What do you notice?

What questions do you ask?

What do you notice?

What questions do you ask?

What do you notice?

What questions do you ask?

What do you notice?

What questions do you ask?

Watch this extract from the end of Scene 1 in Elia Kazans 1951 film version
of A Streetcar Named Desire and, as you watch it, write what you think
were the stage directions given to guide the actors.
Keep your copies of the play closed!

How do your stage directions compare with the original?

What is different?
What is similar?

Scene 2

From the Land of Sky-blue Water,

They brought a captive maid,
And her eyes they are lit with lightnings,
Her heart is not afraid!
But I steal to her lodge at dawning,
I woo her with my flute;
She is sick for the Sky-blue Water,
The captive maid is mute.

Source

Double Indemnity dir. Billy Wilder 1944

Goodbye, Mrs. Deitrichson. Walter Neff, caught in the

web of the femme fatale.

Double Indemnity dir. Billy Wilder 1944

Iconography surrounded by bars

Double Indemnity dir. Billy Wilder 1944

Visual style strong geometric shapes, from German

expressionism

Double Indemnity dir. Billy Wilder 1944

Iconography/symbolism Neff is caught, Keyes is free

Pair / Group Discussion:

What does Williams mean by memory play?
The memory play has a three-part structure:
1. A character experiences something profound.
2. That experience causes an arrest of time (time
literally loops upon itself).
3. The character must relive that profound experience (in
that loop of time) until he or she makes sense of it.

Volpone by Ben Jonson, 1606

The Recruiting Officer by George Farqhuar, 1706

The Recruiting Officer by George Farqhuar, 1706

Naturalism late 19th Century

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, 1890

New York
Production
1914

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, 1890

Expressionism was a form of theatre devised in Germany in the early 20th

century that used dreamlike, unnatural settings and created vivid geometric
patterns using powerful elements of light and shadow.

Expressionism is the form of dramatic expression best conveying the

illusion of reality in the presence of the obviously unreal.

Expressionism is the form of dramatic expression best conveying the

illusion of reality in the presence of the obviously unreal.

What is Plastic Theatre?

Read the sheet in pairs.
Summarise each paragraph.
Prepare to feedback your findings.

Plastic Theatre
To express his universal truths Williams created what he termed plastic
theatre, a distinctive new style of drama. He insisted that setting, properties,
music, sound, and visual effects - all the elements of stagingmust combine to
reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language. (Alice Griffin:
Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina ,
1995)
The scholarship that has focused on Williams' plastic theatre principally
examines its practical implications. Roger Boxill states, for instance, "The 'new
plastic theatre' must make full use of all the resources of the contemporary
stagelanguage, action, scenery, music, costume, sound, lightingand bind
them into an artistic unity conceived by the playwright. (Boxill, Roger.
Tennessee Williams. Modern Dramatists Series)
The purpose of this 'plastic theatre,' of which lighting, music, set, and props
are essential elements, is to provide 'a more penetrating and vivid expression
of things as they are.
(Website Link: http://bhslit10.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/plastic-theatre.html)

Plastic Theatre
Plastic Theatre was an attempt to create theatre in which
truth, life, or reality is an organic thinking which poetic
imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only
through changing other forms that those which merely
present in appearance.
(Sweet Bird of Youth, Katherine Weiss 2010)

In the preface to The Glass Menagerie, Williams explains his

theatrical concept as the incorporation of many styles, such
as expressionism and realism. These unorthodox marriages,
called plastic, are closer to the truth.

Oldham Repertory Theatre, 1952