Post-War American

Drama

Tennessee Williams,
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
 19th Century American Theater
• 1800: just a few theaters with approx. 150 actors – in a
few cities on the East coast;
• by 1885: 5000 playhouses in at least 3500 cities
throughout the country
• GENRES:
• Dramatized versions of classic novels: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein etc.
• Melodramas – bombastic performances;
• Minstrel shows: racist representations, white actors in
blackface;
 (Early) 20th Century
American Theater
• Theater as a cultural
institution
• Broadway – leader of the
theater world; conservative
tastes; favorite genres:
musicals and comedies;
• The “little theater” groups
(The Washington Square
Players, The Provincetown
Players)
• College & amateur theater
(workshops, amateur
authors, noncommercial
theaters, touring)
 The Beginnings of Modern
American Drama
• Starting with the 1920s => psychological and social
realism;

• Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller:

resistance & compliance with social norms; self-delusion;
alcoholism, depression; alienation; the American family;

• modes: tragedy (O’Neill); the Southern gothic (Williams);

ethico-political injunctions (Miller);
 Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953):
Contributions
• Nobel Prize for literature, 1936; 4
Pulizer Prizes
• sought to create a ‘‘modern
American drama’’
• attempted to revive tragedy on
the modern stage
• subject
class matter: sexuality,
conflicts, race relations,
alienation, the American family;
• director of the Provincetown
Players;
• 1923 to 1927: managed the
Greenwich Village Theatre;
• founder of the Theatre Guild,
which produced his later plays;
 The Scope of O’Neill’s Work
• “Nothing inhibited him: modern versions of Greek
tragedy, the renovation of the soliloquy or the mask,
the use of film on the stage, plays about miscegenation
or incest. He planned multi-play cycles, wrote works
that in certain respects are all but unstageable … He
pulled into the orbit of that theatre and domesticated
Greek classical tragedy, Strindbergian domestic drama,
Ibsenesque social plays, Irish dramatic poems,
expressionist melodramas. The church of his drama
was constantly being reconsecrated to different faiths,
faiths which he served with total commitment, only to
abandon them for others” (Bigsby 15).
 Long Day’s Journey into Night
(1941; 1956)
• “The story of one day, 8 A.M. to
midnight, in the life of a family of
four – father, mother, and two sons –
back in 1912, – a day in which things
occur which evoke the whole past of
the family and reveal every aspect of
its interrelationships . . . At the final
curtain, there they still are, trapped
within each other by the past, each
guilty and at the same time innocent,
scorning, loving, pitying each other,
understanding and yet not
understanding at all, forgiving but still
doomed never to be able to forget”
(O’Neill, Letters 506–7).

• Photo: Original production, courtesy of Kennedy Center.

 (Early) Post-War American Drama

• “Williams and Miller can serve as examples of

early responses by American dramatists to the
events that shaped the second half of the
twentieth century, as they began to question the
viability of the American dream, examine the
tension between the individual and the collective
in that context, and explore issues of identity in
terms of role playing and authenticity in
American culture” (Saddik 40-41).
 Tennessee Williams
(1911-1983)
• With A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams brought
sex, the South, and violence to Broadway in
1947, and that triad was thereafter assumed as
his signature. (Ruby Cohn)
• 1930s – a series of political protest plays for a
radical theater group in St. Louis
• 1939 – changed his name to Tennessee (his
original surname was “Thomas Lanier”)
• 1945 – Broadway success of The Glass Menagerie
• 1947 – Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named
Desire; film version: 1951 (dir. Elia Kazan;
Vivian Leigh, Marlon Brando)
• 1954 – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; film version: 1958
(dir. Richard Brooks; Elizabeth Taylor, Paul
Newman)
• 1958 – Suddenly Last Summer; film: 1959
• 1961 – The Night of the Iguana; film: 1964
• 1960s – his “Stoned Age” (drug addiction,
boyfriend dies)
• 1980 – Clothes for a Summer Hotel
 Plastic Theater
• “The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and
authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its
audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and
has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone
should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic
in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the
poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only
through transformation, through changing into other forms
than those which were merely present in appearance.
 These
remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play.
They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre
which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic
conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our
culture” (T. Williams, production notes to the Glass Menagerie,
xix-xxii).
Original Broadway production of
A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947.
Courtesy of the Morgan Library.
 [cont’d]
• “I have noticed … a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or
non-literary elements of the theatre, the various plastic
elements, the purely visual things such as light and
movement and color and design, which play, for example,
such a tremendously important part in theatre . . . and
which are as much a native part of drama as words and
ideas are … I have read criticism in which the use of
transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects, which
are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue, were
dismissed as ‘cheap tricks and devices.’” (T. Williams, letter
to critic Eric Bentley)
 Old vs. New South
• Williams on the Old vs. the New South: “I
write out of love for the South … once a
way of life that I am just able to remember –
not a society based on money … I write
about the South because I think the war
between romanticism and the hostility to it
is very sharp there.”
(qtd. in Bigsby 49)

• Williams about Blanche: “a sacrificial victim

. . . of society . . . not adaptable to the
circumstances as they were, that the world
had imposed upon her.” (qtd. in Saddik 44)

• Photo: Rehearsal of the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named

Desire, 1947. Courtesy of the Morgan Library.
 Dramatic Conflict: Stanley vs. Blanche
(Thomas Adler, A Streetcar Named Desire:
The Moth and the Lantern)
 Williams’ Heroines
• “Williams had the romantic’s
fascination with extreme
situations, with the imagination’s
power to challenge facticity, with
the capacity of language to
reshape experience, with the self
’s ability to people the world with
visions of itself. He deployed the
iconography of the romantic:
fading beauty, the death of the
young, a dark violence, a
redeeming love” (Bigsby 32).

• Photo: Original Broadway production of A

Streetcar Named Desire, 1947. Courtesy of the
Morgan Library.
 Language
• “Language is, indeed, the central device with which
his characters seek to shape their worlds” (Bigsby
48).
• BLANCHE: I don't want realism. I want magic!
[Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to
people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell
truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is
sinful, then let me be damned for it-Don't turn the light
on!
 Works Cited
• Adler, Thomas P. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the Lantern. Boston:
Twayne, 1990. Print.
• Bigsby, Christopher. Modern American Drama, 1945-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
• Downer, Alan S. Fifty Years of American Drama: 1900-1950. Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1951. Print.
• O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. Critical Edition. Ed. William
Davies King. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. Print.
• ---. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. Eds. Travis Bogard and Jackson R.
Bryer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Print.
• Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2007. Print.