Provincetown Playhouse

The Provincetown Playhouse was a seminal American theater company whose early commitment to artistic rather than commercial theater helped shape the landscape in which Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire would later be produced. Its leading people, having been involved in the Playhouse, carried forward a longing for a return to the art of the theater rather than continuing to bury themselves in its commerce. This impulse directly influenced the founding of the Group Theatre by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, who broke off from the Theatre Guild—itself an organization with roots in the Provincetown Playhouse's experimental spirit. The Group Theatre, in 1939, awarded Williams $100 for three one-acts, a recognition that came through the prize committee headed by Molly Day Thacher, Kazan's wife. This chain of institutional lineage, from the Provincetown Playhouse through the Theatre Guild to the Group Theatre, created the conditions under which Williams' work could be nurtured and eventually brought to Broadway.

Legacy and Influence on A Streetcar Named Desire

The Provincetown Playhouse's tradition of valuing literary and artistic merit over commercial success found its fullest expression in the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Arthur Miller, reflecting on that production, noted that the play's first production "planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater," a feat that would have been unimaginable without the precedent set by the Provincetown Playhouse and its successors. The Playhouse's pioneering work with Eugene O'Neill had established that American audiences could respond to serious, artistically ambitious drama, and this legacy was directly invoked by the Theatre Guild's unusual beginning, its leading people having been involved in the Provincetown Playhouse as producer of O'Neill's first plays. The production of Streetcar, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, opened at the Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947, and 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. This production, like few others of any play Miller ever saw, became the play itself, with the cast having left themselves behind to become the characters.

The Playhouse's Enduring Significance

The Provincetown Playhouse's influence extended beyond its immediate productions to shape the very conception of what American theater could be. The play's success demonstrated that a Broadway play with literary quality could survive the banal tastes of the New York audience, which allegedly insisted on plain sidewalk speech and instant linguistic familiarity. George Kaufman had said, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night," and the same would surely hold for the poetic play, such was the addiction to a flat realism. Yet Williams' speech, Southern and shaped by a literary sensibility, was met with passionate gratitude by audiences. The Provincetown Playhouse's legacy of artistic integrity and its willingness to challenge commercial conventions had helped create a theatrical culture in which such a triumph was possible. The play's dark ending, approaching tragedy, and its unmitigated conclusion, were made possible by a theatrical tradition that had learned, through the Provincetown Playhouse and its successors, to trust the audience's intelligence and spiritual vitality.