“They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields!”
Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans while finishing Streetcar, originally called The Poker Night. Kenneth Holditch, who gives literary tours in New Orleans, said:
[Williams] said from that apartment he could hear that rattletrap streetcar named Desire running along Royal and one named Cemeteries running along Canal. And it seemed to him the ideal metaphor for the human condition.
Tennessee Williams on Irene Selznick, who was chosen to produce Streetcar:
She is supposed to have 16 million dollars and good taste. I am dubious.
More – much more – below the jump.
Elia Kazan on scripts:
One must do one’s best and at a certain point say, ‘I’ve done all I can. I’m not going to make this better.’ I’ve noticed that the best pieces of writing for the theatre I’ve known are complete at birth. The first draft had it — or didn’t. In both Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, I asked the author for no rewriting, and rehearsals didn’t reveal the need for any. Those plays were born sound. The work, the struggle, the self-flaggelation — had all taken place within the author before he touched the typewriter. usually when there is a lot of tampering and fussing over a manuscript, there’s something basically wrong to begin with.”
Tennessee Williams, letter to Jay Laughlin, April 9, 1947, included in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 2: 1945-1957:
I have done a lot of work, finished two long plays. One of them, laid in New Orleans, A STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE, turned out quite well. It is a strong play, closer to “Battle of Angels” than any of my other work, but is not what critics call “pleasant”. In fact it is pretty unpleasant.
In 1947 [when Streetcar was still in the planning stages], Williams saw Arthur Miller’s All My Sons on Broadway. Elia Kazan had directed. Williams was blown away and immediately reached out to Kazan, striking up a correspondence. He approached Kazan about maybe possibly directing his new “unpleasant” play. Kazan had reservations at first. Kazan responded to Miller’s red-dyed-Lefty politics, and Williams’ work is apolitical [at least at first glance.] Kazan recognized Williams’ talent but wasn’t sure if it was his cup of tea. Williams’ agent Audrey Wood opened up negotiations with Kazan, and looped in Irene Selznick. At some point, very early on, the negotiations broke down and Kazan withdrew his interest. Williams wrote Kazan [or “Gadg” as he was known to his friends, short for “Gadget”], expressing his disappointment. I love these early letters because their relationship had not solidified yet. It ended up being a spectacular collaboration, one of the most important in American cultural history, but they didn’t know that in 1947. They were still feeling each other out.
Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, April 19, 1947.
I am bitterly disappointed that you and Mrs. Selznick did not come to an agreement…I am sure that you must also have had reservations about the script.I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. 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 blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand – but as a calculating bitch with “round heels”. Mitch accepts first her own false projection of herself as a refined young virgin, saving herself for the one eventual mate – then jumps way over to Stanley’s conception of her. Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of the others – and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other…
I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche. Certainly pity. 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. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley. It is a thing [misunderstanding] not a person [Stanley] that destroys her in the end. In the end you should feel – “If only they all had known about each other!” – But there was always the paper lantern or the naked bulb!…
I have written all this out in case you were primarily troubled over my intention in the play. Please don’t regard this as “pressure”. A wire from Irene and a letter from Audrey indicate that both of them feel you have definitely withdrawn yourself from association with us and that we must find someone else. I don’t want to accept this necessity without exploring the nature and degree of the difference between us.
After Kazan withdrew, Irene Selznick, Audrey Wood and Williams threw out names of different directors – Josh Logan, John Huston, Tyrone Guthrie [Williams dismissed the idea immediately: “He is English. This is an American play.”]. But then negotiations reopened with Kazan. Kazan was concerned about Selznick being too “green” to produce. He didn’t know her, he didn’t trust her. Originally, he said he would only direct Streetcar if Selznick were fired. Back, forth, back forth. Kazan negotiated for artistic control and billing, until finally, he was on board. Williams was ecstatic.
On May 1, 1947, Tennessee Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, and I just love his confidence. It’s inspiring.
Irene says you think the play needs considerable re-writing. As you never said this, or intimated it, in our talk or your letter, I don’t take this seriously, but I think it is only fair to tell you that I don’t expect to do any more important work on the script. I spent a long time on it and the present script is a distillation of many earlier trials. It certainly isn’t as good as it could be but it’s as good as I am now able to make it. I have never been at all difficult about cuts and incidental line-changes but I’m not going to do anything to alter the basic structure – with one exception. For the last scene, where Blanche is forcibly removed from the stage – I have an alternative ending, physically quieter, which could be substituted if the present ending proves too difficult to stage. That’s about all the important change I could promise any director, and only that if the director finds the other unworkable.
