Offers Williams' adaptation of a late nineteenth-century drama about an actress' rejection of the advances of a melancholy, lovesick young man.

THE STORY: On his Uncle Sorin's lakeside estate, Constantine's new play premieres to disdainful reactions from the family and friends who have gathered: Masha; her future husband Medvedenko; Dorn, a lecherous doctor; Shamrayev, manager of the estat

Tennessee Williams freely adapts Anton Chekhov's Russian classic "The Seagull". From the master twentieth-century playwright Tennessee Williams-an adaptation of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, never before available to the general trade. The Notebook of Trigorin is faithful to Chekhov's story of longing and unrequited love. Set on a provincial Russian Estate, its peaceful environs offer stark contrast to the turbulent lives of its characters. Constantine, a young writer, must compete for the attention of his mother, a self-obsessed, often comical aging actress, Madame Arkadina, and his romantic ideal, Nina. His rival for both women is Trigorin, an established author bound to Arkadina by her patronage of his work, and attracted to Nina by her beauty. Trigorin cannot keep himself from consuming everything of value in Constantine's life. Only in the final scenes do all discover that the price for love and fragility can be horribly high. But if the words in The Notebook of Trigorin are essentially Chekhov's, the voice belongs firmly to Tennessee Williams. The dialogue resonates with echoes of the themes Williams developed as his signatures-compassion for the artistic soul and its vulnerability in the face of the world's "successfully practiced duplicity" (Act I).

Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.

"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.

This new volume gathers some of Williams' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time. 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.