The Transformation In Tennessee Williams’ Plastic Theater

Thomas Lanier Williams III, the American playwright, using the penname as Tennessee Williams and is famous for his plays all over the world. As one of the most important playwrights in the 20th century, Tennessee Williams created many popular plays, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on A Hot Tin Roof (1955), which won him the Pulitzer Award for drama writing. As one of the most famous playwrights in last century in America, Tennessee is paid attention to for his unique writing style and the creation of the Plastic Theater. His typical writing style of combining the southern American culture with the modern poetic language arouses a lot of reflections among the readers and audiences. Compared to the former playwrights, Tennessee Williams doesn’t restrict himself to the expression and the story lines that he endeavors to create his own drama empire, thus comes the Plastic Theater and the transformation concept.The Plastic Theater is originated from the production notes to The Glass Menagerie, in which Tennessee Williams reinforces the idea that drama should have the vivid performing power and have to try its best to lead the readers and audiences to experience the reality and the truth. But, being different from photographing, drama should be splendid, as well as organic. The clumsy imitation will only make the drama seem shallow. To solve this problem, Tennessee focuses on the construction of the transformation concept in his drama and aims to use it to maintain the vitality of the culture.There five chapters in this thesis:the introduction part, three chapters for the body part and a conclusion.The first chapter mainly introduces Tennessee Williams as a playwright and lists his famous plays, contributions and influence. And then, it is traced to the origin of the Plastic Theater. Since the study of this theory in China is almost close to zero, the part of the literature review mainly combs the studies from abroad. To end the introduction, the research tasks and methods of this thesis are explained.The second to the fourth chapter is the body part of this thesis, which surrounds the transformation idea in the Plastic Theater. The second chapter is divided into two parts: the first one is to transform from the reality to the illusion; the second one is about transforming from the physical to the spiritual. In order to realize the delivering of the information, at the beginning of this chapter, a brief introduction to the transformation idea is offered. The third and the fourth chapters are about the practicing of the transformation idea in writing and on the stage. The third chapter begins from the production note to The Glass Menagerie and through analyzing the three key elements—sound, lighting and the screen device, the goal of making the idea specific to understand is reached. The fourth chapter, as the one with the most details, starts from the language performance of Tennessee Williams and by discussing the excerpts from his plays, the poetic language features and the formation of the characters are clarified.The last chapter, as the conclusion part, is founded on the basis of the previous chapters that in this part, the transformation concept in the Plastic Theater of Tennessee Williams is considered as the guiding spirit of his drama and it rules the creation of drama from an incredible height and harvests with the most splendid stage effects from the practice of the theory. And even to the highly developed drama/movie industry at present, the transformation concept in the Plastic Theater still is very valuable to refer to.