Tennessee Williams and

A Streetcar Named Desire

Development of American Drama

Not an ambitious art form until 20th c.
Puritanical hostility, an Old World
pleasure, London companies performed
Shakespearean plays
Not a literary effort but a form of
enternainment

Late 19th century: realism

Serious theatre begins in the late XIX
Reflects the method of the realist
American novel
No European models -Ibsen,
Shaw,Chekhov,Pirandello Susan Glaspell's Trifles (1916)

The 1920s: Experimentation

American theatre influenced by European
modernist experimentation
Realism combines with non-realist forms
Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, 1922; Desire
Under the Elms, 1924)
Dissatisfied with limitations of realism in drama
Wants drama to express more than before, to go
deeper, to show more
Importance of Expressionism

Expressionism
A German avant-garde movement
Portrayal of the inner experience of reality
through dreams, memories, fantasies, symbols,
symbolic characters, music, sound, light
The psychic condition of the character is
perceivable
But by the audience, not by the other characters

1930-1945: back to Realism

The Great Depression
Turn to realism
Domestic realism emerges as the dominant,
natural, native voice of American drama

1945-1960: Broadway Theater

Broadway-based
The greatest plays of America's greatest
playwrights: A. Miller and T. Williams
This generation uses the discoveries of the
previous theater
domestic realism +
experimentation/expressionsim

Arthur Miller and T. Williams

a) Social/political
o Everyman
o Clarity and direct
style

b) Psychological focus
oExcentrics, misfits
oEmotional, poetic
language
the ravishment of the tender, the
sensitive, the delicate, by the savage
and brutal forces of modern society

Death of a Salesman (1949):

The Common Man
Willy Loman: madness
because of failure
Pressure to achieve
economic success in
America
Critique of the American
dream as a cultural myth,
its life-destroying aspects

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

and the South
I

write out of love for the

South It is out of a regret
for a South that no longer
exists that I write of the
forces that have destroyed
it.once a way of life that I
am unable to remember
not a society based on
money I write about the
South because I think the
war between romanticism
and the hostility to it is very
sharp there.

The South
o Childhood in Mississippi
o Family moves to St Louis, St. Pollution, Missouri
o After graduating from Iowa, returns to the South:
New Orleans, the last frontier of Bohemia

a migratory bird going to a more congenial climate

It was my first encounter with a free society, I mean, a bohemian
world My whole personality felt free. It gave me an inner
security
In NY, eccentrics, authentic ones, are ignored. In LA they are
arrested. Only in NO are they permitted to develop their
eccentricities into art

The South
Positive qualities:
Grace, taste, elegance, decorum, poetic,
rootednes in soil, close family ties, strong
women (steel butterflies, iron magnolias)
Flaws:
Intolerance, violence, hypocresy (religion,
women)

Art as a reflection
of the artists own tensions

Frankly there must be some

limitations in me as a
dramatist. I cant handle
people in routine situations. I
must find characters who
correspond to my own
tensions

I began to find life

unsatisfactory as an
explanation of itself and
was forced to adopt the
method of the artist of
not explaining but
putting the blocks
together in some way
that seems more
significant to him

Commercial and critical success

In Broadway and also Hollywood hits
The Glass Menagerie (1945)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
The Rose Tattoo (1950)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
The Night of the Iguana (1961)
Frequently revived now

Williams and Hollywood

Collaboration commercial
theatre and film industry
Stronger in the postwar
America: competition from TV,
and artistic European films
The Bicycle Thief (1949):
audiences want artistic, adult
films, featuring sex
Change in popular taste:
rejection of didacticism and
prudishness of Hollywood
films, Production Code
Administration
Holllywood turns to Williams
plays

Williams and Hollywood

Interested in selling production rights of this plays to the
film industry
Film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), by
Elia Kazan, the first adult Hollywood film
Kazan faces PCA censorship
Kazan keeps rape scene, playes down the rest
Brando plays Stanley again, Vivien Leigh as Blanche
Success, film makers compete for the production rights
of Miller's next plays

