The Metatheater of Tennessee Williams: Tracing the Artistic Process Through Seven Plays

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Tennessee Williams created characters who set the stage for their own dramas. Examples include Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, arriving at her sister’s apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props, and Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, who directs her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams’s entire oeuvre. It demonstrates that Williams’s plays always stage the process through which they came into being and that this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter revolves around a detailed, close reading of one play and analyzes its particular variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics addressed include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.