Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed". Wilson helped to advance the off-off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from off-off-Broadway to off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play written by Tennessee Williams and first performed on Broadway on December 3, 1947. The play dramatizes the experiences of Blanche DuBois, a former Southern belle who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her once-prosperous situation to move into a shabby apartment in New Orleans rented by her younger sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley.
Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 American three-act play by Tennessee Williams. The play, an adaptation of his 1952 short story "Three Players of a Summer Game", was written between 1953 and 1955. One of Williams's more famous works and his personal favorite, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the "Cat", Brick's wife.
Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, written in New York in 1957. It opened off Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of a double bill with another of Williams' one-acts, Something Unspoken. The presentation of the two plays was given the overall title Garden District, but Suddenly Last Summer is now more often performed alone. Williams said he thought the play "perhaps the most poetic" he had written, and Harold Bloom ranks it among the best examples of the playwright's lyricism.
Summer and Smoke is a two-part, thirteen-scene play by Tennessee Williams, completed in 1948. He began working on the play in 1945 as Chart of Anatomy, derived from his short stories "Oriflamme" and the then-work-in-progress "Yellow Bird". The phrase "summer and smoke" probably comes from the Hart Crane poem "Emblems of Conduct" in the 1926 collection White Buildings. After a disappointing Broadway run in 1948, the play was a hit Off-Broadway in 1952. Williams continued to revise Summer and Smoke in the 1950s, and in 1964 he rewrote the play as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Keir Atwood Dullea is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of astronaut David Bowman in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and its 1984 sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. His other film roles include David and Lisa (1962), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and Black Christmas (1974). Dullea studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City. He has also performed on stage in New York City and in regional theaters; he has said that, despite being more recognized for his film work, he prefers the stage.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister. In writing the play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller.
"Music Box Dancer" is an instrumental piece by Canadian musician Frank Mills that was an international hit in the late 1970s. It features an arpeggiated piano theme in C-sharp major designed to resemble a music box, accompanied by other instruments playing a counterpoint melody as well as a wordless chorus. Most modern piano music sheets have the song in the key of C major.
A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by James Agee. It was based on events which occurred to Agee in 1915, when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car crash.
The Zoo Story is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee. His first play, it was written in 1958 and completed in just three weeks. The play explores themes of isolation, loneliness, miscommunication as anathematization, social disparity and dehumanization in a materialistic world. Today, professional theatre companies can produce The Zoo Story either as a part of Edward Albee's at Home at the Zoo, or as a standalone play. Its prequel, Homelife, written in 2007, however, can only be produced as a part of Edward Albee's at Home at the Zoo.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel is a two-act play written in 1979–80 by Tennessee Williams concerning the relationship between novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. A critical and commercial failure, it was Williams' last play to debut on Broadway during his lifetime. The play takes place over a one-day visit Scott pays the institutionalized Zelda at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, with a series of flashbacks to their marriage in the twenties. Williams began work in 1976 on what he envisioned as a "long play" about the Fitzgeralds, and had Geraldine Page in mind to play Zelda from the start.
"Elvira" is a song written and originally recorded by Dallas Frazier in 1966 on his album of the same name. Though a minor hit for Frazier at the time of release, the song became a bigger and much more famous country and pop hit by the Oak Ridge Boys in 1981. "Elvira" is now considered one of the Oak Ridge Boys' signature songs.
Ford John Kiernan is a Scottish actor, comedian and writer. He is best known for his work with Greg Hemphill on the BBC Scotland sketch comedy series Chewin' the Fat (1999–2005) and the sitcom Still Game. He also starred as Archie Henderson in Dear Green Place (2007–2008) and as Colin Holliday in Happy Hollidays (2009).
The Two-Character Play is an American play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in London at the Hampstead Theatre in December 1967. Williams himself had great affection for the play, and described it as follows:
Sondheim on Sondheim is a musical revue consisting of music and lyrics written by Stephen Sondheim for his many shows. It is conceived and directed by James Lapine. The revue had a limited run on Broadway in 2010.
What If You Died Tomorrow? is a 1973 play written by David Williamson. It was commissioned by the Old Tote Theatre Company for its first drama season at the new Sydney Opera House.
Kip Williams is an Australian theatre and opera director. Williams is the current Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company. His appointment at age 30 made him the youngest artistic director in the company's history.
