Chris Bauer, Edward Hall and Natasha Richardson in rehearsal for the Roundabout production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

The primal passions of A Streetcar Named Desire steam up director Edward Hall's Roundabout production.

By Chris Jones
photographs by Rivka S. Katvan

“There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” observes Stella Kowalski to her bewildered, uncomprehending sister, Blanche, “that sort of makes everything else seem ... unimportant.” Perhaps more than any other play ever penned, Tennessee Williams' 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, forces us to contemplate the veracity, the practicality, and—most importantly—the transferability of Stella's singular view on human relationships. 

Whichever way Tennessee's Streetcar runs—and productions have toddled along in all kinds of aesthetic directions over the years, with all manner of star names banging its bells and depending on the kindness of strangers—the throughline always seems to start and end with Stella's observation, as dangerously radical as it is completely obvious.

Could one —indeed, should one— go through life following Stella's guide to a successful marriage, a working assumption that's at once desperately risky and endlessly enviable?  Especially if one's companion in the dark is a hard-drinkin' but good-lovin' “Polack” named Stanley Kowalski? In Streetcar, it all comes down to what happens between the sheets. Whichever way one cuts it, this is a work uniquely attuned to the social possibilities and the human tragedies wrought by Eros.

“If ever there was a play that eroticized the stage,” says Edward Hall, the director of Roundabout's revival, “this is that very play. Williams wrote people whose sexuality is at the very core of their characters.” In Streetcar, sex is both viable justification and agent of evil. It creates victims and benefactors. It holds things together like a sticky French Quarter glue, and yet it also brings them crashing down with the ferocity of ten tons of dynamite blowing up an antebellum mansion.

Edward Hall and stage manager, Philip Cusack

The danger and mendacity in desire lies at the heart of all Williams' work, of course. If the recently deceased Arthur Miller was the socio-political and moral conscience of capitalist, twentieth-century America, and Eugene O'Neill was its psychological poet of despair and resignation, Williams was the first to throw open the bedroom doors of our most passionate and secret obsessions.

“Williams,” says the director Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project), who recently worked in Chicago on a new, live version of the unpublished Williams screenplay One Arm, (a very pulpy tale of a one-armed boxer that oozes with sexual tension and throbbing sequences of shadowy passion) “is the American poet of personal revelation.” 

Cultural Touchstone
Moral standards and culture wars may wax and wane, but the capacity of Tennessee Williams' plays to shock somehow has floated above time. It's due in no small part to Williams' incisive vistas into hidden desire, making his work intersect with popular culture in a peculiarly intense fashion. And that statement is especially true of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Certainly, Williams' poetic skills partly explain his place in the American psyche. And it's true that he first demonstrated his singular ability to depict —and seemingly understand— the fragile heroine —in The Glass Menagerie, which predates Streetcar by four years.

But despite the copious amounts of scholarly and student appreciation that followed Glass Menagerie's opening, the memories of Tom Wingfield never quite packed the populist punch of Stella, Blanche, and Stanley. Nor, when you really think about it, have Brick and Maggie, the main characters of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Thanks in no small measure to Elia Kazan's justly famous 1951 film —which wisely retained no fewer than seven cast members from the play's original Broadway cast— Streetcar has become the Williams drama that has made the deepest inroads into the consciousness of ordinary Americans.

To call Streetcar an iconic piece of drama is merely to understate its place in popular culture. What other play is instantly recognizable from a single epithet?  The bare-chested howl “Stella!” —a mix of passion and pain, love and hostility— has been this play's calling card across the second half of the twentieth century, but the simple cry of “Flores!” has also come to signify this play and only this play. And surely no other classic American drama could have sustained an entire episode of The Simpsons, wherein the work was memorably subverted into “Streetcar: the Musical.” Indeed, there's a veritable postmodern slagheap of meanings and interpretations now burying this famous—infamously famous—play.

A Haunted Play
You could make a very good case that past performances and production concepts haunt Streetcar with the kind of ferocity that's equaled only by Shakespearean tragedy. Peter Brook observed that any director attempting Hamlet not only has to wrestle with the text, but he or she also has to deal with the multitude of famous past performances and concepts. It's useless to pretend otherwise when the audience walks in with them all. That's surely the case with Streetcar. It's very tough to separate Stanley Kowalski from Marlon Brando or Blanche DuBois from Vivian Leigh (Leigh, on the verge of a nervous breakdown herself, used to say that she had trouble separating the character from herself).

“This play reveals how much we misunderstand each other. Williams' world is full of surface conversations that mask deep miscommunications that send things spiraling out of control.”

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Kazan's original 1947 Broadway production —and subsequent film— have merged with the text in an usually intense kind of way. Roger Ebert, who's not especially inclined to overstatement, says of Brando's Kowalski that “no performance had more influence on modern acting styles.” And if that weren't enough, consider all the famous women who have interpreted Blanche DuBois over the years: Jessica Tandy, Tallulah Bankhead —and now, Natasha Richardson. The modern-day Blanche is at once a star vehicle, a metaphor for lost souls, a repository for male brutalism, and a reminder that so-called social progress almost always has its victims. These days, the frail, emotionally damaged heroine—whose vulnerability and desperation is what upsets the Kowalskis' Big Easy applecart in the first place—has achieved a gravitas well beyond that of a sad woman with a past who, like King Lear, has ever but slenderly known herself.

In many ways, Blanche is as much a dying cultural tradition as she is a single, troubled human being. “Blanche,” says Hall, “was the kind of civilized character from whom post-war America was already in the process of cutting loose. She's quite literally at the end of the line right from when we first meet her.”

Williams liked people at the end of the line. So do Hollywood and Broadway. In the popular consciousness, the actors and the Streetcar characters they played have merged into a kind of polyglot over the last half-century.  Stanley's words no longer are easily divisible from his bare chest. And we all think we know exactly what Blanche should look and sound like —even before we've met her. To understand the perennial power of this play, all you have to do is go to the modern-day French Quarter and see how much the Big Easy trades on “Streetcar” iconography.

So which came first, the sights and smells of New Orleans or the sights and smells of this play? It's hard to tell the difference anymore. One informs the other. So what to do with all these preconceptions? For a start, Hall says, you have to ignore everything. “People keep telling me this is a highly familiar play,” he says, “but it's not at all familiar to me. Everything anyone has said or written about the play really is useless in the making of the play.”

John C. Reilly and Scott Sowers in rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Heart of Desire
Probe that sexual center of the work, Hall says, and you'll find that its passions spill over into other arenas. “This play reveals how much we misunderstand each other,” Hall says. “Williams' world is full of surface conversations that mask deep miscommunications that send things spiraling out of control.”

That's another Williams specialty. No other American playwright forges such a memorable collection of once-functional human disasters who find themselves condemned to wander from one humiliation to the next.  As such, it's easy to look at Williams' characters from a smug, safe distance. Labeling Blanche a dinosaur in our mind is one way to declare our own ongoing relevance.

But Hall argues that Williams does not merely create whacked-out eccentrics. That would have been letting us off too easily. And it wouldn't account for the popularity of Streetcar. It goes much, much deeper than that.

“This is a good time for this play,” Hall says. “It reminds us that we ought to understand each other before we make judgments about other people's behavior.” Hall's take on the classic suggests that we all have passions; we all have secrets; we're all vulnerable to sudden, brutal exposure. Perhaps that explains Streetcar's enduring appeal: Williams' play creates a bright mirror image of our own dark-of-night dealings.

Chris Jones writes about theatre for the Chicago Tribune and Variety.

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