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Kate Chopin Introduction

Kate ChopinKatherine O’Flaherty Chopin was born on February 8, 1851, in St. Louis, Missouri. The O’Flahertys were a wealthy, Catholic family. Her father founded the Pacific Railroad, but he died when Kate was four. Kate and her siblings were raised by their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. These women proved to be strong role models. They encouraged Kate’s love of reading and storytelling. Kate was an average student at the convent school she attended. After her graduation, she became one of the belles of fashionable St. Louis society. She met Oscar Chopin, a wealthy cotton factor, married him after knowing him a year, and moved to New Orleans.

Oscar Chopin’s circle was the tight-knit French Creole community. Kate led a demanding social and domestic life because of her status. Unusually for the time, her husband was supportive of her independence and intelligence, and her storytelling gifts and her knowledge of French, English, and Creole made her a keen observer of  the local culture. She had much to draw from. Her husband’s business gave him prominence in the Creole community, and New Orleans was a city full of diversions, including horse racing, theater, music (Kate was an accomplished pianist herself), and, of course, Mardi Gras. norlhouseThe Chopins lived in three different houses in New Orleans; this one on Louisiana Avenue was the last. Like many wealthy families, they traveled by boat out of the city to one of the many small Gulf islands to vacation during the summer months. All of these experiences feature in Chopin’s stories and novels.

Oscar’s business failed in 1879. The family moved to their plantation in Natchitoches Parish near the small town of Cloutierville, which strengthened Kate’s connection to the Creole community and gave her more material to draw from. Malaria claimed Oscar’s life in 1880 at the age of 31. Kate moved back to St. Louis with their six children to draw support from her family and place the children in better schools than Cloutierville could provide. The loss of her mother a short time later added to her grief. A family physician suggested writing as an outlet, and Chopin’s literary career was born.

Chopin published her first story in the St. Louis Dispatch. Soon after, her first novel, At Fault, was published privately. Her prolific output over the next fifteen years includes nearly a hundred short stories for adults and children alike. The most famous of these, like “A No-Account Creole,” “Desirée’s Baby,” “The Story of an Hour,” and “A Pair of Silk Stockings” are set in the Creole community and explore its traditions and expectations, especially of the women concerned. Her story collections Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie were nearly universally praised.

The publication of The Awakening in 1899, however, was a different story. Through its heroine, Edna Pontellier, The Awakening gave Chopin’s themes of independence, art, and possibility free rein. Edna’s decisions go against the expectations for women of the time. A few critics praised the novel’s artistry, but most were very negative, calling the book “morbid,” “unpleasant,” “unhealthy,” “sordid,” “poison.” Novelist Willa Cather labeled it trite and sordid. The overall view was that Edna’s decisions, which modern audiences view quite differently, as scandalous and unfeminine. Chopin was ostracized as a result. Her third story collection was refused by its publisher. The Awakening was removed from libraries for its scandalous content. Chopin herself never got over it; her writing output slowed to the point of cessation. Chopin bought a season ticket to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and visited on August 20, an unusually hot day. She took to her bed complaining of a severe headache that evening and lapsed into unconsciousness. Two days later, Chopin died, probably from a brain hemorrhage.

Awakening CoverIn 1969 Norwegian critic Per Seyersted wrote that Kate Chopin “broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.”

Chopin did not consider herself a feminist, but her themes of independence and women’s self-realization are stirrings of a movement that would resound throughout the twentieth century. She is now considered one of the essential authors of American literature.

Includes material from the Biography page of the Kate Chopin International Society.

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Many Faces of Othello

Othello_Relating_His_Adventures_to_Desdemona

On November 1, 1604, Master of Revels Edmund Tilney notes that a play titled The Moor of Venice was performed at Whitehall Palace for King James I. In the four hundred-plus years since, Othello has become one of the best-known and regarded of Shakespeare’s plays. It has also presented a number of questions regarding its central character, Othello the Moor.