By May 1947, Kazan’s contract was set. Williams went to Cape Cod for “tranquility”.
Letter of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1947, from Cape Cod:
The cloudy dreamer type which I must admit to being needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker. I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative, but you have a dynamism that my work needs to be translated into exciting theater. I don’t think “Pulling the punches” will benefit this show. It should be controlled but violent…I think we can learn and grow with it and possibly we can make something beautiful and alive whether everyone understands it or not. People are willing to live and die without understanding exactly what life is about but they must sometimes know exactly what a play is about. I hope we can show them what it is about but since I cannot say exactly what it is about, this is just a hope. But maybe if we succeed in our first objective of making it alive on the stage, the meaning will be apparent. On second visit to “All My Sons”, I decided that [Karl] Malden was right for Mitch. I hope you agree. The face is comical but the man has a dignified simplicity and he is a great actor. I also met Burt Lancaster. Was favorably impressed. He has more force and quickness than I expected from the rather plegmatic type he portrayed in The Killers. He also seemed like a man who would work well under good direction.
As that last paragraph indicates, both Williams and Kazan were turning their minds to casting.
Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, mid-June 1947:
[Margaret] Sullavan is … the sort of actress that would get “excellent personal notices” but do the play no good: unless she has more on the ball than we derived from her readings. Right now [Jessica] Tandy is the only one who looks good to me and I am waiting till I see her and hear her…There isn’t much in the script that should be altered until we know the exact limitations of the Blanche selected and hear the lines spoken. I will do a lot of cutting then. The rewrite on Scene V does not read as well as original but I think it will play better and is more sympathetic for Blanche. [Makes Mitch more important to her].
Tennessee Williams wrote to Margo Jones, early-July 1947, on the initial set design of Jo Mielziner:
Jo’s designs for Streetcar are almost the best I’ve ever seen. The back wall of the interior is translucent with a stylized panorama showing through it of the railroad yards and the city [when lighted behind]. It will add immensely to the poetic quality.
Both Kazan and Williams had John Garfield in mind for the part of Stanley. Kazan and Garfield went back to the 30s, to the Group Theatre, and Garfield was now a movie star. Garfield balked at the idea of coming back for an open-ended run which would keep him out of Los Angeles indefinitely. The trade papers announced in early August that Garfield had signed on to play Stanley – although this was not true. Garfield wanted to do a limited four-month run, and he also wanted to be guaranteed the role in the film, if things moved in that direction. Irene Selznick turned Garfield down, and so they had to, again, look for another Stanley.
Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 25, 1947 in the middle of the Garfield brou-haha:
The actor George Beban was flown out here from the Coast and read for me this morning. This actor has had summer stock experience and has chased a stage coach in a Grade B Western. It was his first time on a horse. He is more adventuresome than I. I don’t want to put my play under him…He read one scene on his feet and his body movements were stiff and self-conscious with none of the animal grace and virility [When I say grace I mean a virile grace] which the part calls for and it made me more bitterly conscious than ever of how good Garfield would have been. I think it was a brutal experience for this actor, and I do regard actors as human beings, some of them just as sensitive and capable of disappointment and suffering as I am. I don’t understand why he was put through this ordeal with no more apparent attributes than he showed this morning… That leaves us with Marlon Brando, of the ones that have been mentioned to date. I am very anxious to see and hear him as soon as I can. He is going to read for Gadge and if Gadge likes him I would like to have a look at him.
A couple of days after this letter, Elia Kazan took Marlon Brando up to Provincetown to meet Williams. Brando was 23 years old. Williams had originally rejected even the idea of seeing Brando for the role at all, since in his mind Stanley was around 30. Brando was a terrible “auditioner”, as many great actors are. People who were pushing Brando for the part were concerned that if he read from the script, he wouldn’t be shown off well at all. Kazan understood the difference between audition and performance – that someone can be amazing onstage and awful at auditions. He had seen Brando onstage and knew he had the “magnetism” that could work very well for Stanley. Brando read the script and was impressed but also scared by it.
Brando to reporter Bob Thomas:
I finally decided that it was a size too large for me, and called Gadg to tell him so. The line was busy. Had I spoken to him at that moment, I’m certain I wouldn’t have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while, and the next day Gadg called me and said, ‘Well, what is it – yes or no?’ I gulped and said, ‘Yes.’
