A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy - Softcover

Williams, Tennessee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217094 ISBN 13: 9780811217095

Publisher: New Directions, 2008

Synopsis

The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author's lifetime is now published for the first time.

Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return home one midnight in a thunderstorm from the Memphis funeral of their older son to a house and a life literally falling apart--daughter Joanie is in an insane asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. Cornelius, who has political ambitions and a litany of health problems, is trying to find a large amount of moonshine money his gentle wife Bella has hidden somewhere in their collapsing house, but his noisy efforts are disrupted by a stream of remarkable characters, both living and dead.

While Williams often used drama to convey hope and desperation in human hearts, it was through this dark, expressionistic comedy, which he called a "Southern gothic spook sonata," that he was best able to chronicle his vision of the fragile state of our world.

About this title

About the Authors

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays―The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions―we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.

Gregory Mosher was the Artistic Director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago for seven years where he directed original plays by Beckett, Williams, Arthur Miller, and most of Mamet's early work. He directed an acclaimed Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin, and was the Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater for seven years. Mosher currently serves as the Director of the Columbia University Arts Initiative.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, Thomas Keith is an editor, as well as production manager and art director, at New Directions Publishing. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

The last full-length play Williams saw through to opening night, A House Not Meant to Stand, was developed from a one-act, Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, and is a gothic comedy containing many familiar Williams themes: eccentricity, hysteria, madness, sexual misconduct, disappointed lives, untimely death, and a once-great southern family fallen on hard times. The central metaphor is announced by the title referring to an elderly couple’s mansion, which, not unlike Poe’s House of Usher, is literally falling apart and also represents the physical and mental decay of its occupants, who cannot cope with their present predicament. At the start of the play, they have just returned from the funeral of the wife’s favorite, a gay son who fled to Memphis to get away from his oppressive family. Like many of Williams’ later plays, this one has moments of pure brilliance but lacks the fluidity, grace, and power of his best work. Still, there is enough of worth in it to interest Williams scholars and fans alike. --Jack Helbig

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811217094
• ISBN 13: 9780811217095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128