The Study of Stage Description (Didascalia) in Tennessee Williams’ One Act Plays

Stage Description or, as Michael Issacharoff says, Didascalia, is a unique characteristic of Drama which has been part of plays from the beginning of the tradition of playwriting in mankind’s history. Didascalia in modern plays has found a complex function, helping playwrites as a technical tool as well as creating a richer vision of the characters, transfer plot in a betterr way, showing the changes in each scenes, and ... In present days, the importance of the function of Didascalia has convinced playwrites to give an equal place and value to it, as they give to dialogues and they tried to pay attention to the stage description as they do for other elements of drama. Among modern playwrites who had used Didascalia in large scale for transfer his ideas to the audience, was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). He wrote many long plays as well as short ones and became a recpectable artist and playwrite, using his knowledge in painting, music, photography, cinema and sculpture for creating more interesting and more complex plays. This paper aims to investigate the style of Tennessee Williams in using Didascalia based on transtextuality, introducing the quality of stage description or Didascalia in his short plays. This research hopes to encourage Iranian playwrites to know and use Didascalia more than before, not only as a technical element, but also as a fundomental one in a play which could led audience to a better understanding of the play.