Tennessee Williams analysis of creativity. Dramaturgy by T. Williams. Commercial success and writing career

Plastic theater... This phrase causes slight bewilderment and a wide variety of associations. Ballet, the art of avant-garde dance, mimic interpretations of Marcel Marceau come to mind… But it is unlikely that anyone will immediately remember Tennessee Williams in connection with these two words. Nevertheless, this unusual term was invented by him, called out of oblivion in the preface to his own play "The Glass Menagerie".

Let's try to figure out what is hidden behind these two words.

First of all, about the author. Tennessee Williams... His real name is Thomas Lanier. His life span of 72 years (1911 - 1983) was spent in the United States of America. Sensitive, receptive, impressionable, he was fond of theater from early youth. However, the state of dramaturgy and theater of that time did not at all delight him, rather, on the contrary. Perhaps the only exception was Bernard Shaw, whose extraordinary and brilliant creations stood out against the background of general monotony. But the magnificent mocker was far away - across the ocean. And in his native South of the USA (even though half a century had passed after the war of 1861-1865), everything was still decorous, traditional, patriarchal, which did not contribute to the development of art, the search for new forms, experiments, which was so greedy the ardent soul of young Lanir. Having received a (good) education traditional for that time and his circle, the future playwright himself without looking back is fond of everything new, extraordinary, untested, which reached their quiet corner. And it didn't get much. The years of the Great Depression (difficult for the whole country, but especially difficult for the "traditional" South) have passed, and another stream of immigrants and new ideas has poured into the United States. But the current settlers were not just seekers of happiness, for the most part they were political émigrés, running away from the inevitable clash between the two beasts spread across Europe - fascism and totalitarianism under a communist mask. They brought to a country far removed from the disasters of the rest of the world not only grief and anxiety, but their discoveries, achievements in various fields of art and science, knowledge about the new that the great minds of Europe discovered. Thus, America learned about the theatrical experiments of Bertolt Brecht, the literary research of Hesse and the Mann brothers, regained the thoughtful bitterness of Eliot's works, discovered Freud's outrageous revelations, and much more that now forms the golden fund of world culture.

All this, of course, did not pass by the future playwright. But, possessing a searching mind and a sensitive soul, he did not accept all this recklessly, but analyzed, passed through himself. None of the achievements of the natural sciences shook his deep religiosity; Freud, perceived and loved by him, did not affect the poetic nature of his nature and did not force him to abandon the glorification of poetry in others.

Until 1945, the world did not know Tennessee Williams. Only Thomas Lanier existed in it, who, as if all these years, had been accumulating knowledge, impressions, sensations, thoughts for himself, in order to later throw them out on a stunned and not always ready for this audience. His very first play, The Glass Menagerie, which was released in 1945, made America talk about a new playwright who seemed to have taken over from Eliot. It was followed by "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), "Orpheus Descends" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), "Night of the Iguana" (1961). In these plays, people are vividly, frankly and talentedly shown, just people who surround us every day everywhere. They are extraordinary, spiritual, poetic, sometimes romantic and almost always lonely, somewhat flawed. They leave the impression of some kind of loss, cause pity (by no means humiliating, on the contrary), a desire to help, protect from something. There are almost no bright colors in their characters, solid transitions, nuances, halftones, contradictory characteristics.

Here, for example, is Williams' characterization of the main character of The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield: “This little woman has a great zest for life, but she does not know how to live and desperately clings to the past and the distant. … She is by no means paranoid, but her whole life has been a complete paranoia. Amanda has a lot of attractive and a lot of funny, you can love and feel sorry for her. She, undoubtedly, is characterized by long-suffering, she is even capable of a kind of heroism, and although she is sometimes cruel out of thoughtlessness, tenderness lives in her soul. These conflicting characters are everywhere in Williams. Even the mythological Orpheus from the era of heroes turns into a sensitive, subtle, easily vulnerable and at the same time bold, firm, somewhat overly decisive and confident person.

With all this, the characters of the plays are amazingly realistic. The impression is that the playwright randomly chose them from the crowd or wrote them from neighbors and acquaintances. However, it may be so, he does not clearly speak about this anywhere, the only allusion - at the beginning of the preface to "The Glass Menagerie" - that this is a memory play.

But this is not the boring, “mature” realism that flourished in the theater of that time and was in use in our country for many years under the name of socialist realism. Williams did not accept such realism at all: “A traditional realistic play with a real refrigerator and pieces of ice, with characters who express themselves in the same way as the viewer speaks, is the same as the landscape in academic painting, and has the same dubious merit - photographic similarity. The playwright saw the realism of theatrical art differently. He believed that what is immeasurably more important is not reliable scenography and scenery, the accuracy of the costumes, the realism of the details and the language of the characters, but the sincerity of the sensations and experiences that the performance evokes in the viewer. Williams believed that the performance is successful when people leave the theater with the feeling that they have just lived someone else's life, when they are filled with the worries and sorrows of fictional characters, transfer their experiences to themselves, try to look at the environment through the prism of what they have just experienced. And to achieve this goal, he proposed to widely use the conventions of the theatrical space.

Here is how Williams himself puts it: “Expressionism and other conventional techniques in drama have one and only goal - to get as close as possible to the truth. When a playwright uses a conventional technique, he does not at all try - at least he should not do this - to relieve himself of the obligation to deal with reality, to explain human experience; on the contrary, he strives or should strive to find a way to express life as it is as truthfully, penetratingly and vividly as possible. ... Now, perhaps, everyone already knows that photographic similarity does not play an important role in art, that truth, life - in a word, reality - are a single whole, and poetic imagination can show this reality or capture its essential features only by transforming the outward appearance of things. Based on this postulate, Tennessee Williams put forward his concept of the theater, which he called "plastic theater". He did this not decoratively and publicistically, simply postulating a new concept in some essay, but revealing its main provisions in the first play he presented to the public, that is, immediately showing his own vision of the theater in action: “These notes are not just a preface to this play. They put forward the concept of a new, plastic theater, which must replace the exhausted means of external credibility, if we want the theater, as part of our culture, to regain vitality.

