A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire : We’ve Had This Date

from the Beginning

Virginia H. Cope

Modern Drama, Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2014, pp. 493-512 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/564356

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire:
We’ve Had This Date from the
Beginning

virginia h. cope

Black and Hispanic actors starred in the 2012 Broadway production of

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, reigniting the rage and the
praise that greeted the multiethnic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008. Both
plays were produced by Stephen C. Byrd, who has made it his mission to
increase the number of African Americans attending Broadway plays. What
his efforts have proved anew is that nothing galvanizes critics quite like
casting blacks in roles usually played by whites. From drama critics to blog
writers, reviewers responded intensely and predictably. Indeed, the 2012
reactions were much the same as those inspired by the first proposed
major multiethnic version of Streetcar – in 1958. That year, a production of
Streetcar with black actors in the lead roles came within one month of
opening at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse in Manhattan. According to papers
in the files of Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood,1 producers, cast members,
and the playwright himself canvassed some now-familiar issues: whether a
mixed-race Blanche DuBois could have existed, whether the need to break
down racial barriers in the theatre justified non-traditional casting, and
whether such choices would be dismissed as publicity stunts. It is notable
that, in analysing the propriety of colour-blind casting, reviewers have
rarely asked whether audience members could or should be colour blind.
Instead, they assume that non-white actors and the characters they repre-
sent share a racial classification and accordingly a racial history. This vari-
ant on the criterion of authenticity could be termed historical essentialism:
the tendency to evaluate performances of black actors according to how
well their characters’ story aligns with standard black history. Needless to
say, this is a limitation not imposed on white actors.
My argument is that it is precisely the predictability with which reviewers
and audiences respond to multiethnic casting that proves its necessity.
Casting against convention reveals something new about the plays but also

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 VIRGINIA H. COPE

about theatregoers’ assumptions. It forces a confrontation with ideology.

That confrontation is essential to understanding Streetcar, the complexity
of which has become lost in stagings that encourage audiences to see a
white, aristocratic Blanche as an embodiment of the slave-holding South,
deserving of her victimization. In casting African-American and Hispanic
actors in the lead roles, Emily Mann invited a more nuanced engagement
with the play’s investigation of the entangled politics of race, sex and class
in mid-twentieth-century America. Simply put, Mann denied theatregoers
the opportunity to ride A Streetcar Named Desire up one old narrow street
and down another to a familiar destination: an interpretation of the charac-
ter, and therefore of the play, that both scapegoats and romanticizes the
South, exposing and concealing our nation’s racial history.
In arguing for the value of a racially diverse cast, I seek to move beyond
the familiar contours of the debates about non-traditional or colour-blind
casting (see, e.g., Pao; Wilkins Catanese). While supporters of the practice
argue the merits of inclusiveness and artistic exploration, those opposed
are typically “dismayed, even outraged, by the disrespect for theatrical tra-
dition and historical ‘authenticity’” and consider such casting “implausible
if not outright offensive” (Pao 2). Such reactions are well represented in the
responses to both of Byrd’s efforts. Reviewers who came to praise Byrd ap-
plauded expanding opportunities for black actors, celebrated the universal-
ity of the play’s themes (Spencer), or cited serendipitous moments created
by the casting (Moore; Rooney). A very few found a new interpretation,
with its own “curious integrity” (Schwarzbaum; Stasio). Those who sought
to denounce Byrd’s efforts insisted on the improbability of a black Stanley
or Brick or bemoaned the casting as a distraction from more important
considerations – how well the play was produced and acted. As I earlier
noted, these claims are not the exclusive province of the twenty-first cen-
tury. According to an article by the New York Times drama critic Arthur
Gelb, the African-American actress slated to play Blanche in 1958 felt ob-
liged to plead that the casting not be “sensationalized” as a “gimmick pro-
duction” (Hilda Simms; qtd. in “Negroes”). In a July 2012 interview with the
Williams, Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played Stella, made a similar plea, and
with equally good cause. Suspicions of gimmickry were pervasive in the
2012 reviews. For example, Ben Brantley of the New York Times agreed,
with significant rhetorical distancing, that “you could argue that such cast-
ing makes a certain sense” but, remarkably, went on to deploy the cliché
“wouldn’t care if all the performers were green” in dismissing the produc-
tion as an “exquisite snooze.” Similarly, Hilton Als, in the New Yorker, ar-
gued that what mattered was not the race of the actors (“actors act”) but
the interpretation of the work (“far afield”). Pointed reminders that we
return to the essence of stagecraft imply that productions such as Byrd’s
are attempting to capitalize on something far less important.