During the Elizabethan era, the word “Moor” could have meant several things. Scholar Ben Arogundade notes that “[‘Moor’] was first used to describe the natives of Mauretania — the region of North Africa which today corresponds to Morocco and Algeria. It was later applied to people of Berber and Arab origin, who conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula — the area now known as Spain and Portugal — for nearly eight centuries. From the Middle Ages onwards the Moors were commonly regarded as black Africans, and the word was used alongside the terms ‘negro,’ ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Blackamoor’ as a racial identifier.

othello arabAt the time of performance, London audiences would have been familiar with a man named Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, who arrived in 1600 as an ambassador of the Sa’adian ruler of Morocco, Mulay Ahmed al-Mansur. England’s various alliances with the countries of North Africa familiarized the Elizabethan world with their traditions. Islamic and Muslim characters appeared in plays as early as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in 1587, and in more than sixty plays from the next ten years, characters described with words like “Moors,” “Saracens,” “Turks,” and “Persians” appeared, including several of Shakespeare’s own. So it is not without historical or literary precedent that some critics believe that the character of Othello is intended to be a North African man of Arab descent.

The far more common interpretation, however, is for Othello to be viewed as a sub-Saharan African with black features. It is this portrayal that is most commonly found in modern productions of the play. From Shakespeare’s time until the early 1800s, this meant that the actor tackling the role would have played it in blackface makeup.
aldridge

It wasn’t until 1826 that Othello was finally played by a black performer: American actor Ira Aldridge. Aldridge emigrated to London at age 17 to pursue his acting career. But his groundbreaking performance wasn’t without criticism. The 1933 performance in Covent Garden was criticized by the paper The Anthenaeum because of the startling new reality of Ellen Tree, the white actress playing Desdemona, being manhandled by Aldridge. And although Aldridge became quite famous in London and abroad, it took nearly a hundred years before another black actor became attached to the role. According to writer Samantha Ellis, “In 1825, the pro-slavery lobby had closed [Aldridge’s] production and the Times‘s critic had written: ‘Owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English.’ No wonder it took almost a century for another black actor to brave the part.”


robesonPerhaps the best-known Othello in the United States is the renowned actor Paul Robeson. The son of an escaped slave, Robeson had built an international reputation not only from his role in the musical Show Boat, but as an athlete and an attorney. Robeson had a commanding physical presence that suited the role perfectly, but his casting against the young British actress Peggy Ashcroft in 1930 was not without controversy. Technical issues like poor staging and difficult acoustics made performing difficult. But no one argued with the power of Robeson’s performance. Ivor Brown, the critic for The Observer, described Robeson as “… an oak…a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.” Audiences at the premiere gave Robeson twenty curtain calls. But, given the societal segregation of the time, Robeson had detractors as well who criticized everything from his interpretation of the role to how he pronounced the words of Shakespeare’s text. Samantha Ellis writes:

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, WA Darlington felt that Robeson was a “really memorable” Othello precisely because he was black: “By reason of his race Mr Robeson is able to surmount the difficulties which English actors generally find in the part.” While other Othellos had seemed illogically jealous, Robeson’s jealousy seemed real, because: “Mr Robeson…comes of a race whose characteristic is to keep control of its passions only to a point, and after that point to throw control to the winds.” It was a “fine” performance and “the much-debated question whether Shakespeare meant Othello to be a negro or an Arab can be left to the professors.” Baughan, in contrast, stated baldly: “I agree with Coleridge that Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but as a high and chivalrous Moorish chief.”

Only the Express‘s critic seemed to think the casting of a black actor was a historic event. He reported overhearing people saying “Why should a black actor be allowed to kiss a white actress?” and his review, subtitled “Coloured Audience in the Stalls,” concluded that Robeson had “triumphed as a negro Moor, black, swarthy, muscular, a real man of deep colour.”

Robeson himself enjoyed playing Othello, and it became his signature role for the remainder of his career. As Ellis notes, “For Robeson, it was more than just a part: it was, as he once said, ‘killing two birds with one stone. I’m acting and I’m talking for the negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.'”

olivier smithDespite the positive reception of an African-American actor in the role, the Oscar-nominated 1965 production (the highest number for a Shakespeare film in history) starring Sir Laurence Olivier and a very young Dame Maggie Smith as Desdemona reverted to type: The famous English actor played the role in makeup. This was the first cinematic Othello to be shot using color film, and Oliver was as meticulous about that as he was about developing the physical character through a deep voice and a special walk. He stated in an interview with Life magazine in 1964 that, “The whole [makeup] will be in the lips and the colour. I’ve been looking at Negroes lips every time I see them on the train or anywhere, and actually, their lips seems black or blueberry-coloured, really, rather than red. But of course the variations are enormous. I’ll just use a little tiny touch of lake and a lot more brown and a little mauve.”

