Harold Clurman on "A Streetcar Named Desire":

Harold Clurman on Streetcar From: The Collected Works of Harold Clurman

The following remarks were written by Mr. Clurman, a founder of the famous Group Theatre and an agent in establishing so-called Method acting in America, on the occasion of Streetcar's original Broadway production. 

. . . Blanche DuBois, a woman whose family once possessed property and title to position in the circle of refined Southern respectability, has . . . lost her job [as a high school English teacher] and has come to stay with her younger sister Stella in New Orleans. . . . [Blanche' s] brother-in-law Stanley . . . (and we) discover her secret : after an unfortunate marriage at an early age to a boy who turned out to be a homosexual, the boy's suicide, her family's loss of all its property, and the death of the last member of the older generation, Blanche has become a notorious person, whose squalid affairs have made it impossible for her to remain in her hometown.  She meets a friend of Stanley whom she wants to marry because he is a decent fellow [Mitch], but Stanley, by disclosing the facts of her life to her suitor, wrecks Blanche s hopes. . . .Tennessee Williams is a poet of frustration, and what [Streetcar] says is that aspiration, sensitivity, departure from the norm are battered, bruised and disgraced in our world today.

It would be far truer to think of Blanche DuBois as the potential artist in all of us than as a deteriorated Southern belle. Her amatory adventures, which her brother-in-law . . .  regards as the mark of her inferiority, are the unwholesome means she uses to maintain her connection with life, to fight the sense of death which her whole background has created in her. The play’s story shows us Blanche’s seeking haven in a simple, healthy man [Mitch] and that in this, too, she is defeated because everything in her environment conspires to degrade the meaning of her tragic situation. Her lies are part of her will-to beauty; her wretched romanticism is a futile reaching toward a fullness of life. . . . Blanche is an almost willing victim of a world that has trapped her and in which she can find "peace" only by accepting the verdict of her unfitness for "normal" life. The play is not specifically written as a symbolic drama or as a tract. What I have said is implicit in all of the play’s details. The reason for the play’s success even with audiences who fail to understand it is that the characters and the scenes are written with a firm grasp on their naturalistic truth. Yet we shall waste the play and the author’s talent if we praise the play’s effects and disregard its core. Like most works of art the play’s significance cannot be isolated in a single passage. It is clear to the attentive and will elude the hasty. . . .

            One of the greatest parts ever written for a woman in the American theatre, Blanche DuBois demands the fullness and variety of an orchestra. . . . The part represents the essence of womanly feeling and wounded human sensibility. Blanche lies and pretends, but through it all the actress must make us perceive her truth. She is an aristocrat (regardless of the threadbare myth of Southern gentility); she is an aristocrat in the subtlety and depth of her feeling. She is a poet, even if we are dubious about her understanding of the writers she names; she is superior by the sheer intensity and realization of her experience, even if much of what she does is abject. 

If she is not these things, she is too much of a fraud to be worthy of the author’s concern with her. If the latter is true, then the play would be saying something rather surprising namely, that frank brutality and naked power are more admirable than the yearning for tenderness and the desire to reach beyond one’s personal appetites. [In Blanche s] appeals to her sister in the name of these values, . . . it is essential to the play that we believe and are touched by what she says, that her emotion convinces us of the soundness of her values. All through the play, indeed, we must be captured by the music of Blanche’s martyred soul. Without this there is either a play whose viewpoint we reject or no play at all           only a series of "good scenes," a highly seasoned theatrical dish. . . .

What is Stanley Kowalski? He is the embodiment of animal force, of brute life unconcerned and even consciously scornful of every value that does not come within the scope of such life. He resents being called a Polack, and he quotes Huey Long, who assured him that "every man is a king." He screams that he is a hundred percent American, and breaks dishes and mistreats his women to prove it. He is all muscle, lumpish sensuality and crude energy, given support by a society that hardly demands more of him. He is the unwitting antichrist of our time, the little man who will break the back of every effort to create a more comprehensive world in which thought and conscience, a broader humanity are expected to evolve from the old Adam. His mentality provides the soil for fascism, viewed not as a political movement but as a state of being. .

When Kowalski tells his wife to get rid of Blanche so that things can be as they were the author is suggesting that the untoward presence of a new consciousness in Kowalski s life   the appeal to forbearance and fineness    is a disturbance and that he longs for a life without any spiritual qualms . . .

[Mitch, ] Blanche s suitor, is a person without sufficient force to transcend the level of  his environment. . . . [Stella,] Blanche’s sister, has made her peace with Kowalski’s normal life. Both appear in a sense to stand outside the play s interpretive problem. They are not struggling with a consciousness of the dilemma that exists in the choice between Kowalski s world and that of Blanche DuBois. . . .

It is a play that ought to arouse in us as much feeling, thought and even controversy as plays on semi political themes, for it is a play that speaks of a poet s reaction to life in our country (not just the South), and what Williams has to say about it is much more far-reaching than what might be enunciated through any slogan.

I have heard it said, for example, that Williams portrays "ordinary" people without much sense of their promise and reserves most of his affection for more special people  that minority which Thomas Mann once described as life s delicate children. I find this view false and misleading, but I would rather hear it expressed than to let the play go by as the best play of the season, something you must see,  "great theatre." 

If the play is great theatre as I believe it is because it is insync with life, a life we share not only on the stage, but in our very homes by night and day. If I have chosen to examine the production with what might seem undue minuteness, it is because I believe that questions of the theatre (and of art) are not simply questions of taste or professional quibbles, but life questions. . .