Two transient plays: A streetcar named desire and camino real

Two transient plays: A streetcar named desire and camino real

Department

Arts Department

Abstract

© 2002 by Robert F. Gross. Critics have made much of the similarities and resonances between Anton Chekhov’s and Tennessee Williams’s plays the qualities of lyricism, poignancy, the bittersweet vision of life, the resemblances among certain characters in the plays, and a basic humanity shared by the writers. An opportunity for comparing these two playwrights in detail is provided by the 1997 publication of Williams’s The Notebook of Trigorin, subtitled ‘a free adaptation of Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’. Williams’s focus on sex and age continues in Masha and Medvedenko’s discussion of whether Arkadina and Trigorin are lovers or just traveling companions something which would have been understood in Chekhov’s culture and the fact that in Notebook Trigorin is made closer in age to Treplev than to Arkadina. Notebook is a bleakly funny, wonderfully gothic and even grotesque melodrama and must be taken on its own terms, separated from comparison with its source of inspiration.

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Document Type

Book Chapter

Book Title

Tennessee Williams: A Casebook

Editors

Professor Robert Gross

ISBN

9781135673543

Publisher

Routledge

City

New York, NY

First Page

51

Last Page

62

Two transient plays: A streetcar named desire and camino real
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