Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays

by Tennessee Williams, Nicholas Rand Moschovakis (Editor), David E. Roessel (Editor), Eli Wallach (Foreword by), Anne Jackson (Foreword by)

Overview

Thirteen previously unpublished short plays now available for the first time.

Tennessee Williams had a distinct talent for writing short plays and, not surprisingly, this remarkable new collection of never-before-published one-acts includes some of his most poignant and hilarious characters: the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens...; the strange little man behind the nom de plume Mister Paradise; and the extravagant mistress who cheats on her married man in The Pink Bedroom. Most were written in the 1930s and early 1940s when Williams was already flexing his theatrical imagination. Chosen from over seventy unpublished one-acts, these are some of Williams's finest; several have premiered recently at The Hartford Stage Co., The Kennedy Center, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Included in this volume:

• These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch
• Mister Paradise
• The Palooka
• Escape
• Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?
• Summer At the Lake
• The Big Game
• The Pink Bedroom
• The Fat Man's Wife
• Thank You, Kind Spirit
• The Municipal Abattoir
• Adam and Eve on a Ferry
• And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens...

Long associated with Williams, acclaimed stage and film actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson provide a fresh and challenging foreword for actors, directors, and readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226370
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.

Editorial Reviews

Here, two master playwrights make encore appearances. Columbus, associate director of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, offers new translations of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, giving audiences a genuine theatrical experience rather than a guided tour through a museum. These are "actorly" texts, i.e., they are easy to read and recite. Previous translations, though (mostly) of high literary quality, were deeply rooted in the scholar's garden; Columbus, however, has gone a long way toward pruning the text and allowing the playwright's lively and engaging dialog to shine through. The introduction describes the process of translation and Columbus's approach to production. Recommended for libraries of all types. Less engaging are the 13 previously unpublished one-act plays of Williams, which editors Moschovakis and Roessel-collaborators on The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams-exhumed from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (Austin, TX) and the Department of Special Collections at UCLA's University Research Library. Granted, this anthology embodies the youthful Williams, only hinting at the mature playwright to come, yet it's hard to read some of the plays without thinking that they amount to bad Hemingway. Nevertheless, university libraries supporting theater programs will want to purchase this once the amateur performance rights become available, as will holders of New Directions' The Theatre of Tennessee Williams.-Larry Schwartz, Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Recommended reading."

Modern Words

"The plays have an immediacy and spontaneity that make them akin to snapshots."

Gambit Weekly - Olivia Jane Smith

"Summer at the Lake" shows the young author contemplating his restlessness and toxic love of his overbearing and manipulative mother."

The New Yorker - John Lahr

"Kudos to Nicholas Rand Moschovakis and David E. Roessel for locating and so ably editing these firecrackers."

World Literature Today

"Kudos to Nicholas Rand Moschovakis and David E. Roessel for locating and so ably editing these firecrackers."

World Literature Today - Philip C. Kolin