IHE PLAY

AND
AUTHOR
On >4 Streetcar Named Desire.
Brenda Murphy

The Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, on Decem-

ber 3,1947, was a major event in American theatrical history. Not only
was it the official birth of Tennessee Williams's most significant play,
which went on to run for 855 performances and to win the Pulitzer
Prize for drama, it was the first collaboration between director Elia
Kazan and designer Jo Mielziner, an artistic combination that was to
work with Williams and Arthur Miller in realizing several more of the
most important American plays of the twentieth century on stage, in-
cluding Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Kazan's stage
version of^4 Streetcar Named Desire was tremendously infiuential, and
his interpretation of Williams's play has been permanently fixed in the
public imagination through the 1951 film adaptation that he directed,
with a screenplay written by Williams and Oscar Saul. While Blanche
DuBois was played by two different actors, Jessica Tandy in the theater
and Vivien Leigh in the film, Stanley Kowalski was played with such
authority by Marlon Brando both on stage and in the film that the char-
acter has become almost inextricable fi'om the actor, even for succeed-
ing generations of the film's viewers.
Kazan had a tendency to seek an emotional and moral clarity on
stage that sometimes became melodrama. Early on in their negotia-
tions, suspecting that Kazan might have reservations about taking on
the direction of the play, Williams offered an explanation of the tragic
ambiguities he saw at its heart. In an extraordinary letter laying out his
conception of the play, he wrote that in^ Streetcar Name Desire "there
are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse
but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blind-
ness to what is going on in each other's hearts." Stanley, he said, sees
Blanche "not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last comer to
make a last desperate stand—^but as a calculating bitch with 'round
heels. ' . . . Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the fiaws of their

On A Streetcar Named Desire 3

own ego." The only point the play makes, he insisted, is "the point or
theme of human understanding," explaining that "it is a tragedy with
the classic aim of producing a katharsis of pity and terror, and in order
to do that Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion
of the audience." And this must happen "without creating a black-dyed
villain in Stanley. It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stan-
ley) that destroys her in the end. In the end you should feel—'If only
they all had known about each other.'"'
A good example of Williams's reftisal to make a clear moral state-
ment in Streetcar is Stanley's rape of Blanche in scene 10 and its after-
math in scene 11, whieh was controversial from the first and remains so
to this day. Williams had rethought this sexual encounter continuously
as he worked on the script, and several surviving manuscript versions
in the Williams archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas show very different conceptions of it.
In a fragment of a version called "The Passion of a Moth," Blanche and
Stanley seem to have made love with mutual attraction, and Blanche
tells Stanley she is going on to Mobile, where she expects to meet a
stranger. She also speaks of bearing Stanley's son, who will wash them
all elean. At the end of the play, Blanche is alone onstage, in complete
control as she says it is time for her to get packed and be going. In a
later version, ealled "The Poker Nigbt"—Williams's favored title for
the play up until the last revisions—Blanche is presented as a helpless
victim in the final seene. She is described by the doctor as "catatonic"
as she sits staring out the window, and later she crouches in a gro-
tesque, twisted position, screaming. She is taken away in a straitjacket
by the people from the asylum.
In the final version of the play, it is evident that Williams aimed to
steer between these two extremes. Wbile Blanche is clearly the victim
of Stanley's assault, and she is ready to twist the jagged edge of a bro-
ken bottle in Stanley's face as she unsuccessfully fights him off, the de-
termination of her resistance is undermined by Stanley's line "We've
had this date with each other from the beginning"^ and by her moaning

4 Critical Insights
and sinking to her knees before he carries her inert figure to the bed. To
emphasize this ambiguity, Williams, in a revision sent to Kazan just a
few weeks before rehearsals began, had cut a line from the next scene
in which Stella said to Eunice that Blanche told her Stanley had raped
her. This was underlined visually when Stella held up Stanley's pajama
top, which had been ripped to shreds, and said that his shoulders and
back were covered with scratches. All Stanley would say in his defense
was that Blanche was crazy. In cutting this graphic demonstration of
the rape and depicting Blanche as out of touch with reality and thus un-
reliable as the narrator of her story in the final scene, Williams took
away the element of moral certainty that the earlier version had. He
also made Stella's guilt for sending away her sister less overt. When
she says, "I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley,"^
in the final version of the play, there may be some doubt in her mind.
There was none in the earlier version.
With Marlon Brando playing Stanley, the ambiguities—and the un-
resolved confiicts in the audience's empathy with the characters—
became more exaggerated. Kazan and Williams agreed that the audi-
ence should be on Stanley's side at the beginning of the play, as
Blanche invades his home and sets about attempting to "resubjugate
Stella," as Kazan put it.'' In the course ofthe play, the audience should
be drawn toward Blanche. Kazan wrote in his director's notes:

