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 The Rose Tattoo tells the story of an Italian-American widow in Mississippi who has withdrawn from the world after her husband's death and expects her daughter to do the same.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 1955 American 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.
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.
Geraldine Sue Page was an American actress. With a career which spanned four decades across film, stage, and television, Page was the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four nominations for the Tony Award.
Camino Real is a 1953 play by Tennessee Williams. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, Williams directs the reader to use the Anglicized pronunciation "Cá-mino Réal." The play takes its title from its setting, alluded to El Camino Real, a dead-end place in a Spanish-speaking town surrounded by desert with sporadic transportation to the outside world. It is described by Williams as "nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in."
Mary Beth Peil is an American actress and soprano. She began her career as an opera singer in 1962 with the Goldovsky Opera Theater. In 1964 she won two major singing competitions, the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions; the latter of which earned her a contract with the Metropolitan Opera National Company with whom she performed in two seasons of national tours as a leading soprano from 1965 to 1967. She continued to perform in operas through the 1970s, notably creating the role of Alma in the world premiere of Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke at the Minnesota Opera in 1971. She later recorded that role for American television in 1982. With that same opera company she transitioned into musical theatre, performing the title role of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate in 1983. Later that year she joined the national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I as Anna Leonowens opposite Yul Brynner, and continued with that production when it opened on Broadway on January 7, 1985. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal.
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.
Betsy Palmer was an American actress known for her many film and Broadway roles, television guest-starring appearances, as a panelist on the game show I've Got a Secret, and later for playing the antagonist and mother of Jason Voorhees, Pamela Voorhees, in the first Friday the 13th film (1980).
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963) is a play in a prologue and six scenes, written by Tennessee Williams. He told John Gruen in 1965 that it was "the play that I worked on longest," and he premiered a version of it at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1962.
Edwin Sherin was an American-Canadian director and producer. He is best known as the director and executive producer of the NBC drama series Law & Order (1991–2005).
Small Craft Warnings is a two-act play by Tennessee Williams, written in late 1971 and early 1972. Williams expanded his two-scene play Confessional (1970), which had been published in his 1970 compilation Dragon Country, into this full-length play that centers on a motley group of people gathered in a seedy coastal bar in Southern California.
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.".
Lia Williams is an English actress and director, on stage, in film and television. She has had television roles in The Crown, in May 33rd (2004) for which she was nominated for a BAFTA, and in The Missing (2016), Kiri (2016), His Dark Materials (2019–2022) and The Capture (2019–2021).
Vieux Carré (1977) is a play by Tennessee Williams. Referring to the French term for the French Quarter, it is a semi-autobiographical play set in New Orleans. Although he began writing the play shortly after moving to New Orleans from St. Louis in 1938, Williams did not complete it for nearly 40 years.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is a one-act play in two scenes, written in 1968–69 by Tennessee Williams.
Summer and Smoke is a 1961 American drama film directed by Peter Glenville, and starring Laurence Harvey and Geraldine Page, with Rita Moreno, Una Merkel, John McIntire, Thomas Gomez, Pamela Tiffin, Malcolm Atterbury, Lee Patrick, and Earl Holliman. Based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name, it was adapted by James Poe and Meade Roberts.
Out Cry is a play by Tennessee Williams, his rewrite of The Two-Character Play which he had written in 1966 and which was staged in 1967 and published by New Directions Publications in 1969. Williams began rewriting the play after its publication, and Out Cry premiered at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago on July 8, 1971, with Eileen Herlie as Clare and Donald Madden as Felice. It debuted on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with a preview on February 28, 1973 and ran from March 1 to 10; the production was directed by Peter Glenville and starred Cara Duff-MacCormick as Clare and Michael York as Felice. Out Cry was published by New Directions in 1973 – by which time Williams had already rewritten the play into a third version, again titled The Two-Character Play, which New Directions published in 1975. In a 1971 interview Williams said of the first version of The Two-Character Play, "I wrote it when I was approaching a mental breakdown and rewrote it after my alleged recovery. I was thoroughly freaked out."
Margaret Phillips was a Welsh-born actress who was active on Broadway from the 1940s and in television in the 1950s and 1960s.
