The Movie Palace and the Culture of Performativity in These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch by Tennessee Williams

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22456/2236-3254.142137

Abstract

This paper aims to establish a relationship between the spatiality and cultural characteristics of early 20th-century American Movie Palaces and the development of the characters in the play These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch by Tennessee Williams. Following the idea that the ambiance of a work of art imposes specific sensorialities and historical meanings (Gumbrecht, 2014) and that the frequency of movie palaces brought with it a “performative consumption” (Slowinska, 2005), we would like to reflect on how space produces, in the literary field, epic-dramaturgical tensions, acting actively on the characters of the drama. To this end, we will analyze the dramaturgy of the play and an excerpt from Tennessee Williams’s never-filmed screenplay, entitled Movie Sequence

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Author Biography

Fernanda Sales Rocha Santos, Universidade de São Paulo – USP, São Paulo/SP, Brasil

Doutoranda em Meios e Processos Audiovisuais na Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, com período sanduíche na School of the Arts da Columbia University (New York). Mestra pelo mesmo programa na USP. Além de acadêmica, Fernanda também é dramaturga e roteirista profissional.

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Published

2025-04-30

How to Cite

Sales Rocha Santos, F. (2025). The Movie Palace and the Culture of Performativity in These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch by Tennessee Williams. Revista Cena, 43(2). https://doi.org/10.22456/2236-3254.142137

Issue

Vol. 43 No. 2 (2025): Revista Cena

Section

Artigos

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