Williams' plays are distinguished by absolute perfection. Not plot, namely, stage, which is very different from most other playwrights. When reading the plays of Beaumarchais, Schiller, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, not to mention the ancient classics, however paradoxical it may sound, you need to know very well what you are reading about, otherwise you will simply fall out of context, you will not get the full impression, there will be a feeling of misunderstanding, incompleteness and, ultimately, dissatisfaction. Faced with their remarks like: “The hall in the palace of the countess” (Lope de Vega “Dog in the manger”), “The hall in the castle of Moors” (F. Schiller “Robbers”) or “Linier's clothes are in disarray; he has the appearance of a drunken man of the world.” (E. Rostand "Cyrano de Bergerac") you need to know very well what the hall looks like in the count's palace in Naples at the beginning of the 17th century or in a medieval castle in Franconia (while you still need to guess where this Franconia is) and, at least, to have an idea of ​​how secular people dressed in Paris in the middle of the 17th century, in order to be able to imagine "a drunken secular person." In the works of Williams there are no such exercises for the mind. And the point is not that the playwright most often wrote about his contemporaries, that is, he described the 20th century, close and consonant with our worldview, but in the very nature of the description, the accuracy of the smallest details. In Williams' plays, the texts are usually (with the exception of individual monologues) uncomplicated and meaningfully simple, telling about everyday things, familiar emotions and experiences. They do not reveal universal truths, do not raise global questions, like Shakespeare's "To be or not to be?". His heroes solve everyday problems, discuss topics that are understandable and close to everyone. Another thing is how they do it, how the author describes what is happening in the play.

That is, the author's remarks have the same, and often greater meaning than the text. They don't just tell us where the action takes place, who comes, leaves, gets up, sits down, smiles, etc., but unfolds the whole picture. An idea of ​​what a theatrical stage looks like, a little bit of imagination - and we have a finished performance in front of our eyes. Here's an example: "Laura, have you ever liked anyone?" Along with this inscription, blue roses appear on the screen above the darkened stage. Gradually, the figure of Laura emerges, and the screen goes blank. The music subsides. LAURA sits on a flimsy palm-wood chair at a small table with bent legs. She wears a light purple kimono. The hair is picked up from the forehead with a ribbon. She washes and polishes her collection of glass animals. AMANDA appears on the steps at the entrance. Laura holds her breath, listening to the footsteps on the stairs, quickly leaves her knick-knacks and sits down in front of a typewriter keyboard diagram pinned to the wall, straight, as if hypnotized ... Something has happened to Amanda - grief is written on her face. Stepping heavily, she rises to the landing - a gloomy, hopeless, even absurd figure. She is dressed in a cheap velvet coat with a faux fur collar. She is wearing a five-year-old hat, one of those monstrous structures that were worn in the late twenties; in the hands of a huge black flat bag of patent leather with nickel-plated clasps and a monogram. This is her weekend outfit, in which she puts on, going to the next gathering of the "Daughters of the American Revolution". Before entering, she peeks through the door. Then he purses his lips mournfully, rolls his eyes wide open, shakes his head. Enters slowly. Seeing her mother's face, Laura fearfully raises her fingers to her lips ”(“ The Glass Menagerie ”, picture two).

The question may arise: “why?”. Allegedly, resorting to such details, reproducing details so accurately, the author leaves no room for creativity for others - actors, director, set designer, decorator, etc. Not at all. Freedom for your own expression as much as you like. And the fact that a certain framework has already been indicated, the necessary clarifications, makes the task even more interesting for a truly creative person. It's like a medieval trouvery contest: a poetic duel on a given topic, and sometimes with given rhymes. Williams doesn't take away creative freedom from others, he just makes it harder. With all the descriptive accuracy in his works, there are no rigid frameworks. The performer of each role must himself look for the character of the character, simply relying on the text and already postulated features, the stage designer must decide the stage space himself in order to correspond to the multifaceted and multilayered space of the play, the composer must understand what “the theme of this drama” is. And the director is the most difficult - he must combine all these disparate components into a single whole, so that there is a feeling of the same wholeness and completeness that is present when you read a play.

The novelty of Williams' vision of the theater is to abandon the old forms of "realistic convention", to stop every time "negotiating" with the viewer so that he takes the theater stage for a knight's castle, an endless field, a fairy-tale forest, etc., and pompous monologues of an unimaginable lengths, frilly poses and gestures for sincere feelings. The playwright did not try to "simplify" the theatre. Against. His requirements for all participants in the creation of the performance were extremely strict. But the most important of them is that there should be no falsehood. If the theater is a convention, it is necessary to create it in such a way that the viewer forgets about it, does not feel the unreality of what is happening, so that after 5, maximum 15 minutes he forgets where he is and completely immerses himself in the action on stage. For the sake of this, and games with lighting and music, and the famous screen, which at one time caused so much bewilderment and criticism. It's time to talk about all these elements in more detail. Since both the concept itself and the analysis of its main elements were put forward by the author in his first play, explanations and examples will be mainly taken from The Glass Menagerie and its preface.

So. The SCREEN is an extremely important element. He is constantly present in the author's remarks, especially those related to the beginning of a picture or action. The principle of operation of the screen is very simple: images or inscriptions are projected by a magic lantern onto a part of the theatrical scenery, which should not stand out otherwise. The purpose of using the screen is to emphasize the meaning of a particular episode. Here is how the playwright himself explains it: “In each scene there is a moment or moments that are most important in terms of composition. In a play consisting of separate episodes, in particular in The Glass Menagerie, the compositional or plot line can sometimes escape the audience, and then the impression of fragmentation, rather than strict architectonics, will appear. Moreover, the matter may not be so much in the play itself, but in the lack of attention from the audience. The inscription or image on the screen will strengthen the hint, help to easily convey the desired idea contained in the replicas. I think that in addition to the compositional function of the screen, its emotional impact is also important.” And (returning to the conversation about limiting creativity), the author did not set clear limits for the use of the screen, leaving the directors to decide for themselves in which scenes it is needed. Moreover, Williams even calmly accepted the stage version of the play, in which there was no screen at all, and the directors managed with a minimum of the simplest stage means (this was the first production of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway).

The screen is really new. When you read Williams' play for the first time and find a mention of him, there is bewilderment and the same meaningless question: "why?". But as soon as a complete picture of what is happening unfolds before you, as soon as you find that very significant episode, the question disappears. And again, this is not a limitation of perception, not a given. Just with the help of the screen, the play appears before us brighter, more imaginative. The beam of a magic lantern snatches out of the twilight not something that should settle in the memory, like the key phrase of a school essay, but a grain of the character's image, a piece of his soul. Here is how the author applies it to the fabric of the play:

"Picture Three

Screen caption: "After failure..."

Tom is standing on the landing in front of the door.

Tom: After the failure of the Rubicam Trade College, my mother had one calculation: that Laura would have a young man, that he would come to visit us. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the "collective unconscious", the image of the guest hovered in our tiny apartment.

On the screen is a young man.

