Paces as if she were angry, as if she were on the edge of frenzy. She understood only the look of fear in her keeper's eyes. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangerous, whose anger can kill, they had said. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. She has never in her life stretched those legs. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963).Guardian review of an October 2001 revival performed at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester.21st century premiere of the play on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.The Swan, one of the short stories that feed into the play, from The Missouri Review. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. When I look back at Stairs to the Roof.I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Six years later, in remarks published in the Pasadena Playhouse program notes, Williams commented on the play: He acknowledges the play's " didactic material" as being perhaps inappropriate as the country was preparing to go to war, but he felt his protagonist's problems were "universal and everlasting,", an assessment that made the play appropriate even during such a trying time. In "Random Observations" written as a preface in 1941, Williams noted that the play was "written for both the stage and the screen" with Burgess Meredith in mind as the protagonist. Zero" Williams' female lead is "Girl" Rice has Messrs. Both plays show the robotic typing of office workers, both have a scene of divine intervention and another set by a lake, and both make use of generically named characters (Rice's male lead is "Mr. Williams scholar Allean Hale, in his introduction to a 2000 New Directions Publishers edition of the play ( ISBN 0-8112-1435-4), commented on similarities the play shares with the 1923 expressionist play The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. The subtitle of the play (and of the earlier story) is "A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That are Kept in Cages" though that phrase conveys the seriousness of the playwright's chosen topic, its treatment, particularly the elements not present in the original story (such as the Mummers play-within-a-play and the swan-on-a-lake scenes), lighten the tone with elements of fantasy. Unlike that story, the play is optimistic, with elements of romance and fantasy, and a deus ex machina ending. The play is based on earlier stories written by Williams, including "The Swan" and most specifically, one of the same title written in October 1936, after he had recovered from a nervous breakdown arising from his experiences working in the relentlessly mechanical world of the large International Shoes factory in St. It was completed in December 1941, and premiered (as a full-scale production) at the Pasadena Playhouse on February 26, 1947. Stairs to the Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams, the last of his apprentice plays.
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