SEARCHING FOR TENNESSEE: PERFORMATIVE IDENTITY AND THE THEATRICAL EVENT. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS/NEW ORLEANS LITERARY FESTIVAL

CAROLYN BAIN

[Finally, Stanley stumbles half-dressed out to the porch and down the wooden steps to the pavement before the building. There he throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife’s name: Stella! Stella! Sweetheart! Stella!] (Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire)

There will always be festivals to remember. (Tennessee Williams, The Two Character Play)

EVENTIFYING A THEATRICAL MOMENT In 1996 the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival invented the ‘Stella-and-Stanley Shout-off Contest’, exploiting Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire and creating another kind of success: an annual theatrical event, performed on the festival’s final day of five days of panels, interviews, classes, parties and book signings. The contest allows twenty-five contestants to perform their interpretations of the infamous lines, ‘Stella! Stella, Sweetheart! Stella!’ from scene three of Streetcar, during which Williams’s character, Stanley Kowalski, calls for his wife Stella, who escaped his violent outburst by retreating to a neighbour’s apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In standing beneath the balcony and calling for Stella, Stanley creates a theatrical moment now so deeply rooted in the American psyche that performance of just the word, ‘Stella’, constructs a theatrical event; the event begins and ends with the utterance, ‘Stella’, performed out of context of the play yet within the framework of a literary festival that celebrates the name of the playwright and the play’s site. The shout-off serves as a theatrical event within the theatrical systems of a festival and communicates on multiple levels of experience, perception and memory. Theorised by Willmar Sauter, theatrical events act as cultural frameworks facilitating mutual interactions between the performer and 300 Carolyn Bain the spectator. He proposes that during a festival communication occurs between performer and spectator at the levels of the sensory, artistic and symbolic (Sauter 2000: 31). Adding to Sauter’s work, Temple Hauptfleisch describes a festival as a theatrical event and a phenomenon of multiple theatrical systems related to the religious, artistic and cultural life of a particular community. Informed by the work of Sauter and Hauptfleisch, I argue that the shout-off simultaneously informs the artistic life of the community, performs the celebrity of Tennessee Williams, and communicates a capacity for sensuality that crosses traditions of both theatre and gender. Within the context of the festival and consideration of it as a theatrical event, the shout-off enhances our understanding of the artistic relationship of New Orleans and Tennessee Williams (1938- 1984); the symbolic relationship of Tennessee Williams (1911-1984) and Marlon Brando (1924-2004) to celebrity identity; and the expression of sensuality in performance. For almost a decade the shout-off has attracted media attention, expanding the reputation of the festival while satisfying the criteria of eventification. Eventification argues for the unique model of performance, which enhances the separation between the ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ experience. The theatrical event is subject to a start and a stop time, exists in a defined space, and demonstrates communication experienced between audience and performer (Hauptfleisch 2004: 282). Behind the contestants’ shouts for Stella in the shout-off lie decades of memories of Stanley’s ‘Stellaaaaaa’ as it reverberated around the world, exploding expectations of the gender prototype male of the 1940s embedded in the romanticised images of actors Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Gary Cooper and their performances of the strong silent type. On 3 December 1947 at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre with actor Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the opening night audience initially sat in dead silence at the play’s conclusion. From their stillness, the audience erupted into a thirty-minute ovation – a response that I propose confirmed the recognition of a moment in theatrical history. With Streetcar, Williams destabilised not only the social performance of gender but also his own identity as a writer. A Streetcar Named Desire, the play and the 1951 film of the play, followed Williams’s earlier success, The Glass Menagerie, adding to