Tennessee Williams: A study of the dramaturgical evolution of three later plays, 1969-1978.
Item
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Title
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Tennessee Williams: A study of the dramaturgical evolution of three later plays, 1969-1978.
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Identifier
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AAI8821111
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identifier
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8821111
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Creator
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Pettinelli, Frances.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Edwin Wilson
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater
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Abstract
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Although Tennessee Williams established his place in American letters with the works he produced in the first half of his professional career, in the last two decades of his life he created a body of literature virtually equal in quantity to that of his younger years. This later output, like his earlier writing, includes long and short plays, novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction prose that is largely autobiographical.;He is, however, best known for the dramas he wrote between 1940 and 1962. Yet, from 1963 until his death in 1983, Williams produced more new works for the stage than he had in the previous two decades, although these later dramatic efforts are often smaller-scaled than their predecessors and are considered inferior in quality to them.;Nevertheless, these later plays evolved in the same manner as the earlier ones--through repeated revisions--and are comparable to their predecessors in a number of obvious respects, such as in their themes, lyricism, metaphoric richness, and perspective. Moreover, all fourteen of the longer plays from this latter period were produced professionally, most of them more than once, at different stages of their evolution, and manuscripts of the various versions of these works are still extant.;This dissertation examines a representative group of Williams' last full-length plays (The Two-Character Play, Small Craft Warnings, and Vieux Carre), in order to discover the evolutionary process the playwright used in creating original drama for the stage. This discovery is based on an analysis of the texts of several versions of each work, as it appears both in manuscript and in published form. The study also evaluates each of the three plays in terms of their dramaturgical development, their literary values, and their structural merit as performance vehicles.;Thus this dissertation attempts not only to elucidate the methodology Williams followed in creating new plays for the stage but also to place his later dramatic works into a context that illuminates their relationship to his earlier dramas, as well as to other plays of the modern era.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
