and widow of cheating drug smuggler become loose women.

I know, I know. It looks really bad when you look at the specifics. Don't say you weren't warned. There are lots better plays and playwrights out there to spend your time with.