But as well-received as the production was by the Oscar crowd, its release during the height of the Civil Rights Movement dampened its reception with audiences. Arongundade remarks that “…[Olivier’s] blackface portrayal troubled American critics when the film opened there in 1966…sensitivities about black identity were at their height, and many saw Olivier’s chosen aesthetic as outdated.”

othello-james-earl-jonesPerhaps the pushback against the Olivier production opened the door for the now generally-accepted casting of an African-American actor in the role. Famous Othellos of the last several decades include theater luminaries like James Earl Jones, Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Fishburne in a stellar 1995 production starring Kenneth Branagh as Iago and French actress Irene Jacob as Desdemona, and young actor Mekhi Phifer in “O,” a contemporary version that transforms the military conflict into a basketball rivalry set in a high school. Other famous actors who have played Othello include Orson Welles, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Eamonn Walker in a 2001 TV movie co-starring Christopher Eccleston (best known as the ninth Doctor Who) as Iago, which transplants the action from Venice and Cyprus to a London police station.
othello reverse

Modern theater companies wishing to explore the themes of Othello in new ways have explored variant casting. A 1997 production of the play in Baltimore starred Patrick Stewart as Othello, the lone white actor in a racially-flipped cast in which every other actor was African-American. Stewart, pictured here with Patrice Johnson as Desdemona, explained, “One of my hopes for this production is that it will continue to say what a conventional production of Othello would say about racism and prejudice… To replace the black outsider with a white man in a black society will, I hope, encourage a much broader view of the fundamentals of racism.” A review in the Baltimore Sun said, “It is a tribute to the concept as well as Stewart’s performance that the initial awkwardness falls away as early as his second scene…Stewart, who possesses a calm assuredness at the start of the play, lets the theater’s predominantly white audience experience how completely foreign Othello must have felt in a society where he was viewed as the outsider.”

wolff othelloSpeaking of foreign: A German production at the Deutsches Theatre in 2001 pushed the boundaries of the character by not only casting a white actor as Othello, but a female one. This more avant-garde production starring actress Susanne Wolff sees Wolff utter her lines in varying costumes progressing from a simple black-and-white shirt and pants ensemble to—believe it or not—a gorilla suit intended to show Othello’s shift from loving partner to a more animalistic creature bent on vengeance. Blogger/reviewer Andrew Haydon says about the production, “Okay, there are two headlines to choose from here: 1) I’ve just seen the best production of Othello I’ve ever seen. 2) I’ve just seen a production of Othello in which Othello is played by a white woman in a gorilla costume. My job, then, is to explain how (2) manages to be (1).”

Sources:
Ben Arungodade, “What Was Othello’s Race?” and “The 18 Most Memorable Othello Actors Performances
Baltimore Sun review of Sir Patrick Stewart Othello
Jerry Brotton, “Is This the Real Model for Othello?
Samantha Ellis, “Paul Robeson in Othello, Savoy Theatre, 1930
Emily Anne Gibson, “The Face of Othello
Andrew Haydon, “Othello – Deutsches Theatre

Othello Relating His Adventures to Desdemona by Carl Ludwig Friedrich Becker, 1880.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

midsummerShakespeare borrowed from novels, older plays, history, mythology, and other sources. His plays are typically divided into three groups: histories, comedies, and tragedies. Some scholars include his later plays, like Cymbeline and The Tempest, in a group called the romances. Shakespeare comedies exemplify various types: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives of Windsor (farce); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night (romantic comedies); All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida (dark comedies).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first performed about 1594, is where Shakespeare as an artist begins to emerge. The play combines a number of comedic elements, from the farcical actions of the “rude mechanicals” and their play-within-a-play to the rich language of the lovers, elevating the comedy into something different. The mystery of the forest setting and the various moods provide a base for future comedies, where more finely drawn and developed characters like Rosalind of As You Like It, Portia and Shylock of The Merchant of Venice, and the twins Sebastian and Olivia of Twelfth Night take important roles.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a good way to kick off our study of Shakespeare because within its boundaries, we see many Shakespearean play characteristics brought to life, like the parallel worlds of the city and the forest, mirrored characters like Theseus/Hippolyta and Oberon/Titania, and the contrasts between upper- and lower-class characters. These differences are found primarily in language level and style; the rulers and lovers speak poetically and beautifully, but the rustics from the lower classes have speech that is rougher and less rhythmic. Humor is found in wit (upper), farce (upper and lower), and downright bawdy language (lower). These shadings highlight the appeal that Shakespeare’s works had for all levels of the theater-mad Elizabethan society.

