Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
The plays of Tennessee Williams' post-1961 period have often been misunderstood and dismissed. In light of Williams' centennial in 2011, which was marked internationally by productions and world premieres of his late plays, Annette J. Saddik's new reading of these works illuminates them in the context of what she terms a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Saddik explains why they are now gaining increasing acclaim, and analyzes recent productions that successfully captured elements central to Williams' late aesthetic, particularly a delicate balance of laughter and horror with a self-consciously ironic acting style. Grounding the plays through the work of Bakhtin, Artaud, and Kristeva, as well as through the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik demonstrates how Williams engaged the freedom of exaggeration and excess in celebration of what he called 'the strange, the crazed, the queer'.
- Provides a new way of understanding Williams' later plays that have often been perceived as odd and incomprehensible
- Looks at Williams' late plays in the context of the grotesque, the carnivalesque, and queer theory, paving the way for more informed productions
- Includes analyses and photographs of recent productions of Williams' late plays around the world that captured his aesthetic of excess
Reviews & endorsements
"Annette Saddik’s lucid and vital assessment of the misunderstood, mysterious later plays of Tennessee Williams opens the door for a new generation of appreciation for the entire body of his work. A wonderful and eye-opening achievement for those of us passionate about the plays that poured out of him in the twenty years of life that remained after his last ‘so-called’ success, Night of the Iguana."
John Guare, author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation
"Annette Saddik midwifes the rebirth of Tennessee Williams as poet and avant-garde icon, as she rehabilitates the soul and honor of America's greatest playwright."
Lee Breuer, Mabou Mines Theater Company
"In her groundbreaking new book, Annette Saddik proves that Tennessee Williams is the greatest unknown playwright America has produced. She demonstrates so beautifully and persuasively that for the length of his career, Williams was a writer less of lyrical realism, than the grotesque. His later works, on which her book focuses, are thus not aesthetic failures but richly imagined, experimental plays written for an experimental theatre. By so rethinking the whole of Williams’s career, Saddik sheds a different light on his most popular plays and reveals to us a new and thrilling Tennessee Williams."
David Savran, City University of New York
"Annette Saddik is a rare scholar. Not only does this book demonstrate her qualities as a meticulous theatre historian and Tennessee Williams specialist, but every page bristles with ideas. This book is of utmost importance for understanding the development of Williams’ dramatic output and of the confluence of twentieth-century American and European performance."
Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester
Product details
October 2016Paperback
9781107433908
194 pages
230 × 153 × 12 mm
0.3kg
5 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: 'sicker than necessary': Tennessee Williams' theatre of excess
- 1. 'Drowned in Rabelaisian laughter': Germans as grotesque comic figures in Williams' plays of the 1960s and '70s
- 2. 'Benevolent anarchy': Williams' late plays and the theater of cruelty
- 3. 'Writing calls for discipline!': chaos, creativity, and madness in Clothes for a Summer Hotel
- 4. 'Act naturally': embracing the monstrous woman in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, and The Pronoun 'I'
- 5. 'There's something not natural here': grotesque ambiguities in Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady and A House Not Meant to Stand
- 6. 'All drama is about being extreme': 'in-yer-face' sex, war, and violence
- Conclusion: 'the only thing to do is laugh'.