The Provincetown meeting between Brando and Williams is rather notorious, told by all the different parties who were there. Williams was sitting in his beach house at Provincetown, with Pancho, his hot-tempered lover, and a couple of friends from Texas. Everyone was drunk. The electricity and the plumbing were not working so they were sitting there in the gathering dark when Brando arrived. Brando strolled in, assessed the situation, walked into the bathroom, stuck his hand down the toilet to unclog it, and then fiddled with the blown fuses to get the electricity back on.
Imagine a young Brando doing this. Brando was no idiot. I’m sure he was aware that “reading from the script” was not his strongest point, and perhaps doing a little plumbing and electrical work as the playwright watched him do so would help his case. Or who knows, maybe it was completely unconscious and he thought, “What the hell. No lights? No toilet? What is WRONG with you people?” Whatever his motivations, when he finished with the blown fuses, he stood in the middle of the living room and started his audition. He got 30 seconds into it when Williams stopped him and told him he had the part. Williams gave him bus fare to go right back to New York to sign the contract.
Irene Selznick remembers her first meeting with Brando, when he signed a two-year contract in her office:
He didn’t behave like someone to whom something wonderful had just happened, nor did he try to make an impression; he was too busy assessing me. Whatever he expected, I wasn’t it. He seemed wary and at a loss how to classify me. He was wayward one moment, playful the next, volunteering that he had been expelled from school, then grinning provocatively at me. I didn’t take the bait. It was easy going after that. He sat up in his chair and turned forthright, earnest, even polite.
Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 29, 1947:
I can’t tell you what a relief it is that we have found such a God-sent Stanley in the person of Brando. It had not occurred to me before what an excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in this part. It humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man. I don’t want to focus guilt or blame particularly on any one character but to have it a tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity to others. A new value came out of Brando’s reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard. He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans. This is a value beyond any that Garfield could have contributed, and in addition to his gifts as an actor he has great physical appeal and sensuality, at least as much as Burt Lancaster. When Brando is signed I think we will have a really remarkable 4-star cast, as exciting as any that could possibly be assembled and worth all the trouble that we have gone through. Having him instead of a Hollywood star will create a highly favorable impression as it will remove the Hollywood stigma that seemed to be attached to the production. Please use all your influence to oppose any move on the part of Irene’s office to reconsider or delay signing the boy, in case she doesn’t take to him.
The rest of the cast was finalized. Rehearsals for Streetcar began in October.
Here is Elia Kazan on how he worked with Brando. Kazan was cunning, manipulative, secretive: he worked with each actor differently, pulling each one aside, whispering, cajoling, planting seeds. Brando was different though.
With other actors, I’d always say what just what I want: ‘You do this. No, I don’t like that, I want you to do it like this.’ With Marlon … it was more like, ‘Listen to this and let’s see what you do with it.’ … I’d heard about his parents, but not from him, and I never asked. I treated him with great delicacy. One reason he got to trust me – as a director – was that I respected his privacy… I was always hoping for a miracle with him, and I often got it.
Kazan describes pulling Brando aside and starting to say something to him, and Brando would hear the first two or three words, then nod, turn and walk away. Because he got it. He understood. He absorbed everything – quickly, immediately. So few people are that absorbent.
Kazan on Brando:
Look, Marlon was always at arm’s length and he felt safe there, uninspected, unprobed. How much of the potential penetration was based on my insight, as opposed to stuff I picked up here and there, I don’t know… It’s my trade, though. I know where to look, where to put my hand in, what to try to pull out, what to get.
Brando’s feeling that the play was a size too big for him was intensified by his knowledge that John Garfield had been the first choice. He couldn’t get it out of his head. In the middle of a rehearsal, when he was struggling, he would mutter, “They should have gotten John Garfield.” His insights into the character of Stanley, however, were [and are] invaluable. In my opinion he shows the lie behind the whole “you have to like the character you are playing” malarkey so many actors subscribe to. [However, Brando was a genius. So we have to factor that in. He was an unusual case]. Brando described Stanley:
A man without any sensitivity, without any kind of morality except his own mewling, whimpering insistence on his own way … one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They’re so muscle-bound they can hardly talk.
That is incredibly insightful analysis.