Contribution to Drama
Psychosexual focus
Plastic theatre:
use of non-realistic techniques

Psychosexual focus
Characters' struggle
with their emotional
and sexual drives
Eroticises the
American stage
Foregrounds topics of
sexuality and desire
Desire leads to social
rejection and
atonement

Sexual politics
Influence of D. H. Lawrence:
sexuality as a life force, restores balance flesh/spirit
Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex as the primal life urge and was the lifelong adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked away in the cellars of
prudery
Reverses tendency in American literature to portray desire as male and as
heterosexual only
- Female characters subject of desire, their bodies not eroticised
- Male bodies eroticised: Kowalsky = Marlon Brando
- Makes room for homosexual characters in his plays
Limitations: Cold War conservatism
(McCarthism, anti-comunism, homophobia)
** Censorship: Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928 Italy,
1960 UK; E.M. Forsters Maurice written 1913 but
published posthumously in 1971 )

Characters
The individualistic, the
excentric,the outcast
Difficulties in coping
with life, punished by
society
the ravishment of the
tender, the sensitive,
the delicate, by the
savage and brutal
forces of modern
society

Themes
Sexuality and desire
Escapism in art and fantasy
Tenacity and endurance in the face of
difficulties, social indictment
Indirectly, social issues in post-war
America:
the war, the old versus the new South,
multiculturalism

The plastic theater

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques
in drama have only one valid aim When a play
employs unconventional techniques, it shouldn't
be trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with
reality but should be attempting to find a closer
approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression
of things as they are. Everyone should now nowadays
the unimportance of the photographic in art: that
reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination
can represent or suggest only through transformation
These remarks have to do with a conception of a new,
plastic theatre which must take the place of the
exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is
to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

Plastic theater features

Poetic language: vivid, visual, evocative
Expressionistic techniques:
- Music, sound and visual effects to highlight
the character's thoughts and obsessions
Sense of realism and domesticity is not
weakened

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Compendium of Williams themes and techniques
Ran for 855 performances, winning all major awards
Central characters represent opposing forces
But they are complex: flawed, divided natures (Blanche)
Trial titles underline Blanche as protagonist:
The Passion of the Moth, Blanche's Chair in the Moon
Southern roots and European Influences:
o Southern Literature (Gone with the Wind 1936, Faulkner,
Carson McCullers)
o D. H. Lawrence The Princess, Lady Chatterley
o European dramatists: Anton Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard
(1904)

Setting

French Quarter, New Orleans

Mixture of decay and
continental refinement
Multicultural, colourful city,
blues scene: romantic and
sensual undertones
'Cementeries' and 'Desire,
Elysian fields
Action: Stella and Stanley's
street level flat at the Quarter
Allusions to Laurel, Belle
Reve, mansion of the Dubois
family, the old South

Structure
Episodic drama comprised of eleven scenes
In performance, three-act structure, breaks after
scenes 4 and 6
These points mark shifts in the seasons:
scenes 1-4: two consecutive days in spring
scenes 5-6: a hot evening, summer
scenes 7-11: afternoon and night of
Blanche's birthday in September, fall

Myth
All my great characters are larger than life, not
realistic
oIn addition to articulating Williams own conflicts,
and the dychotomy Old/New South
oThe clash Blanche/Stanley may be seen as the
clash between two myths: Dionysus and Orpheus
(see Roche-Lajtha 2011 in CV)

If you were going to have a Blanche DuBois in the modern world, a

woman who is looking for 'a cleft in the rock of the world,' as
Blanche does in the play, how would she be?

"I think that Woody pulls it off. I think this feels like a very authentic
representation of who Blanche would be if Blanche was around now."
Do you agree?
- Stephen Rea, TNS

Futher reading

Do use study materials suggested in

bibliography and uploaded to CV