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The New Yorker’s John Lahr was far less coy: “[N]o more infernal all-
black productions of Tennessee Williams plays unless we can have their
equal in folly: all-white productions of August Wilson,” he wrote in a
December 2011 Christmas wish list (“Best Theatre”). In a 2009 review (of
the Yale Repertory Theatre’s all-black production of Death of a Salesman),
he lent authority to his claim that to do so is “to change something elemen-
tal” by citing Wilson’s impassioned rejection of colour-blind casting. “To
mount an all-black production of ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play
conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition
through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our
own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural
ground on which we stand as black Americans,” Wilson had declared in
1996 (qtd. in Lahr, “Hard Sell”).
As Wilson’s extensive qualifications reveal, however, the playwright’s
rationale for opposing colour-blind casting is considerably more complex
than Lahr’s. Wilson was deeply concerned with the lack of support for black
playwrights and the minimal presence of works validating the experience of
African Americans. In a well-known series of exchanges with critic Robert
Brustein, he argued for the distinctiveness of African-American history and
culture and deplored its erasure through assimilation as well as oppression.
Casting black actors in plays like Death of a Salesman, he said, appeased as-
similationist sentiment and distracted from efforts to develop a theatre re-
presenting “a culture that’s separate and distinct from the mainstream
white culture” (qtd. in Bryer viii). The passage quoted by Lahr continues: “It
is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in
America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our
many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large” (qtd.
in Lahr, “Hard Sell”).
While Wilson rejects claims of universality and argues vehemently that
colour-blind casting usurps efforts to develop a black theatre tradition,
Lahr concerns himself with historical probability. Like Stanley, with his
“impressive judicial air” (Williams, Streetcar 42), he rejects magic and what
“ought to be truth” by referencing history (122). He argues that no African
American in 1949 could have shared Willy Loman’s “sense of expectation
and entitlement,” elaborating thus: “‘Death of a Salesman’ is a brilliant tax-
onomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. To
remove from the play – through the novelty of casting – the issues of race,
class, and history is not to challenge the imagination but to beggar it.
‘Death of a Salesman’ is about alienation; it shouldn’t be an exercise in it”
(Lahr, “Hard Sell”). Whereas Wilson believed that casting blacks in tradi-
tionally white roles would undermine efforts to develop an “American the-
ater . . . led by African Americans” (qtd. in Breyer x), Lahr simply asserts
that such casting fails to portray America as he understands it, distracting

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audience members from enjoying the death of an (inevitably white) sales-

man. He does manage to avoid using the word “gimmick,” but his “novelty
of casting” has the same connotation.
Condemnations such as Lahr’s inspire supporters to respond on his
terms. They pull out their history books or their novels to demonstrate that,
in fact, a black Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, or Stanley Kowalski could
have existed. In the case of Streetcar, the effort is fruitful because of the
well-known history of the gens de couleur libres, the large population of
free, prosperous blacks in early New Orleans, many of whom owned prop-
erty, and some of whom owned slaves. This history is, in fact, the rationale
put forward by Streetcar director Emily Mann and members of the cast.
Blair Underwood, who played Stanley, posted a defence of the production
on Facebook citing this history and attributing resistance to the play to a
refusal to accept African-Americans in classic roles. In an interview with the
author, Rubin-Vega (Stella) said that information Mann supplied on the
gens de couleur libres helped to “solidify the play.” Although Rubin-Vega
considered the play’s power to derive from its treatment of ahistorical as-
pects of human nature, she said her knowledge of the free people of colour
and of black-owned plantations added to the pathos of the play: “It made it
much more tragic – and inevitable,” she said. A black woman clinging to
her aristocratic past in 1940s New Orleans stood an even slimmer chance
than a white Blanche DuBois of surviving the confrontation with a violent
brother-in-law, an embattled sister, and the matron with the straitjacket.
A reviewer for The Grio went a step beyond this defence, complaining
that the production had not done enough to dramatize the class warfare
between Blanche and Stanley. The reviewer, Chase Quinn, wished the play
to “reference the damaged intra-race relations that plagued the black com-
munity,” saying that “the irony when Parker’s light-skinned Blanche refers
to Stanley as an ‘ape’ cannot be ignored!” (Presumably the irony is that
Blanche uses racist slurs against someone of her own race.) Lahr and
Quinn, then, complain from opposite ends of the spectrum: whereas Lahr
cites the improbability of blacks with a sense of entitlement, Quinn seeks a
more nuanced depiction of a historically based class conflict. Both base
their critiques on their interpretation of African-American history and share
a belief that historical probability shapes how characters and their actions
should be interpreted. Moreover, both assume that all performers represent
characters of their own racial group.
Notably, casting across class or gender lines rarely inspires the outrage
of casting across the lines of race – befuddlement, perhaps, but not the
slings and arrows assaults on multiethnic casting (Rao). This is peculiar and
revealing. One explanation for this over-determined response is that critics
are entrapped by what I earlier described as historical essentialism: the
assumption, not necessarily that skin colour dictates character, but that it

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire

determines history. In plays set in a recognizable American history, only a

limited range of plots are imaginable for people of colour before the civil
rights movement or the Civil War, it seems. Moreover, no viewer can be ex-
pected to “see” beyond skin colour; a dark-skinned actor or actress must
“be” black, and the play in which he or she performs must be interpreted
according to the reigning understanding of black history. To put it another
way, audiences inevitably ascribe racial meaning to the performers, limiting
what they can signify (Wilkins Catanese 41). Inevitably, this places far
greater constraints on black actors, for, while whiteness is often deployed
as “endless individuality unencumbered by racialized histories” (71), the
same cannot be said of blackness.
Intriguingly, Tennessee Williams himself addressed this conundrum in
1957, in response to producer Terry Carter’s attempt to revive Streetcar. Un-
published documents concerning the production offer more insight into
Williams’s attitude toward issues of race and Streetcar than has heretofore
been recognized. Carter wrote to Williams in 1957 seeking permission for
a revival, with a cast that would include Hilda Simms, a light-skinned
African-American actress who had gained fame in the 1944 Broadway pro-
duction of Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta (three years before the original
Broadway Streetcar) (Letter to Tennessee Williams, 18 Oct. 1957). He sug-
gests Eli Rill as the director and Sidney Poitier as the male lead (“he ex-
pressed a great interest in playing Stanley”). To persuade Williams that the
play is “easily adaptable to Negro life,” Carter implies that Blanche can be
interpreted as the mixed-race descendant of a plaçage relationship. Accord-
ing to the legend of plaçage (only very recently debunked by historians, in-
cluding Thomas Ingersoll and Emily Clark), white Creole men in early New
Orleans routinely sought out light-skinned quadroon women with whom to
form life-long alliances. The men (according to the mythology) would pro-
vide elegant accommodation for their mistresses and a sophisticated
education for their children, inspiring in those descendants a sense of supe-
riority. Carter seems to refer to this legend when he describes a “quadroon
or ‘cafe-au-lait’ society’” in early nineteenth-century New Orleans, with the
“class-consciousness, decadence and pomposity that created Blanche Du-
bois” and “stratified according to the shade of ones [sic] skin, the lighter
complexions automatically being considered superior in caste.” A Creole,
mixed-race Blanche would be plausible perceiving Stanley as “common
clay and dark-skinned.” Leaving no argument untried, Carter also hits upon
what have since been the standard claims of critics supporting such casting:
the opportunity it would offer black actors, the revelation it would provide
that “Negroes are human beings,” and the universality of the themes of the
play.
Williams was receptive. According to letters, telegrams, and memos in
the archives, Williams approved the revival, and by July 1958 contracts were