A rare evening at home passed without somehow hinting at this image, this ghost of this hope ... Even when it was not mentioned, its presence was still felt in the preoccupied look of the mother, blamed for Laura's movements and hung over the Wingfields like a punishment! Mom's word was not at odds with the deed. She began to take appropriate steps. She realized that additional expenses would be required to line the nest and decorate the chick, and therefore, all winter and early spring, she waged a vigorous telephone campaign, catching subscribers to The Mistress of the House's Companion, one of those magazines for respectable matrons, which publishes with continuations of elegant the experiences of literary ladies who have only one song: tender cups of breasts; thin waists, like the stem of a glass; lush hips; eyes as if shrouded in the haze of autumn bonfires; luxurious, like Etruscan sculptures, bodies.

On the screen is a glossy magazine cover.

The same thing happens with music. It's easy to say: "The theme of the Glass Menagerie sounds." But what is it? The playwright believes that each play should have its own through melody, which emotionally emphasizes the corresponding episodes. Moreover, referring to the entire action, it should correspond to one of the key characters to an even greater extent, “personified” when the action focuses on him. Wow problem! How subtly one must feel the work in order to compose such a through melody. The playwright himself saw it in the manner of an endless rondo, constantly changing character, loudness and clarity of sound. This is how he himself described it: “You will hear such a melody in the circus, but not in the arena, not with the solemn march of the artists, but in the distance and when you think about something else. Then it seems endless, then it disappears, then it sounds again in the head, occupied with some thoughts, - the most cheerful, most tender and, perhaps, the saddest melody in the world. It expresses the apparent lightness of life, but it also contains a note of inescapable, inexpressible sadness. When you look at a bauble made of thin glass, you think how lovely it is, and how easy it is to break. So it is with this endless melody - it either appears in the play, then it subsides again, as if carried by a changeable breeze. Apparently, Williams had a flattering opinion of contemporary composers. Be that as it may, this theme song is a really great find. Unfortunately, we do not have the possibility of how it was realized in the plays of the author himself during his lifetime. But the way she performs in the test is overwhelming. If you are really carried away by Williams's dramaturgy, if you really like his plays, then, in the end, each one acquires its own musical sound, its own for everyone and in some way common to all readers.

Here's what it looks like in action:

Tom: Yes, I'm lying. I'm going to the opium haza - like this! In a den where there are only prostitutes and criminals. I'm in Hogan's gang now, mom, a contract killer, I carry a machine gun in a violin case! And in the Valley I have several of my own brothels! They called me the Killer - Killer Wingfield! I lead a double life: during the day - an inconspicuous, respectable clerk in a shoe store, and at night, the fearless king of the bottom! I visit gambling houses and spend fortunes on roulette. I wear a black eye patch and a fake mustache. Sometimes I even glue green jars. Then my name is Devil! Oh, I could tell such a story that you can't close your eyes at night. My enemies are plotting to blow up our house. Someday at night it will lift us up - straight to heaven! I will be happy, madly happy, and so will you. You will rise up and broomstick over the Blue Bounty with all your seventeen fans! You... you... you old talkative witch!

The women were horrified. Tom wants to put on his coat, but his hand is stuck in his sleeve. He furiously, tearing at the seam of his shoulder, throws off his coat and throws it. The coat ends up on a bookcase, on which the sister's little animals are placed. The sound of breaking glass.

Laura screams as if she's been hit.

The inscription on the screen: "Glass Menagerie".

Laura (shrill): My glass...menagerie! (Turns away, covering her face with her hands.)

Amanda (after the words “talkative witch” was dumbfounded and hardly noticed what happened. Finally she comes to her senses. In a tragic voice): I don’t want to know you ... until you ask for forgiveness! (He goes into another room, drawing the curtains tightly behind him.)

Laura turned away, leaned against the mantelpiece. Tom looks at her, not knowing what to do. He approaches the bookcase and begins to collect the fallen figures on his knees, looking at his sister every now and then, as if he wants to say something and cannot find words. The melody of the "Glass Menagerie" appears timidly.

The scene darkens.

Music was an integral part of Williams' plays. Creating his works with a constant projection of their stage production, he was sure that the theater should use all non-literary means available to it, music in particular, as an art that has the strongest emotional impact. Modern directors widely use this technique, moreover, in staging works that, by their nature, plot, and content, are absolutely not in contact with the plays of the American playwright. Andrey Zhitinkin's productions ("Dear Friend", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "Caligula", etc.) can serve as a striking example of this, each of which has its own musical theme.

Another “non-literary” (in the words of the author himself) tool that Williams widely used, and in the application of which he also has a large share of innovation, is lighting. New for that time was the reception of the so-called. “selective lighting”, i.e., the rejection of the entire area of ​​​​the stage habitually flooded with bright light, the concentration of light on some of the most significant objects, a group of people, a mise-en-scene, etc. Moreover, the playwright proposes to make lighting not just selective . In its application, it still violates all the usual canons, according to which the center of the action, the main character, the key detail should be most clearly illuminated. And the lighting offered by the playwright acquires “character”, it is an additional characteristic of a character, episode, action or dialogue, has some distinctive features of its own, as if it were not the light of soulless spotlights, but an integral part of a living the fabric of the play, the reality of its characters.

However, the playwright himself, as always, will say it better. Here is how the tone describes the lighting in The Glass Menagerie: “The scene is seen as if in a haze of memories. A ray of light suddenly falls on the actor or on some object, leaving in the shadow what seems to be the center of the action. For example, Laura is not involved in Tom's quarrel with Amanda, but it is she who is flooded with clear light at this moment. The same applies to the dinner scene, when the silent figure of Laura on the sofa should remain the focus of the viewer's attention. The light falling on Laura is distinguished by a special chaste purity and resembles the tones on ancient icons or on images of the Madonnas. In general, lighting can be widely used in a play, similar to colors in religious painting - for example, in El Greco, whose figures seem to glow against a relatively foggy background. (This will also allow for more efficient use of the screen.) Free, imaginative use of light is essential, and can lend fluidity and fluidity to static plays.

28. Creativity of one of the post-absurd playwrights (optional: Peter Weiss, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Slavomir Mrozhek, Tom Stoppard, Max Frisch, Sam Shepard).

Full name Samuel Shepard Rogers.

Sam Shepard has worked in virtually all forms of visual and dramatic arts, including film, television and theatre.

Shepard first starred in Bob Dylan's Renaldo & Clara (1978), and made his name as an actor with Terrence Mallick in Days of Heaven (1978). With success, he embodied on the screen the image of the legendary pilot Chuck Eager in the film "The Right Thing" (1983).