In what is a well-known fact now, after one week of rehearsal Brando moved into the theatre, sleeping on a cot backstage. He felt insecure. He stopped eating, sleeping. He was late to rehearsals. Kazan, rather than being impatient, was tender. He understood the stretch Brando was experiencing, and the fear that came with it. The other actors were at almost performance-level in their rehearsals, and Marlon was still mumbling and wandering around. This was true struggle. Marlon Brando is so imitated now it is hard to remember just how revolutionary the performance was. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Brando had great talent, yes, and perfect instincts – but part of that talent was knowing how his own talent operated, and that meant holding off on committing to a specific choice, resisting “nailing it down”, having the patience to try to feel his way in. It was very frustrating for the other actors.
Karl Malden describes a moment in rehearsal:
We were rehearsing the bathroom scene, the one where I come out and meet Blanche for the first time and Stanley says, ‘Hey, Mitch, come on!’ Now, as we were working on it, every day would be different. Marlon would come in before you said your line, or way after you said your line, or even before you had anything to say. The best was all wrong.Anyway, it was just beginning to go well for me for the first time – when you think, Oh, my God, this is it – and boom, he hit me with one that just upset everything. I said, ‘Oh, shit!’ and threw something and walked offstage, up into the attic. Kazan said, ‘What the hell happened?’
‘I can’t concentrate,’ I told him. ‘I was going along beautifully and all of a sudden in comes this jarring thing. It throws me. It’s impossible.’ I was furious and explained that it had been happening regularly. He said, ‘Wait’.
Kazan made a little speech the next day for the cast, saying:
Let’s talk this out right now. Karl, you have to get used to the way Marlon works. But Marlon, you must remember that there are other people in the cast also.
That’s a leader.
By mid-October, the cast was ready for a run-through. Stella Adler was in attendance, as well as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy’s husband. After a couple of weeks of trying to “find” the part, Marlon suddenly gave a full-blown white-hot opening-night performance, electrifying everyone present. Nobody forgot that day when they realized they were in the presence of someone who was obviously going to be a giant star. It made Hume Cronyn nervous. Streetcar was about Blanche, not Stanley. If Blanche seems incidental to Stanley’s journey, then wasn’t that counter to what the play actually was about? Cronyn spoke to Kazan about it. [If you read the script, Stanley is a small part. Stella is a far bigger role. If you forget about Brando and just read the script, the story is about two sisters.]
Later, Kazan said:
Perhaps Hume meant that by contrast with Marlon, whose every word seemed not something memorized but the spontaneous expression of an intense inner experience – which is the level of work all actors try to reach – Jessie was what? Expert? Professional? Was that enough for this play? Not for Hume. Hers seemed to be a performance; Marlon was living on stage. Jessie had every moment worked out carefully, with sensitivity and intelligence, and it was all coming together, just as Williams and I had expected and wanted. Marlon, working ‘from the inside’, rode his emotion wherever it took him; his performance was full of surprises and exceeded what Williams and I had expected. A performance miracle was in the making.
Streetcar opened in Boston for a tryout run and played from November 3 to November 15, 1947. There were bubbling censorship issues, especially in regards to the rape scene. It would get even more controversial, worrying Kazan. More on this later. The reviews they got in Boston were fair. Tandy got most of the press. The earthquake that was Marlon Brando wasn’t making itself felt yet.
Streetcar moved to Philadelphia for another tryout [Nov. 17-29] and then finally, New York. The buzz had started.
Streetcar Named Desire opened on this day in 1947.
On opening night, Tennessee Williams sent Marlon Brando a telegram, which read:
RIDE OUT BOY AND SEND IT SOLID. FROM THE GREASY POLACK YOU WILL SOME DAY ARRIVE AT THE GLOOMY DANE FOR YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT MAKES THE THEATRE A WORLD OF GREAT POSSIBILITIES.
Tennessee Williams wrote to Jay Laughlin the following day, December 4, 1947:
Streetcar opened last night to tumultuous approval. Never witnessed such an exciting evening. So much better than New Haven you wdn’t believe it; N.H. was just a reading of the play. Much more warmth, range, intelligence, interpretation, etc. – a lot of it because of better details in direction, timing. Packed house, of the usual first-night decorations, – Cecil B’ton, Valentina, D. Parker, the Selznicks, the others and so on, – and with a slow warm-up for first act, and comments like “Well, of course, it isn’t a play,” the second act [it’s in 3 now] sent the audience zowing to mad heights, and the final one left them – and me – wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained [see reviews for more words] and then an uproar of applause which went on and on. Almost no one rose from a seat till many curtains went up on whole cast, the 4 principles, then Tandy, who was greeted by a great howl of “BRavo!” from truly all over the house. Then repeat of the whole curtain schedule to Tandy again and finally ……….. 10 Wms crept on stage, after calls of Author! and took bows with Tandy. All was great, great, GREAT!
