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Good morning.
Today, a sweltering New Orleans apartment on a Broadway stage… and the unknown twenty-three-year-old who walked away from opening night a star.
Let’s begin.
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The Night an Unknown Actor Became Impossible to Ignore
Tennessee Williams—“A Streetcar Named Desire”
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ew York. 3 December, 1947. The curtain fell at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. For a moment, nobody in the audience made a sound. Then the applause started, and it kept going for half an hour. |
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was born Thomas Lanier Williams III, in Columbus, Mississippi. He was thirty-six, and this was only his third full-length play. His first, The Glass Menagerie, had opened on Broadway just two years earlier.
The play drops a fading Southern belle, Blanche DuBois, into her sister Stella’s cramped New Orleans apartment, where Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski does not want her there. Blanche clings to old manners and half-true stories. Stanley has no patience for either. Williams gave Stanley to a mostly unknown twenty-three-year-old stage actor named Marlon Brando.
This is Brando in that very role, photographed during the original production.
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| Carl Van Vechten, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1948. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. |
Photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) shot Brando in costume not long after the play opened, T-shirt torn, expression somewhere between amused and dangerous. Jessica Tandy played Blanche opposite him, and she was the one the opening-night reviews actually singled out. It took hindsight, and eventually a film version, for the world to fully clock what Brando had just done to American acting.
On opening night, Williams sent Brando a telegram before the curtain went up: “Ride out boy and send it solid.” He did. Director Elia Kazan (1909–2003) had built the whole production around a rawer, more physical style of performance than Broadway audiences were used to, and Brando, trained in that same method, became its most electric example.
I once watched a film clip of Brando’s Stanley expecting a stage performance, all projection and polish. What I got looked like eavesdropping on an actual fight. It took me a while to understand that unsettling, unpolished quality was the entire point.
The play ran 855 performances, an extraordinary number for straight drama at the time. It won Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and earned Tandy a Tony. Blanche’s closing line, delivered as she’s led away, has outlived the play itself as a piece of quotable English: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
The play had its first tryout weeks earlier… at a theater in Philadelphia, on a stage that would later host the pre-Broadway runs of half a dozen future American classics.
Thirty minutes of applause for a play about people who could barely stand each other… and an unknown actor who never went back to being unknown.
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Three Things Worth Knowing
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Art
Edward Hopper’s Loneliness
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American painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967) spent the same decades painting a related kind of American isolation: strangers in diners, women alone in bright apartment windows, all lit by a hard, flat light. Hopper never met Williams, but their work shares the same postwar mood, ordinary rooms where something is clearly unsaid. “Nighthawks,” his best-known painting, appeared in 1942, just five years before Blanche stepped off her own streetcar.
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Le Mot Juste
Southern Gothic
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Critics reached for this label to describe Williams, and later writers like Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote: stories set in the American South, mixing faded gentility with violence, decay, and the grotesque, just beneath a polite surface. Blanche, clinging to old manners while her whole world rots around her, is close to the genre’s defining character.
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Philosophy
Apollonian and Dionysian
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In 1872, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) split human nature into two forces: the Apollonian, orderly and image-loving, and the Dionysian, raw and instinctual. Blanche, all illusion and careful appearance, is pure Apollonian. Stanley, blunt appetite with no patience for pretense, is pure Dionysian. Williams never read it this way on paper, but the whole play runs on exactly that collision.
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Connoisseur’s Diary
Worth Seeing This Week
A Streetcar Named Desire is currently part of the season at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, the very stage where the play had its first-ever tryout in 1947, ahead of its Broadway opening.
Where: Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Tickets: check the show page for current dates and pricing; all tickets carry a small historic-preservation fee. Insider tip: the Walnut is the oldest continuously operating theater in the United States, so even a bad seat comes with genuine history in the walls. Check dates at walnutstreettheatre.org →
Worth Reading
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A Streetcar Named Desire — Tennessee Williams (1947). The play itself, still one of the fastest, tightest three-act dramas ever written for the American stage.
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Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh — John Lahr (2014). A National Book Critics Circle Award–winning biography, tracing Williams’s life from Mississippi childhood to his final, difficult years.
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Elia Kazan: A Life — Elia Kazan (1988). The director’s own memoir, including a candid account of building Brando’s Stanley from the ground up in rehearsal.
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