Shepard also starred in "The Right Guys!" Phil Kaufman (Oscar Nominated), Billy Bob Thornton's Untamed Hearts, Password: Swordfish, Michael Almereida's Hamlet, Scott Hicks' Snowcapped Cedars, Safe Passage, The Case of the Pelicans, "Steel Magnolias", "Baby Boom", etc.

On TV, Shepard starred in Dash & Lilly, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie; "Purgatory" - one of the highest rated films on TNT; Lily Dale, Good Old Boys and Streets of Laredo.

Shepard is the author of numerous award-winning plays. By the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, he became a famous American playwright, presenting several powerful plays to the audience, including The Buried Child (Pulitzer Prize in 1979), Simpatiko, The True West, The Curse of the Starving class" and "Fool in Love".

In his latest play, The Late Henry Moss, Shepard cast Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, Cheech Marin, and James Gammon.

Shepard directed two films as a director - "The Far North" (for which he himself wrote the script) and "Silent Language".

Sam Shepard has two children with actress Jessica Lange.

Thomas Lanier Williams, aka Tennessee Williams, was born March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the second of three children of Cornelius and Edwina Williams. Raised predominantly by his mother, Williams had a difficult relationship with his father, a demanding salesman who preferred to work rather than raise children.

Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as a calm and happy time. But that all changed when the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. The new urban environment met him unfriendly, as a result of which Tennessee withdrew into himself and became addicted to writing.
The situation in the family also influenced the child. Tennessee's parents were not shy about sorting things out; a tense situation often reigned in the house. Williams later called his parents' barque "an example of a wrong marriage". However, this only added to him themes for creativity. As a result, his mother became the prototype of the goofy but strong Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, while his father became the aggressive Big Daddy driver in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

In 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri to study journalism. But he was soon recalled from school by his father, who was indignant when he learned that his son's girlfriend was also attending university.

Williams had to return home and, at his father's insistence, take a job as a salesman for a shoe company. The future great playwright hated his work, finding an outlet only in his work. After work, he immersed himself in his world, creating stories and poems. However, he eventually developed a deep depression that led to a nervous breakdown.

After undergoing treatment, Tennessee returned to St. Louis, where he made acquaintances among local poets who studied at the University of Washington. In 1937, Tennessee decided to continue his education by attending the University of Iowa, from which he graduated the following year.

Commercial success and writing career

At 28, Williams moved to New Orleans and changed his name. He chose Tennessee because his father was from there. He also completely changed his lifestyle, immersing himself in city life, which inspired him to create the play "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Tennessee quickly proved his talent by winning $100 in a writing competition at the Group Theater. More importantly, it brought him an acquaintance with the agent Audrey Wood, who also became his friend and adviser.

In 1940, Williams' play Clash of the Angels debuted in Boston. It failed instantly, but Williams did not give up and reworked it into Orpheus Descends. According to him, the film "From the breed of fugitives" with Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani in the lead roles was created.
This was followed by new work, including scripts for MGM. However, Williams has always been closer to the theater than to the cinema. On March 31, 1945, Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie, on which he worked for several years, debuted on Broadway.

Both critics and the public equally fell in love with this work of the playwright. This changed Williams' life and fortune forever. Two years later, he presented to the public the play "A Streetcar Named Desire", which surpassed previous success and cemented his status as one of the best writers in the country. The play also earned Williams the Playwrights Award and his first Pulitzer Prize. The subsequent works of the writer only added to him the praise of critics and the love of the public. In 1955, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which was also brought to the big screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as lead actors. His works "Tequila Camino", "Sweet Bird of Youth" and "Night of the Iguana" also became successful.

Later years

However, the 60s became difficult for the famous playwright. His work began to receive cool reviews, which was the reason for his addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills. For most of his life, Tennessee lived in fear of going insane, as happened to his sister Rose. In 1969, his brother was forced to send him to the hospital for treatment.

After returning, Williams tried to re-enter the working track. He released several new plays, and also in 1975 wrote the book "Memoirs", in which he told about his life.

On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap and died, surrounded by bottles of alcohol and pills, at his New York City residence at the Elysee Hotel. He was buried in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tennessee Williams has made an invaluable contribution to the history of world literature. In addition to twenty-five feature-length plays, Williams has written dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one hundred poems, and an autobiography. Among many awards, he has received two Pulitzer Prizes and four Circle Critics Awards in New York.

Personal life

Tennessee Williams did not hide his unconventional orientation, which, however, was not new in the creative circles of that time. In the late 30s, he joined the gay community in New York, where his partner Fred Melton was. Throughout his life, the playwright had several love affairs, but his main passion was Frank Merlo, whom he met in 1947 in New Orleans. Merlo, an American-born Sicilian, served in the US Navy during World War II. His influence had a calming effect on Williams' chaotic life. In 1961, Merlo died of lung cancer, which was the beginning of a long depression for the writer.

Williams attended the University of Missouri, from which he did not graduate. Between 1936 and 1938, in St. Louis, he became close to the Mummers Artistic Youth Troupe, which staged Williams' early, unpublished plays.

Williams had a strict, picky father who reproached his son for his lack of masculinity; a domineering mother, overly proud of the family's prominent position in society, and a sister, Rose, who suffered from depression. Subsequently, the playwright's family served as the prototype for the Wingfields in The Glass Menagerie. The play was staged in Chicago in 1944.

Not wanting to vegetate in production, to which he was sentenced by the constrained financial situation of the family, Williams led a bohemian life, wandering from one exotic corner to another (New Orleans, Mexico, Key West, Santa Monica). His early play Battle of Angels (1940) is built on a typical conflict: in the stuffy atmosphere of an inveterate town, three women are drawn to a wandering poet.

After the most famous play A Streetcar Named Desire, the playwright gained a reputation as an avant-garde artist.

Williams' plays have repeatedly attracted the attention of filmmakers - among the many adaptations of his works, the most popular were A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia Kazan (1951) with the participation of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh and Cat on a Hot Roof directed by Richard Brooks (1958) in which the main played by Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.

Williams was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, in 1952 for A Streetcar Named Desire and in 1957 for Elia Kazan's The Dolly, based on his two one-act plays Twenty-Seven Cotton Carts and "Inedible Dinner"

The work of Tennessee Williams on stage and in film

The plays of Tennessee Williams have always been in demand and have been repeatedly staged on the stage of theaters, many have been filmed.

Here is the opinion of Vitaly Vulf, who translated Williams a lot and who is an expert on his work: The playwright did not compose anything. He described what he had experienced. Williams expressed all his thoughts, feelings, sensations through female images ... Once he said about the heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire: "Blanche is me." Why do actresses like to play him so much? Because not a single author in the twentieth century has such brilliant female roles. The heroines of Williams are strange women, unlike anyone else. They want to give happiness, but there is no one to give.

