1955

1955 was a pivotal year in the career of Tennessee Williams, a year that saw both the triumphant Broadway debut of one of his most celebrated plays and the cinematic release of another, while the shadow of his earlier masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, continued to define the theatrical landscape. On March 24, 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, and Burl Ives. The play would go on to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award, cementing Williams's reputation as the preeminent American playwright of the postwar era. That same year, the film version of The Rose Tattoo, for which Anna Magnani would later win an Academy Award, was released, further extending Williams's reach into popular culture. Yet 1955 also marked the eighth anniversary of the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, a production that had premiered at the Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947, and which, in the words of Arthur Miller, had "planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater." The play's first production, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski, and Karl Malden as Harold Mitchell (Mitch), had become the definitive realization of the work, a production so powerful that Miller recalled it was "impossible to separate them, the cast had left themselves behind, became the characters." By 1955, the play had already been adapted into a celebrated 1951 film starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Brando reprising his role as Stanley, and its language and imagery had permeated American culture. The "blue piano" music that expressed the spirit of life in the French Quarter, the raw colors of the poker night scene, and the unforgettable final line—"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"—had become touchstones. The play's exploration of the collision between a fading, romanticized Southern gentility and a brutal, modern, working-class masculinity had struck a nerve, and its treatment of desire, violence, and madness had pushed the boundaries of what was permissible on the American stage. The year 1955 thus stands as a moment of consolidation for Williams's legacy: the new triumphs of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Rose Tattoo were measured against the enduring power of Streetcar, a play that had, as Miller noted, "approaches tragedy and its dark ending is unmitigated." The play's social reality, its depiction of the outsider in American society, and its raising of "the question of justice" from the inside out, continued to resonate. The copyright for A Streetcar Named Desire, held by The University of the South, had been renewed in 1957, but in 1955 the play was still very much a living force, its characters—Stanley, the "gaudy seed-bearer" with his "animal joy in his being," and Blanche, the moth-like figure with her delicate beauty that "must avoid a strong light"—still haunting the American imagination. The year also saw the continued professional relationship between Williams and Kazan, who had directed Streetcar and would go on to direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a collaboration that had proven essential in bringing Williams's lyrical, emotionally charged dramas to the Broadway stage. Kazan's understanding of the New York audience, his ability to keep "intact the play's links with the familiar realistic tradition while allowing its language free play," had been crucial to Streetcar's success, and that same directorial hand guided Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to its own triumph. In 1955, Tennessee Williams was at the height of his powers, a playwright whose work had irrevocably changed American theater.