1959

1959 was a pivotal year in the career of playwright Tennessee Williams, marked by major theatrical and cinematic productions that both consolidated his reputation and reflected the increasingly dark and violent tenor of his work. On March 10, 1959, Williams's play Sweet Bird of Youth opened on Broadway, where it ran for three months. The same year saw the release of the film version of Suddenly Last Summer, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, further extending Williams's influence into American cinema. These works, along with the film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof released the previous year, placed Williams at the center of American dramatic arts as the decade closed.

The Legacy of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1959

By 1959, A Streetcar Named Desire had been a cultural touchstone for over a decade. The play had opened on December 3, 1947, at the Barrymore Theatre in New York, produced by Irene Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, with a cast including Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski, and Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois. The 1951 film version, starring Vivian Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley, had cemented the story's place in popular culture. Arthur Miller, reflecting on the play's legacy in 2004, noted that by the late 1950s, the play had already become so thoroughly mined in drama schools and acting classes that its characters risked turning "to stone, their eyes to marble." Miller observed that later productions often failed to embrace the language, striving instead for a naturalism suited to television rather than the stage, and that caricature had become the fate of such a successful play. The original production, however, had been a revelation, planting "the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater" and approaching tragedy with an unmitigated dark ending.

Thematic and Social Context

The late 1940s, when Streetcar first appeared, had been a moment when theater bore "a sort of unnamable prophetic ambience," as Miller put it, and the play echoed "the fate of the outsider in American society" while raising "the question of justice." Williams's work, though often seen as apolitical, had roots in socially conscious writing; his previously unproduced prison play, Not About Nightingales, was eventually brought to Broadway in 1999. In Streetcar, social conditions were symbolized through characters like Stanley Kowalski, while the individual's inner life moved to center stage. The play's setting in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a cosmopolitan city where there was "a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town," provided a backdrop of social texture. The Napoleonic code, referenced by Stanley as the legal framework governing his marriage to Stella, further grounds the play in its specific Louisiana context, while Stanley's assertion that he is "a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth" reflects the ethnic and class tensions that animate the drama. The Kowalskis and the DuBois, as Stanley observes, "have different notions."

Williams's Artistic Evolution

By 1959, Williams had long since established himself as a writer who 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," as he stated in a 1957 self-interview titled "The World I Live In." He acknowledged that his work had always been "a kind of psychotherapy" for him and that he went "that way" without pushing or pulling anyone with him. His plays, he believed, released the "increasing tensions, verging on the psychotic" that audiences themselves felt. The "crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better" was, in his view, the positive message of his work. He rejected the notion of "original sin" or "guilt," believing instead in "right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents." This philosophy, articulated in the late 1950s, undergirds the moral complexity of A Streetcar Named Desire, where no character is a simple villain or hero.