Customer Reviews
Stay Away From This Book!!! - By: , 06 Jun 2005 
This book (sorry play!) is the worst play I have ever read. It is absolutely awful. It is boring, repetitive & has no plot whatsoever. I recently read this play for an exam & found that it was not helpful at alll in prepearing me for my exam. The only humerous thing I thought about this play was that it was similar to a person's life that I know.
The best part of the book was the end & I will NEVER read it again.
Williams Most Autobiographical Work - By: Bruce Kendall, 21 Feb 2003 
There are few American playwrights who rank as highly in the Pantheon as Tennessee Williams. He is up there with O'Neill, Miller & Albee as amongst the quintessential dramatists of the 20th century. This is one of his earliest, & in some respects his most timeless, of his scripts. No one can argue that it his most autobiographical, as it portrays a cloyingly suffocating matriarch, Amanda, & a younger sister, Laura, who are both interchangable characters for Williams' own little St Louis family. Actuallly, in real life, the outcome was much more tragic, as Williams' mother had a frontal lobotomy performed on his actual sister. One can see how Williams may have harbored some deep resentments towards his mother, & he spends most of his time getting even with her in this Euripidean play.
Though recent adaptations of this play have emphasized the "touchy-feely" aspects of the relationship between brother & sister (Why does Treat Williams come to mind?), the actual script lends itself to a much darker, Medea-like interpretation, which I believe Williams originallly intended. This is Williams way of getting back at the evil Witch of the West who dominated his youth & who would exert her influence upon him for the rest of his life. It doesn't take a Freud to untangle this thread
If you want to watch a great performnace of this play, try to track down the "Broadway Theater Archive" 1973 version with Katherine Hepburn as Amanda, Sam Waterston as Tom, Michael Moriarity as "The Gentleman Calller," & Joanna Miles as an unforgettably vulnerable & poignant Laura. The Paul Newman 1987 theatrical release had a strong cast as well, but can't compete.
plain and simple - By: , 26 Feb 2001 
The layout of the play is easy to read & make notes on. There are useful notes at the front of the book to help understand the performance of the play. A perfect version if you are studying the play in school.
