Unconscious Acts of Aggression: Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Key Rewritings of Sweet Bird of Youth

Exceptionally thorough scholarly researchers have detailed the long and complicated development process of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Wildly diverse scenes and plotlines found their way to inscription, then to frequent reworking, throughout more than a decade before a 1959 Broadway production script emerged. The Broadway run uncomfortably blended together Williams' own writing with some provocative, and perhaps overly robust, adjustments to the script by the stage director Elia Kazan, with whom the playwright had a productive but often contentious working relationship. Here, Loomis discusses the evolution of Sweet Bird of Youth. In addition to marshaling important evidence about the production and publication history of the play, he details what distinguishes the various extant versions of Sweet Bird from one another, placing them and the archival evidence in sequence to tell the story of the circumstances, including production histories, that gave rise to each of them.