Spring Storm is a three-act play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams. He began writing it when he was twenty-six years old, in 1937, while enrolled in the University of Iowa's drama school, and completed the play the following year.[1] But Williams's playwriting teachers had a negative response to Spring Storm, and it did not receive its first production until 1995 in Berkeley, California. In 2001, the play was produced at Willoughby Fine Arts Association in northeast Ohio, directed by Lenny Pinna. The European premiere took place at the Royal & Derngate Northampton on 15 October 2009, running alongside Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill. Both productions subsequently transferred to the Royal National Theatre in 2010 to the Cottesloe Theatre. Written and rewritten between 1937 and 1938, this full-length play depicts life and conflicted love in a small Mississippi Delta town during the Great Depression.[2] The Performing Arts Association of Notre Dame Australia (PAANDA) presented Spring Storm in 2018. The play was directed by Courtney McManus and Stage managed by Carmel Mohen.[3]
The play's original title was "April is the Cruelest Month," which was also the opening line from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." When Williams presented Spring Storm to his playwriting class in April 1938, he wrote in his diary that the class, "Read the final version of my second act and it was finally, quite, quite finally rejected by the class because of Heavenly's weakness as a character. Of course, it is very frightening and discouraging to work on a thing and then have it fall flat. There is still a chance they may be wrong-- all of them-- I have to cling to that chance...."[2]
Summary
PLACE
Port Tyler, a small Mississippi town on the Mississippi River
TIME
Spring, 1937
Act One:
A high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River on a spring afternoon
Act Two:
Scene 1 — The Critchfield home. Friday afternoon, the same week
Scene 2 — Same, that evening
Scene 3 — Same, three o'clock in the morning
Act Three:
Scene 1 — Lawn of the Lamphrey residence, the next evening, a party in full swing
Scene 2 — The Port Tyler Carnegie Public Library, the same evening
Scene 3 — The Critchfield home, late afternoon of the next day
Main characters
Dick Miles
A man considered of a lower class than the Critchfield family. Plans on leaving Mississippi with Heavenly to find construction work.
Heavenly Critchfield
An upper-class woman with family lineage, but her family has since run out of money. Does not want to leave Mississippi with Dick, although she has lost her virginity to him. Decides to marry Arthur Shannon who does have money, but fails and is left alone. The stage notes say that, "The important thing about Heavenly is that she is physically attractive. She has the natural and yet highly-developed charm that is characteristic of girls of pure southern stock. She is frankly sensuous without being coarse, fiery-tempered and yet disarmingly sweet. Her nature is confusing to herself and to all who know her. She wears a white skirt and sweater with a bright-colored scarf."[4]
Arthur Shannon
An upper-class man whose family still has money. Went to England for school after being bullied by Dick as a child. Has come back to Mississippi and plans on marrying Heavenly. After having sex with Hertha, he blames himself for her suicide and leaves town. Dan Isaac, editor of the published copy of Spring Storm, says that, "Williams designed [...] Arthur Shannon, as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Heterosexual."[5]
Plot
The play opens with the stage directions setting the scenery and state layout, as:
The curtain rises to reveal a high, windy bluff over the Mississippi River. It is called Lover's Leap. On its verge are two old trees whose leafless branches have been grotesquely twisted by the winds. At first the scene has a mellow quality, the sky flooded with deep amber light from the sunset. But as it progresses, it changes to one of stormy violence to form a dramatic contrast between Heavenly's scene and Hertha's. The atmospheric change is caused by the approach of the spring storm which breaks at the scene's culmination.[4]
Heavenly Critchfield and Dick Miles are arguing about Dick's career and their future as a couple. Dick wants to head to the river to find work, but Heavenly wants to stay near home and her family. Arthur Shannon, a childhood acquaintance of Dick and Heavenly returns to town and Heavenly begins to question her decision to stay with Dick.
Mrs. Critchfield and Lila, Heavenly's aunt, are found in the Critchfield home's living room discussing what's happened to the other young women who chose not to marry young or made the wrong decision; they're all lonely and poor now. Mrs. Critchfield wants Heavenly to marry Arthur Shannon for his wealth and family name. While the Critchfields have a strong familial name, they do not have the wealth that the Shannons have.
Arthur comes to the Critchfields' home to have a date with Heavenly. The pair do not see eye to eye and talk around each other as neither have any common interests. After Arthur refuses to sleep with Heavenly, Heavenly runs away to find Dick leaving Mrs. Critchfield to lie to Arthur about Heavenly's whereabouts.
Arthur and Heavenly try to speak to each other in private but are never afforded time alone. The pair gives up, leaving Arthur to tend to an intoxicated Hertha, another local girl of the same age. After causing a scene in the library in front of Miss Schlagmann, who never married, Arthur and Hertha fight, leading to the murder of Hertha.
Heavenly returned home after discovering that Dick left town without her, only to have Arthur come and confess the murder, leaving Heavenly single with no prospects.
Notes
↑ Williams, Tennessee. Plays 1937–1955. Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch, eds. New York: Library of America, 2000, p. 1029. ISBN978-1-883011-86-4
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.