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being drawn up. In August, Williams wrote to Rill and Carter, approving the
removal of references to Stanley’s Polish heritage and expressing his enthu-
siasm, so long as the revival did not include additional script revisions or
compete with the premiere of his new play, Sweet Bird of Youth. “In all
other respects I am most enthusiastic about this ‘desegregated’ production
as I am about all advances in racial relations and I look forward eagerly to
it. Is there any chance of getting Sidney Poitier [in] the cast opposite Miss
Simms?” (6 Aug. 1958). In a 30 July telegram to Williams in Italy, however,
Audrey Wood mentions another condition, presumably at Williams’s insis-
tence: “NEGRO PRODUCTION STREETCAR INVOLVES NO DISTORTION
NO REFERENCES CREOLE-NEGRO BLOOD STOP NO CHANGES CON-
TEMPLATED OTHER THAN OMITTING REFERENCES POLACKS STOP”
(capitalization in the original).
This anxiety concerning the characters’ race was most likely inspired by
the 14 July New York Times article by drama critic Arthur Gelb, also in
Wood’s collected papers. The article, announcing that the play would pre-
miere in September, with black actors in the major roles, said that Blanche
would be represented as a “Creole, or mixed French, Spanish and Negro
ancestry.” Simms, according to the article, defended the interpretation as
“altogether plausible,” given the many “Creoles in New Orleans who come
from aristocratic backgrounds not unlike that of Blanche Du Bois” (Simms;
qtd. Gelb, “Negroes Slated”). Like Carter, Simms is defining Creole as imply-
ing mixed race (itself a controversial assumption, as Virginia Dominguez ex-
plains in her discussion of the conflicting definitions). She also appears to
be referencing the gens de couleur libres and possibly the “quadroon soci-
ety” Carter also described.
Within nine days of Gelb’s article, Williams had composed a lengthy
demand for a correction. He explains, in a letter addressed to Gelb, that he
has discussed the casting with Carter but by no means expects audiences to
assume Blanche is anything other than a white woman:

I told him I would love to have Streetcar performed by a negro cast but made it
quite clear to him that Blanche Dubois could not be represented as a Creole with
negro blood as this would be a distortion, destroying the truth of the play. Blanche
has been played by actresses all over the world, of every color and creed but
always represented truthfully as a white woman of a particular background and
she cannot be legitimately played as anything else . . . If a character has been
truthfully drawn, such changes can only result in falsification, and I don’t think
New York audiences and critics would believe in it. (23 July 1958)

Williams’s rationale is an odd mixture of realism and idealism. He supports

colour-blind casting in its purest sense (the actors are cast regardless
of whether their physical qualities reflect the character as described or

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire

assumed) because he wants to expand the number of roles available to

black actors. However, he does not expect a 1958 New York audience to
accept the idea that the daughter of Belle Reve could be a woman of mixed
race or support such an interpretation of the character of Blanche. He
writes to Gelb that he told Carter, in phone conversations,

that there is no reason to change the race or background of Blanche because she
is being played by a negro player. Such a move would place an unfortunate and
false emphasis on racial separation and would establish a very bad precedent: i.e.,
that all plays about white people must be re-written to be plays about colored
people in order for colored people to play them. That is exactly what we don’t
want if we want to break down this racial barrier in the theatre.

Re-imagining Blanche as black because the actress who played her was
classified as such would undermine Williams’s goal of expanding oppor-
tunities, reinforcing the idea that spectators neither could nor should be
colour-blind.
Most intriguing, however, is that Williams assumes that the audience
members will watch an African-American actress portray Blanche and yet
perceive the character she portrays as white. He expects colour-blind casting
to produce colour-blind audiences. This is an extraordinary assumption,
one that reviewers writing fifty-five years later do not make, no matter what
training they or the imagined spectators may have had in the arbitrary
nature of racial construction. Williams’s assumption is even more surprising
given that Hilda Simms, though light-skinned, was routinely described and
cast as an African-American actress. (Indeed, her light skin drew even more
attention to her casting in African-American roles). She played Joe Louis’s
mother in a 1953 bio-pic, was one of Jet magazine’s first “cover girls,” and,
more famously, was the lead in the two-year run of the hit Broadway play
Anna Lucasta, thought to be the first to hire an all-black cast for a produc-
tion not dealing with racial issues. In his article, Gelb describes her as “the
Negro actress who achieved fame” in that role. The Joe Louis bio-pic was
one of her last good jobs, however, in part because of her ambiguous racial
classification. In a 1959 article in Jet, she said the producers considering her
for an upcoming Broadway play (“Only in American”) were concerned
about her appearance: “Producer Harry Shumlin likes me as an actress, but
I don’t look typically Negro enough. I’ve heard this line 1,000 times.” She
hoped at least to be chosen as a “standby” for the role of the “Negro secre-
tary” ( Jet 60). There is no evidence that she was given the role.
A year earlier, however, with the New York Times’s announcement of the
premiere of Streetcar, Simms’s next big gig had looked assured. Nearly fif-
teen years after her break-out performance, she would be playing a classic
role off-Broadway, with the support of a legendary playwright. Williams

