Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

by Tennessee Williams

Martin Sherman (Introduction)

Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, “lewd vagrant” Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.

Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a “short morality play,” has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.

With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer — this volume also offers Williams’s related essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” and a chronology of the playwright’s life and works.

• ISBN10: 0811219399
• ISBN13: 9780811219396
• Publish Date: 24 December 2012 (first published 11 December 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 208
• Language: English

Reviews

I think I've found a new favorite Williams play with Suddenly Last Summer -- my old one had always been Cat on a Hot Tin Roof due to Liz Taylor and Paul Newman as well as Burl Ives. Anyway, after having to constantly listen to my mother rave about SLS every time TCM showed the movie, I decided to pick up a copy and see what all the fuss was about.

As with his other plays of of the South, these two are powerful masterworks if not short of controversial as with Suddenly Last Summer's themes of homosexuality, madness, and supposed cannibalism. Orpheus is a powerful reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice using an everyday setting of a southern general store/confectionery to explore themes of love, death, race, and adultery. It's a shame this work isn't performed as much as some of his other better known works. A must read for everyone.