• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Ransom Center Magazine

  • Articles
  • Sections
    • Art
    • Books + Manuscripts
    • Conservation
    • Exhibitions + Events
    • Film
    • Literature
    • Photography
    • Research + Teaching
    • Theatre + Performing Arts
  • Print Edition

Marlon Brando

Archive acquired of theatre and film actor Peter O’Toole

April 21, 2017 - Jennifer Tisdale

The Ransom Center has obtained the archive of British-Irish theatre and film actor Peter O’Toole (1932–2013). [Read more…] about Archive acquired of theatre and film actor Peter O’Toole

Filed Under: Film, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: acquisition, Acquisitions, Bristol Old Vic, British theater, Dustin Hoffman, Edmund Kean, Eric Colleary, film archive, Harold Pinter, Henry Irving, Jeremy Irons, John Gielgud, Kate O’Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Olivier, Lawrence of Arabia, Marlon Brando, Michael Blakemore, Michael Caine, National Theatre, Paul Newman, Performing Arts, Peter Hall, Peter O’Toole, Royal Shakespeare Company, Spike Milligan, Stella Adler; Robert De Niro; Edith Evans; Anne Jackson; George Bernard Shaw; Eli Wallach; Donald Wolfit, T. E. Lawrence, theater, Trevor Nunn

Fellows Find: Hear inside Stella Adler’s studio

April 5, 2016 - Scott Balcerzak

Stella Adler. This publicity photograph was probably taken in 1937, the year Stella's first film "Love On Toast" was released.

Scott Balcerzak is Associate Professor of film and literature at Northern Illinois University. He was supported by the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies and is currently writing a book on Stella Adler and male movie stars. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Hear inside Stella Adler’s studio

Filed Under: Film, Research + Teaching, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: acting, acting class, actors, Actors Studio’s, audio recording, Fellows Find, Lee Strasberg, Marlon Brando, plays, Robert De Niro, stage, Stella Adler, theater, Yiddish theater

Director draws upon Tennessee Williams collection for UT production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”

October 14, 2014 - Alicia Dietrich

A production of Tennessee Williams’s iconic play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on campus last week, and director Jess Hutchinson delved into the Tennessee Williams collection at the Ransom Center to guide some of her work on the play.

Set in New Orleans, William’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic centers around fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois as she seeks refuge in her sister’s home, only to clash with her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

Hutchinson, a third-year MFA Directing candidate at The University of Texas at Austin, was especially interested in digging deeper into the ending of the play, and in the Williams collection, she found multiple drafts of endings that were quite different from the published version.

“Williams tried on different ways to end Blanche’s story and handle her departure,” said Hutchinson, noting one discarded draft included Blanche being forced into a straightjacket. “And he chose this very specific, relatively controlled exit. That tells me a lot about what that moment is for her, how to stage it, how to think about where she is mentally and emotionally at the end of the play.”

Hutchinson worked with a group of undergraduate actors in the production, and exploring the drafts and ideas that Williams discarded helped guide how she and the actors approached the ending of the play.

“It focuses our range of choices in rehearsal,” said Hutchinson. “I feel that it would be disingenuous to the play for Blanche to be completely out of control at the end. She isn’t taken away in a straightjacket. In other drafts, she is. So that tells me Blanche still has some lucidity, that she retains the ability to make choices in that moment. The actress and I have looked for Blanche’s power in that scene, her control. Where can we see her consciously make decisions, and how do they fuel her departure with the doctor and matron? The actors and I have come to see that as a moment of recognition. Something in this doctor—this stranger—reaches a place in her that is whole and hasn’t been broken by this experience. And really, we got to complicate what some might write off as a moment of clear ‘insanity’ because I was able to see to see the other drafts that Williams tried first.”

As Hutchinson sifted through various early drafts of the play in the Williams collection, she was struck by how “not good” many of them were and how it was a great reminder that the creative process includes false starts and dead ends even for the most talented writers and artists.

“Something about seeing documents in a famous, iconic writer’s handwriting revealed that this person who wrote this thing that I love was closer to me than I might have thought,” she said. “He was a human and an artist and was trying to make something that spoke to the core experience of what it is to be a person—what it means to interact with other people in the world and have your heart broken and have moments of incredible joy. Just the humanity that’s present in these archival materials and what we can see in these drafts and false starts and moments of inspired genius made it possible, at least for me, to be bolder in my own work in the rehearsal room.”

A Streetcar Named Desire runs through October 19 at the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre at The University of Texas at Austin.

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Department of Theatre and Dance, dramaturgy, Elia Kazan, Jess Hutchinson, Manuscripts, Marlon Brando, Oscar G. Brockett Theatre, Research, Stanly Kowalski, Tennessee Williams, theater

Primary Sidebar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_kazYMjNM

Recent Posts

  • Celebrate with us in 2023
  • Photographer Laura Wilson delves into the lives of writers with stunning portraits
  • A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting
  • “Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

Tags

acquisition Alice's Adventures in Wonderland archive archives Art Books Cataloging Conservation Council on Library and Information Resources David Foster Wallace David O. Selznick digitization exhibition Exhibitions Fellows Find Fellowships Film Frank Reaugh Frank Reaugh: Landscapes of Texas and the American West Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez archive Gone with the Wind I have seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America Lewis Carroll literature Magnum Photos Manuscripts Meet the Staff Nobel Prize Norman Bel Geddes Norman Mailer Performing Arts Photography poetry preservation Publishing Research Robert De Niro Shakespeare theater The King James Bible: Its History and Influence The Making of Gone With The Wind Undergraduate What is Research? World War I

Archives

Before Footer

Sign up for eNews

Our monthly newsletter highlights news, exhibitions, and programs.

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

About

Ransom Center Magazine is an online and print publication sharing stories and news about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and the creative community surrounding it.

Copyright © 2023 Harry Ransom Center

Web Accessibility · Web Privacy