Dance

One -Acts Research Paper
One of the most noted one act play writers is Tennessee Williams. Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1914. His father was a shoe salesman for a large shoe manufacturer and his mother was a Southern belle. Soon after his childhood, he moved to St. Louis Missouri with his family. He began to write because he found "life unsatisfactory" in MIssouri. Williams then attended three different colleges, worked for his father's shoe company, and then moved to New Orleans. Tennessee soon fell in love with the city of New Orleans. He then began traveling through the country and writing.
Written in 1937 under the title Escape, Summer at the Lake was unproduced until November 11, 2004, when it opened at the New York City Center in a collection of rarely-seen Williams one-acts titled Five by Tenn. The autobiographical play tells the story of Donald Fenway, a sensitive teenager who feels trapped by his self-absorbed Southern mother and his shoe-company executive father, who wants him to abandon his plans for college and find a menial job. The play was interpreted by several critics as "an early snapshot" of the characters and themes that later appeared in Williams' breakthrough 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, which also focused on a combative mother and a dreamy son bent on escape. William's first critical acclaim came in 1944 when The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. Williams' The Palooka is a 1937 one act about an old has-been boxer. The characters are The Palooka (Galveston Joe), The Kid and The Trainer. The Kid is nervous about his first fight, and The Palooka relieves the Kid's anxiety by telling about the fictional life he wanted to lead after he retired as Galveston Joe. Its world premiere was presented by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre (Chattanooga, TN) as part of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Southern Writers Conference in 2000, and was later performed on October 2, 2003, by the...