1960

The year 1960 occupies a specific place in the extended history of A Streetcar Named Desire, serving as a marker of the play's ongoing cultural reach through film adaptations of Williams's other works. On November 10, 1960, Williams's comedy Period of Adjustment opened on Broadway and ran for over four months. That same year, the film version of Orpheus Descending was released under the title The Fugitive Kind, and the film version of Suddenly Last Summer, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, was also released. These releases demonstrate how Williams's name and the thematic territory he staked out with Streetcar continued to be commercially viable more than a decade after the play's debut.

The 1947 Production as the Defining Context

Any discussion of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1960 is inevitably shaped by the towering legacy of its original 1947 Broadway production. The play was presented at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, by Irene Selznick, directed by Elia Kazan, 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 scenery and lighting were by Jo Mielziner, and costumes by Lucinda Ballard. The production was performed with intermissions after Scene Four and Scene Six. The assistant to the producer was Irving Schneider, and the musical advisor was Lehman Engel. This 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. By 1960, this original production had become the benchmark against which all subsequent stagings were measured, and its influence was so pervasive that later productions often struggled to escape its shadow, sometimes devolving into caricature of Brando's performance.

The Play's Enduring Legal and Social Framework

The year 1960 also falls within the period governed by the play's copyright, which was originally secured in 1947 by the University of the South and renewed in 1957. The copyright notice, which appears in the published edition, explicitly warns against unauthorized reproduction, including mechanical or electronic forms such as CD-ROM and information storage and retrieval systems. This legal framework underscores the play's status as a protected commercial property. The play's setting in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races, remained a fixed element of its identity. The legal and social realities of the play's world, such as Stanley Kowalski's invocation of the Napoleonic code—which in the state of Louisiana dictates that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa—and his proud declaration that he is a "one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth," continued to resonate as points of conflict and identity. The play's social reality, as Arthur Miller noted, echoed the fate of the outsider in American society and raised the question of justice, doing so from the inside out.

The Play's Thematic and Stylistic Legacy

By 1960, A Streetcar Named Desire had already established itself as a work that approached tragedy, with its dark ending unmitigated. The play's language, flowing from the soul and packed with imagery, had planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater. The play's structure, with its tangible, realistic story-telling line, was not due to any invention in its form, but rather to the writing itself. The play's characters—the DuBois sisters and the Kowalskis—had become archetypes, their conflicts representing a clash of cultures and classes. The play's enduring power lay in its ability to make the stage seem capable of expressing any and all things, and to do so beautifully. The audience, as Miller observed, understood this and was moved by what was a kind of tribute to its intelligence and spiritual vitality.