1948

1948 stands as the year immediately following the landmark Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, a period in which the play's seismic cultural impact was already registering and its production history continued to develop. The play had opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Irene Selznick, with 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 copyright for the play, held by The University of the South, was originally issued in 1947 and renewed in 1957, establishing the legal framework for its continued life in print and on stage.

Broadway Run and Immediate Reception

Throughout 1948, A Streetcar Named Desire continued its initial Broadway run, building on the extraordinary response it had generated from its very first out-of-town tryout in New Haven. Arthur Miller, who attended that early performance at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, recalled that 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 production's impact was immediate and profound: Miller described the audience's reaction when Blanche said the "kindness of strangers" line, remembering the inhaling of breath across the auditorium, and noted that when she exited on the arm of the Doctor everyone went with her. This kind of identification, Miller reflected, was an explosive contradiction of the prevailing wisdom that a Broadway play with literary quality could not survive the banal tastes of the New York audience.

The Play's Theatrical and Cultural Significance

In 1948, the play was already being recognized as a work that had thrown open doors to another theater world. Miller observed that the writing itself left one excited and elevated, with language flowing from the soul, and that each character's speech seemed uncannily his own, free to declare contradictory selves rather than being harnessed to the play's story-telling needs. The production was the fullest bloom of the vanished Group Theatre's intense, decade-long investigation into the Stanislavski Method, a form of realism so deeply felt as to emerge as a stylization. Miller concluded that this play made it seem possible for the stage to express any and all things and do so beautifully, planting the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater. The play, more than any of Williams's other works before or afterward, approaches tragedy and its dark ending is unmitigated.

The Revelation of Marlon Brando

Alongside Williams, the other great revelation of the performance was Marlon Brando, whom Miller described as a tiger on the loose, a sexual terrorist. Nobody had seen anything like him before because that kind of freedom on the stage had not existed before. Brando roared out Williams's celebratory terror of sex, its awful truthfulness and its inexorable judgments, and did so with an authority that swept everything before it. Miller characterized Brando as a brute who bore the truth. The actor's performance became inseparable from the play itself, and the cast had left themselves behind, becoming the characters.

The Play's Social and Political Dimensions

Miller also reflected on the play's social reality, noting that Streetcar at the hour of its birth echoed the fate of the outsider in American society and raised the question of justice, but did so from the inside out. Williams, Miller pointed out, had much earlier written what would have been labeled socially conscious plays with a distinct Leftist coloration, and his previously unproduced prison play, Not About Nightingales, was brought to Broadway in 1999. With Streetcar, the individual and his inner life moved to the center and social conditions were symbolized, as in Stanley Kowalski and the disappeared father in The Glass Menagerie. Miller argued that Williams the poet was not as politically neutered as many assume, and some part of the immense wave of appreciation for Streetcar was a tribute to its social reality as well as its personal poetics.

The Play's Enduring Legacy and Later Productions

Looking back from 2004, Miller offered a sobering assessment of the play's fate in later decades. He noted that two highly-touted productions he saw shared a failure to embrace the language, striving for an off-the-shoulder kind of naturalism suited to television but not the stage and not this play with its foundation in joyfully enunciated speech. In one production the famous movie star playing Blanche DuBois could barely be heard at all, and 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, their eyes to marble. He concluded that Streetcar is a cry of pain, and forgetting that is to forget the play. The play's copyright, originally issued in 1947 and renewed in 1957, was still in force in 2004, and the play continued to be published by New Directions Publishing Corporation, with inquiries concerning amateur rights directed to The Dramatists Play Service.