Tennessee Williams

Menagerie was Williams' first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our preeminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and it is studied and performed in classrooms and theaters around the world. A new introduction by prominent Williams...

Tennessee Williams' classic drama studies the emotional disintegration of a Southern woman whose last chance for happiness is destroyed by her vindictive brother-in-law.

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media-though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams's candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself. As it turns out, Williams's look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight"...

Alma Winemiller is a shy, religious young woman who grew up pining for the boy next door, John Buchanan. He's grown up to become a doctor with a penchant for sexual conquest, so when he returns to their Mississippi town to start a medical practice, their strange attraction sets them on a path of turmoil and heartbreak. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center in June 2008. Directed by Michael Hackett Producing Director:...

A defrocked, alcoholic, American minister becomes a tour guide, and while travelling in Mexico with a bus-load of school teachers and their 18-year old charge, becomes entangled with the girl, with a woman of eloquence and wisdom, and with an earthy and beautiful former love.

After being exiled from her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly at the New Orleans home of her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski and her husband Stanley. Stanley, both repulsed and attracted to Blanche, discovers that she has mortgaged property left to both sisters and spent all the money whereby he sets about discovering everything else he...

Rebel without a cause (1955): The adolescent son of a well-to-do family gets into trouble with other kids and the police. East of Eden (1955): A wayward Salinas Valley youth vies for the affection of his hardened father with his favored brother. Cat on a hot tin roof (1958): A drama of the problems of a wealthy but decadent family in the South. A streetcar named Desire (1951): Set in the steamy squalor of New Orleans, the story of a neurotic woman's...

She was once a beautiful screen idol who fled Hollywood after a film premiere for fear that she had lost her allure. He was once a local golden boy who, through missed opportunities, found himself a cabana boy. This powerful production of the Tennessee Williams play incorporates the intense drama and steamy lust of two people determined to use each other to achieve their goals.