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did, however, retain the right to cancel the production on four weeks’
notice if it threatened to distract from the opening of Sweet Bird of Youth. “I
regard ‘Streetcar’ as my best play and I’m afraid that most of the work I’ve
done since has suffered from comparison to it,” he wrote to Carter and Rill
(8 Aug. 1958). With the Streetcar premiere slated for September 1958 and
Sweet Bird for winter 1959, this would not have seemed a likely obstacle.
Williams’s two-page letter to Gelb, on stationary from the Hotel Excelsior
in Rome, also includes a note signed with his agent’s initials: “not mailed
AW.” Williams apparently had second thoughts about demanding a correc-
tion. And, one week after the expected opening of Streetcar, a press release
announced a postponement, “in answer to a request from Mr Williams,”
because of its proximity to the opening of Sweet Bird.
Sweet Bird premiered 10 March 1959, but the “postponed” Streetcar
never made it to the stage. This suggests another possible explanation for
Williams’s decision: that, after the Gelb article, he lost faith that audiences
would perceive Blanche as white and took advantage of the contractual
clause to cancel the performance. Doing so would certainly have been
more effective than a correction buried in the Times. While Williams re-
solved his own concerns, however, he also deprived Simms of her last, best
chance at staying in the limelight. She had few other major roles. In the
summer of 1959, not quite a year after Streetcar was postponed, she finally
played Blanche – but in summer stock, nowhere near Broadway or even
off-Broadway ( Jet).
Despite Williams’s doubts, we cannot deny the rich interpretive possibi-
lities of imagining the DuBois family as descendants of free people of colour
in early New Orleans. As Mann and Underwood, as well as many historians,
note, African Americans owned estates like Belle Reve. Yet, while this justifi-
cation restores complexity to history as well as to the play, it sidesteps the
larger problem with disputes about historical accuracy (one which Williams
addressed): It assumes that audiences will inevitably filter the actions of the
characters, when played by black actors, through their knowledge of the
history of people of colour. Themselves historical essentialists, critics
assume audiences will be as well. They therefore conclude that “something
essential” to the play is lost if the actors in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Street-
car – or Fences – do not provide visual cues (i.e., skin colour) supporting the
audience’s understanding of what represents a quintessentially black – or
white – experience. This is a problem in itself, but it also gestures at a larger
issue that is particularly evident in responses to Streetcar. Conventional
casting, as promoted by critics such as Lahr, relies upon a simplistic racial
history. In insisting that blacks should be cast only in roles consonant with
their understanding of black history, such critics risk fetishizing a newer
version of received wisdom about the Southern past, albeit one reflective of
a welcome historiographical shift.

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With Nicole Ari Parker, Underwood, and Rubin-Vega cast as Blanche,

Stanley, and Stella, the 2012 production revealed the fallacy of the assump-
tion that the play is not “about” our history of assigning arbitrary racial cate-
gories to create hierarchies of power. Indeed, I would argue (with apologies
to Williams), it is only with multiracial casting that Streetcar’s complicated
overlapping of the imperatives of race, gender, and class reveals itself,
restoring nuance to a flattened version of our country’s racial history (and
of the play). The social psychology behind hierarchies invented to disem-
power – whether of race, class, gender or sexuality – is Williams’s point. Yet
that concept has been lost because of a tradition (firmly established by Elia
Kazan) of casting Blanche, who comes to represent the dishonoured South,
as white. In wrangling for sixteen years to bring Tennessee Williams’s classic
play to Broadway with a multiracial cast, Byrd was fighting the odds but ful-
filling Streetcar’s destiny. As Stanley might say, we have had this date from
the beginning.
Williams invoked issues of race simply by setting the play in his new-
found home of New Orleans. Arguably, no other American city has inspired
such ferocious debates about its history, many elements of which remain
“buried in a heap of myths” (Ingersoll xvii). The Louisiana Purchase gave
the republic control over the mouth of the Mississippi (and therefore trade
between the continent and the Gulf of Mexico) but also proprietorship of a
French-speaking, Roman Catholic city, with a population that (it has been
claimed) defied Anglo-American norms for language, religion, and racial ca-
tegorization. Jon Kukla accordingly argues that the 1803 purchase changed
the fate of the nation by beginning “a long encounter with diversity that
has forced us, and should inspire us, to think and live far differently than
the Founders intended” (339). Richard Campanella describes New Orleans
as America’s “first genuinely multicultural metropolis” in a chapter entitled
“Extraordinary Multiculturalism, Extraordinarily Early” (169). The city’s in-
habitants in the early nineteenth century included French and Spanish co-
lonizers and their descendants (Creoles), refugees from the Haitian
Revolution – who would continue to pour in over the decade and ensure a
French-speaking culture for another two generations – and enslaved people
as well as the largest population of free people of colour in the nation. At all
times in its early history, blacks outnumbered whites.
Many historians claim that, during the Spanish colonial period, prosper-
ous free blacks maintained a distinct sense of identity that created, in effect,
a tripartite social order (Hangar 1–2), complicating the norm toward which
the nation was driving inexorably in its early years, in which “whites were
free, blacks were slaves, and Native Americans didn’t count” (Kukla 339).
Famously, historian Frank Tannenbaum credits French and Spanish law
and tradition for creating a less oppressive slave system, with more oppor-
tunities for manumission. This, in turn, has encouraged a belief that the