As you read, be on the lookout for a few of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, such as “The course of true love never did run smooth” and “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

As with most Shakespeare plays, filmed versions abound. Of special note are the 1968 Peter Hall-directed version (young and gorgeous Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren play Helena and Hermia, with the inimitable Judi Dench as Titania) and the 1999 Michael Hoffman production starring Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfieffer, Rupert Everett, and Stanley Tucci in a memorable performance as Puck. The 2002 film A Midsummer Night’s Rave transports elements from the plot and several characters into L.A.’s rave scene—obviously not a true version of the play, but true to the spirit of the play, Shakespeare’s most fanciful comedy.

The full text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be found here.
A PDF copy of the text may be found here.

Illustration: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton

Brockett, Oscar G. The Theatre: An Introduction, Historical Edition. New York: Holt, 1979.
Mordden, Ethan. The Fireside Companion to the Theatre. New York: Fireside, 1988.

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A Middle-Class Wife

This essay appeared in the January 20, 1917 edition of The New Republic. Although its origins come some twenty years after the publication of The Awakening, many of the sentiments could have been uttered by Edna Pontellier. Consider the context and tone of the remarks to understand more about Edna’s state of mind.

A Middle-Class Wife
Alice Austin White

I HAVE two babies; I hope they may never know how warmly at this moment I hate them. I have a husband; we were married because we were very much in love-and him I hate too. I have a large stock of relatives, and them I hate with the heart and should hate with the hand if I had not the misfortune to be well brought up. This emotion of mine, especially in connection with my spouse and offspring, is, up to the present, local and temporary; indeed I think it will not grow into a permanent hatred, but will gradually assume two peculiar forms: toward my children a passionate and slavish devotion, which will make me resent my daughters-in-law; and toward my husband regards, reasonably kind, which will be reciprocated. My feeling toward my relatives, on the other hand, is becoming quite, quite fixed.

It is all the fault of the children. I wanted children very much; I am fond of children, mentally and physically; and the sheer normality of having them I rejoice in. Furthermore, having been an only child myself, I wanted my children close together so that they might enjoy one another all the way up. I seemed to think I could have babies as easily as a geranium has red blossoms. But I find they commonly come rather hard and that I am not the only woman who for months after a baby is born has an aching body and a dull mind and a defective sense of humor. During this period one’s husband is very fatherly toward one, and one begins to feel the small asp of hate nipping at one’s heart.

The semi-invalidated stage that I have gone through with each of my babies is well past: I am normally sturdy—I have to be. I shall not tell over the tale of the things there are to do, cooking and mending and washing and baby-tending. It happens that I relate my daily household misadventures in a way diverting to my relatives, and they think I dote on housework. A really model wife and mother, say my kin; so unexpected, they say, considering her education, and all. And when I crawl to bed at half past eight, no thought save detail of housework and child-rearing has found place in my mind all day; I have done no reading save snips from a book propped against the sink faucets while I washed dishes; and I have simply heard, not shared even mentally such stimulating conversation as my husband brings home to dinner.

I know house and children ought not to take all my day and all my strength. If I had had special training in domestic science and child-psychology and nursing I should doubtless be able to do my work in less time and with far less effort. But in college and university I flew straight in the face of providence, which is a war-name of advising relatives, and worked at mathematics, while in the spare time which I might have devoted to stray courses in home economics as a sop to the gods, I took ‘cello. Furthermore, I am glad of it. If I were to have a vacation tomorrow and a financial windfall, I should take two courses in mathematics at the university, and a ‘cello lesson a week, and bask in it as my sister-in-law does in chiffon underwear.

You ought to have help, say my relatives, and I add a verse to my hymn of hate for them. Among the qualities for which I love my husband are generosity, sensitiveness, modesty and conscientiousness, and I take it each of these characteristics has lower money-making value than the others. Some day when we have got middle-aged, we shall have the salary we need now; and just about that time our relatives will die and leave us money we could get on without. If I happened to be male instead of female, which God forfend, could double the family income by teaching at the university, but the university does not yet see its way to employing women on its teaching staff, and I therefore scrub the square of my kitchen floor instead.