Gradually, as they see how genuinely in pain, how actually desperate she
is, how warm, tender and loving she can be (the Mitch story), how
freighted with need she is—then they begin to go with her. They begin to
realize that they are sitting in at the death of something extraordinary . ..
colorful, varied, passionate, lost, witty, imaginative, of her own integrity...
and then they feel the tragedy.'

In the acting script ofthe play, Williams added a note at the begin-
ning of scene 5 that identifies the scene as "a point of balance between
the play's two sections, Blanche's coming and the events leading up to

On ^ Streetcar Natned Desire 5

her violent departure. The important values are the ones that charac-
terize Blanche: its function is to give her dimension as a character and
to suggest the intense inner life which makes her a person of greater
magnitude than she appears on the surface."^ This is the scene in
which Stanley first reveals the threat of exposing Blanche's past
through his informant Shaw, and Blanche admits to Stella that she has
not "been so good the last two years or so, after Belle Reve had started
to slip through my fingers. . . . I was never hard or self-sufficient
enough. . . . Soft people, soft people have got to shimmer and glow.
They've got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings and put a
paper lantern over the light."^ This is the point at which the audience
should begin to be drawn to her side.
With Brando playing Stanley, however, this was no mean feat. The
magnetism of the actor carried over to the character, and Brando was
able to find points of vulnerability, humor, and vitality in Stanley that
kept audience members from transferring their sympathy completely
to Blanche. This bothered Kazan at first, thinking that it was a fault in
his direction, but Williams reminded him that Stanley was not meant to
be evil and Blanche was not ftawless. Kazan fmally came to the con-
clusion that this uneasy ambiguity was exactly what was in the play:
"Was the play an affirmation of spiritual values over the brutish ones?
Certainly. But that simple? No."^
As he became closer to Williams, Kazan came to locate the play's
ambiguity in the playwright himself. Observing Williams's stormy re-
lationship with his partner at the time, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez,
Kazan concluded that the moth imagery originated very close to home:
"Blanche is attracted by the man who is going to destroy her. I under-
stood the play by this formula of ambivalence. Only then, it seemed to
me, would I think of it as Tennessee meant it to be understood: with fi-
delity to life as he—^not all us groundlings, but he—had experienced
it."' Later critics have found a deep ambivalence in the play that they
see arising from Williams's relationships to his homosexuality, to
members of his family, and to the South or to American values in gen-

6 Critical Insights
eral. There is no doubt ofthe play's complexity, however, or of its un-
canny power to touch all kinds of spectators and readers. In the ten
years after its premiere, A Streetcar Named Desire was staged in Ha-
vana, Mexico City, Rome, London, Paris, Toronto, Hamburg, Vienna,
Basel, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Tonui, Wroclaw, and Melbourne.'" During
the latter half of the twentieth century, it became an important part of
the world's collective theater experience, and so it remains in the
twenty-first.

Notes
1. Tennessee Williams to Elia "Gadge" Kazan, April 19, 1947, in The Selected
Letters of Tennessee Williams, vol. 2, 1945-1957, ed. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M.
Tischler (New York: New Directions, 2004), 95-96.
2. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee
Williams, vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 402.
3. Ibid., 405.
4. Elia Kazan, "Notebook for Streetcar," in Directors on Directing, ed. Toby Cole
and Helen Chinoy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 372.
5. Ibid., 367.
6. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Dramatists Play
Service, 1947), 52.
7. Ibid., 56.
8. Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 349.
9. Ibid., 351.
10. Philip C. Kolin, Williams: "A Streetcar Named Desire " (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 175-79.

On A Streetcar Natned Desire

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