The first productions of Williams's playwriting were as early as 1936, when early works were staged in St. Louis by the Mummers troupe. In 1944, The Glass Menagerie was staged in Chicago. In 1947, Williams' most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, was staged at the Barrymore Theatre. In 1950, the Chicago Erlanger Theater staged the first play, The Tattooed Rose. In 1953, the Martin Beck Theater staged the allegorical drama The Path of Reality.

The famous play by Williams "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" staged in 1955 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Previously, the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" was awarded the same prize.

Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descends into Hell" staged for the first time in 1957 at the New York Producers Theater in 1961 was staged by the Mossovet Theater (Vera Maretskaya and Serafima Birman played brilliantly there) and then in the same year by the Saratov Academic Drama Theater .

In 1950, director Elia Kazan made the first film based on Williams's play, A Streetcar Named Desire. The film premiered in the United States on September 18, 1951. Blanche Dubois played Vivien Leigh, and Marlon Brando played his second film role in this film - Stanley Kowalski. At that time, the actor was not yet a star, and therefore his name was second in the credits after the name of Vivien Leigh. Then, one after another, film adaptations of six more works by Williams followed: "Doll" (1956), "Cat on a Hot Roof" (1958), "Mrs. Stone's Roman Spring" (1961), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962), "Night of the Iguana » (1964).

According to Vitaly Wolf, the plays of Tennessee Williams are not fully understood in the United States, even though he was an American. The way they stage it just shows that they do not understand it, and then, in America, the theater is very bad. A wonderful musical, they are masters here: dance, spin, sing, but they don’t have a drama theater, however, like in Paris.

In the 1970s, Lev Dodin staged the play "The Tattooed Rose" on the stage of the Leningrad Regional Drama Theater. In 1982, Roman Viktyuk staged the play "Tattooed Rose" at the Moscow Art Theater. In 2000, a performance based on three early plays by Tennessee Williams was staged at the National Karelian Theater. In 2001 at the theater. Vakhtangov directed by Alexander Marin staged the play "The Night of the Iguana". In 2004, director Viktor Prokopov staged the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" on the stage of a theater in Smolensk. In 2005, Henrietta Yanovskaya staged the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" on the stage of the Moscow Youth Theatre.

Color, elegance, lightness, skilful change of mise-en-scenes, quick interaction of living people, whimsical, like a pattern of lightning in clouds - this is what makes up the play ... I am a romantic, an incorrigible romantic.

T. Williams

Tennessee Williams is the greatest playwright of the post-war decades, one of the famous figures not only on the American but also on the world stage of the second half of the last century. An artist of original style, an innovator, he is the theorist and practitioner of what is known as plastic theatre.

Beginning: "Battle of the Angels" The real name of the playwright is Thomas Lanier. He took the pseudonym Tennessee, apparently changing the name of the English Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson. Williams was born (1911 - 1983) in the small town of Columbus in southern Mississippi. The writer's family was proud of its aristocratic (mother was an aristocratic) "southern" roots, but became impoverished. Nostalgic sentiments about the former greatness of the South were strong in the family. Later the motive unrealizable illusions, unrealized dream, contrasting with rough prosaic reality, will largely determine the atmosphere of the theater of T. Williams, an artist consonant with the style southern school.

T. Williams showed his literary predilections early: the first attempt at writing was at the age of 14. He wrote poetry and prose. But fame came to Williams when he was already over thirty.

In 1929, he began studying at the University of Missouri, then his studies were interrupted at the request of his father by serving as a petty clerk in a shoe company. After a hateful job, he devoted his evening and night hours to writing. The playwright's debut was the play "Battle of the Angels"(1940), which was not successful. But he did not leave the dream of the theater. For several years, the novice writer was forced to roam around the country, visited Chicago, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco.

"Glass menagerie": a play-remembrance. Fame began with a triumphal procession through the stages of the world of Williams' drama " Glass Menagerie»(1944), awarded a series of prestigious awards. It marked the establishment of new accents in American dramaturgy: in contrast to the plays of the "Red Decade" with their attention to social issues, T. Williams immerses the viewer in the area of ​​subtle spiritual movements, purely family problems.

The playwright called her memory play. It is built on nuances, hints, and this is achieved by special design, use of the screen, music and lighting. Her uncomplicated plot: an episode from the life of an ordinary, average American family Wingfields. Her theme: a mother's failed attempt to find the groom's daughter. family of three: mother Amanda, son Volume and daughter Laura - live in a modest home in St. Louis. The events are built like a chain of memories of Tom, the hero-narrator. The mother is worried about her daughter's disorder: Laura has been limping since childhood and wears a prosthesis. The father left the family a long time ago.

In the description of Amanda, Williams combined psychologism with the grotesque, subtle humor. Amanda lives in a world of illusions. She is all in the past, immersed in that unforgettable time when her youth passed in the South. There she was surrounded by "real" ladies and gentlemen, admirers, who in fact are the fruit of her imagination. An incorrigible dreamer, she believed in worthy prospects for her children.

Tom is also from the breed of visionaries. He works at a shoe company, bored with mediocre work. He tries to write, spends evenings in cinema halls, cherishes the dream of becoming a sailor.

The main event in the play is a visit to the house Jim O'Connor friend and colleague of Tom. His arrival is an occasion for Amanda to dream about Laura's matrimonial prospects. Burdened with physical inferiority, the daughter also indulges in hope. She collects glass animals. They are the main artistic symbol of the play: fragile figures of human loneliness and the ephemerality of life's illusions. It turns out that Laura knew Jim in high school and that he is the object of her secret hopes. Jim is politely friendly. Inspired by his courtesy, Laura shows him her "menagerie" and her favorite toy, a unicorn figurine. When Jim tries to teach Laura how to dance, they awkwardly hit a piece of glass. She falls to the floor and breaks. Jim, wanting to cheer up Laura, recalls that at school she was called the Blue Rose for being different from others. He calls her sweet and even tries to kiss her, but then, afraid of his own impulse, he hurries to leave the Wingfield house. Jim explains that he won't be able to come anymore because he has a girlfriend. He is engaged and is going to marry her.

Amanda's matrimonial plan fails. The mother brings down reproaches on Tom, who invited a "not free" man as a guest. After a harsh explanation with his mother, Tom leaves the house.

"The Glass Menagerie" is a play about human loneliness, about "fugitive" people, about the unrealizability of illusions colliding with reality. Revealing the touching defenselessness of the characters, Williams is filled with sympathy for them.