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Louisiana Purchase ended a golden age by imposing Anglo-America’s rigid

racial order on a city with a more fluid sense of race. Many historians have
disputed Tannenbaum’s thesis – most sweepingly, Thomas Ingersoll. Inger-
soll also finds no records supporting the practice of plaçage, often cited as
evidence of the city’s looser construction of race and wrongly credited with
creating the well-educated, prosperous free people of colour in early New
Orleans (gens de couleur libres). Moreover, although the myth of plaçage
perpetuates the idea that mixed-race women were doomed to a life of ele-
gant concubinage, Emily Clark has documented the marital history of free
women of colour in New Orleans and recovered archival information estab-
lishing that they were as likely to marry (legally) as white women. Yet
despite recent efforts by historians such as Ingersoll and Clark, the myth of
a decidedly un-American, cosmopolitan New Orleans of haughty quad-
roons persists – and continues to inform reinterpretations of Williams’s
play (from Carter to Quinn). For a typical representation of this myth in
recent fiction, consider Anne Rice’s Feast of All Saints, told from the point
of view of the conflicted son of a plaçage alliance, Barbara Hambley’s Ben-
jamin January detective series, and Patricia Vaughan’s bodice ripper (Sha-
dows on the Bayou). George Washington Cable is credited with introducing
the institution into fiction with The Grandissimes (1880), an outing that, the
story goes, earned him the undying enmity of Creole New Orleans.
Williams wished to take full advantage of the implications of his New
Orleans setting, his stage directions suggest. His opening scene calls for a
white woman to share the stoop with a “colored woman a neighbor” and
provides an explanation for this integration that establishes this as an
exception, in the city as well as in the nation: “[F]or New Orleans is a cosmo-
politan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races
in the old part of town” (13). He also specifies that tinny music from a “blue
piano” saturates the scenes (13). Such music is always “just around the cor-
ner” in New Orleans and “expresses the spirit of the life that goes on here”
(13). In the recent production, Mann extended this idea by asking famed
dancer Carmen de Lavallade to parade regally across the stage and inviting
trumpeter Terrence Blanchard to create the score. Their contributions,
critics noted, added resonance to the production (see Stasio).
Yet while Williams’s stage directions are routinely cited, critics have
been as deeply divided over Williams’s attitude toward race as they are
about multiethnic casting. Cornel West claims that African-American cul-
ture saturates Williams’s work and salutes Williams as a “soul brother” and
a “white literary bluesman of the highest order.” His works, like the blues,
represent “a compassionate response to catastrophe” created by “a Black
peoples on the underside of a romantic project called the USA.” Yet George
Crandell recognizes the “apparent absence of African American voices” in
this Southern “discourse community” as well as the “menial roles, limited

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dialogue, and disparaging names (or namelessness)” they are assigned

(337). He draws on Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to discover a
“discernible Africanist influence and presence” in Williams’s works, with
Stanley serving as the “racial Other,” depicted as “physically threatening,
inarticulate, lacking intelligence, full of desire, and sexually potent” (339).
“Masked beneath the ostensible class conflict between the aristocratic
Blanche DuBois and the bourgeois Stanley Kowalski lies another struggle”
dealing with race and miscegenation.
I would argue that we are not required to perceive Stanley the Pole as a
stand-in for a black man in order to interpret the play as a commentary on
racism. To Blanche and Stella, Stanley Kowalski would have been a man of
another race, and their condescending references to him as a Polack would
have been racist, not ethnic slurs. The alchemy was not yet complete by
which European immigrants, previously perceived as racially distinct from
Americans, were re-categorized as Caucasians (Jacobson 92). Williams sets
his play in the “birthplace of diversity” (Kukla) after World War II, names a
poker player Pablo, includes Mexican tamale vendors in the background,
and specifies that a blue piano is being played with “the infatuated fluency
of brown fingers” (13). His stage directions, dialogue, and plot all invite us
to examine the interplay of sexual, racial, and class politics at a pivotal his-
torical moment in the American history of race, the period in which white-
ness was being consolidated (Jacobson 93).
Blanche’s pivotal speech to Stella describing Stanley as an ape not only
echoes racist rants, as critics have pointed out – it is a racist rant, drawing
upon a century’s worth of pseudo-science that positioned Anglo-Saxons as
the superior race among Europeans as well as in relation to Africans. Stan-
ley’s whiteness was, as yet, probationary (Jacobson 95) – one reason why
Blanche’s attacks enrage the man who prefers to be recognized as 100 per
cent American (i.e., white). Her reference to Stanley as “not so – highbrow?”
as the Irish gestures at this history, while revealing that she and Stella (who
giggles in response) recognize the tenuousness of his claims to privilege
and can share a frisson of class superiority (23).
Although Williams had embraced the decidedly un-American charm of
the Vieux Carré, by the time he was writing Streetcar, the city was losing its
appeal as an immigrant destination, its ethnic communities were declining,
and Jim Crow laws had deprived black Creoles of economic and social sta-
tus (Powell). By 1950, the “cosmopolitan city” would be one of the most
segregated cities in the South (“New Orleans”). Streetcar initially appears to
elide this shift; yet a closer examination of Blanche’s psychology and Stan-
ley’s anxiety reveals that Williams was, in fact, capturing a specific historical
transition.
Traditional productions have suppressed this narrative in favour of a
narrower one based on class – beginning with Kazan’s legendary original