Irene Selznick describes the opening night:
In those days, people stood only for the national anthem. That night was the first time I ever saw an audience get to its feet, and the first time I saw the Shuberts stay for a final curtain … round after round, curtain after curtain, until Tennessee took a bow on the stage to bravos.
Now, about that rape scene, which loops into Hume Cronyn’s concern about Brando’s power changing the fabric of the play. Kazan came to share Cronyn’s concerns, which leads to an extremely revealing comment from Williams. Maybe the ONLY comment you need to know. It’s what makes Williams Williams.
Kazan wrote in his memoir about how Brando tipped the balance of the play to Stanley’s favor:
But what had been intimated in our final rehearsals in New York was happening. The audiences adored Brando. When he derided Blanche, they responded with approving laughter. Was the play becoming the Marlon Brando Show? I didn’t bring up the problem, because I didn’t know the solution. I especially didn’t want the actors to know that I was concerned. What could I say to Brando? Be less good? Or to Jessie? Get better? …Louis B. Mayer sought me out to congratulate me and assure me that we’d all make a fortune … He urged me to make the author do one critically important bit of rewriting to make sure that once that “awful woman” who’d come to break up that “fine young couple’s happy home” was packed off to an institution, the audience would believe that the young couple would live happily ever after. It never occurred to him that Tennessee’s primary sympathy was with Blanche, nor did I enlighten him … His misguided reaction added to my concern. I had to ask myself: Was I satisfied to have the performance belong to Marlon Brando? Was that what I’d intended? What did I intend? I looked to the author. He seemed satisfied. Only I — and perhaps Hume [Cronyn, Tandy’s husband] — knew that something was going wrong …
What astonished me was that the author wasn’t concerned about the audience’s favoring Marlon. That puzzled me because Tennessee was my final authority, the person I had to please. I still hadn’t brought up the problem, I was waiting for him to do it. I got my answer … because of something that happened in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, across the hall from my suite, where Tennessee and Pancho [Tennessee’s companion at the time] were staying. One night I heard a fearsome commotion from across the hall, curses in Spanish, threats to kill, the sound of breaking china … and a crash … As I rushed out into the corridor, Tennessee burst through his door, looking terrified, and dashed into my room. Pancho followed, but when I blocked my door, he turned to the elevator still cursing, and was gone. Tennessee slept on the twin bed in my room that night. The next morning, Pancho had not returned.
I noticed that Wiilliams wasn’t angry at Pancho, not even disapproving — in fact, when he spoke about the incident, he admired Pancho for his outburst. At breakfast, I brought up my worry about Jessie and Marlon. “She’ll get better,” Tennessee said, and then we had our only discussion about the direction of his play. “Blanche is not an angel without a flaw,” he said, “and Stanley’s not evil. I know you’re used to clearly stated themes, but this play should not be loaded one way or the other. Don’t try to simplify things.” Then he added, “I was making fun of Pancho, and he blew up.” He laughed. I remembered the letter he’d written me before we started rehearsals, remembered how, in that letter, he’d cautioned me against tipping the moral scales against Stanley, that in the interests of fidelity I must not present Stanley as a “black-dyed villain”. “What should I do?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Don’t take sides or try to present a moral. When you begin to arrange the action to make a thematic point, the fidelity to life will suffer. Go on working as you are. Marlon is a genius, but she’s a worker and she will get better. And better.”
Incredible.
Marlon Brando, years later, spoke to Truman Capote in an unguarded moment, and described what it felt like to realize he was famous. It’s one of the best – hell, one of the ONLY – descriptions I’ve ever heard.
You can’t always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There’s an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that’s what I was – a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I’m still not. Then, when I was in “Streetcar”, and it had been running a couple of months, one night — dimly, dimly — I began to hear this roar.
