In commemoration of the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, The Historic New Orleans Collection presents Drawn to Life: Al Hirschfeld and the Theater of Tennessee Williams. Williams drew from his own private drama to create a new kind of theater—one that revolutionized Broadway. The characters in his plays, often representations of individuals in his own life, became archetypes that transcend time and place.

Over six decades, Hirschfeld drew almost all Tennessee Williams productions on and off Broadway as well as two film adaptations, and Hirschfeld created a landmark series of works based on the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. No other artist so thoroughly documented Tennessee Williams in the playwright’s own lifetime.

Hirschfeld looked with an artist’s eye, but with a journalist’s intent, to capture Williams’s unique brand of stage magic. Like Williams, Hirschfeld was unconstrained by reality, merging literal details with the playwright’s poetic vision. His contribution, Hirschfeld said, was to take the character created by the playwright and portrayed by the actor and reinvent it for the reader. He created not only a fascinating archive of Williams’s career (both original productions and revivals), but one that gives viewers, then and now, a real sense of the performance and personality of the actors who inhabited these roles.

Now for the first time, these drawings, augmented by related material drawn from The Historic New Orleans Collection, are reunited to give us a contemporaneous account, literally drawn from life, of the work of Tennessee Williams on Broadway and beyond.

Book Details
Published by The Historic New Orleans Collection, December 2010 • 88 pp. • 8.5 x 11 • Paperback • ISBN: 978-0-917860-58-4 • $17.95

Ordering: Copies may be ordered from The Shop at The Collection, (504) 598-7147; michelleg@hnoc.org