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 VIRGINIA H. COPE

Broadway (1947) and film (1951) productions. Kazan cast unforgettable

white actors – Marlon Brandon, Jessica Tandy, and then Vivien Leigh – in
the two major roles, creating an ur-version that ever since has guided audi-
ences and producers to a narrow historical reading of Williams’s work – one
that now seems as inevitable as Brando’s T-shirt and cry of “STELL-
LAHHHHH” (Streetcar 60). While Stanley’s ethnicity has generated com-
mentary, no director has insisted that a Polish actor portray him. Yet the
“seminal Blanche” of the last sixty-five years has been “white in language,
gesture, or costume,” as Philip Kolin remarks (xvii) (leading us to wonder
whether Williams, like his heroine, was “joking – feebly!” when he drew
upon his limited French to name the character white – notably ignoring her
married name of Grey) (82). Blanche in most productions represents, not a
woman, but a region. Articulate, delusional, manipulative, and promiscu-
ous, a doomed white Blanche embodies the antebellum South, “a dying civ-
ilization, making its last curlicued and romantic exit” (Kolin 10). Williams
tipped his hat to this convention by providing the DuBois sisters with an
ancestral mansion in Laurel, Mississippi, which Stanley, like Eunice, knows
from a photo as “a great big place with white columns” (17) – a phallic sym-
bol that he trumps with his sexual prowess (“I pulled you down off them
columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going!” [112]).
Beginning work on Streetcar in 1945 while relishing the “shock of free-
dom” in his adopted home of New Orleans, Williams could thank Margaret
Mitchell and William Faulkner for popularizing the narrative that would
animate his story. The 1936 novel and 1939 film versions of Gone with the
Wind garnered enormous success with the story of a high-strung plantation
daughter whose sense of entitlement persists despite impoverishment and
straight-talking men. While the novel itself was considerably more compli-
cated, in most viewers’ minds, Scarlett O’Hara represents the romanticized
South of aristocratic grandeur and loyal slaves, a myth popularized in the
early twentieth century; while we enjoy her charm, we deplore her arro-
gance and demand that she meet her come-uppance. Besides Scarlett’s re-
purposing of the drapes for finery, what most remember about the film are
the scenes of Rhett sweeping his ornery wife up the stairs to assert his mari-
tal rights and of his final desertion, when he chooses not to give a damn.
The message is clear. She gets what she had coming. The power of this
comic convention explains why some audiences applaud and laugh at
Blanche’s rape, despite the far more subtle psychology, and tragic over-
tones, of Williams’s play (Gross 77).
The metaphor of the South as a haughty belle derives from a romanti-
cized version of Creole New Orleans and of the South more generally that
was retailed during Reconstruction and popularized in Gone with the Wind
and its many imitators. Interpreted in light of this tradition, Streetcar’s plot
deploys our misogyny for its own ends, suggesting that Blanche’s rape and

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire

descent into madness are brutal but necessary outcomes. Like the slave-
holding South, she had it coming. Stagings of the play that present Blanche
as an arrogant and delusional (white) Southern woman, clinging to the
power of the past, take advantage of two kinds of narrative pleasure – the
thrill of watching a proud woman brought low, supported by the Schaden-
freude of imagining an elitist South getting what it deserved. The play,
then, yokes a worn comic convention about uppity women to a more mor-
ally acceptable narrative about slavery’s inevitable defeat. Notably, the
storyline also routes our sympathy to Stanley. The besieged husband, like
the victorious North, had no choice but to assert his rights. As Robert Gross
amply demonstrates, only the most careful and self-aware of directors finds
a staging that resists giving audiences an opportunity to identify with Stan-
ley and therefore with “the powerful over the disempowered” (80). It was
easy enough for Kazan and his successors to put Streetcar “at the service of
post-World War II American normative masculinity, asserting the primacy
of men over women, and heteronormative families over ‘perverts,’” Gross
contends (80).
Kazan’s interpretation is, of course, entirely viable. Williams certainly
helps us along to this reading, but not (I would argue) because it is the
most resonant vision of the play. Williams was deploying a method I call
narrative entrapment. Writers are engaged in narrative entrapment when
they include elements that adhere to an extremely familiar, culturally reso-
nant plotline in order to provide cover for the uncomfortable implications
of their stories. These ungentlemanly callers take full advantage of the ex-
pectations of readers, seducing them with a few deft strokes. Because read-
ers and potential critics will inevitably respond to the initial cues of setting
or characterization and interpret the work in conventional fashion, the
writer can smuggle in a less palatable, more complex exploration of social
ills. Williams reveals something truly unpleasant about American society
(and not just the white South), even as we ride unsuspectingly along, listen-
ing for the clack-clack of the story of the desperate Southern belle, delight-
ful and despicable, clinging to her misguided belief in her social and racial
superiority and courting her own downfall.
Casting black and Hispanic actors in the roles disrupts the easy flow of
these conventions, restoring the subtlety of Williams’s play. There was little
danger of the audience’s cheering Blanche’s rape in the Mann production,
not only because it was staged brutally (Stanley shoves her face-first into
the kitchen table to rape her from behind), but because a darker-skinned
Blanche is hard to confuse with Scarlett O’Hara. A mixed-race Blanche’s
downfall takes on far more tragic undertones, as Rubin-Vega noted. One
could argue that, with this casting, the director took advantage of the audi-
ence’s historical essentialism: we cannot help but imagine the tragedy and
fragility of a penniless Blanche, descended from a property-owning black

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Creole family exiled in 1940s New Orleans. Under Mann’s direction, the audi-
ence is forced out of the reductive tradition in which Blanche serves as a
stand-in for an arrogant, immoral South deserving defeat. At the Broadhurst
Theater, on two successive nights in July 2012, audience members gasped
and covered their eyes during the rape scene and sobbed when the doctor
and matron manipulated a hallucinating Blanche into exiting with them.
In the traditional casting, the (white) DuBois’ displacement from a
Southern plantation to a burgeoning city of immigrants appears to be an
essential, and racially limiting, historical element, positioning the sisters to
represent the South’s transition to a harsh industrial society represented by
an ethnic Stanley. Yet it serves arguably only as a convenient cover story for
Williams’s exploration of a wider sweep of history: the overlapping layers of
racism, sexism, and classism on which the American national identity was
built and the ruthlessness with which members of a society in crisis police
transgressions of these norms.
Stanley and Blanche arm themselves with ideological weapons inherited
from their ancestors. The ferocity of their battle derives, of course, from the
tenuousness of their respective positions as an ill-educated working man
and an impoverished, aging woman. Deploying the logic of her European
forebears, Blanche implies that hierarchy – not equality – is the foundation
of a stable social order, in which the labour of the masses provides the leisure
required for the nobility to cultivate finer tastes and intellect. It may be that
we are to suppose that Blanche, like the English essayist Samuel Johnson,
sees in the brutish side of New Orleans proof that a hierarchy based on
intrinsic merit rather than inherited superiority results only in Hobbesian
battles for control, with the physically superior (the Stanleys) winning out.
To avoid this “very dangerous” situation, Johnson told his disciple James
Boswell in 1763, “all civilized nations, have settled [the issue] upon a plain
invariable principle,” to empower and respect men “born to hereditary rank”
or appointed to great offices (qtd. 442). “Subordination tends greatly to
human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other
enjoyment than mere animal pleasure,” he declaimed (442). Blanche and
Stanley both appear to believe that subordination tends greatly to human
happiness – so long as they are not the one subordinated. Audiences for tra-
ditional productions – thrilled to see Blanche punished or trusting that she
enticed, deserved, or even enjoyed the rape – might themselves agree with
Johnson on “the reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed” (408).
In her famous speech to Stella about Stanley’s primitive nature, Blanche
is invoking not just the Great Chain of Being but also the myth of antebel-
lum New Orleans as a place in which aristocratic descendants upheld the
traditions of the Old World. This myth, developed during Reconstruction
and still pervasive, describes the white descendants of the colonizers as
insular, haughty aristocrats, proudly maintaining their class distinctions

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire

amid the vulgar invading Americans. Historian Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., de-
scribes this fantasy of aristocratic gentlemen devoting themselves to duel-
ling, dining, and gaming while their womenfolk “shine as paragons of
gentility, style, and grace, matrons ruling as arbiters of all the nuances of
polite society, demoiselles reigning as cameos of beauty and flirtatious
charm” (136). Blanche poses as such a woman, who “can’t stand a naked
light bulb, any more than [she] can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (55),
recognizes that her charm is “fifty per cent illusion” (41), and tells, not what
is true, but “what ought to be truth” (117). Of course, those paragons she
imitates relied upon the labour of slaves to support their gentility and justi-
fied enslavement with a racism derived from the Old-World theories of
class hierarchy – an irony complicated in this production if one considers
Blanche to be descended from Africans as well as Huguenots.
Given the intertwined nature of such ideologies, it is inevitable that
Blanche’s attack invokes the justifications for both class and racial privilege.
She draws on the narratives of human progress central to the Enlighten-
ment worldview (Davis 95) and relegates other beings to animal status, a
key component in the justification of slavery (52). The excess of Blanche’s
speech is our clue that we are not glimpsing Blanche’s corrupt soul but lis-
tening to her act out a culturally prescribed role, the only one that gives her
any vestige of power – as Stanley’s superior in class, and by implication,
race. As delivered by Parker, the rant’s racial implications rang clear – as
did the humour of her hyperbolic portrait of Stanley as a cave man:

He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks
like one! There’s even something – sub-human – something not quite to the stage
of humanity yet! Yes, something – ape-like about him, like one of those pictures
I’ve seen in – anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have
passed him right by, and there he is – survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw
meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you – you here – waiting for him!
Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been
discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the
cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker
night! – you call it – this party of apes! (72)

Blanche begs her pregnant sister to leave Stanley, not because he is abu-
sive, but because, in staying with him, she is abandoning the march of civi-
lization and “hang[ing] back with the brutes” (72). Her marriage is an act of
atavism. This is not a heartfelt speech but a desperate – and, in perfor-
mance, ridiculous – act of manipulation, in which Blanche seeks to create a
sense of solidarity (in this production, leaving out Stanley’s name). Notably,
the audience on two successive nights at the Broadhurst laughed heartily at
Blanche’s colourful portrait of Stanley the ape.

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It is notable that, despite the emotion with which Blanche appeals to her
sister, she had earlier made light of their differences, saying “maybe he’s
what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve,”
another line that inspired laughter from the audience (44). When Parker di-
rected that comment at Underwood in Mann’s production, the comment
came across not only as racist but as a futile effort to gather whatever cul-
tural scraps she can find into a weapon with which to forestall her inevita-
ble destruction. There is little danger of the audience’s failing to recognize
the racial overtones of her attack on Stanley as an ape or underestimating
the vengeance such a slur would have stirred. There is equally little danger
that the audience will believe that her attack on Stanley will succeed
(accordingly, the audience feels free to laugh rather than take offence).
What, with a white cast, might seem like Blanche’s grasping after an illusory
superiority (a discursive remnant of a forgotten past in which Poles weren’t
yet white) regains its complexity when aimed at a darker-skinned black
man rather than Marlon Brandon.
For his part, Stanley asserts the rights of a patriarch, king of his tenement
castle. He demands to be treated as “one hundred percent American,” but
his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is quite literal (only
men are created equal) (110). Moreover, he deviates from the demands of
chivalry, since he fails to provide protection to his subordinates. (As
Blanche notes, he has no element of the gentleman). What is notable about
his language – like Blanche’s – is its excess. The lower-class, ill-educated,
ethnic Stanley is over-the-top as he sententiously asserts his rights over his
wife, her sister, and their (lost) property: “In the state of Louisiana we have
the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs
to the husband and vice versa. For instance if I had a piece of property, or
you had a piece of property – ” (34–35). He is correct in assessing the 1808
law as a reassertion of patriarchy but wrong in his legal analysis (McLynn
256–57). The Napoleonic code would not have given Stanley rights over his
wife’s immoveable property (because it was acquired before marriage). His
equal ignorance about movable property is evidenced as he rips through
Blanche’s trunk, declaring that her dresses are “solid-gold,” her “summer
furs” are expensive finery (35, 36), and her rhinestone tiara is made of dia-
monds. In keeping with his Napoleonic aspirations (writ comically small),
Stanley drives the women out of his territory with drunken poker parties,
winning control with physical violence and seduction (abusing and impreg-
nating his wife, raping Blanche). Stanley’s supreme assertion of masculinity
comes, not with the rape, but when he investigates and then reveals
Blanche’s sexual history to Mitch; he controls knowledge with his network
of male spies, and therefore, his version of reality prevails. Ultimately, Stan-
ley triumphs over the descendant of the French Huguenots because he
controls the economic resources and because, as a man, he can strip her of

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 A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire

her authority by attacking her virtue. She fails the test crucial to Southern
womanhood, just as her homosexual husband failed his role as a Southern
male (and committed suicide in consequence). Realism triumphs over
romance, sexism over elitism, the North over the South, and capitalism
over a slave economy.
Like Blanche in her attack on her brother-in-law, Stanley so thoroughly
inhabits his role as a misogynist that we are compelled to recognize it as
such: a performance of masculinity by a man in a culturally insecure
(although physically dominant) position. Stanley wins out because his as-
sumptions are backed by economic and physical force, if not eloquence:
“What do you two think you are? a pair of queens? Remember what Huey
Long said – ‘Every Man is a King!!’ And I am the king around here, so don’t
forget it!” he says in the original script (107). (In the Mann performance, the
reference to Huey Long was removed). These are patriarchy’s set speeches,
recast in modern idiom to comic and brutal effect. Stanley provides (tossing
meat to his wife and expecting more than a “plate on ice” for dinner), con-
descends (accepting her kisses in their dilapidated apartment with “lordly
composure”), and beats her when she asserts her right to play music or
remain in the apartment during poker parties (32). In her production,
Mann somewhat altered the language to remove references to Stanley’s
ethnicity but needed to make few emendations to Stanley’s language of
male supremacy. Blanche takes on the role of white Southern womanhood,
Stanley that of the patriarch; neither is an easy fit.
With his brutishness, Stanley acts out the prediction of Edmund Burke,
the eighteenth-century philosopher–politician who bemoaned the French
Revolution with peculiar attention to the attack on Marie Antoinette in her
bedchamber. The forced entry marked the end of the age of chivalry, he la-
mented, and the rise of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” (113).
Only the protection and grace of chivalrous men stripped the sting from
women’s disempowerment, inspired male courage, and “ennobled what-
ever it touched,” Burke claims, in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in
France (113). Stanley claims to be king of his tenement castle, but according
to Burke, without chivalry, “a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a
woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order” (114).
After Stanley’s rape drives Blanche mad, it is left to Stella to cherish illu-
sions, believing what ought to be true rather than what is. She remains with
him, and he gains a son while retaining the opportunity to fondle the
woman he tore down from those columns. But with Underwood, rather
than Brando, on his knees before Stella in the final scene, Stanley’s triumph
seems far from assured, and the ferocity with which he ousts Blanche testi-
fies to the unbearable threat that she posed to his fragile and limited cul-
tural power as a black man in a pre-Civil Rights-era South.

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 VIRGINIA H. COPE

We do the play a grave injustice if we assume that the South’s fall is the
primary, or inevitable, message of A Streetcar Named Desire – or even that
we are being asked to decide whether to condemn a racist, manipulative,
drunken, and promiscuous woman or a brutally ignorant and violent rapist
(or, like some critics, to cast Stella, instead, as the villain). It is impossible to
watch the play without empathizing with every character. Williams insisted
to Elia Kazan that we should not take sides, saying that he did not seek to
“focus guilt or blame on any one character but to have it a tragedy of mis-
understanding and insensitivity to others” (qtd. in Burks 32). “Misunder-
standing” is a frustratingly mild description for the characters’ blindness,
but it reveals something important about Williams’s vision. The characters
deserve sympathy, not because they are good, but because their blindness
is socially conditioned and, indeed, inevitable in a Hobbesian society that
pitches these characters, each in a socially tenuous position, against each
other.

NOTES
1 Wood’s papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at
Austin. For the information in the paragraph that follows, see, e.g., Carter; Wil-
liams, Letter to Rill and Carter; Williams, Letter to Gelb; Hilda Simms, qtd. in
“Negroes Slated”; Brantley; Lahr, “Hard Sell”; Moore; Rooney; Schwarzbaum; Sta-
sio; Quinn.

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ABSTRACT: Stephen Byrd’s 2012 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar

Named Desire, with black and Hispanic actors, inspired the typical strong responses from
critics, many of whom objected to the casting as historically improbable. Yet it is precisely
the predictability of these responses that argues in favour of non-traditional casting. Such
casting reveals something new about the play and also about audience assumptions. It
forces a confrontation with ideology that is particularly revealing in the case of Streetcar.
When director Emily Mann cast African-American and Hispanic actors in the lead roles,
she denied theatregoers the opportunity to ride the tracks up one old narrow street and
down another to a familiar destination – an interpretation that both scapegoats and ro-
manticizes the South, exposing and concealing the nation’s racial history. Byrd and Mann
proved, not only that Streetcar can be successfully produced with a multiethnic cast, but
that it demands to be done so.
KEYWORDS: Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire, colour-blind casting, Stephen
Byrd, Emily Mann, multiethnic casting

VIRGINIA H. COPE is an Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University and
an Associate Dean for the Ohio State University at Newark. She is also the author of
Property, Education and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Heroine of
Disinterest (Palgrave 2009).

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