A proposta desta tese é analisar a representação de questões sócio-históricas em American blues, de Tennessee Williams, coletânea de cinco peças curtas escritas durante as décadas de 1930 e 1940 e reunidas para publicação em 1948. Cada uma delas é de vital importância para a compreensão da sociedade norte-americana desse período. Considerando que o blues expressa o pathos e as condições de vida da classe trabalhadora e dos excluídos das relações de produção, afirma-se que as peças Moony´s kid don´t cry, The dark room e The long stay cut short, or The unsatisfactory supper figuram os efeitos causados sobre essa larga camada da população nos anos da Depressão Econômica. The case of the crushed petunias a lyrical fantasy parodia o impacto da sufocante ideologia do American way of life sobre a classe média e o desinteresse dessa pelos principais acontecimentos durante a II Guerra Mundial. Por fim, Ten blocks on the Camino Real a fantasy alegoriza a sociedade capitalista do pós-guerra e o nascedouro da era macartista. Por meio de um sucinto levantamento das peças escritas por Tennessee Williams até a publicação da coletânea é possível extrair elementos que permitem evidenciar a constituição e organicidade de American blues. / The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the representation of socio-historical issues in American blues, by Tennessee Williams, a collection of five short plays written during the 1930s and 1940s and grouped for publication in 1948. Each one is vitally important to the understanding of the American society of that period. Taking into consideration that the blues express the pathos and the living conditions of the working class and those excluded from the relations of production, we assert that the plays Moony\'s kid don´t cry, The dark room and The long stay cut short, or The unsatisfactory supper represent the effects of the Great Depression on this broad population group. The case of the crushed petunias a lyrical fantasy parodies the impact of the American way of life ideology on the middle class as well as this class´s indifference concerning the major events of World War II. Finally, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real a fantasy allegorizes postwar capitalist society and the roots of the McCarthy era. Through a brief survey of the plays written by Tennessee Williams until the publication of the collection it is possible to draw elements that evidence the constitution and organicity of American blues.

A proposta desta tese é analisar a representação de questões sócio-históricas em American blues, de Tennessee Williams, coletânea de cinco peças curtas escritas durante as décadas de 1930 e 1940 e reunidas para publicação em 1948. Cada uma delas é de vital importância para a compreensão da sociedade norte-americana desse período. Considerando que o blues expressa o pathos e as condições de vida da classe trabalhadora e dos excluídos das relações de produção, afirma-se que as peças Moony´s kid don´t cry, The dark room e The long stay cut short, or The unsatisfactory supper figuram os efeitos causados sobre essa larga camada da população nos anos da Depressão Econômica. The case of the crushed petunias a lyrical fantasy parodia o impacto da sufocante ideologia do American way of life sobre a classe média e o desinteresse dessa pelos principais acontecimentos durante a II Guerra Mundial. Por fim, Ten blocks on the Camino Real a fantasy alegoriza a sociedade capitalista do pós-guerra e o nascedouro da era macartista. Por meio de um sucinto levantamento das peças escritas por Tennessee Williams até a publicação da coletânea é possível extrair elementos que permitem evidenciar a constituição e organicidade de American blues. / The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the representation of socio-historical issues in American blues, by Tennessee Williams, a collection of five short plays written during the 1930s and 1940s and grouped for publication in 1948. Each one is vitally important to the understanding of the American society of that period. Taking into consideration that the blues express the pathos and the living conditions of the working class and those excluded from the relations of production, we assert that the plays Moony\'s kid don´t cry, The dark room and The long stay cut short, or The unsatisfactory supper represent the effects of the Great Depression on this broad population group. The case of the crushed petunias a lyrical fantasy parodies the impact of the American way of life ideology on the middle class as well as this class´s indifference concerning the major events of World War II. Finally, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real a fantasy allegorizes postwar capitalist society and the roots of the McCarthy era. Through a brief survey of the plays written by Tennessee Williams until the publication of the collection it is possible to draw elements that evidence the constitution and organicity of American blues.

