🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£24.25
Printed on Demand
Dispatched within 7-9 working days.

Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess

The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer

By (author) Annette J. Saddik
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Published: 20th Oct 2016
Dimensions: w 152mm h 229mm d 10mm
Weight: 268g
ISBN-10: 1107433908
ISBN-13: 9781107433908
Barcode No: 9781107433908
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
The plays of Tennessee Williams' post-1961 period have often been misunderstood and dismissed. In light of Williams' centennial in 2011, which was marked internationally by productions and world premieres of his late plays, Annette J. Saddik's new reading of these works illuminates them in the context of what she terms a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Saddik explains why they are now gaining increasing acclaim, and analyzes recent productions that successfully captured elements central to Williams' late aesthetic, particularly a delicate balance of laughter and horror with a self-consciously ironic acting style. Grounding the plays through the work of Bakhtin, Artaud, and Kristeva, as well as through the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik demonstrates how Williams engaged the freedom of exaggeration and excess in celebration of what he called 'the strange, the crazed, the queer'.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New£24.25
+ FREE UK P & P

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
'Annette J. Saddik's lucid and vital assessment of the misunderstood, mysterious later plays of Tennessee Williams opens the door for a new generation of appreciation for the entire body of his work. A wonderful and eye-opening achievement for those of us passionate about the plays that poured out of him in the twenty years of life that remained after his last 'so-called' success, Night of the Iguana.' John Guare, author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation 'Annette Saddik midwifes the rebirth of Tennessee Williams as poet and avant-garde icon, as she rehabilitates the soul and honor of America's greatest playwright.' Lee Breuer, Mabou Mines Theater Company 'In her groundbreaking new book, Annette Saddik proves that Tennessee Williams is the greatest unknown playwright America has produced. She demonstrates so beautifully and persuasively that for the length of his career, Williams was a writer less of lyrical realism, than the grotesque. His later works, on which her book focuses, are thus not aesthetic failures but richly imagined, experimental plays written for an experimental theatre. By so rethinking the whole of Williams's career, Saddik sheds a different light on his most popular plays and reveals to us a new and thrilling Tennessee Williams.' David Savran, City University of New York 'Annette Saddik is a rare scholar. Not only does this book demonstrate her qualities as a meticulous theatre historian and Tennessee Williams specialist, but every page bristles with ideas. This book is of utmost importance for understanding the development of Williams' dramatic output and of the confluence of twentieth-century American and European performance.' Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester