Dance

One -Acts Research Paper One of the most noted one act play writers is Tennessee Williams. Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1914. His father was a shoe salesman for a large shoe manufacturer and his mother was a Southern belle. Soon after his childhood, he moved to St. Louis Missouri with his family. He began to write because he found "life unsatisfactory" in MIssouri. Williams then attended three different colleges, worked for his father's shoe company, and then moved to New Orleans. Tennessee soon fell in love with the city of New Orleans. He then began traveling through the country and writing. Written in 1937 under the title Escape, Summer at the Lake was unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely-seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn. The autobiographical play tells the story of Donald Fenway, a sensitive teenager who feels trapped by his self-absorbed Southern mother and his shoe-company executive father, who wants him to abandon his plans for college and find a menial job. The play was interpreted by several critics as "an early snapshot" of the characters and themes that later appeared in Williams' breakthrough 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, which also focused on a combative mother and a dreamy son bent on escape. William's first critical acclaim came in 1944 when The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. Williams' The Palooka is a 1937 one act about an old has-been boxer. The characters are The Palooka (Galveston Joe), The Kid and The Trainer. The Kid is nervous about his first fight, and The Palooka relieves the Kid's anxiety by telling about the fictional life he wanted to lead after he retired as Galveston Joe. Its world premiere was presented by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre (Chattanooga, TN) as part of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Southern Writers Conference in 2000, and was later performed on October 2, 2003, by the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut. In January 1941, Williams completed a one act play centering around "a deranged spinster living in poverty and with her memories of a former lover." Variously titled Port Mad and The Leafless Block, he revised the play in 1944 and renamed it Portrait of a Madonna. After seeing Jessica Tandy's performance in a 1947 West Coast production of Madonna, Williams decided to cast her in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He later wrote, "It was instantly apparent to me that Jessica was Blanche [DuBois]." Tennessee's Moony's Kid Don't Cry was originally an eight-page melodrama titled Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, which Williams wrote in 1930 at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Hot Milk was produced at UMC in 1932, and was revised and titled Moony's Kid Don't Cry in 1941, when it was published in Margaret Mayorga's Best One Act Plays of 1940. It was the first of Williams' plays to be published. In both versions of the play, a poor young married couple get into an argument over their child and, eventually, their relationship. The Purification is the only verse play Tennessee Williams wrote; Williams recalled that it was written in the summer of 1940, although his biographer Lyle Leverich thought it more likely written in spring 1942. It was published in 1944 in the anthology New Directions 1944 under the title Dos Ranchos, or the Purification. Set on a ranch in the mid-1800s, the play deals with an incestuous brother/sister relationship and a murder trail. The Purification had its New York debut off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys on December 8, 1959. Ten Blocks on the Camino Real is a one-act play that was written in early 1946 and published in Williams' 1948 play collection American Blues; in 1952, the playwright expanded it into a full-length play, Camino Real. Williams directs the reader to use the Anglicized pronunciation "Cá-mino Réal" This Property Is Condemned was written in 1946. In 1966, the play was expanded into the film of the same name, which starred Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton is a 1946 one-act that Williams referred to as "a Mississippi Delta comedy." In it, Jake, a middle-aged, shady cotton gin owner burns down the mill of Silva Vicarro, a rival in the cotton business. His rival, who knows what happened but cannot prove it, seeks revenge by seducing Jake's young, frail, delicate wife, Flora. Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 movie Baby Doll was based on this play. Incidentally, the play's title is written as a line of trochaic pentameter (TWENty SEVen WAGons FULL of COTTon). The Last of My Solid Gold Watches was written in 1946, and centers around a Mississippi shoe salesman named Charlie Colton "whose time has passed and who pathetically echoes himself"; Williams is thought to have drawn on aspects of his father, a traveling salesman, in his portrait of Colton. Written in 1946, Lord Byron's Love Letter takes place in New Orleans in the late 1800s during Mardi Gras. A Spinster and an Old Woman advertise that they have one of Lord Byron's love letters (written to her grandmother). A Matron stops by to look at it and drags her partially inebriated Husband along. As the spinster reads from her grandmother's diary, it becomes apparent that the grandmother and the old woman are one and the same. According to the two women, the grandmother met Lord Byron in Greece, shortly before his death, and they had a summer filled with romance. After he died, the grandmother retired from the world and remained in complete seclusion as an honor to his memory (this does not prevent her from commenting on the spinster's every action). The Matron and her Husband aren't permitted to read the letter, only to look at it from a distance. Over his lifespan, Williams was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” Although he was faced with criticism and ridicule Tennessee Williams is undeniably one of the most prominent figures in the history of one-act playwriting. As an actress I am proud to perform his work and I am grateful for his contributions to the arts. Tennessee Williams is truly a legend.