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I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
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Author: Tennessee Williams Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 19 Pub. Date: 1951 ISBN-10: 0822205513 ISBN-13: 9780822205517 Cast Size: 2 female, 1 male
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About
the Play:
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix is a one-act drama by
Tennessee Williams. A
fictionalized version of D. H. Lawrence's last hours, supported by an
abrasive wife, Frieda, and a doting friend, Lady Brett. As the poet
clambers the tortured steps to death, refusing to go gently into that
good night, we do get glimpses of Lawrence's phoenix spirit and
poetic pain; Lawrence was one of Williams' chief literary influences.
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
presents a fictionalized version of the death of English writer D. H.
Lawrence on the French Riveria. Tennessee Williams
refers to his work as "imaginary." The basic facts,
however, are well known. There are three characters, Lawrence
himself, Frieda and Bertha Brett, and the scene is a sun porch at a
small retreat in the Alpes Maritimes. We see Lawrence at the very end
of his career, in fact the very day he dies, and recognize him as the
erratic, inspired, ill-tempered genius who was never able to come to
terms with life. Yet he stands revealed here as the man who, in
Tennessee Williams' words, "… felt the mystery and
power of sex, as the primal life urge, and was the life-long
adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked away in the
cellars of prudery."
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix was written as a tribute
to D.H. Lawrence in 1941, but was not published until 1951. It
premiered Off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel
Theatre) in 1959.
Cast: 2 female, 1 male
About the Playwright:
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's
most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and
prolific. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather
was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman,
moved with his family to St. Louis some years later, both he and his
sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered
college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to
take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years,
spending the evening writing. He entered the University of Iowa in
1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large
number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a
Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948
and 1955.
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