Two masterpieces by Williams. " Tram “Desire”»(1947) - another play about loneliness. It has also gained the status of a classic. This is the third outstanding work on desires and passions: Dreiser's Trilogy of Desires, O'Neill's Love Under the Elms. And a play by T. Williams!

Heroine Blanche Dubois, an elegant, beautiful woman, changeable in her moods, comes to visit her sister in New Orleans Stella Kovalskaya. In her apartment, the action of the play unfolds.

Blanche from the impoverished southern aristocracy: the family estate "Dream" is sold to relatives. Husband - handsome, zhuir, "blue", committed suicide. Blanche, who made a modest living as a teacher, is forced to leave after being caught having an intimate relationship with one of her students. Lovers do not give the desired stability, but Blanche stubbornly hopes for a change in her fate. However, youth inexorably disappears. The heroine stubbornly but unsuccessfully hunts suitors, is preoccupied with her appearance and outfits. Her exalted nature is hurt by the contrast between romantic ideas about the noble South and the rudeness that reigns in the family. Kowalskikh.

The conflict between Blanche and Stanley, her sister's husband, is a clash of two life principles. And he is the inner motive of the play. Former soldier, now a merchant, Stanley - triumphant rudeness itself. Insolent, aggressive, self-confident. “Behaves like a beast, and the habits are like a beast!” Blanche certifies him. His element - sex, booze, cards. When Blanche tries to open her sister's eyes, it turns out that Stella is happy with her marriage. She loves Stanley, because "a man and a woman have their secrets, the secrets of two in the dark, and after that everything else is not so important."

Blanche meets Mitcham, a friend of Stanley's who is infatuated with the Kowalskis' sophisticated guest. But the emerging serious relationship is upset: Stanley informs Mitch about Blanche's past, about her reprehensible lifestyle at the Flamingo Hotel, where she appeared under the name of the White Lady. When Stella arrives at the maternity hospital, Blanche and Stanley are left alone. He roughly takes possession of Blanche. Upon Sister Blanche's return, she confesses what happened. Stella, on the other hand, not only does not believe or pretends, but declares her recognition the fruit of a confused imagination. With Stanley's active participation, doctors are called in to send Blanche to a psychiatric hospital.

A summary of the twists and turns of the plot gives only a rough idea of ​​​​the plays of Williams. In A Streetcar Named Desire, as in the best examples of his dramaturgy, every detail, replica, intonation, musical note is weighty. Stella and Stanley (pay attention to the consonance of names) are in their own way a harmonious union; Blanche and Stanley not only come into conflict, but also constitute, musically expressed, the contrast of two emotional and psychological elements - fragile love and sensual, rough love. Symbolism is the most important device in this and other plays by Williams.

A Streetcar Named Desire, a play with a subtle erotic atmosphere, is considered one of Williams' masterpieces.

"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"(1955) - another classic play continues the playwright's artistic exploration of "southern manners". The action takes place in the estate, in the family Big Daddy Polite, a vulgar, domineering 65-year-old planter terminally ill with cancer. The disease is kept secret from both him and his wife. Big Mom. The Pope has been heavily besieged by relatives who are fighting both openly and underhandedly for a future inheritance - 10,000 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta. Before the viewer - another variation of the eternal, like the world, theme: the destructive power of money, which turns relatives into implacable enemies.

While fighting, they do not spare each other. Son Brik, drunkard and gay, reveals to his father that he is doomed, another son Gooper and his wife May, in turn, try to convince Big Mom that Big Dad is curable. But she refuses to sign the agreement drawn up by them on the division of property. Maggie, Brick's wife, decides to please Big Daddy and "catch on" to the inheritance. She informs him of her alleged pregnancy. In the finale, the dying planter finds the exact words that characterize his neighbors: “All around, everywhere, everywhere, always - lies and hypocrisy. Everyone lies, everyone lies. They lie and die."

Plastic theater: theory and practice. The life philosophy of T. Williams, poetics, typology of his heroes, the unique coloring of his plays were embodied in that innovative phenomenon, which he called: plastic theatre.

The style of T. Williams is synthetic. It contains a synthesis of heterogeneous elements: realism, romance, sometimes naturalistic frankness.

The conflict in his plays is often built on the confrontation of a fragile, defenseless, sometimes neurasthenic personality with rough reality. Hence the cross-cutting motive of the collapse of illusions, the humiliation of dreams.

plastic theater, consonant, in a broad sense, with Chekhov's methodology, is based on psychological overtones, the location of mise-en-scenes, lighting effects, musical and poetic atmosphere that affect the inner world of the viewer. Despite the deceptive semblance of life, Williams exposes "explosive contact with the human subconscious." Offers a scenic embodiment of primordial conflicts, the meaning of which is beyond the rational and social factors. They are in the realm of the subconscious.

Here is the beginning of the fourth scene in the Menagerie: “The alley is dimly lit. A bass bell from a nearby church strikes at the very moment when the action begins. Tom appears at the far end of the alley. After each solemn stroke of the bell on the tower, he shakes the rattle, as if expressing the insignificance of human fuss before the restraint and greatness of the Almighty.

Individual words and details are filled with symbolism. When Laura asks her brother what he is doing, Tom replies that he is looking for the key. In a deeper sense, of course, this does not mean the loss of the key to the door. Tom is looking for a way out of life's impasse in which he found himself. This subtext is typical of Williams' plays.

Tennessee Williams "modeled" the theater in accordance with his worldview. His plays were more autobiographical than it might seem at first glance. In the characters of Williams there is something from himself: an artistic and artistic beginning, vulnerability in the absence of determination and willpower. This prevents them from achieving success and standing up for themselves.

T. Williams was an artist, infinitely devoted to his art. He confessed: "I never had any other choice but to become a writer ... The theater and I found each other in all the best and worst of times, and I know that this is the only thing that saved my life."

The play by Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire" is the first "serious" American drama that received worldwide recognition due to the actualization of the conflict between man and society. It realizes the tragedy of a confused person, generated by the whole way of life in society. Existential insight drives him crazy, he is unable to withstand the all-round pressure of circumstances. Then all that remains for him is to flee into a world of illusions that only irritate the soul.

The playwright set to work on a new play in the winter of 1944-1945. Then he was inspired only by the image of the main character, writing the poetically beautiful scene “Blanche in the Moonlight”, where the beautiful southerner sits on the windowsill and dreams of a better life in the arms of a loving and understanding person.

