Month: October 2010

Contribution Needed for Given Circumstance: Tentative Action Plan

“Given circumstance” is the environmental facts about geographical, economic, political, social and religious settings. Environmental facts also refer to things that have already happened and polar attitudes of the characters (how do they start and why).Perhaps using the previous post from Oct 4th, we can EDIT, add to the list and begin answering the following questions for each fact:What is the significance of these facts? How do they contribute to the meaning of the play?

Notes on Given Circumstances

Ok, these are a few of the given circumstances I have found toward the beginning of the play:

There is a bowling alley around the corner from Stella’s home.

Stanley and Mitch are 28-30 years old, and in denim “work clothes”

Stella looks 25 and has “a background obviously quite different from her husband’s” (4)

Stella, Eunice and Blanche are white

Blanche is around 5 year’s older than Stella.

There are “street cars” with given names, such as Desire, or Cemeteries.

Stella lives at Elysian Fields. In the downstairs flat of house 632. Underneath Eunice.

Eunice owns the house.

There are two rooms (kitchen and bedroom) and a bathroom.

Blanche is Stella’s sister.  She was a teacher.  She is from a plantation (Belle-Reve) in Mississippi.

“The L and N tracks” (12).  They are in New Orleans.

Stanley is Polish, and a Master Sergeant in the Engineers Corps.

More to Come…

First Thoughts on Dialogue and Research

Hey guys!
Here are some main points about the reviews/production history:

  • First opened on December 3rd, 1947 at the Barrymore Theatre (had succesful tryouts in Boston, New Haven and Philadelphia)
  • Thomas P. Adler: “may arguably be the finest play ever written for the American stage”
  • Howard Barnes: Williams is the “O’Neill of the present”
  • 855 performances in the first two years
  • 1st play to ever receive the Pulitzer, Donaldson and New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards
  • Received both as feminist and celebratory of masculinity; Marxist-inspired interpretations claim a message of political revolt
  • Character of Blanche has been widely debated over; hailed as Williams’ “finest creation,” and a “sexual Joan of Arc,” but noted for her contradictions and refusal to accept reality
  • Williams documented as identifying closely with both Blanche and Stanley, “I was and still am Blanche, but I have a Stanley side in me, too.”

Some preliminary biographical info:

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911
Died 1983, apparently alcohol-related, in New York, at 71
Father C.C. Williams was a traveling salesman, mother Edwina had a history of nervous breakdowns
Older sister Rose (very close), younger brother Dakin
Moved to St. Louis in 1918, afterwards moved around a lot
Picked on at school, shy, always loved writing
University of Missouri to study journalism, started writing plays – influenced by Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe
Dad made him drop out and work at a shoe factory for 3 years, had a nervous breakdown, went to Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Iowa
Rose had a prefrontal lobotomy, institutionalized for the rest of her life
Grant to study playwriting at the New School in New York – started to be influenced by Anton Chekov and poet Hart Crane
1944 – The Glass Menagerie opened in New York, won New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
1947 – A Streetcar Named Desire
1955 – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Critics’ Circle and Pulitzer)
Common themes: alcoholism, depression, desire, loneliness, insanity, nostalgia
The South
Being openly homosexual
Realism in the wake of the Depression and World War II
Wrote 25 full length plays, 5 made into movies, 5 screenplays, over 70 one-acts, hundreds of short stories, 2 novels and a memoir

http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/23445/sample/9780521623445wsc00.pdf, Sparknotes, Wikipedia