The truth is, however, that it is not a floor-scrubber and dishwasher that I desire. I could get along with that work or leave it happily undone. It is the care of two children under three that concerns me. It is unremitting and nerve-tearing, and the day in and day out of it is under mining mercilessly my ability to be lovable and to love. Furthermore, I have not the qualifications that would justify entrusting me with sole responsibility for the growth of human beings. Maternal instinct I have in normal amount; I could be trusted to rescue my infants from a burning building, but that is a very different matter from knowing what to do with twenty-four hours’ worth of bodily and mental development every day. I do not want a nursemaid; I have no training for my job, but I have an occasional vagrant idea, and it does not appeal to me to exchange my services to my offspring for those of a hand-maiden with neither training nor ideas. The helper for me should be a trained psychologist, a child-lover, to be sure, but a child-lover with expert knowledge of the needs of growing minds. She should have also training in the treatment of the smaller physical ailments of children. She ought to cost me two thousand dollars a year, but in the present state of women’s wages I have no doubt I could get her for a thousand. And I want her only half the day-five hundred dollars. Our income is sixteen hundred.

Such a woman as I have in mind, however, take charge of a very appreciable number of children along with my important two. For five or six hours a day she could take care of a nursery-full, and still have time for life and love; while the sigh of relief that a mother breathes when she ties her son’s Windsor under his chin and posts him off to school would be breathed five years earlier. Indeed she might enjoy her children, and the sigh be dispensed with. Four hours a day of freedom for us educated, reasonably intelligent, good-stock, middle-class mothers—! The possibilities are limitless. We might even have more children.

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Femme de l’Intériure: The Creole Woman

angelAs the critic Per Seyersted phrases it, Kate Chopin “broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.” (The Kate Chopin International Society)

Edna Pontellier reveals this dynamic throughout The Awakening. The women around her represent two potential choices for her development. But in order to understand her journey, we have to understand her starting point. Victorian society in the United States demanded rigid, defined roles for both men and women. The ideal Victorian woman was exemplified by the English poet Coventry Patmore”s 1854 narrative poem “The Angel in the House.” The paragon of female virtue described in the poem, who Patmore based on his own wife, is a creature whose feminine beauty, virtue, attention to family, and devotion to husband set her apart from mere mortals (these expectations carried with them a suppressive, near overwhelming demand for perfection which few women could hope to maintain). When you add on the cultural expectations of New Orleans, you can see why change, for Edna, is a gradual process.

These expectations are laid out beautifully in the following 1901 excerpt from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, published in 1901 by the New Orleans Picayune, one of the three leading newspapers in the latter part of the 19th century. The Picayune was the first Southern daily to be published by a woman, Eliza Poitevent Nicholson, who took over the paper after the death of her husband in 1876.

The Creole mother eminently merits the term that was bestowed upon her long ago by a sweet Louisiana poet, and which has become a household word in the French Quarter, Femme de l’Intérieure. These words indicate her life, that beautiful, interior, hidden home life, not given to solving the many vexing questions of woman suffrage and woman’s rights, that agitate the minds of many of the sex in our day, for she is no aggressive competitor in the ranks and callings of men; she is indeed the “Femme de l’Intérieure”, the queen of the hearth and home. She holds the home as woman’s supreme sphere, her ideal realm, where Love is her throne, a throne reared in the hearts of her husband and children, and of which the attendant ministers are Purity, Truth and Fidelity. She is cultured, gracious, refined, as able to grace the parlor as she is capable of presiding in the kitchen; thoroughly conversant with all the leading topics of the day, with which she familiarizes herself, not that she may be regarded simply as a brilliant woman, not for the sake of argumentative discourse on public platforms, but for her own inner satisfaction and pleasure, and that she may be the fitting companion of her husband, the pleasing, intelligent confidant of her children, the wise and earnest director of their moral and intellectual aspirations and ambitions. And so her husband learns to look to his home during the weary working hours of the day as to a beacon star, for he knows that within bloom the fairest flowers of modest worth; the violet and the rose are there, the chrysanthemum and the lily, and those that bloom in God’s own garden shed not a sweeter fragrance than these heavenly exotics around the hearth of the true Creole home…

 

Essentially, Edna Pontellier has two choices for her life, as characterized by her two closest friends.

