1956

1956 was a year of both creative expansion and public controversy for Tennessee Williams, coming nearly a decade after the Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire had established him as a transformative force in American theater. The year saw the release of a major film, the publication of his first poetry collection, and the ongoing cultural reverberations of his most famous play, which continued to shape how audiences and critics understood the possibilities of dramatic language and performance.

Film and Controversy

The most prominent event of 1956 was the release of the film Baby Doll, for which Williams wrote the screenplay. Directed by Elia Kazan, who had also directed the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the film generated significant controversy. It was blacklisted by Catholic leader Cardinal Spellman, a public condemnation that underscored the provocative nature of Williams's material and the cultural tensions surrounding his work. The controversy reflected the broader pattern of resistance and fascination that had greeted Streetcar itself, a play that Arthur Miller later described as having "planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater" while also approaching tragedy with an "unmitigated" dark ending.

Publication of Poetry

In June 1956, Williams published his first book of poetry, In the Winter of Cities, through New Directions, his longtime publisher. This collection marked a formal expansion of his literary voice beyond the stage, though his dramatic work remained his primary vehicle. The publication came at a time when Williams was already a celebrated figure, having won the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948. The poetry collection allowed him to explore themes of isolation, desire, and decay in a more concentrated lyrical form, complementing the dramatic intensity of his plays.

Legacy of A Streetcar Named Desire

By 1956, A Streetcar Named Desire had become a cornerstone of American drama, its influence extending far beyond its initial Broadway run. The play's first production, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947, had been directed by Elia Kazan and featured a cast that included Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski, and Karl Malden as Harold Mitchell (Mitch). The production was a landmark in the application of the Stanislavski Method, emerging from the Group Theatre's intense decade-long investigation into psychological realism. Williams's dialogue, as Miller observed, was "colorful as it was and packed with imagery" yet never let the story fade from sight, continuously pressing it forward. The play's language, which Miller described as "flowing from the soul," created a single, enveloping voice while allowing each character's speech to seem "uncannily his own." The film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, released in 1951 starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando reprising his role as Stanley, had further cemented the play's cultural status. By 1956, the play's characters had become so iconic that Miller later warned of the risk of caricature, noting that "their characters have turned to stone, their eyes to marble" in subsequent productions that failed to embrace the language.

Thematic and Social Resonance

The year 1956 also saw the continued relevance of the social and thematic concerns that A Streetcar Named Desire had brought to the forefront of American theater. The play, as Miller argued, "echoed the fate of the outsider in American society and raised the question of justice," doing so "from the inside out" by placing the individual's inner life at the center while social conditions were symbolized through characters like Stanley Kowalski. Williams himself, in a 1957 interview titled "The World I Live In," reflected on the tension and violence in his work, acknowledging that he had "followed the developing tension and anger and violence of the world and time that I live in through my own steadily increasing tension as a writer and person." He described his work as "a kind of psychotherapy" and identified his basic allegorical theme as "the crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better." These statements, made just a year after 1956, illuminate the continuity between the personal and social dimensions of his drama, a continuity that A Streetcar Named Desire had established with its fusion of lyrical language and raw emotional force.