Then I stopped writing because I was in an incredibly depressed state, it is difficult to work when thoughts are far away. I decided not to drink coffee and gave myself a rest for a few months and, indeed, soon came to my senses, Williams shares his memories.

After the restoration of strength, the work continued at a crazy pace, the author did not spare the nights for the realization of a long-standing plan. On a summer day in 1946, he arranges the first reading and shows the drama to his friends. It was originally called "Poker Night" in honor of that fateful moment when all of Blanche's hopes are shattered. The listeners were delighted and spoke about the exclusivity of the play, the playwright did not share their enthusiasm. The desire for perfection forced him to continue the night vigils again. As a result, the "Tram" Desire "" appeared.

In 1947, Tennessee Williams came to New York and went to a production of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, directed by Elia Kazan. It was his author who asked to take up the embodiment of the text on the stage. Then they began to look for actors for the main roles, because the success of the work depended on how spectacularly it would be shown to the viewer. In the course of a persistent search, they achieved their goal: Stanley played Marlon Brando, and Blanche played Jessica Tandy.

It premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on December 3, 1947. The performance ran 855 times with a full house. The fact is that Puritan critics were quick to call the play too frank and dangerous for public morality. Notoriety served the production well: it became the most famous creation of the author.

Why is it called so?

1. The drama is named after the vehicle in which the heroine got to her sister's house. When Blanche arrived, she dropped a remark: “They said, first get on the tram - in the local Desire, then on the other one - the Cemetery.” In this quote, the meaning of the play's title is hidden: it is desire that leads a broken, downtrodden woman to the grave. All her life she obeyed her inner impulses and aspirations, regardless of the realities of the world around her. In search of love, the only absolute value, the beauty wasted herself in love affairs. In the hope of regaining her former luxury, she squandered the estate. Trying to drown out the pain of confronting reality, she succumbed to a passion for drinking. In obedience to the dream of a family shelter visiting Stella, she went to New Orleans, although from the very beginning it was clear that she did not belong there at all. But that's the way it works: always choose Wish, even if it leads to a graveyard. But Williams does not consider this a consequence of spoiled and licentious morals. He sees in his creation the refinement and sophistication of a spiritually developed personality who found freedom in himself and preferred a lonely, beautiful rebellion against conformity to the cowardly opportunism of his sister.
2. Another meaning lies in the parallelism of the names: the Desire tram and the Dream house. When the dream has gone under the hammer, there is nothing left to do but drag out your life on the occasion of more definite and less lofty aspirations - to fall from heaven to earth. Blanche dreamed of refined aristocratic surroundings, of serenity and detachment from everyday life and routine, but all her impulses were roughly backed up against the wall. All that remained was her pathetic attempts not to hang herself on this wall: to indulge her instincts and weaknesses, to live by imagination and lies, to hope against all odds.
3. Another option is a cruel irony of fate: the heroine wanted to use the last chance and fulfill her desire to cling to the hearth, settle in life. And this device, the last refuge, with which nothing can be compared in peace, was precisely the lunatic asylum for her. There, her mental illness was cast into oblivion. But this was the essence of her desire - to find peace.

What is the play about?

A ruined middle-aged aristocrat comes to New Orleans, ostensibly to visit her sister. In fact, this is her only hope for shelter, because Madame Dubois has neither a job lost due to dissolute behavior, nor a family estate sold for debts, nor a family. Her husband committed suicide, her parents died, there are no children. Stella meets Blanche with open arms, she is kind and mediocre, so the squalor and vulgarity of life do not bother her. The guest, on the contrary, is fraught with a rich inner world, gracefully hovering in the clouds of her fantasies and prejudices. Only Stanley, the husband of the mistress of the house, does not share his wife's enthusiasm. He does not like his relative, because in her he sees only the pomp of speeches and arrogance, so class enmity towards the spoiled lady intensifies in him. The conflict in the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is built on it.

Blanche was seriously interested in Kowalski's friend Mitchell. He even intends to marry a stranger, so she hooked him with her mystery and tragic charm. But Stanley gives him the riddles of the southern princess one after another: she led a frivolous and dissolute life, for which she was expelled from the city and deprived of her job. Illusions are destroyed, and the groom abandons his intention. The last hope of the heroine leaves with him.

Exaltation, education and mannerisms make Blanche superfluous in the world of the “average person”. Stanley senses a threat in her and harasses her for a reason. His revenge for the offense is too sophisticated for the average hard worker from the outskirts, who heard that he was not a gentleman. For him, his wife's sister becomes a symbol of that bourgeois, chic lifestyle that he will never achieve. He wants and hates it. A fragile and beautiful guest evokes the same attitude in him. He desires and despises her, she brings him out of his usual routine stupor, awakening in him such emotions that he did not know in himself, and could not realize, like all his surroundings. Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is a story about how idealism and a genuine moral sense struggle with the narrow-mindedness and unscrupulousness of the moderate middle. In the finale, the heroine is sexually abused and goes crazy. She is taken to an insane asylum. This is the verdict of the barbaric and narrow-minded crowd to lofty thoughts and strong feelings.

