His father used to taunt him with the nickname "Miss Nancy" for being less than masculine

The Rose Tattoo is an excellent play. Especially a live production

Is that not fucked up?

It's better than Miss Thing

I think

sometimes i like his writing, sometimes i don't... i am, for the most part, annoyed by southern gothic writing.

cborgman said:

this is so goddamn funny

rdhull said:

why is that funny?

tennessee williams had a busted childhood. it wasn't just his father. his sister was a mess, his mother was a trainwreck. and you can see a lot of his life in his work. the glass menagerie is the first thing that comes to mind but, really, most of his work was therapy...and he needed it.

SassyBritches said:

didn't his sister end up being forced into getting a frontal lobotomy, a la "suddenly last summer"?

cborgman said:

something like that, yeah. look, ol'girl went through it to say the very least. she was ca-razy! and there was no kind of help for crazies back then. at least now, we can get therapy and meds!

I've been meaning to read his biography for the last ten years. I gotta get on with that.

I love "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I'd love to see a stage version.

madartista said:

i have never seen a stage version fo cat i like. maggie is a very difficult character to play, alonfg the lines of some of shakespeares more difficult complex characters. i saw jessica lange do it and i swear i have never wanted to slap the shit out of a person so much as i did when i saw her playing maggie. she lacked any subtlety whatsoever and just kept doing these catlike stretches and doing an accent so southern fried, she made scarlet o'hara sound like a new yorker by comparisson.

tommy lee jones rocked as brick, and rip torn was born to play big daddy, in that same production. if you look for it, it is out on video.

SassyBritches said:

True. His mom arranged the lobotomy for her. He feared his whole life that he would go insane. Elia Kazan said about him, "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."

cborgman said:

yeah, you've told me about that -- I do need to search it out.

i think a lot of my dislike of tennessee williams stems from having a best friend who is insanely in love with his writing, and has dragged me to every production near where either of us live, forced me to sit through every film adaptation available, and conned me into reading every script, short story, and letter of his that has been published.

and people are NUTS about TW in the south. i have seen more productions of menagerie and streetcar than any one person should have to suffer.

i did get my revenge though. in high school theatre production, your senior year, your final exam was a one act play you had to select, produce, and direct, and chad (my TW-obesessed best friend) tried to foist every tennesee williams short play and one act cutting he could find on me. i ended up choosing this hysterically funny parody of "the glass menagerie" called "for whom the southern belle tolls", and dedicating it to him "for forcing me to sit through endless hours of tennessee williams" in the program.

the best part about it was the people that would seek me out after the shows and thank me for doing it, as they usually claimed to hate menagerie too.

good times...

Yeah, Glass Menagerie has never done much for me. I saw another great parody, "The Glass Mendacity." Fuckin hilarious!!!

Denver Center is now doing an all black "Streetcar". I do wanna see that. I've never seen a stage version.

How satisfying that through all this, it's the "Miss Nancy" that history will remember, not his anonymous idiot father.
[This message was edited Thu Jan 22 11:16:39 PST 2004 by Lammastide]

SassyBritches said:

One of the Kennedys got a lobotomy too