In my thesis, I focused on the challenges of the American Dream and its damaging demands. I compared these aspects to The Glass Menagerie, All My Sons, and Death of the Salesman, plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, two playwrights concerned with similar issues in the 1940s and 1950s. Each chapter was introduced by Robert Frost's poem related to its topic. This element was added as a chapters' introduction to express the universality of the depicted issues and to tight the sections together under one pattern. In the theoretical part of the thesis, I concentrated on the 40s and 50s America and its features and the historical development of the American Dream. This section's main influences were works by Rodney P. Carlisle, Richard A. Schwartz, Stephanie Coontz, and Jim Cullen. With their books about America and its historical background, Carlisle, Schwartz, and Coontz provided a base for the factual context of this thesis. Cullen's work on the American Dream was used as the primary source for understanding the reasons behind the Dream and its historical development. The whole thesis was supported by arguments from Lauren Berlant, John W. Thoburn and Thomas L. Sexton, and Piotr Sztompka. Berlant's work on cruel optimism provided a possible explanation of particular behavior that accompanied...

Through a comparison of Tennessee Williams’ Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and Neil LaBute’s Steph in reasons to be pretty, this thesis explores the ways in which the female position has both changed and remained relatively the same over the course of the last sixty years.

New Orleans has been the subject of a narrative of exoticization throughout much of its history as an American space. The dominant trend in representation casts this city as a lush site of strangeness, intercultural confusion, enchantment, and, occasionally, an alternatively transformative or annihilative freedom. My project travels across genres and critical frameworks to explore the history and development of the narrative of New Orleans’ exoticism in literary and public discourse. The narrative’s evocative rhetoric, including the frequent appearance of the term “jungle,” and its emphasis on both charm and degeneracy encode larger doubts over the ability of the city to fit national ideals. These codes draw on a negative racial imaginary and manifest as sentiments of anxiety and desire over the crossing of nationally normative racial and sexual boundaries. Although the generative position of the narrative has gone largely unrecognized, it surfaces in multiple contexts and in concert with larger discursive trends, such as 19th century interests in racially exclusive American nationalism and 20th century fears of a racialized, sexualized other. This project pays particular attention to the articulations of the narrative in George Washington Cable’s novel The Grandissimes and in the New Orleans-based works of Tennessee Williams. It also explores challenges to the narrative offered by contemporary poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Joy Harjo. Additionally, it investigates the recycling of the narrative in contemporary political discourse. / text

What basic similarities are found in all the fugitives? First of all, they are fugitives in the sense that they are wanderers. While not necessarily running to or from some specific thing, the fugitives nonetheless are men who travel; they are men who only face their conflicts directly when they attempt to stop traveling either by changing themselves so that they will fit in (Val in Orpheus Descending and Chance), by changing their environment so that it will accept them (Val in Battle of Angels and Shannon), or by searching for something that is permanently lost (Kilroy).

This thesis is a written documentation of the original, devised performance piece, ANTI-BELLUM: A RECLAMATION OF THE SOUTHERN BELLE, written in the fall of 2006 by Chandra O. Hopkins. The document tracks the creative process through the stages of: initial inspiration, written development and script formation, creative collaboration in the rehearsal hall, and finally the staging presentation of the piece through production. In addition to this written document, the original, devised script of the production is also included.

This thesis is dedicated to illustrating the unique challenges of staging works by the playwright Tennessee Williams, and to making suggestions on how to avoid common pitfalls in production, performance, and direction of his plays. It uses evidence from the playwright’s various biographical works as well as insight and conjecture from the author’s experience to illuminate these challenges and help the reader to avoid hackneyed or ineffective staging practices. It touches on the effect of film adaptations on stage performances; the typical portrayal of American Southern characters onstage; the aural ramifications of Williams’s poetry to a now-visually-centered audience; stylistic elements similar to Williams’s contemporaries, including Rice, Brecht, O’Neill, and others; the delicacy of Williams’s signature meter and rhythm in his plays; dramaturgical groundwork in the playwright’s intentions; and a systemization of archetypical Williams characters. This thesis does not prescribe a cut-and-dried set of rules and regulations for performing Williams’s works, for the simple reason that the Williams canon is so diverse that no singular set of “tricks” will be effective in every play. Furthermore, the author understands that a producer, director, or actor will not find use in all facets of a rigid “system”. The thesis does outline a number of practices whose aims are to make productions more effective from an integral perspective. There are exercises to attempt, questions to pose, and matters to consider in the staging of Williams’s plays during any part of production—from in-class reading to designing the scenery, and from deciding why to put a Williams play in a season to the living moments of an actor’s performance. The thesis aims to be helpful, informative, and accessible, rather than doctrinaire: much like the playwright’s works, its purpose is to illuminate dark corners of something that viewers think they already fully understand.

