Holocaust victim

A streetcar named desire

When the curtain dropped at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York at the end of the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the audience sat in stunned silence. It then erupted, according to contemporary accounts, into a tumultuous applause that lasted for some 30 minutes. Those in attendance at the Barrymore that December 1947 evening, knew they had witnessed something radically new in American theater.

Williams’s play, under the direction of Elia Kazan, with its frank and realistic presentation of male and female sexual desire, nymphomania, homosexuality, and rape, and set in the gritty, sweaty slums of New Orleans, was both exhilarating and shocking. Marlon Brando, who played Stanley Kowalski, strutted around the stage in very tight jeans and a T-shirt. He fascinated and terrorized his wife (Stella, played by Kim Hunter), his friends, and his visiting sister-in-law Blanche DuBois (Jessica Tandy).

The next morning the New York critics were ecstatic. The drama critic for The New York Post called the play “feverish, squalid, tumultuous, painful, steadily arresting and oddly touching.” 1 Harold Barnes of The New York Herald Tribune found it a play of “heroic dimensions.”2 In 1948, Williams was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and he received his first Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948.

The play is centered on Blanche DuBois and her tragic downward slide into madness. But it is “Marlon Brando in a role six times smaller than [Tandy’s] who is the sensation,” commented David Thomson.3 Brando drifted into New York from Illinois in the early 1940s with a vague idea of acting, and his first big break came when he landed a minor role in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama. Brando hated the play but it paid his bills. His next role was in Sherwood Anderson’s Truckline Café. The play was a flop, but Elia Kazan saw Brando, invited him to study at the Actors Studio, and two years later recommended him to Williams for the role of Stanley. As Richard Schickel noted: “The part was his — forever […] since every actor who has attempted it since has had to compete against everyone else’s memory of’ Brando.”4 Coming from an entirely different upbringing, co-star Jessica Tandy was born in England. Her mother was a popular stage actress, and Tandy made her first appearance on the London stage in 1926. She played opposite Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud in Shakespearean productions, moving to America to continue her stage and film career. She won a Tony for her performance of Blanche and an Oscar 42 years later for her memorable role in Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Since that opening evening, both the play and Marlon Brando’s stunning performance as Stanley Kowalski have taken on an iconic identity. Streetcar has been revived on Broadway numerous times. It has been performed more than 20,000 times before audiences worldwide, and in 1951 Warner Bros released a movie version — starring Brando and Vivien Leigh, and directed by Kazan — that swept the Academy Awards in 1952. In 1984, Ann- Margret starred in a television version for CBS Playhouse; André Previn wrote an opera that was performed by the San Francisco Opera Company; it has been performed as a ballet; and to illustrate its popularity across generations, a musical version of the play — Oh! Streetcar — featured in “A Streetcar Named Marge,” a 1992 episode of the popular television program The Simpsons.

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

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