The Mother-Woman
Adèle Ratignolle
(Traditional)

cassatt

Young Mother and Two Children
by Mary Cassatt, 1905

Secure
Good mother
Inner peace
Beautiful

but…

Repressed by society
Chained to husband
Child bearer

 

The Artist-Woman
Mademoiselle Reisz
(Non-traditional)

piano

Girl at the Piano
by Theodore Robinson, 1887

Devoted musician
Independent

but…

Bitter and unfriendly
Scorned by society

Victorian family painting at top: “The Golden Butterfly – The Harvey Family.” John Henry Frederick Bacon (1868-1914)

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The Glass Menagerie Interview

 

Since its debut in 1945, The Glass Menagerie has been revived on Broadway seven times, in 1965, 1975, 1983, 1994, 2005, 2013, and most recently in 2017. PBS commentator Charlie Rose featured the 2013 revival cast of The Glass Menagerie on his October 4, 2013 show, including actors Cherry Jones (Amanda), Zachary Quinto (Tom), Celia Keenan-Bolger (Laura), and Brian J. Smith (Jim). The production received a total of seven 2014 Tony Award nominations for the run, including Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Jones), Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play (Smith), Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play (Keenan-Bolger), Best Scenic Design of a Play, Best Lighting Design of a Play (winner), and Best Direction of a Play. The production was also nominated for three Drama Desk Awards.

In the interview, the actors discuss Williams’ text, their approach to the roles, and the enduring appeal of The Glass Menagerie in American theater.

The most recent revival premiered in March, 2017, starring Sally Field as Amanda, Joe Mantello as Tom, and Finn Wittrock as Jim. The stripped-down production also featured actress Madison Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy, as Laura, prompting a wider discussion of disability in the theater. In the interview below, Sally Field discusses the role of Amanda and its importance in American theater history.

Madison Ferris was featured in a March 23 article in People magazine discussing the new production of The Glass Menagerie and how she pursues her ambitions despite the challenges her MS creates for her. Read the article, which includes a video interview, here.

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Tennessee Williams Intro

tennessee_williams3Playwright Tennessee Williams is widely considered one of the twentieth century’s leading lights of American literature. Born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi as Thomas Lanier Williams, Tennessee Williams was the middle of three children. His father was a salesman who much preferred life on the road to family life; as a result, Williams was raised primarily by his mother. His early years in Mississippi were relatively carefree. When Williams was seven, the family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, a change reflecting a difference in the family’s fortunes that Williams understood but resented. He attended college briefly in Missouri until his father withdrew him and demanded he come home and get a job. Williams fell into a depression during this time working at a shoe factory. Although he made time after work to continue his writing, eventually the stress proved too much, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. After recovery he left home, finished college at the University of Iowa, and changed his name to Tennessee Williams.

toulouseWilliams famously quipped, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” He chose New Orleans as his home, and his work is infused with places and situations that could only have been spawned from the Crescent City’s mix of class, jazz, decadence, and alcohol. He moved into an apartment at 722 Toulouse Street and began working on the plays which would make him famous. The first was a flop. The second, the highly autobiographical The Glass Menagerie, premiered in 1945 to nearly universal acclaim. The character of Amanda Wingfield exerts the same kind of strong influence on her children Tom and Laura that Edwina Williams did on Tennessee, his sister Rose, and their brother Dakin. Fragile, crippled Laura Wingfield is based in no small part on Rose Williams, who possibly suffered from schizophrenia and who was subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 at their mother’s choice.

Oscar Brockett explains that

By the late 1940s, theatrical realism, the faithful reproduction of real life as accurately as possible on the stage, had begun to modify. Simplification, suggestion, and distortion, borrowed from other artistic movements of the early 20th century, made their way onto stage sets and into character portrayals. Stage settings became more suggestive of locales and functions. Play structures changed as well, often shifting from formal acts into more fluid collections of scenes.

Tennessee Williams’  work employs many of these theatrical devices. Symbolism is found in all of his plays, and his play titles usually indicate some deeper symbolic meaning. Normally, Williams settings are fragmentary and suggestive: consider the fire escapes, alleys, and rooms in The Glass Menagerie that require no scene changes. The use of time is fluid.

