Three Plays (50 page)

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive—that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life—live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

A Streetcar Named Desire was presented at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, produced by Irene Seiznick. Scenery and lighting by Jo Mielziner, costumes by Lucinda Ballard. Assistant to the Producer was Irving Schneider, Musical Advisor was Lehman Engel.

It was directed by Elia Kazan, with the following cast:

STANLEY
KOWALSKI
- Marlon Brando

STELLA
KOWALSKI
- Kim Hunter

STEVE HUBBELL
- Rudy Bond

EUNICE
HUBBELL
- Peg Hillias

HAROLD MITCHELL (MITCH)
- Karl Malden

BLANCHE
DUBOIS
- Jessica Tandy

NEGRO WOMAN
- Gee Gee James

MEXICAN WOMAN
- Edna Thomas

PABLO GONZALES
- Nick Dennis

A YOUNG COLLECTOR
- Vito Christi

NURSE
- Ann Dere (
STRANGE WOMAN
per www)

DOCTOR
- Richard Garrick (
STRANGE MAN
per www)

The action of the play takes place in the spring, summer, and early fall in New Orleans. It was performed with intermissions after Scene Four and Scene Six.

Another Introduction

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26th, 1911. He assumed the name "Tennessee" in 1938 because, he said, "The Williamses fought the Indians for Tennessee, and I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defence of the stockade against a band of savages"—a description reminiscent of Blanche's battles with Stanley in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Indeed, it has been repeatedly pointed out by critics, biographers and Williams himself, that his plays were very much an exploration and a working out of his own life.

His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, a hard drinking, bad tempered, coarse man who called his son "Miss Nancy", was often absent from the household—he had "fallen in love with long distances" like the father in
The Glass Menagerie
—in his work for the telephone company, and later, for a shoe company. Tennessee's mother was Edwina Dakin, the daughter of an Episcopal minister. She despised her husbands drinking and womanising; she felt she had an aristocratic pedigree which was ill-suited to the life her husband, and his frequent changes of address, forced her to lead. "CC" Williams and Edwina Dakin had three children: Rose, born in 1907, Tom, born in 1911 and Dakin, born in 1919—shortly after the family's traumatic move to St Louis. In St Louis the family were separated from Edwina's genteel background—she was thirty-four and had to cook for the first time—an experience which Tom later described as losing "belief in everything but loss". As a result, Tom withdrew into his writing, Edwina into dreams of lost Southern gentility, and Tom's sister, Rose, into madness—she was lobotomized in 1937. Edwina Dakin Williams, similarly, ended her life in a mental home.

Tennessee Williams's first major success was
The Glass Menagerie
(1944), his second was
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947). In an article in the
New York Times
(30.11.47) Williams describes the disadvantages of sudden fame—"the catastrophe of success," which he had experienced following his first successful play. He felt that the material security he found following
The Glass Menagerie
had limited his creativity. He felt that
Streetcar
rediscovered this creativity—and in many ways this battle between humanity and the corrupting effect of security is an important theme in the play.

When
Streetcar
was first performed in England in 1949 it attracted a good deal of the "wrong" sort of attention: it was serialised in one of the more excitable Sunday newspapers and was popularly thought to be sexually permissive in the extreme. The play's early reputation, however, was short lived; critics and audiences quickly came to see Williams' play for what it really is — a work of great humanity and technical brilliance. Indeed, it is not too grand a claim to suggest that
A Streetcar Named Desire
is a classic tragedy. The poet Keats identified a tragic hero as an individual unable to see that life has its impossibilities. Tennessee Williams' contemporary, Arthur Miller, maintained that the struggle of a tragic hero, "is that of the individual attempting to gain his rightful place in society... ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity." Keats and Miller would, I think, have recognized in Blanche the individual they had in mind—unable to renounce the image of herself as a rare being, unable to accept, as her sister does, the "blisses of the commonplace".

Between his success with
Streetcar
and 1962 Tennessee Williams produced a large number of highly acclaimed plays:
Summer and Smoke
(1948),
The Rose Tattoo
(1951),
Camino Real
,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955),
Orpheus Descending
(1957),
Suddenly Last Summer
(1958),
Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959),
Period of Adjustment
(1960),
Night of the Iguana
(1961) and
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
(1962).
Night of the Iguana
is considered by many to be his last great play, and although his reputation declined in subsequent years, he continued writing until his death (by accidentally choking on a bottle top) in 1983.

In 1976 Williams published his
Memoirs.
He wrote to his agent shortly before their publication: "I have a new title for my memoirs—'Flee, Flee This Sad Hotel'—it's a quote from a poem by Anne Sexton. Of course hotel is a metaphor for my life—and flight from it—if not an impulse—at least is an imminence." He never used the title.

Whatever your purpose in reading the play, you will find
A Streetcar Named Desire
eminently approachable, and a richly rewarding play to study in depth.

- Ray Speakman