A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
by Tennessee Williams
directed by Tony EstrellaFading southern belle Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly on the doorstep of her sister, Stella, searching for solace from romantic delusions and the vicissitudes of life. But the sultry New Orleans summer proves too much for the former beauty whose brutish brother-in-law, Stanley, cruelly exposes Blanche's genteel façade and brings her last gasp at meaning to a tragic end. Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and a landmark of 20th-century theater, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire remains an undisputed masterpiece and one of the most remarkable plays of our time.
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"Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range."
"In Streetcar Williams found images and rhythms that are still part of the way we think and feel and move."
-Newsweek
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 FROM THE DIRECTOR
Tennessee Williams was indeed the "screaming banshee" of the American Stage. In Irish myth, banshees are said to be heard wailing upon the imminent approach of death. A few years earlier, the Broadway debut of his Glass Menagerie hinted at what Streetcar's initial production would later confirm that, in the words of Arthur Miller, Tennessee had "[planted] the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater." In doing so, he helped resuscitate, in the days before the regional or "art" theater movement, the moribund, safe, consumerist palliative that too often ruled the Great White Way. Tennessee's "screaming" helped arrest that mortification and ushered in a Golden Age of American Theater.
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| | W. Eugene Smith-The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images |
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
by JENNIFER MADDEN, Gamm Resident Scholar
I think Late Williams--frowsy, blowsy, panicked--is also True Williams, the unredacted source-code of his madness and his majesty. Even the silliness and near schlock are essential. -Scott Brown, The New Yorker
Tennessee Williams achieved international acclaim in 1944 with his first great success, The Glass Menagerie. Simultaneously poetic and raw, his plays broke new ground in both form and content, and his willingness to address taboo subject matter earned him both acclaim and censure. (In 1956 Cardinal Spellman declared his work, "revolting, deplorable, morally repellent...offensive to Christian standards of decency.") Surprisingly Williams' plays, populated with haunted, intensely poetic and defeated characters, defined American drama during the conservative, optimistic post-war period. His wounded characters (like Williams himself) are typified by intense sensitivity to their surroundings, dislocation, and otherness, and were fiercely animated by a deep personal connection--as if each were, in the words of his great contemporary Eugene O'Neil, "written in tears and blood." Williams dominated the American theater (and cinema) until 1961 with Night of the Iguana, the last of his major works.
Williams floundered personally and professionally during the latter half of his career following the death of his longtime partner Frank Merlo in 1963. He continued to experiment with new forms and his wild later work became increasingly surreal and was largely misunderstood and dismissed. He was wounded by scathing and increasingly personal reviews that seemed to revel in his downfall (many of them fueled by homophobia). In appreciation of his later work, theater critic Scott Brown observes: "Williams could never keep quiet, even when the critics and fans begged him to. He seemed bent on shattering the myth of himself, which might have been the point of that despised shadow canon he left for the theater to finish. It's certainly kept him talking, long, long after we were all sure we'd heard everything he had to say."
Tennessee Williams authored dozens of plays, screenplays, poems, and works of fiction. Major works include Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth. Later plays include The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Slapstick Tragedy, The Red Devil Battery Sign, and Clothes For a Summer Hotel.
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Related articles & videos from across the web
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DRAMATURGY ESSAY
I AM BLANCHE DUBOIS
by JENNIFER MADDEN, Gamm Resident Scholar
Blanche DuBois, the woman, is Williams. Blanche comes into a house where someone is going to murder her... I saw Blanche as Williams, an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it because it threatens his life. -Elia Kazan
Critic John Lahr calls Blanche DuBois "the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range, which many stars have attempted and few have conquered." She's also been called a predatory nymphomaniac, pedophile, drag queen, and preening destructive egoist. Depsite the early triumph of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Tennessee Williams found his greatest artistic creation increasingly under attack in the 1960s and 70s by critics who found the play morally repugnant and its heroine a misogynist caricature, a neurotic slut who got what she deserved. New York Times critic Stanley Kauffman deplored Williams' "viciousness towards women, the lurid violence... the transvestite sexual exhibitionism." Feminist scholar Kathleen Margaret Lant calls Blanche's final destruction "an intentional stab at womanhood." She further elaborates that Williams "dehumanizes Blanche, undercuts her tragic situation, and renders her . . . a maddened hysteric with no place in a well-ordered society." This seems a profound misreading of the playwright's intent, for Blanche was the character with whom Williams most identified. (He once proclaimed, "I am Blanche Dubois.") Read the full essay
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| | Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty Images |
ARTICLE
BLANCHE DUBOIS: CHASING MAGIC, FLEEING THE DARK
When she boards the streetcar that will take her to her sister Stella's home in New Orleans, Blanche DuBois knows she's headed for a place where she doesn't belong -- and where, she will soon discover, she "is not wanted."
Blanche DuBois, the fallen Southern belle at the center of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, has been a character so rich and so complex that bringing her to life is one of acting's greatest challenges.
Playing her is like climbing Mount Everest, both physically and emotionally demanding. Actresses talk of losing their voice, suffering bouts of depression or having anxiety attacks while playing the part.
Yet they covet the role.
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HISTORY
DECEMBER 3, 1947 - STREETCAR OPENS ON BROADWAY
History.com
On December 3, 1947, Marlon Brando's famous cry of "STELLA!" first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire.
The 23-year-old Brando played the rough, working-class Polish-American Stanley Kowalski, whose violent clash with Blanche DuBois (played on Broadway by Jessica Tandy), a Southern belle with a dark past, is at the center of Williams' famous drama. Blanche comes to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), Stanley's wife, at their home in the French Quarter of New Orleans; she and Stanley immediately despise each other.
Streetcar, produced by Irene Mayer Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, shocked mid-century audiences with its frank depiction of sexuality and brutality onstage. When the curtain went down on opening night, there was a moment of stunned silence before the crowd erupted into a round of applause that lasted 30 minutes. On December 17, the cast left New York to go on the road. The show would run for more than 800 performances, turning the charismatic Brando into an overnight star. Tandy won a Tony Award for her performance, and Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Read the full article
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HISTORY
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS:
PORTRAITS OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS
Time.com
While Eugene O'Neill, with his Nobel Prize and four Pulitzers, is the greatest American playwright of the 20th century, Arthur Miller the most lastingly relevant, Edward Albee the most challenging and Sam Shepard simply the coolest, one could argue that Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III is the most influential, and his work the most universally beloved.
Putting one's finger on why Williams' plays have held pride of place in theater goers' hearts for so long is another matter. Yes, the dialog is a thrilling mixture of the perfectly colloquial and the poetic. Yes, the passions on display in works like The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie and, of course, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are as blistering as those given voice by any other American dramatist, while the characters Williams brought to life remain, for many of us, as indelible as members of our own families.
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RADIO
CONDUCTING CONVERSATIONS -
THE GAMM ON CLASSICAL 95.9
Host Mark Maino and Gamm Artistic Director Tony Estrella talk about the theater's upcoming 2015-2016 season, and listen to some selections of blues music that will be used in our production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
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IN THE NEXT GAMM INSIDER:
THE RANT
by Andrew Case
One summer night in Brooklyn, an unarmed black teenage boy is gunned down by the police. When the department closes ranks around the accused officer, an investigator assigned to the shooting takes what she knows to a tabloid reporter. But she quickly learns that the story she fed to the press is still only part of the truth. Alone, she must wade through prejudice, deceit, and a volley of anonymous threats to find where culpability and truth really lie. Based on playwright Andrew Case's eight years' experience working on police misconduct issues for New York City, The Rant is a gripping, timely drama exploring racial bias and police ethics on the perilous path to justice.
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