Main characters and their characteristics

1. Blanche- an aristocrat from the old young family of Dubois, the heiress of former planters who completely impoverished after the victory of the North in the civil war. She is a refined, intelligent, refined, beautiful, but weak woman. After a disaster in her marriage (husband turned out to be homosexual and killed himself when he was exposed), she was left abandoned and unsettled. A brilliant education and manners did not save him from poverty. She worked as a teacher, and, naturally, not knowing the practical side of life, she could not prevent the loss of the estate. Endless sorrows and disappointments led her to alcoholism and frivolous sexual behavior. As a result, she was forced to leave the city after a scandal with a young student with whom the teacher was having an affair. However, Tennessee Williams makes it clear that Blanche's loneliness is not a consequence of her immoral behavior, but the irreversible effect of social conditions on a degenerate element. The aristocrat Dubois does not keep up with the rapidly changing world and realizes that she is running in vain: there is no place for her there. She does not accept the rude and vulgar Stanley Kowalski, the embodiment of narrow-mindedness, vulgarity and aggression. Living side by side with this empty, philistine life, she feels at the level of intellectual intuition that she has no place in modern American society, but is afraid to admit it to herself. The passenger of the Desire Streetcar is a relic of the southern aristocracy, her time is up. She's dying like the Usher estate. The heroine is also doomed to disaster, like Roderick Usher in Edgar Poe's short story.
2. Stanley is the main character of the play. This is a rude, self-confident dork who has a rather primitive way of life and thoughts: an evening at cards, a night with a woman (and not necessarily with a wife), food and drink, during the day physical poorly paid labor, etc. Outwardly, he is an adherent of the traditional moral principles of the layman, but deep inside he hides depravity, unscrupulousness and cruelty. As soon as the wife left the house and went to give birth, he attacks her sister and rapes her, for sure knowing that nothing will happen to him. His mind is clouded by resentment towards the arrogant Dubois who condemned Stella for her choice. Now he has found a way to get even and prove that he spits on this elite. Thus, Kowalski is a vengeful, selfish and mean man, hiding behind the pride and hypocrisy of his oppressed environment. However, critics' opinions about it vary. For example, G. Clerman believes that "He is the embodiment of animal strength, a cruel life that does not notice and even despises all human values." But actor James Farentino, who played the hero of the drama A Streetcar Named Desire, says otherwise: “Stanley treats Blanche as a person who has invaded his kingdom and can destroy it. For me, Stanley is a highly moral person; he puts up with the existence of a guest in his house for six months until the day when he accidentally overhears her speech addressed to him, in which she calls him "man-monkey".
3. Stella- a symbol of conformity and tolerance of a mediocre person, leading him to unscrupulousness and permissiveness. Sister Blanche is her opposite. She is calm, even apathetic. Maybe that's why she escaped shocks, grief and life itself in all its diversity. Her little world is limited by the walls of a miserable apartment and the whims of a stupid, and sometimes cruel husband, who does not hesitate to raise a hand against her. But she comes to terms even with this. Her character is too sluggish and amorphous to prevent anything. She goes with the flow and gets dumber playing bridge with her neighbors. In the end, she becomes an indifferent witness to the death of her sister and ... leaves everything as it is.
4. Mitchell Stanley's friend. He is timid and shy by nature. He spent his whole life with a sick mother, who never bypasses him with advice and participation. Due to his strong attachment to his mother, he never built his family, although he is already quite old. He is also a worker, he also kills time playing cards, but at the same time he has sincerity, kindness, and the ability to feel beauty. It is not in vain that Blanche notices him against the general background: he intuitively reaches out to her, seeing a kindred spirit. However, the man is also weak, he easily follows the lead of a friend and forgets about the inner voice that asked to give the woman a chance to be heard. He cowardly does not come to meet his beloved and becomes a silent accomplice to her persecution.

What is the meaning of the play?

The main idea of ​​the work is much broader than a showdown. The idea of ​​the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is that culture is doomed to perish in the face of a vulgar "mass man", self-confident to the point of adoration. This is a social conflict, where Blanche and Stanley are images - symbols that personify two social strata, irreconcilable in mutual enmity. Before us is more than a clash of characters, before us is a confrontation between human ideals and the routine truth of life.

The primary place in the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is given to the problem of the coexistence of a refined, spiritually developed person and a rough, cruel reality that is created by vulgar, narrow-minded people like Stanley. Williams' psychologism lies in showing interest in the contradictory inner world of even the most unattractive hero. Blanche's spiritual invincibility lies in the fact that she, doomed to perish in a pragmatic society, does not renounce her ideals, does not give up her positions, unlike her apathetic sister, who is content with movies and cards. Lofty ideals are the psychological protection of people from the collapse of all hopes they have experienced. If the heroine gives up her views, she will have nothing left.

The violence that Stanley committed to Blanche sums up her twisted life. Reality in the face of vulgar and primitive people violates her illusory inner world. In this business and prudent world, everything is set in motion, nothing is idle, so the heroine was also assigned a place corresponding to her functionality. She was shamelessly used, but vice did not penetrate into her essence. She was left to the mercy of fate and always depended on the kindness of random people, so no one can be blamed for the situation.

“I create an imaginary world to hide from the real one, because I have never been able to adapt to it,” the author of the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” himself said about himself. In the image of the heroine, he embodied his own soul, full of fear of what is happening outside of it.

Criticism

Some reviewers attributed the incredible success of the play to the fact that there are sex scenes, and scenes of violence. However, their gloomy thoughts were refuted by time itself. In our time, staged rapes will not surprise anyone: they are actively exploited by the cinema, the theater does not shy away from them, many famous books are teeming with them. But A Streetcar Named Desire is still considered the pinnacle of American literature, which means it's not about sex at all. The same idea, laughing, was confirmed by the author's contemporary, the writer Gore Vidal:

The shortcomings of the plays of T. Williams are inaccessible to all living playwrights today.

The importance of this work lies in the fact that it preaches a fundamental rejection of the vices of modern realities, and not a treacherous compromise with them:

The man in Williams' work confronts the cruelty, violence, nightmares and madness of modern reality, saving his dignity and not submitting - even when he becomes a victim, even when the madness of this world strikes him as well. In most of his plays, the dramas of this confrontation are captured, says the Russian researcher V. Nedelin.

The techniques with which the author depicts psychologism in the book "A Streetcar Named Desire" are interesting. Each tense scene uses a musical insert that draws our attention to Blanche's state of mind. We see this world through her eyes, together with her we hear the heartbreaking polka and the cry of the funeral wreath trader. At the climax, the sounds of the blue piano abruptly break off, and the heroine's inner world collapses along with them, unable to withstand the onslaught from the outside. The same psychological anguish of the narrative is noted by theater scholar Richard Gilman:

Now it should be clear that the true theme of T. Williams is the painfulness, torment (and not tragedy) of existence and the fate of human dignity (not spirit) in the face of suffering. For him, everything is painful - both sexuality, and the transience of time, and the loss of innocence, and communication between people.

During Blanche's passionate monologue, her remarks are interrupted by the persistent offers of the merchant to buy "flowers for the dead." At this moment, we understand that the heroine can no longer get out of the set snares, that tragedy awaits us in the finale. This technique was brilliantly implemented by Flaubert in Madame Bovary, when Emma listened to Rodolphe's confession in the midst of the bustle of the fair. It was not about love, but about winning another trophy. So in the play, the woman also spoke about life, but it was already about death. It is no coincidence that the book shocked many experienced literary critics with the power of its tragedy, comparable only to something classical and indisputable:

There is no drama today that could even remotely compare with the scale of A Streetcar Named Desire, and nothing like it has been written in the West for the entire second half of the 20th century, - noted the American critic John Simon.

It is no coincidence that the author compares the heroine with a moth. She flew into the flames throughout the dark night of her life, but a person will find a rational use for everything. He caught it and put it on pins, and then threw it away like a boring piece of junk. Clarity, artistic truthfulness and emotional brightness of the images determined the author's place in the brilliant galaxy of writers who became the national pride of the country:

If we had a national repertory theatre, Harold Clerman reflected, this play would no doubt be among the few worthy of taking a permanent place in it.

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