Barrymore Theatre

The Barrymore Theatre, located on West 47th Street in New York City, was the site of the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened on December 3, 1947. Presented by Irene Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, the production starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski, and Karl Malden as Harold Mitchell (Mitch). The play's premiere at the Barrymore marked a watershed moment in American drama, with Arthur Miller later recalling that the performance "planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater" and made it seem "possible for the stage to express any and all things and do so beautifully."

Production and Reception

The Barrymore Theatre production was the fullest bloom of the Group Theatre's intense, decade-long investigation into the Stanislavski Method, emerging as a form of realism so deeply felt it became a stylization. The audience's response was extraordinary: Miller remembered the collective intake of breath across the auditorium when Blanche spoke her famous line about the "kindness of strangers," and when she exited on the arm of the Doctor, "everyone went with her." The play created such a buzz that the New Haven tryout theater was filled with New Yorkers who had to be the first to know. The production's success contradicted the prevailing wisdom that a Broadway play with literary quality could not survive the banal tastes of the New York audience, which allegedly insisted on "plain sidewalk speech and instant linguistic familiarity."

Cultural and Historical Context

The Barrymore Theatre's staging of Streetcar arrived at a particular historical moment—the late Forties—when theater seemed to bear "a sort of unnamable prophetic ambience." The play echoed the fate of the outsider in American society and raised questions of justice, doing so "from the inside out." Williams, who had earlier written socially conscious plays with a distinct Leftist coloration, here moved the individual and his inner life to the center, with social conditions symbolized through characters like Stanley Kowalski. The immense wave of appreciation for the play was a tribute to both its social reality and its personal poetics. The production was guided by Kazan, who understood the New York audience and kept intact the play's links with the familiar realistic tradition while allowing its language free play.

Legacy and Later Productions

Miller observed that the play has fared less well in later decades, with two highly-touted productions he saw sharing a failure to embrace the language, striving instead for an "off-the-shoulder kind of naturalism suited to television but not the stage." In one production, the famous movie star playing Blanche DuBois could barely be heard; in another, Stanley was plainly a self-conscious variant of Brando. Miller warned that caricature can be the fate of plays as successful as Streetcar, ironically because they have been so well-mined in drama schools and acting classes, their characters turned to stone. "Streetcar is a cry of pain," he wrote; "forgetting that is to forget the play." The Barrymore Theatre's original production, however, remains the benchmark against which all subsequent interpretations are measured, a production that became inseparable from the play itself.

The production's journey to Broadway involved a pre-Broadway tryout at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven and the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where the casting decisions were finalized. Irene Mayer Selznick, the producer, initially sought Margaret Sullavan and John Garfield for the leads but ultimately chose Jessica Tandy and the then-unknown Marlon Brando. Tandy's casting came after Williams saw her in a West Coast production of his one-act play Portrait of a Madonna, while Brando's youthfulness was deliberately used to reinterpret Stanley Kowalski as a figure whose cruelty stems from ignorance rather than malice. The opening night audience responded enthusiastically despite the play's raw content, and Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times praised Tandy's performance as "almost incredibly true," calling the play "a poignant and luminous story." Tandy won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 1948, sharing the honor with Judith Anderson and Katharine Cornell. The original run saw subsequent cast changes, including Uta Hagen as Blanche, Anthony Quinn as Stanley, and Ralph Meeker in the role, before closing in 1949 after 855 performances.