The period from the end of World War I through the 1950s has been called “the Golden Age of Drama on Broadway.” Subsumed within this period is another sort of golden age, of music in the American spoken theater, Broadway and beyond, c. 1935-60. Unlike more familiar, and better-studied, genres of dramatic music such as opera, ballet, and the Broadway-style musical, music composed for spoken dramas is neither a definitive part of the dramatic form nor integral to the work’s original conception. Rather, it is added in production, like sets, costumes, and lighting. This study traces the roots of this rich period of spoken-dramatic music to the collaboration of producer John Houseman, director Orson Welles, and composer Virgil Thomson on the Federal Theatre Project, beginning in 1936. The musical ramifications of that collaboration eventually extended to include composers Paul Bowles and Marc Blitzstein, influential theater companies such as the Theatre Guild and Group Theatre, innovative directors such as Elia Kazan and Margo Jones, and major playwrights such as Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams. Following a consideration of the forces that gave rise to this musically rich nexus and the people, materials, and practices involved, three high-profile theatrical collaborations are examined, along with three scores that resulted from them: Thomson’s score for Houseman’s 1957 “Wild West” Much Ado About Nothing; Blitzstein’s score for Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s 1937-38 “anti-Fascist” Julius Caesar; and Bowles’s score for the original production of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944-45). Each score is located within the musico-dramatic history that produced it, and analyzed within the context of the production for which it was written. This work aims to begin to recover a vast body of forgotten American dramatic music, to limn the role of the spoken theater in the careers of these three noteworthy American musical artists, to probe a busy intersection of high and commercial art forms, and to suggest music’s important role in the development of the American spoken theater.

Submitted by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2017-03-21T20:15:36Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertação - Bernardo Ale Abinader.pdf: 1700776 bytes, checksum: bc8ed05e2d701f28709ae70aaf331467 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2017-03-21T20:15:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertação - Bernardo Ale Abinader.pdf: 1700776 bytes, checksum: bc8ed05e2d701f28709ae70aaf331467 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2017-03-21T20:16:03Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertação - Bernardo Ale Abinader.pdf: 1700776 bytes, checksum: bc8ed05e2d701f28709ae70aaf331467 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-21T20:16:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertação - Bernardo Ale Abinader.pdf: 1700776 bytes, checksum: bc8ed05e2d701f28709ae70aaf331467 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-09 / This study has the purpose of analyzing comparatively the play Sweet bird of youth, of 1959, by the playwright Tennessee Williams, and the movie Sunset Boulevard, of 1950, by the filmmaker Billy Wilder, focusing on the decadence, observing how this aspect was represented and what purpose it has in the text and in the film. In both study objects, there are characters who were famous movie stars in the past, but now are relegated to ostracism by Hollywood. There are male characters in the play and the movie who want, but cannot achieve fame in the American film industry and they establish a prostitution relationship with the actresses. These are people presented as decadent, narcissistic, materialistic and have tragic endings. Furthermore, there are other characters and aspects of the selected works that expose decadent facets of American society at the time, as the representation of religious conservatism in Sweet bird of youth and the working relationship in the film Sunset Boulevard. By analyzing the characters in the works and how they relate with each other and with the society which surrounds them, it is possible to verify a commentary done by the authors about the negative consequences of capitalism, of the film industry and of the conservatism in the American society. / O presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar comparativamente a peça Doce pássaro da juventude, de 1959, do dramaturgo Tennessee Williams, e o filme Crepúsculo dos deuses, de 1950, do cineasta Billy Wilder, com foco na decadência, observando como este aspecto foi representado e qual função desempenha no texto dramático e no filme. Nos dois objetos de estudo figuram personagens atrizes que, no passado, foram famosas estrelas de cinema, mas que agora se encontram relegadas ao ostracismo por Hollywood. Há personagens masculinas na peça e no filme que desejam, mas não conseguem alcançar a fama na indústria cinematográfica americana e estabelecem uma relação de prostituição com as atrizes. São figuras apresentadas como decadentes, narcisistas, materialistas e que têm finais trágicos. Também há, além dessas, outras personagens e aspectos nas obras selecionadas que expõem facetas decadentes da sociedade americana da época, como a representação do conservadorismo religioso em Doce pássaro da juventude e das relações de trabalho no cinema em Crepúsculo dos deuses. Por meio das personagens nas obras e no modo como elas se relacionam entre si e com a sociedade que as cercam, é possível verificar uma análise feita pelos autores das consequências negativas do capitalismo, da indústria cinematográfica e do puritanismo da sociedade americana.