The Actor as Author of the Text he Acts

Author(s):  
Marta Nogueira

We aim to demonstrate how the acting technique and skills of an actor may influence the intentions of a text’s author, showing him new paths through the human and emotional factors. We also aim to demonstrate that what is usually considered a “text” may not always be a fixed entity produced by a single isolated individual. The analysis of the staging and film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and the development of the character Stanley Kowalski by Marlon Brando, shows how he changed the written version of the play, shifting its core, interfering with the balance between the two main characters and helping to shape the cultural and historical attributes which rendered its particular place in art history. The text produced by the actor may, thus, assume an identical value to that of the dramatic script from which it developed, or even produce a higher impact.

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip C. Kolin

En diciembre de 1948 y de mayo a agosto de 1949, la obra clásica de Tennessee Williams, Un Tranvía Llamado Deseo, se presentó por primera vez en México y con ella hizo historia, tanto en el teatro mexicano como en el estadounidense. La obra fue dirigida por Seki Sano, el director japonés a quien se le atribuye la transformación del teatro mexicano, y en ella actuaron Wolf Ruvinskis, quien después siguió una destacada carrera en el cine, y María Douglas. La joven compañía de Seki Sano recibió grandes alabanzas de los críticos mexicanos por introducir y representar de una manera muy bella uno de los dramas más importantes de los Estados Unidos.


Author(s):  
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

From 1940 to 1960 some of modern drama’s most famous plays were staged: Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), attaining a new kind of tragedy and a particularly American brand of realism; and, in London, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), introducing, respectively, the ‘theatre of the absurd’ and a new linguistic and emotional brutality, inaugurating an era of ‘kitchen sink’ realism. ‘Salesmen, southerners, anger, and ennui’ shows how these radically different dramas expanded plays’ subject matter as well as their formal and linguistic properties; in particular, they changed forever the way language (and silence) worked on stage.


Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cardullo

This essay places Glengarry Glen Ross in the context of David Mamet’s oeuvre and the whole of American drama, as well as in the context of economic capitalism and even U.S. foreign policy. The author pays special attention here (for the first time in English-language scholarship) to the subject of salesmen or selling as depicted in Mamet’s drama and earlier in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire—each of which also features a salesman among its characters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Iga Rahadiyanti

The purpose of this study is to observe the types of women language features and the most frequent women language feature used by the main women characters in the dialogue of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire play. Ten women language features proposed by Robin Lakoff is used to analyze the data. This study only observes eight out of ten women language features proposed by Robin Lakoff, namely tag question, intensifier, hypercorrect grammar, hedges or fillers, empty adjectives, precise color terms, super polite form, and avoidance of strong swear words. This study excludes emphatic stress and rising intonation on declaratives feature. Due to the absence of any numeric data, this study uses descriptive qualitative approach. The data is taken from written script of the play which consists of eleven scenes. Seven women language features found namely lexical hedges or fillers, tag question, intensifier, empty adjectives, superpolite form, avoidance of strong swear words, and precise color terms. The most frequent feature is lexical hedges or fillers (59.49%) while no hypercorrect grammar is found. This study supports Lakoff theory since most of the features are found in the conversation of main women characters


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Juan Filipe Stacul ◽  
Sirlei Santos Dudalski

O presente estudo pretende realizar uma leitura comparativa entre as obras A streetcar named desire, deTennessee Williams, e Onde andará Dulce Veiga?, de Caio Fernando Abreu. A tese defendida é a de que uma ligação possível entre as obras se dá a partir, basicamente, de três elementos: a crise do sujeito, o erotismo e as representações de masculinidades. Como referencial teórico, pretende-se utilizar as teorizações pós-modernas acerca de identidade cultural (Hall, Debord), men's studies (Nolasco, Badinter,Sedgwick) e erotismo (França, Chauí).


Author(s):  
Fouad Oveisy

Elia Kazan is arguably one of the most influential directors of mid-century mainstream America. Kazan is renowned for his introduction of the Moscow Art Theatre’s method acting into American film and theatre, his semi-documentary style of shooting on location, and a thematic variance that ‘reflects changes and tensions in the national culture’ (Neve 2) of the US. His 19-film oeuvre continues to exert great influence in its pioneering of cinematic realism. Kazan’s career can be divided into two parts: the socially conscious films he produced before his testimony in front of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), and those produced afterward, which reflect on the traumatic effect this event had on his life. Nevertheless, an unforgiving dedication to contemporary social and political dilemmas resonates throughout his films: Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) deals with anti-Semitism, his masterpiece On the Waterfront (1954) concerns workers’ rights, and his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1955) focuses on the modern American familial crisis. After the successful staging of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Kazan’s film adaptation of Williams’ play in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) further cemented his reputation as a dramaturge and actors’ director. Kazan’s long-take style of shooting, corroborated by an acute attention to mise en scène, grants a suspenseful yet clear atmosphere to the rather simple diegeses in all his films.


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