2000

The year 2000 functions as a notable chronological landmark in the publication and reception history of Tennessee Williams's body of work, marking the posthumous release of previously unpublished early plays and the beginning of a major scholarly edition of his correspondence. It also appears as a retrospective reference point in Arthur Miller's 2004 introduction to A Streetcar Named Desire, where Miller uses the turn of the millennium to measure the play's long-term cultural fate.

Publication Milestones

In November 2000, New Directions published Spring Storm, an early, previously unproduced play by Tennessee Williams, bringing to light a work from the beginning of his career. That same month, the first volume of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams was released, inaugurating a major scholarly project that would continue with a second volume in 2004. These publications extended the posthumous expansion of Williams's canon, which had accelerated in the late 1990s with the 1998 premiere of Not About Nightingales at the Royal National Theatre in London and its subsequent Broadway opening in 1999.

A Measure of Decline

In his 2004 essay "Regarding Streetcar," Arthur Miller reflects on the state of A Streetcar Named Desire half a century after its 1947 premiere, using the year 2000 as an implicit benchmark for the play's diminished fortunes. Miller observes that the play "has fared less than well half a century later," citing two highly-touted productions he saw that shared a failure to embrace the play's language, striving instead for an off-the-shoulder naturalism suited to television. In one production, the famous movie star playing Blanche DuBois could barely be heard; in another, Stanley was plainly a self-conscious variant of Marlon Brando. Miller diagnoses this as the ironic fate of plays as successful as Streetcar: they have been so well-mined in drama schools and acting classes that their characters have "turned to stone, their eyes to marble." The year 2000 thus becomes a marker not of celebration but of a warning that forgetting the play's essence—that it is "a cry of pain"—is to forget the play itself.

Historical Context and Social Reality

The year 2000 also serves as a vantage point from which to reconsider the social and historical forces that shaped Streetcar at its creation in the late Forties. Miller notes that theater at that particular moment bore "a sort of unnamable prophetic ambience," and that Streetcar echoed the fate of the outsider in American society, raising the question of justice from the inside out. Williams, Miller argues, was not as politically neutered as many assume; his earlier, unproduced prison play Not About Nightingales—which was finally brought to Broadway in 1999 by Colin Redgrave—had a distinct Leftist coloration. The immense wave of appreciation for Streetcar, Miller suggests, was a tribute to its social reality as well as its personal poetics. The year 2000, coming after the successful revival of that early prison play, allows a fuller view of Williams's political dimensions, which had been obscured by the dominant reading of Streetcar as purely a psychological drama.

The Enduring City

The setting of Streetcar in New Orleans, a city where there is "a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town," remains a constant across the decades. The Napoleonic code, which Stanley Kowalski invokes to assert his claim over his wife's property, is a Louisiana-specific legal doctrine that anchors the play's conflict in a particular regional jurisprudence. Stanley's proud declaration that he is "a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth" reflects a postwar nativism that would continue to resonate in American culture into the year 2000 and beyond. The play's geography—from the Elysian Fields street to the French Quarter, from the L&N tracks to the Mississippi River—creates a specific, enduring sense of place that transcends any single historical moment.