The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams
Plays
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Summary
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A Street Car Named Desire
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Is concerned with
the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and
abnormality. Blanche the protagonist
of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep
intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America. Sex takes the form of perversion.
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The Summer and Smoke
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Deals with
unsuccessful love affair. Alma is the
central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from
defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form,
John on the other hand is a sex profligate.
The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the
force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken. The play stresses that love and sex are
inseparable.
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The Rose Tattoo
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Is concerned with
a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her
husband. The play points out that
false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of
sexual passion. Sexuality suppressed reawakens
with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak. Here force of sexual passion gains
domination.
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Kingdom of Earth
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Presents a true
picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than
anything else. Spiritual satisfaction
alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.
Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment. To him sex
is the possible path, it is everything.
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
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Dramatizes the
feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of
untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception. It portrays the deterioration of a young
aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the
oblivion that will bring peace. The
characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
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Sweet Bird of Youth
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Is concerned with
the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life. Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the
central characters of the play. Boss
Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their
happiness. But the only way through
which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making. Love making is the only “dependable
distraction”.
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The Milk Train Does not Stop Here
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Depicts the pain
and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape
painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections.
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Period of Adjustment
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Williams pursues
his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with
reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of
age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money. Williams sincerely desires to help people
rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so
much in his own tormented history.
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