Theatre Guild

The Theatre Guild was a Broadway producing organization that, despite its commercial orientation, retained an artistic mission rooted in its origins with the Provincetown Playhouse and the production of Eugene O'Neill's early plays. It played a crucial role in the early careers of both Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and its institutional practices—from prize committees to production credits—form the commercial and artistic backdrop against which A Streetcar Named Desire was created and launched.

Origins and Artistic Mission

The Theatre Guild had an unusual beginning, its leading people having been involved with the Provincetown Playhouse, the producer of Eugene O'Neill's first plays. A few of its leaders still nursed a certain longing for a return to the art of the theater rather than continuing to bury themselves in its commerce. To that end, Guild members Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford broke off to found the Group Theatre, which in 1939 awarded Tennessee Williams $100 for three one-acts. The head of that prize committee was Molly Day Thacher, the wife of Elia Kazan. This lineage—from the Provincetown Playhouse through the Theatre Guild to the Group Theatre—established a tradition of art-minded theater that would later shape the production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Role in Playwright Development

The Theatre Guild's Bureau of New Plays offered a prize of $1,250 to college students across the country, which Arthur Miller won about a decade before Streetcar's premiere. Miller described this as a small fortune in that Depression year and noted it was the only attempt by a Broadway producer to encourage playwrights beyond the Manhattan boundaries. This institutional support for emerging writers paralleled the Guild's earlier recognition of Williams, creating a shared professional lineage between the two playwrights. The Guild's prize committee structure and its willingness to invest in untested talent helped sustain the careers of writers who would later define mid-century American drama.

Production and Commercial Context

The Theatre Guild's commercial apparatus is visible in the production credits of A Streetcar Named Desire. The play was presented at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, by Irene Selznick, with scenery and lighting by Jo Meilziner and costumes by Lucinda Ballard. The assistant to the producer was Irving Schneider. The Guild's commercial orientation coexisted with its artistic aspirations, a tension that Arthur Miller identified as central to the Broadway system. Miller noted that George Kaufman had said, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night," and that the same would surely hold for the poetic play, such was the addiction to a flat realism. Yet Streetcar's success contradicted this prevailing wisdom, proving that a Broadway play with literary quality could survive the banal tastes of the New York audience.

Legal and Institutional Framework

The Theatre Guild's institutional framework extended to the legal and copyright structures that governed the play's production and distribution. A Streetcar Named Desire is published by special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, and is fully protected under copyright laws of the United States, the British Commonwealth, and all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, video or sound recording, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are expressly reserved. Inquiries concerning the amateur rights are directed to the Dramatists Play Service, without whose permission in writing no amateur performance may be given. This legal apparatus reflects the commercial theater system within which the Guild operated and which shaped the conditions under which plays like Streetcar were produced and disseminated.

Significance in the Play's World

The Theatre Guild's existence and practices inform the cultural context of A Streetcar Named Desire in several ways. The Napoleonic code, which Stanley Kowalski invokes to assert his claim over Blanche DuBois's property, represents a legal framework that contrasts with the Guild's more artistic concerns. The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions, as Stanley observes, and this difference extends to the cultural capital that the Theatre Guild represented—a world of literary prizes, artistic ambition, and refined taste that Blanche embodies and Stanley resents. Stanley's assertion that he is "a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth" stands in opposition to the European-influenced artistic traditions that the Guild championed. The play's exploration of class, culture, and power is thus shadowed by the institutional structures of American theater, where the Theatre Guild represented an older, more genteel tradition that was being displaced by the raw energy of figures like Stanley and the commercial imperatives of postwar Broadway.