The Traveling Companion & Other Plays

Tennessee Williams

Williams’ late experiments in ordered anarchy and avant-garde European aesthetics were … very much earned, very much his distinctive own. Williams’ dramaturgy is still ahead of our time.

Randy Gener, American Theatre Magazine

12 previously uncollected experimental shorter plays: The Chalky White Substance • The Day on Which a Man Dies (An Occidental Noh Play) • A Cavalier for Milady • The Pronoun I • The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. LeMonde • Kirche, Kueche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) • Green Eyes • The Parade • The One Exception • Sunburst • Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? • The Traveling Companion

The Traveling Companion & Other Plays

Theater by Tennessee Williams

Edited by Annette J. Saddick

Even with his great commercial success, Tennessee Williams always considered himself an experimental playwright. In the last 25 years of his life his explorations increased—especially in shorter forms and one-act plays—as Williams created performance pieces with elements of theater of the absurd, theater of cruelty, theater of the ridiculous, as well as motifs from Japanese forms such as Noh and Kabuki, high camp and satire, and with innovative visual and verbal styles that were entirely his own. Influenced by Beckett, Genet, and Pinter, among others, Williams worked hard to expand the boundaries of the lyric realism he was best known for. These plays were explicitly intended to be performed off-off Broadway or regionally. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes outrageous, quite often the tone of these plays is rough, bawdy or even cartoonish. While a number of these plays employ what could be termed bizarre “happy endings,” others gaze unblinkingly into the darkness. Though several of Williams’ lesser-known works from this period have already been published by New Directions, these twelve plays have never been collected. Most of these shorter plays are unknown to audiences and scholars—some are published here for the first time—yet all of them embrace, in one way or another, what Time magazine called “the four major concerns that have spurred Williams’ dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival.”

Buy The Traveling Companion & Other Plays

Paperback(published Apr, 01 2008)

ISBN
9780811217088
Price US
17.95
Price CN
18
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
352
Portrait of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

America’s playwright

Williams’ late experiments in ordered anarchy and avant-garde European aesthetics were … very much earned, very much his distinctive own. Williams’ dramaturgy is still ahead of our time.

Randy Gener, American Theatre Magazine

Just when I thought I was familiar with Tennessee’s stage work, here comes an entire volume of plays that’s completely new to me. What a windfall!

Landford Wilson