Tennessee Williams

Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife, and dominating mother, hopes to match her daughter Laura with an eligible "gentleman caller" while her son Tom supports the family. Laura, lame and painfully shy, evades her mother's schemes and reality by retreating to the make-believe world of her glass animal collection. Tom eventually leaves home to become a writer but is forever haunted by the memory of Laura.

Brick, an alcoholic ex-football player, drinks his days away and resists the affections of his wife, Maggie. His reunion with his father, Big Daddy, who is dying of cancer, jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.

"The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in a matching format the plays of a genius of the American theatre. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes. Leading off Volume 5 is The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1964), a play that explores the tenacity of the human body and spirit when confronted with death. The more light-hearted Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents...

In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real (pronunciation: Cá-mino Réal) is a long highway, a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, a nightmare, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature -- Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron -- inhabit a place where corruption, starvation, indifference and greed have immobilized anyone who tries to escape. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal...