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A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams
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It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.
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A Streetcar Named Desire is an intricate web of complex themes and conflicted characters. Set in the pivotal years immediately following World War II, Tennessee Williams infuses Blanche and Stanley with the symbols of opposing class and differing attitudes towards sex and love, then steps back as the power struggle between them ensues. Yet there are no clear cut lines of good vs. evil, no character is neither completely good nor bad, because the main characters, (especially Blanche), are so torn by conflicting and contradictory desires and needs. As such, the play has no clear victor, everyone loses something, and this fact is what gives the play its tragic cast. In a larger sense, Blanche and Stanley, individual characters as well as symbols for opposing classes, historical periods, and ways of life, struggle and find a new balance of power, not because of ideological rights and wrongs, but as a matter of historical inevitability. Interestingly, Williams finalizes the resolution of this struggle on the most base level possible.
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Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in its first year of production in New York (1947) received the Pulitzer Prize, the Donaldson Award, and the New York Drama Critics Award. It won praise not only for Williams and director Elia Kazan, but for Marlon Brando as Stanley, Jessica Tandy as Blanche, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. The 1951 film reunion featured the original director, as well as the entire cast except Jessica Tandy who was replaced with Vivien Leigh, and continued to pile up praise and awards, including Oscars for Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden. Marlon Brando’s stage and screen performances as Stanley Kowalski were nothing less than epochal, and any actor who has played the role since has inevitably been compared to Brando.
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A Streetcar Named Desire opened Dec. 3 1947 and sent shockwaves through the theater community. The play opened to a half-hour's standing ovation. One reviewer wrote, "'Williams is certainly the Eugene O'Neill of teh present period.'" The play ran for 855 performances. "Williams dramatizes what results when a southern woman's dream of beauty and refinement is challenged by the vulgarity and brutality of the mechanistic world, a brutality with which she, at one point at least and ... unintentionally, cooperates." (Thomas P. Adler, American Drama, 1940-1960: A Critical History (Twayne Publishers:New York) 1994: 140.) In this original production picture, Stanley (Marlon Brando) takes Blanche (Jessica Tandy) into the bedroom.
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A Streetcar Named Desire is rightly seen by many as Tennessee Williams's best play. The least that can be said is that along with The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof it counts among his most haunting work. No-one can emerge unscathed from the New Orleans abode of Stella and Stanley, and Blanche surely remains the most pathetic - in the best sense of the word - theatrical character in the twentieth century. Complete with well-chosen pictures, Patricia Hern's 1984 Methuen student edition of A Streetcar Named Desire is ideal for secondary school and undergraduate students; the notes in particular are very useful for students of American Literature in non English-speaking countries. This edition will ... please the non academic admirers of Williams's plays, as it provides an unpretentious and enlightening commentary, which is short enough not to bore. Curiously, Hern refrained from mentioning the playwright's love life in the chronology, which is rather infrequent when it comes to Williams.
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A Streetcar Named Desire is an Academy Award-winning 1951 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. It was directed by Elia Kazan, who directed the original stage production, and starred Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski), Vivien Leigh (Blanche DuBois), Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. All but Leigh were chosen from the Broadway cast of the play.[1]
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