Brooks Atkinson observed in his review of the play for The New York Times:
Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which was acted at the Ethel Barrymore last evening. And Jessica Tandy gives a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording. This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting. For the acting and playwriting are perfectly blended in a limpid performance, and it is impossible to tell where Miss Tandy begins to give form and warmth to the mood Mr. Williams has created. Like “The Glass Menagerie,” the new play is a quietly woven study of intangibles. But to this observer it shows deeper insight and represents a great step forward toward clarity. And it reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human…By the usual Broadway standards, “Streetcar Named Desire” is too long; not all those words are essential. But Mr. Williams is entitled to his own independence. For he has not forgotten that human beings are the basic subject of art. Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story.
Brooks Atkinson was a longtime “watcher” of Tennessee Williams, and his reviews showed thoughtful consideration of what Williams was attempting. He and Williams enjoyed a long private correspondence. On December 14, 1947, as the Streetcar uproar was in crescendo, Atkinson wrote another piece in the Times, expressing some reservations about the play.
Now this is interesting: Atkinson, a discerning perceptive man, felt that the play was weakened because it arrived at no moral conclusion. The playwright takes “no sides in the conflict”. He felt that Williams limited himself by refusing to come down on one or the other side.
Williams jotted off a note to Atkinson in response:
At last a criticism which connects directly with the essence of what I thought was the play! I mean your Sunday article which I have just read with the deepest satisfaction of any the play’s success has given me. So many of the others, saying ‘alcoholic’, ‘nymphomaniac’, ‘prostitute’, ‘boozy’ and so forth seemed – though stirred by the play – to be completely off the track, or nearly so. I wanted to show that people are not definable in such terms but are things of multiple facets and all but endless complexity that they do not fit “any convenient label” and are seldom more than partially visible even to those who live just on the other side of “the portieres”. You have also touched on my main problem: expanding my material and my interests. I can’t answer that question. I know it and fear it and can only make more effort to extend my “feelers” beyond what I’ve felt so far. Thank you, Brooks.
Producer David O. Selznick was in the process of divorcing Irene Selznick at this time, but he sent her a letter on December 17, 1947 after reading Atkinson’s first review:
Dear Irene: Just read Brooks Atkinson’s rave notice in Sunday’s New York Times … Also, I am in receipt of the most wildly enthusiastic telegram from Bob Ross, who says among other things that you have “one of the most rewarding, stimulating and exciting plays in many a season,” and “a real and distinguished hit.” … Accordingly, I feel justified in sending you most excited and delighted congratulations. It is a joy to know that all my predictions of your success are commencing to come true, and in a big way. I am sure you are well on the road to recognition as the theater’s best and most distinguished producer. Love David
Interestingly enough, Brando was not singled out in the reviews. Tandy got the real raves. It is only with retrospect that people seemed to understand what had happened. But actors sure as hell knew. And directors sure as hell knew.
Here is director Robert Whitehead on Brando in Streetcar:
There were no models for Brando. His relationship to the sounds and poetic reality of Williams was particularly embracing; what Tennessee wrote, both in relation to the age and Marlon’s sensibility, it all worked … That particular kind of reality existed in a way that it hadn’t ever before.
Here is Maureen Stapleton on Brando:
“It goes well beyond talent. It’s MALE. It’s talent PLUS.”
Joan Copeland, actress, younger sister to Arthur Miller, said:
Watching [Brando in Streetcar] was like being in the eye of the hurricane.
Dakin Williams [Tennessee Williams’ brother]:
Blanche is Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn’t be necessarily true. And Blanche says in Streetcar, ‘I don’t tell what’s true, I tell what ought to be true.’ And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee.Why is A Streetcar Named Desire so controversial?
Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire presents an ambiguous moral puzzle to readers. Critics and audiences alike harbor vastly torn opinions concerning Blanche's role in the play, which range from praising her as a fallen angel victimized by her surroundings to damning her as a deranged harlot.
What did critics say about A Streetcar Named Desire?
Some reviewers thought Blanche Du Bois a “boozy prostitute,” and others believed her a nymphomaniac. Such designations are not only inaccurate but reveal a total failure to understand the author's intention and the theme of the play.
What is the main point of A Streetcar Named Desire?
A Streetcar Named Desire presents a sharp critique of the way the institutions and attitudes of postwar America placed restrictions on women's lives. Williams uses Blanche's and Stella's dependence on men to expose and critique the treatment of women during the transition from the old to the new South.
What mental illness does Stanley have in The Streetcar Named Desire?
Symptoms of battle neurosis mirror a Stanley Kowalski personality profile: fear, anxiety, alcoholism, more. “Behavior like Stanley's, his impulsive behavior, his outbursts—that would have been very recognizable to most people,” Hinnershitz said.