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Tennessee Williams

Arthur Miller at the center of a network of Ransom Center collections

January 9, 2018 - Megan Barnard

By Megan Barnard and Eric Colleary

Arthur Miller has long had a significant presence at the Ransom Center. In 1961 and 1962, Miller donated a collection of his manuscripts to the Center. [Read more…] about Arthur Miller at the center of a network of Ransom Center collections

Filed Under: Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: Arthur Miller, Eric Colleary, PEN, Stella Adler, Tennessee Williams

How a sun hat, an address book, and a character outline enhance Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

April 4, 2017 - Christine Lee

Gotham Book Mart photograph of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, from the Tennessee Williams literary file.

“It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity.”—Carson McCullers’s essay “The Nature of Loneliness”

[Read more…] about How a sun hat, an address book, and a character outline enhance Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts Tagged With: book club, Carson McCullers, Christine Lee, collections, Lisa Pulsifer, literature, manuscript, member, Membership, novels, Tennessee Williams, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Papers of actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson acquired

March 6, 2017 - Jennifer Tisdale

Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in the original Broadway production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1961). Unidentified photographer.

The Ransom Center has acquired the papers of actors, and husband and wife, Eli Wallach (1915–2014) and Anne Jackson (1925–2016). [Read more…] about Papers of actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson acquired

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Film, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, acquisition, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Me, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks, Anne Jackson, Arthur Miller, Early Stages, Eli Wallach, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Magnum Photos, method actors, Norman Mailer, OBIE award, Robert De Niro, Stella Adler, Tennessee Williams, the Bad, The Good, Tony Award, Walter Cronkite, Zachary Scott

Fellows Find: Painter and muse Tennessee Williams

June 28, 2016 - Simona Cupic

Tennesse Williams (American, 1911-1983) Untitled [portrait of Frank Merlot], not dated Oil on paper board 11 15/16 x 8 1/4 inches Signed T.W.

Tennessee Williams’s dramatic opus as well as his abundant correspondence have been minutely and well systematized, interpreted, and to a large extent published, during the decades before and after his death. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Painter and muse Tennessee Williams

Filed Under: Art, Research + Teaching Tagged With: 2014-2015 fellowships, Fellowships, Tennessee Williams

Notes from the Undergrad: An alternate ending for A Streetcar Named Desire

March 12, 2015 - Haley Williams

Haley Williams looks at archive materials with Professor Elon Lang. Photo by Pete Smith.

Haley Williams is a psychology/Plan I Honors senior in Dr. Elon Lang’s “Drama in the Archives” course. In the course, students used resources at the Harry Ransom Center to better understand plays, texts, dramatists, cultures from which they are drawn, and the archival process itself. Below, Williams shares her experience in the class. [Read more…] about Notes from the Undergrad: An alternate ending for A Streetcar Named Desire

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Research + Teaching, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: Audrey Wood, Drama in the Archives, Elon Lang, Notes from the Undergrad, Stella Adler, tenesse, Tennessee Williams, Undergraduate

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

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