The Staging "A Streetcar Named Desire":

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Recognized as perhaps the greatest American playwright, Tennessee Williams was himself an individual whose life and personality reflected many of the problems he built into his characters. DaPonte in “Williams’ Feminine Characters,” for example, says of him, “Many of the personages he has created would seem to be projections of his own disoriented personality, frightened, timid, groping, highly sensitive, somewhat neurotic dreamers who, like their creator, are unable to adjust to the harsh realities of a world of crass materialism and brute strength. Or, if they have been forced to make an adjustment, this adjustment usually hardens and distorts them . . .” (54). Williams is probably best known for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and The Night of the Iguana. The first two received Pulitzer Prizes and each was given the Drama Critics Circle Award. He is, however, also the author of many other plays including the well respected The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth.

Although Williams’s reputation had already grown considerably with the production of The Glass Menagerie in 1944, with A Streetcar Named Desire he immediately gained world fame. John Chapman, a drama critic for The New York Daily News, commented following the opening night, “Tennessee Williams, a young playwright who is not ashamed of being a poet, has given us a superb drama in A Streetcar Named Desire. Last evening, under the sentient direction of Elia Kazan, it was given a brilliant performance at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The company, headed by Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Maiden, is the answer to a playgoer’s prayer” (Chapman 29). He went on to tell his readers, “The new play is full-scale-throbbingly alive, compassionate, heart-wrenchingly human. It has the tragic overtones of grand opera, and is, indeed, the story of a New Orleans Camille—a wistful little trollop who shuns the reality of what she is and takes gallant and desperate refuge in a magical life she has invented for herself” (Chapman 29).

Philip Kolin makes a distinction between works of art that appeal to a general audience and those that appeal to what he calls “ sophisticated literary critics” (Kolin 133) and says of Williams, “The one American playwright who is a conspicuous exception to the dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is Tennessee Williams. Williams’s South, with its sexual ambivalence, self-delusion, and irrational violence, has become part of our popular mythos, the ambience of countless B-movies and television melodramas” (Kolin 134). He goes on to say of Streetcar, “Surely, no play of the American theatre, perhaps no play in English since the time of Shakespeare, has won such praise from both the critics and the populace” (Kolin 134).

ABOUT THE PLAY

Since that first night, the play has garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1947 and reached a wide audience, partly through stage productions, but perhaps more from the cinema version in 1951, starring Marlon Brando as Stanley and Vivien Leigh as Blanche. It also has been produced on television, and the play has been staged widely. Thomas Adler and other critics believe that Williams created a new form of lyrical drama with this play. According to Adler, “Williams fully utilized the stylistic possibilities of the stage...to break away from the language-bound realistic drama of the nineteenth century . . . . This new type of play would not only admit but insist that the language of drama involves more than just words; it would acknowledge the stage symbols and the scenic images that speak to the audience as powerfully as what issues from the mouths of the characters” (Adler 8). Other critics have found comedy in the play, that at first may seem to be a harsh picture of anger and misery, calling it brilliant tragicomedy. “With the tragic implications of so many events in Streetcar, one is tempted simply to label the play a tragedy, if an imperfect one. What rises again and again, however, to contradict such a position is a comic spirit that continuously puts the audience off balance. Rather than viewing these comic elements as imperfections in a purely tragic mode, then, or the tragic events as weak melodramatic elements in a comic mode, our appraisal should encompass both modes and allow Williams his tragicomic stance with all of its irreconcilabilities” (Roderick 93).

STAGING OF THE PLAY

Tennessee Williams gives very explicit directions as to how A Streetcar Named Desire is to be staged: “The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both” (13).

Later he describes the unusual relationship between an outer wall of the house and street, “Depending on the location of the action, the audience sees either the inside or the street and outside of the house: A light goes on behind the blind, turning it light blue. Blanche slowly follows her into the downstairs flat. The surrounding areas dim out as the interior is lighted” (16).

It is important as one reads the play to realize that sometimes we can see the street and the outside of the house; and, sometimes, a wall of the house becomes transparent, and we see inside the house. “When the lights fade on the gauzy, shimmery exterior and rise on the inside two rooms of the apartment, the contrast from the beauty—even beauty in decay—is startling. Here the colors, though still dingy with age, are primary, greens and yellows, rather than muted—a fitting reflection . . . of the wilder side of the Quarter” (Adler 24). The touch of elegance on the outside can be seen both as a contrast to the lives within it and a reminder of the elegance of Belle Reve, the DuBois family plantation (Adler 24).

Music and light are also an important part of the setting. Williams includes them in his instructions concerning the set, “It is first dark of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner. In this part of New Orleans, you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This “Blue Piano” expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here” (13).

“The spirited yet sometimes dissonant jazz music—the recurrent blues piano, trumpet, and drums—heard during the play [reflecting] . . . the wilder side of the Quarter” (Adler 24) starts as the play begins with the entrance of Stanley and Mitch, and never ends. Williams refers to it as the “perpetual ‘blue piano’” in the stage direction at the start of Scene Two (82). There is a clear connection between the music and the characters. “The nightclub music and the Varsouviana (a polka melody played when Blanche’s husband died that haunts her at stressful times throughout the play) convey the emotional states of the characters at each stage of the action” (Corrigan 59).