Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays

2 August 2016

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Tennessee Williams (Author), Thomas Keith (Editor)

Description

“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams

This new collection of fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams’s most potent, comical and disturbing short plays?Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws, while the poet Hart Crane is confronted by his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle. Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman’s entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span. This volume is edited, with an introduction and notes, by the editor, acting teacher, and theater scholar Thomas Keith.

Reviews

"Mr. Williams is a master of the short play." — Clive Barnes, The New York Times

"Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths." — Randy Gener, American Theatre Magazine

"Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws is a loopy send-up of New York society, written in a gleefully absurdist mode." — Bruce Weber, The New York Times

"A Recluse and His Guest has remarkable language; indeed one listens for how the Master keeps showing up in late-career scripts." — Hilton Als, The New Yorker

"From Williams, it seems, there are treasures to be plundered still." — Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times

"Steps Must Be Gentle provides a tantalizing peek into Williams’s preoccupation with death, suicide, and creativity." — Tom Valeo, Chicago Reader

"The fact that This Is the Peaceable Kingdom takes place in New York puts a whole different spin on the play and gives the poetry a different kind of starkness." — Mallery Avidon, Brooklyn Rail

"The Strange Play and Ivan’s Widow make for intriguing theater, both in their own right and as a part of the legacy of Tennessee Williams—a playwright who prowled the world’s dark corners long before, and long after, he shone under the bright lights of Broadway." — Brad Rhine, The New Orleans Advocate

"I do not want to reveal too many of The Strange Play’s secrets—its embrace of a whimsical, ethereal, and, yes, strange, world is most pleasing when it is a surprise to the audience." — Bess Rowen, The Huffington Post

"You won’t forget Now The Cats with Jeweled Claws—I’ve seen quite a few late-period Williams curios but this mesmerizing 1981 piece may be the most demented of them all." — Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post

"In A Recluse and His Guest, Williams skillfully breaks our hearts." — David Clark, OUT Magazine

"The Strange Play is delightful and bizarre." — Tyler Gillespie, Gambit (New Orleans)

"Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths." — Randy Gener, American Theatre

"The Demolition Downtown wrings laughter from the plight of a couple whose lives have been ruined by a new political order bent upon demolishing, literally and otherwise, the lives of its citizens." — Eric Marchese, Backstage, Los Angeles, Backstage, Los Angeles

"In A Recluse and His Guest, America’s most poetic playwright brings to life an entire relationship of depth and intimacy, from the first meeting to the last, in an astonishingly short amount of time." — Todd Stuart Phillips, One Man’s World

Also By: Tennessee Williams View all by author...

Also By: Thomas Keith View all by author...

Paperback

9780811225564

132 x 203 mm • 208 pages

£13.99

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Ebook

9780811225571

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