L.A. Theatre Works Releases Four Tennessee Williams Audio Plays

LOS ANGELES (December 10, 2024) — L.A. Theatre Works is excited to announce the availability, beginning today, of four audio theater productions of classic plays by Tennessee Williams. The company’s Tennessee Williams Collection launches with the release of The Glass Menagerie today, December 10, followed by three titles in 2025: A Streetcar Named Desire on March 11, The Rose Tattoo on April 8, and Summer and Smoke on May 6. Listeners can find each recording online at latw.org, as well as at retailers and libraries everywhere.

A co-production with NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM and the BBC, the L.A. Theatre Works audio production of The Glass Menagerie, Williams’ autobiographical “memory play” that launched his career, reunited the cast of the Roundabout Theatre’s celebrated revival: Julie Harris, Calista Flockhart (in her Broadway debut), Kevin Kilner and Zeljko Ivanek, and features John Goodman as the narrator. Set in 1935 and based on Williams’ family, the play centers on the Wingfield family, who live together in a cramped St. Louis flat, forced to wrestle with unrealized dreams and painful memories.

Glenne Headly, Vincent D'Onofrio, Amy Brenneman, and David Selby headline the cast of A Streetcar Named Desire, an L.A. Theatre Works co-production with the BBC and CBC. In Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Blanche DuBois, once a well-heeled Southern belle but now alcoholic and destitute, arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and her brutish brother-in-law Stanley. As Stanley terrorizes the fragile Blanche, reality slips slowly away from her.

Mercedes Ruehl and Anthony LaPaglia, who starred in the 1995 Broadway production of The Rose Tattoo that earned a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and Drama Desk Awards for both actors, reunited to record the play for L.A. Theatre Works in front of a live audience at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center. The story of an Italian-American widow in Louisiana who has allowed herself to withdraw from the world after her husband's death; the large cast also includes Emily Bergl, Marieclare Costello, Tim DeKay, Brent Hinkley, Carol Locatell, Kate Mulligan, Antonia Ray, Peggy Roeder, Vincent Schiavelli and Claudette Sutherland.

Finally, Summer and Smoke’s Alma Winemiller is a shy, religious young woman who grew up pining for the boy next door. He’s grown up to become a doctor with a penchant for sexual conquest, so when he returns to their Mississippi town to start a medical practice, their strange attraction sets them on a path of turmoil and heartbreak. Also recorded before a live audience at the Skirball, the L.A. Theatre Works audio production stars Ann Gee Byrd, Kristen Frazier, Mark Kudisch, Carlos Lacamara, Gabriel Olds, Tina Sánchez, David Selby, Tegan West, Armin Shimerman, Kitty Swink and Sarah Zimmerman.