Étude d'oeuvre : A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee WILLIAMS

CM Étude d’œuvre ; séance 10, 15/11/21

Chapter II: A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee WILLIAMS

1. Methodology for analyzing a play and backgrounds for this play

Drama needs performers to arrive at full interpretation, meaning

When reading a play, imagine being part of the audience.

A play is based on a combination of different types of sights

1. How to read a play: methodological advice and guidelines

- Specificity of drama as a genre

1. Theatre as the art of paradox

- a play = a text and a performance

- double system of enunciation

- Anne UBERSFELD, Lire le théâtre (1996): drama requires participation, reader has to fill in the blanks

1. Theatrical text as a combination of different types of signs

- Theatrical text as association of 3 types of signs: visual signs (set, props, lightning, costumes)/ sounds, sound effects/ verbal signs

- 1. Stage directions

- 2. Setting and space

- 3. Props (=stage properties) and objects

- 4. Costumes

- 5. Colours and lighting effects

- 6. Sound effects: ex. “blue piano”, Varsouviana polka, jungle-like cries

1.  Backgrounds

1. Tennessee Williams: short biography and major works

- “I must

A Southern background:

- 1911: born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi

- 1919: St Louis, Missouri

- 1928: “The Vengeance of Nitocris”

- 1929: university of Missouri

- Theme of homosexuality

- A Chekhov (Russian), a Strindberg (Swedish), H. Ibsen (Norwegian)

- 1935: Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay (first produced play)

- State University of Iowa, The Mummers

- 1937: sister Rose underwent pre-frontal lobotomy

- 1939: American Blues

- Audrey Wood (theatrical agent)

- Rockefeller fellowship

- Advanced writing seminar, New York

- Battle of Angels

Major works

- 1944-45: The Glass Menagerie opposite 1950 film adaptation with Kirk Douglas (dir. Irving Rapper)

- 1947: A Streetcar Named Desire

- 1950: The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, a novel

- 1951: Baby Doll, film script

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