The Rose Tattoo is a three-act play written by Tennessee Williams in 1949 and 1950; after its Chicago premiere on December 29, 1950, he made further revisions to the play for its Broadway premiere on February 2, 1951, and its publication by New Directions the following month. A film adaptation was released in 1955. The Rose Tattoo tells the story of an Italian-American widow in Mississippi who has withdrawn from the world after her husband's death and expects her daughter to do the same.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a three-act play written 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, the play 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.
Baby Doll is a 1956 American black comedy film directed by Elia Kazan and starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach. It was produced by Kazan and Tennessee Williams, and adapted by Williams from his own one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1955). The plot focuses on a feud between two rival cotton gin owners in rural Mississippi.
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.
Sweet Bird of Youth is a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams which tells the story of a gigolo and drifter, Chance Wayne, who returns to his home town as the companion of a faded movie star, Alexandra del Lago, whom he hopes to use to help him break into the movies. The main reason for his homecoming is to get back what he had in his youth: primarily, his old girlfriend, whose father had run him out of town years before. The play was written for Tallulah Bankhead, a good friend of Williams.
The Night of the Iguana is a stage play written by American author Tennessee Williams. It is based on his 1948 short story. In 1959, Williams staged it as a one-act play, and over the next two years he developed it into a full-length play, producing two different versions in 1959 and 1960, and then arriving at the three-act version that premiered on Broadway in 1961. Two film adaptations have been made: The Oscar-winning 1964 film directed by John Huston and starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr, and a 2000 Croatian production.
Blanche DuBois is a fictional character in Tennessee Williams' 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire. The character was written for Tallulah Bankhead and made popular to later audiences with Elia Kazan's 1951 film adaptation of Williams' play; A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando.
Elizabeth White is an English actress. She grew up in Plymouth and attended Plymstock School from 1989 until 1994. She is known for portraying roles of Annie Cartwright in the BBC One drama series Life on Mars (2006–2007), and Emma Keane in the Channel 4 school-based drama series Ackley Bridge (2017–2019).
The Colleen Bawn, or The Brides of Garryowen is a melodramatic play written by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. It was first performed at Laura Keene's Theatre, New York, on 27 March 1860 with Laura Keene playing Anne Chute and Boucicault playing Myles na Coppaleen. It was most recently performed in Dublin at the Project Arts Centre in July and August 2010 and in Belfast by Bruiser Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre in April 2018. Several film versions have also been made.
St. Louis Woman is a 1946 American musical by Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The musical opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on March 30, 1946, and ran for 113 performances. The original cast included Robert Pope (Badfoot), Harold Nicholas, Fayard Nicholas (Barney), June Hawkins (Lilli), Pearl Bailey (Butterfly), Ruby Hill, Rex Ingram, and Milton J. Williams (Mississippi). The production's scenic designer and costume designer was Lemuel Ayers. It is based upon the novel God Sends Sunday by African-American writer Arna Bontemps.
Not About Nightingales is a three-act play by Tennessee Williams. He wrote the play late in 1938, after reading in a newspaper about striking inmates of a Holmesburg, Pennsylvania prison in August 1938, who had been placed in "an isolation unit lined with radiators, where four died from temperatures approaching 150 degrees.".
A House Not Meant to Stand is the last play written by Tennessee Williams. It was produced during the 1981–82 season at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago by Gregory Mosher and published for the first time in 2008 by New Directions. with a foreword by Gregory Mosher and an Introduction by Thomas Keith.
I Met My Love Again is a 1938 American romantic drama film distributed by United Artists, directed by Joshua Logan, Arthur Ripley and George Cukor. The screenplay was written by David Hertz, based on the novel Summer Lightning by Allene Corliss. The film stars Joan Bennett and Henry Fonda.
Sweet Bird of Youth is a 1962 American drama film starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Madeleine Sherwood, Ed Begley, Rip Torn and Mildred Dunnock. Based on the 1959 play of the same name by Tennessee Williams, it focuses on the relationship between a drifter and a faded movie star. The film was adapted and directed by Richard Brooks.
And The Soul Shall Dance is Wakako Yamauchi's first full-length play. Written in 1977, the story involves a young Japanese American girl and her parents as they struggle to live in a white America during The Great Depression. And The Soul Shall Dance grapples with many of the issues facing Japanese Americans in America such as assimilation, immigration, social, economic and political status, and simply surviving in the cruelties of the "California Dream" era.
Candles to the Sun was the first full-length play written by Tennessee Williams to be produced. In 1939 Candles to the Sun was one of 4 one-act plays he submitted to the New York Group Theatres' American play contest, winning the $100 prize. The play is set in the Red Hills area of Alabama in a coal mining town. The story deals with the struggle of the miners to form a union while also highlighting the difficult lives of their families. The St Louis Star-Times critic Reed Hynds described the play as "an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set out in human and dramatic terms." It was premiered on March 18, 1937 by The Mummers, a socially aware and semi-professional theatre troupe in St. Louis, Missouri where it opened to rave reviews.
John Waldhorn Gassner was a Hungarian-born American theatre historian, critic, educator, and anthologist.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
