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War & Sex: the Makings of Streetcar

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War & Sex: the Makings of Streetcar War & Sex: The Makings of Streetcar By Johanna Gruenhut, Artistic Associate Tennessee Williams began writing A Streetcar Named Desire in 1944. At the time, he was calling it The Poker Night. It is hard to imagine this play with that title! But title not withstanding, the play possessed spectral, menacing, elusive, and destructive qualities from inception; Williams said that the inspiration for the play was a mental image of Blanche: “I saw Blanche sitting in a chair with the moonlight coming through a window onto her. My first idea for the title was Blanche’s Chair in the Moon. But I only wrote one scene then. She was waiting for Mitch, and he wasn’t showing up. That was as far as I got then; it was December of 1944. I felt Streetcar so intensely it terrified me. I couldn’t work for several months I was so terrified…I didn’t go back to it until 1947, when I was in New Orleans… Then I went back to it, and it wrote itself, just like that…It took me by storm. Blanche was so dynamic, she possessed me.”[1] It cannot be overstated how new and even subversive this play was. Among other things, this was the first in post-war American theatre to place desire and sexuality at the heart of the action. “Stanley Kowalski changed the concept of sex in America,” said Gore Vidal upon seeing the original Broadway production. The post-World War II period was dominated by musicals and revivals of classical texts. But the ‘well made play’ of the 1920s and 1930s did not sit readily with audiences who had lived through the anxieties of recent depressions, World War and nuclear weapons.[2] It was also a society from which men had been largely extracted during the war and then reintroduced after, while women entered a workforce that previously excluded them. It was a society undergoing multiple transitions, not the least of which involved negotiating the roles and relationships of women and men. Streetcar barreled into this uncertain and changing world, brimming with the anxieties of its audiences. The men in the play are all reentering society —all of those gathered around Stanley Kowalski’s poker table had fought in the war. These are the kinds of men —if not the very same— who populate Blanche’s fond memories of liaisons with off duty soldiers at Belle Reve. But, no longer soldiers, they seem altogether different, and they are now men with whom similar liaisons would have a very different meaning and very different implications.[3] For her part, Blanche is a woman trapped between the past, the present, and the future, a place occupied by many women at this time. In his first description of Blanche, when the play was still a one-scene sketch, Williams writes: “She tries to explain her life to him [Stanley] but he can see only the details of promiscuity, not the underlying panic and need for protection which had forced this upon her.”[4] In discussing the characters with Elia Kazan, the play’s first director, Williams had this to say: “Blanche is backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand.”[5] Williams saw how women had been marginalized, and he also saw the possibility of an inflection at this moment in time. Blanche is a woman at the margins, grasping for the right to be accepted and acceptable. The margins always occupied Williams’ writing interests. He described himself as “drawn to those on the margins, the damaged, the excluded, those who had stepped off the American train to glory.’[6] Perhaps as a homosexual man at a time when homosexuality was illegal, William understood the implications of standing apart from society’s norms. Like Blanche, he was forced “to shade one’s eyes against the bright light of reality, to deploy imagination as the only available defense.”[7] Williams once said “my only influences were Chekov, D.H. Lawrence – and my life,”[8] At the time of his writing Streetcar Williams was involved in a very tumultuous and violent love affair. Elia Kazan saw the parallels onstage and off: “Wasn’t he [Williams] attracted to the Stanley’s of this world? Danger itself? Part of the sexuality that Williams wrote into the play is the menace of it.”[9] Kazan drew further parallels. To his analysis, Blanche “wants the very thing [Stanley] that’s going to crush her. The only way she can deal with this threatening force is to give herself to it.”[10] The play shows us Stanley through Blanche’s gaze, and thereby we see him through Williams’ eyes as well. As Gore Vidal observed: “The male is his [Williams] obsession, and male sexuality the benchmark. Females are principal characters in his plays because it’s through them that you’re going to view the male, which is the playwright’s objective.”[11] Is there anything more American in the end than upending tradition, rejecting authority, repurposing old rules (if not breaking them), turning low-brow into high-brow, and vice-versa. Streetcar does all these things. Pay attention, and you will even notice that Williams frequently juxtaposes opposites. He uses lyrical, poetic language when characters are the most vulgar. Beautiful melodies play when Blanche is about to vomit. If you don’t know exactly how you feel during this play, then the play may be having its desired effect. A Streetcar Named Desired opened on Broadway to “tumultuous approval.”[12] Arthur Miller famously commented that “Streetcar planted the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre.”[13] [1 ] Jim Gaines in conversation with Tennessee Williams, (1972) in Albert J. Devlin, ed., Conversations with Tennessee Williams, University Press of Mississippi, 1986, p. 215 [2] Donmar Warehouse Production education packet, donamrwarehouse.com/media/files/a streetcar named desire [3] Ibid. [4] Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, WW Norton, 2014. p. 95 [5] Lahr, p. 120 [6] Christopher Bigsby, ‘The Kindness of Strangers’. Donmar Warehouse Production program, donamrwarehouse.com/media/files/ a streetcar named desire [7 ] Ibid. [8] Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, WW Norton, 2014. p.1 [9] Lahr, p. 143 [1 0] Lahr, p. 143 [1 1] Lahr, p. 146 [1 2] Lahr, p. 145 [1 3] Lahr, p.146 Trackbacks (0) | Permalink .
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