Against these suggested backdrops, though, are very lifelike characters dealing with conflicts that represent larger human issues. As Brockett puts it, “…spiritual and material drives are almost always at odds and the resolution of a dramatic action depends on how well the characters can reconcile the demaonds of these two sides of human nature.” Juxtaposition is also evident in how he reveals comic and serious elements. Amanda, for example, can be ridiculous one minute, admirable the next. Williams explores human limitations alongside their aspirations, resulting in plays that can be at once compassionate and bitter. (from The Theatre: An Introduction, Historical Edition. New York: Holt, 1979.)

desireThese human limitations are on full display in Williams’ second and perhaps most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, which premiered in 1947. In it, genteel Southern manners and brutish reality clash in the characters of Stanley Kowalski, his wife Stella, and her delicate sister Blanche DuBois. Named for the New Orleans streetcar that traveled through the French Quarter to the Bywater district, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was later made into a film starring Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Vivien Leigh, winning Oscars for Hunter and Leigh and a nomination for Best Actor for Brando in addition to other nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. A Streetcar Named Desire is widely considered one of the preeminent plays of the 20th century.

tennplaysSeveral of Williams’ plays, many featuring clashes of culture and class, were produced and filmed in the years to following. Summer and Smoke and The Rose Tattoo received mixed reviews, but 1955’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (famous for Elizabeth Taylor’s slinking about in a silk slip—and not much else—in an unsuccessful attempt to engage her husband Brick’s, played by Paul Newman, attention), won another Drama Critics Circle Award and a second Pulitzer Prize. Later plays included Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana. As Ethan Mordden explains in The Fireside Companion to the Theatre (New York: Fireside, 1988), “His arena is the south, his genre is the cross section of personal relationships, and his archetypes are the somewhat cultured (but inbred and shy) gentlewoman and the brutish male who shatters her flimsy pretenses: in essence, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire, but, in variation, the Daughter and the Gentleman Caller of The Glass Menagerie, she terminally unsensual and he more breezy than brutish…Almost always, however, Williams deals with the confrontation of the dreamer and realist, his sympathies lying with the dreamer but the victory, in the end, always going to the realist. Thus…the Gentleman Caller does not, as was hoped, stay on to comfort the Daughter…”

Williams became a darling of the midcentury literary set. Despite his successes, he battled a lifelong dependency on alcohol and drugs and was at one point committed to the hospital by his brother to recover. Although he worked feverishly after his release in the mid-1970s, his demons caught up with him. In 1983, Tennessee Williams was found dead in his New York apartment, surrounded by pills and empty bottles. He’d choked to death on a plastic bottle cap.

tennesseetime

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Learn as You Go: How to Succeed in AP Lit

There’s a kitchen principle known as “clean as you go” that suggests that if you keep a sink full of hot, soapy water available as you’re cooking, then drop in your messy tools and bowls as you finish using them, the cleanup afterwards goes much faster. The same is true of learning. If you do a little as you go along, there’s much less effort right at the end, whether that means studying for test, writing a paper, or preparing for a seminar. Here are some “learn as you go” principles that will help you be a successful student in AP Lit.

Plan Your Reading – Senior year can become great practice for college. A heavy class load, lots of responsibilities, extra activities like college and scholarship applications, and the usual demands at home and work can really eat up your time. Plan your reading so you don’t get behind. Divide the number of pages you need to read by the number of days available, and read a little every day. It’s okay to schedule in breaks as long as you maintain your pace.

Take Note – In college, you’ll be able to mark up your books, since you’ll probably be buying your own copies. With plays and novels, you have two primary options: sticky notes or directly on your Six Pack Sheet. When you come across something in a book that makes you go “Hmm…” or “Aha!” or “I wonder…”, that’s something to note. Poetry notations will go directly into your journal.

Once Is Not Enough – You always notice new details when you watch a movie for a second time. Why should reading be any different? Rereading is okay. In fact, it’s encouraged! If you’ve read one of our class selections before, don’t decide you can skip it this time. You’ll gain more from the rereading and probably make some insights you missed the first time.

Connect – Read everything with a question mark in your head. How does this sound familiar? Why does this image keep recurring, and what could it mean? Where have I seen characters like these before, and what happened to them? What were people like during this period of history, or how did this event change people’s lives? Connection is the way human brains make ideas stick. The more you connect what you read with something you already know, the more you’ll be able to recall and analyze later. 

Check the Website – When in doubt, check this website. Background information on the author or the context of the book can sometimes be a key that unlocks an idea in a play or novel.

Keep thoughts thoughts bubbling. Happy reading!

 

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Oscar Wilde Introduction

Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright who became the darling of British high society, is probably the best-known and most-quoted satirist of the late 19th century. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1864, Wilde became a well-known lecturer, essayist, and playwright who enjoyed near-universal popularity until the shocking trial that ended his literary career and, not long after, his life.

