{"id":2202435,"date":"2025-12-17T09:01:32","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T09:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2202435"},"modified":"2025-12-17T09:01:32","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T09:01:32","slug":"tennessee-williams-early-radio-play-the-strangers-publishes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/tennessee-williams-early-radio-play-the-strangers-publishes\/","title":{"rendered":"Tennessee Williams’ early radio play ‘The Strangers’ publishes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Long before the rise of podcast dramas, listeners worldwide tuned in to the audio-only narratives of radio plays.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller were among the many playwrights who early in their careers completed brief pieces for radio, while such memorable dramas as Harold Pinter’s \u201cA Slight Ache\u201d and Robert Bolt’s \u201cA Man for All Seasons\u201d premiered as radio broadcasts. Radio work was often a way to bring in money and to refine the arts of plotting and dialogue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Tennessee Williams was a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, still referring to himself by his birth name, Tom Williams, he completed a rarely-heard gothic sketch for radio called \u201cThe Strangers.\u201d Williams’ play appears this week in The Strand Magazine<\/a>, which has previously published little-known works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck among others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,\u201d writes Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, \u201ca storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings \u2014 as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Blanche DuBois would famously invoke \u201cthe kindness of strangers\u201d in Williams’ classic \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire.\u201d You could call this early work \u201cThe Horror of Strangers.\u201d His play is set in a columned New England manor on the Atlantic coast, a \u201cghostly\u201d home squinting under a lighthouse beam that casts a yellowish spell. The title refers to invisible demons who haunt two of the home’s residents, Mr. Brighton and Mrs. Brighton.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe members of the human species are equipped with only five senses. Or six at the very most,\u201d Mr. Brighton declares early on. \u201cThe Strangers are creatures that might be perceptible to us if we had seven or eight or maybe nine senses. But as it is, they exist just outside our little sphere of contact with reality and so \u2026 what we know of them is very, very slight.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Williams scholar John Bak, \u201cThe Strangers\u201d was among a handful of radio dramas the young playwright worked on while in Iowa, where he and his classmates were required to write and produce plays. Bak believes Williams was influenced by commercial considerations and by more personal forces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Horror stories were popular on radio in the late ’30s, Bak says. Williams first thought of radio plays as an \u201cexercise,\u201d but he would eventually take them more seriously. While writing \u201cThe Strangers,\u201d he was already haunted by the mental health struggles of his sister, Rose, who would later inspire the fragile Laura Wingfield of \u201cThe Glass Menagerie.\u201d Williams would long explore the idea of madness, Bak says, and how we respond to people who seem to see things \u201cno one else can see.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newstimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Long before the rise of podcast dramas, listeners worldwide tuned in to the audio-only narratives of radio plays. Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller were among the many playwrights who early in their careers completed brief pieces for radio, while such memorable dramas as Harold Pinter’s \u201cA Slight Ache\u201d and Robert Bolt’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2202436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[425199,379438,425198,425197,425200,425196,394432,425195,345440,313298,425201,345436,345437,345439,425194,23502,425192,382762,425193],"class_list":["post-2202435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-andrew-gulli","tag-arthur-miller","tag-blanche-dubois","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-harold-pinter","tag-john-bak","tag-john-steinbeck","tag-laura-wingfield","tag-package-100024-ap-online","tag-package-100373-mc-complete-state-national","tag-product-30051-ap-iowa-state-news-no-weather","tag-product-30598-ap-national-news-report-a-wire","tag-product-31388-premium-entertainment","tag-product-33328-ap-premium-entertainment-other","tag-robert-bolt","tag-tennessee","tag-tennessee-williams-radio-play-strangers","tag-tom-stoppard","tag-tom-williams"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Tennessee-Williams-early-radio-play-The-Strangers-publishes.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202437,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202435\/revisions\/2202437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2202436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}