1947

1947 stands as the decisive year in which Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire premiered on Broadway, a production that Arthur Miller later described as having "planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater" and that fundamentally altered the possibilities of American stagecraft. The play opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, produced by Irene Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, with a cast that included Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski, and Karl Malden as Harold Mitchell (Mitch). The production was the fullest bloom of the vanished 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 play won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award, and its impact was immediate and profound, with Miller recalling that the audience's identification with the characters was so complete that when Blanche exited on the arm of the Doctor, "everyone went with her."

The Play's Thematic and Social Resonance

The year 1947 placed the play at a particular historical moment—the late Forties—which Miller suggested bore "a sort of unnamable prophetic ambience." Streetcar echoed the fate of the outsider in American society and raised the question of justice, but did so "from the inside out," placing the individual and his inner life at the center while social conditions were symbolized through characters like Stanley Kowalski. The play's setting in New Orleans, a cosmopolitan city where there was "a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town," and its references to the Napoleonic code—the Louisiana law according to which "what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa"—grounded its conflicts in specific legal and social realities of the post-war American South. The antagonism between the DuBois and Kowalski families, which Stanley explicitly names when he says "The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions," dramatized the collision between the old Southern aristocracy and the rising industrial working class, a tension that Blanche articulates when she describes Stanley as "survivor of the stone age" and "something—ape-like."

The Production and Its Revolutionary Impact

The 1947 production was inseparable from the play itself, with Miller noting that "this production, like few others of any play I ever saw, became the play, it was impossible to separate them, the cast had left themselves behind, became the characters." Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley was a revelation—"a tiger on the loose, a sexual terrorist"—whose "kind of freedom on the stage had not existed before." He roared out Williams's "celebratory terror of sex, its awful truthfulness and its inexorable judgments" with an authority that swept everything before it. 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." Instead, Williams's Southern, literary speech was "pleasant to hear" and the audience was "passionately grateful for it, strange as it sounded on this first hearing." The play created such a buzz that the New Haven theater was filled with New Yorkers who had to be the first to know.

The Play's Enduring Significance

Miller's retrospective essay, written in 2004, acknowledged that the play has "fared less than well half a century later," with subsequent productions failing to embrace the language and instead striving for "an off-the-shoulder kind of naturalism suited to television but not the stage." He 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" that their characters have "turned to stone, their eyes to marble." The play, he insisted, "is a cry of pain; forgetting that is to forget the play." The year 1947 thus marks not only the birth of a masterpiece but the moment when American theater discovered a new voice—one that could express "any and all things and do so beautifully"—and when the commercial stage was forced to acknowledge that poetry and popularity were not mutually exclusive.