Wilde’s parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits. His success at Dublin’s Trinity College ended in his receiving a scholarship to Oxford University in England, where he won prizes for his academic achievements and his writings. He graduated with a degree in classics. Wilde was a strong proponent of the intellectual movement known as aestheticism, which emphasized the pursuit of beauty more than social-political themes for the arts. His lecture tour of the United States introduced him to many American artists and intellectuals, including the poet Walt Whitman. He continued lecturing upon his return to England in 1882.

Wilde began his professional writing career as the editor of the magazine Lady’s World. In 1888, he published The Happy Prince and Other Stories, a collection for children. Three years later, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a man whose enchanted portrait ages so that he can continue living a life of sin, was published in 1891. Dorian Gray was viewed as scandalous and immoral, a hint of troubles to come.

The next year, Wilde’s first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, made its debut to great acclaim. Playwriting became Wilde’s preferred literary style. Lady Windermere’s Fan was followed in short order by A Woman of No Importance in 1893 and both An Ideal Husband and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Each of these works skewered the pretensions of British high society through clever wordplay and Wilde’s satirical wit. 

Irene Vanbrugh as Gwendolen Fairfax and George Alexander as Jack Worthing in the 1895 production of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, from The Sketch magazine, London, March 1895. NAL 131655

Wilde’s gift for the cutting remark and his razor-sharp acuity about human folly would have made him a natural at Twitter, had social media existed at the time. As it was, he could be counted on to provide a smart remark about just about any topic:

“There is always more books than brains in an aristocracy.” —Vera, or The Nihilists

“The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.” —The Critic As Artist

“One is impressed in America, but not favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its impressive bigness.” —Impressions of America 

“If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised.” —An Ideal Husband

“The Rhine is of course tedious, the vineyards are formal and dull, and as far as I can judge, the inhabitants of Germany are American.” —Letter to Robert Ross

“It is the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production.” —Pen, Pencil, and Poison

“There is no sin except stupidity.” —The Critic as Artist

The year 1895 proved both the pinnacle of Wilde’s success as an artist and the nadir of his personal life. Wilde was married to a woman named Constance Lloyd, and although he and Constance had two children together, it was no secret that Wilde’s true affections lay elsewhere. He had for years enjoyed a close relationship with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the son of the powerful Marquess of Queensbury. When the Marquess found out about the relationship, he publicly accused Wilde of homosexuality, which was a crime in Great Britain at the time. Wilde sued the Marquess for libel, which proved his undoing. At the trial, excerpts from his writings and his personal letters to Bosie were presented as evidence. His libel case was dismissed. Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years at hard labor.

Wilde emerged from prison a broken man, his popularity shattered and his family and fortunes gone. He spent the next couple of years in exile. His only writing from that period was the long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which chronicled his prison experience.

In 1900, Wilde contracted a serious case of meningitis at the age of 46 while living in a shabby Paris hotel. Witty to the end, his reputed last words were, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.”

 

SOURCES:
https://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-importance-of-being-earnest-first-stage-production/
http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/articles/oscar-wilde-s-reputed-last-words.html

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Wuthering Heights on the Radio

In 1978, British singer/songwriter Kate Bush released “Wuthering Heights,” a song inspired by Brontë’s novel. Bush wrote the piece when she was 18 and discovered that she and Emily B shared a July 30 birthday. “Wuthering Heights” has proved to be Bush’s most famous and popular song, which has been covered by multiple artists in the years since. Below are the song’s lyrics and three videos. The first is the UK release of “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush. In the second, New Zealand soprano Hayley Westenra covers the song, and the imagery suggests events and imagery from the book. The third one is American rock singer Pat Benatar’s cover. Benatar is an operatically-trained soprano, so her rock version is a little different than you might expect. The cut was included on her 198o album Crimes of Passion, but it was never released for radio play.

Out on the wiley, windy moors
We’d roll and fall in green
You had a temper, like my jealousy
Too hot, too greedy
How could you leave me
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you too

Bad dreams in the night
They told me I was going to lose the fight
Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window

Oh it gets dark, it gets lonely
On the other side from you
I pine a lot, I find the lot
Falls through without you
I’m coming back love, cruel Heathcliff
My one dream, my only master

Too long I roam in the night
I’m coming back to his side to put it right
I’m coming home to wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window

Ooh let me have it, let me grab your soul away
Ooh let me have it, let me grab your soul away
You know it’s me, Cathy

Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold, let me in in your window
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home
I’m so cold

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