Week four, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

New Orleans as location within and outwith America; immigration

Postwar America; elemental qualities of the city

Desire and death: the Southern aristocracy in decline

Born in 1911, as Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi. With his sister Rose, Williams grows up in various Southern towns. During the 1920s, Williams writes short stories, poems, articles, and travels around Europe with his grandfather in 1928. Persuaded to be a playwright by a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts that he sees in 1936. 1937: several plays produced by the Mummers amateur group in St. Louis. Studies playwriting and production at University of Iowa.1939: lives for a time in French Quarter of New Orleans. Perhaps has first significant homosexual relationship here.1940: takes a playwriting seminar in New York with John Gassner, and has first lengthy homosexual affair in Provincetown. Rose is institutionalized in 1943 and treated with lobotomy. 1944: The Glass Menagerie premieres. Has a highly-successful Broadway run in 1945. Writes Streetcar in one month whilst summering in Key West in 1946. Streetcar is the first American play to win all three major awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.

Tennessee Williams: chronology

‘[P]oor but unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. […] You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee.’ (Stage directions, p.115.)

‘As the twentieth century rushed away from it, the South became an aesthetic rather than a social fact.’

(Christopher Bigsby, ‘Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self’, in Modern American Drama, 1945-1990, p.48.)

In Blanche, ‘[t]he barren woman condemned to an asylum becomes a perfect image of the South.’

(Christopher Bigsby, ‘Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self’, p.50.)

Draft titles for Streetcar

‘Blanche’s Chair in the Moon’‘The Passion of a Moth’‘Go, Said the Bird’‘The Moth’‘The Primary Colors’‘Electric Avenue’‘The Paper Lantern’‘The Poker Night’

Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café (1888) – see Williams’s stage directions for scene 3.

A participant in the annual Stanley and Stella shouting contest, in which males try to mimic Marlon Brando’s impassioned wailing, and coax their female down from the balcony.

‘If [Williams] had written plays in the days before the technical development of translucent and transparent scenery, I believe he would have invented it. […] It was a true reflection of the contemporary playwright’s interest in – and at times obsession with – the exploration of the inner man. Williams was writing not only a memory play but a play of influences that were not confined within the walls of one room.’ (Jo Mielziner, quoted in Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, v.2: Williams/Miller/Albee, pp.49-50.)