Alternative Visions of ASND

Alternative Visions
of Blanche DuBois:
Uta Hagen and Jessica Tandy
in A Streetcar Named Desire
http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.32.4.545 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:54:44 PM - IP Address:5.62.154.57
SUSAN SPECTOR
Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the great roles for an
actress in the American repertory. Blanche spends more time onstage than any
other character in the play; she is also a richly complex protagonist representing
both abstractly civilized and basically physical womanhood in a society that
rejects any comfortable fusion of these qualities. Like Hamlet for the actor,
Blanche encourages an actress to communicate her vision of the artistic
temperament in conflict with a hostile environment; individual performers have
been able to represent this conflict differently depending on their own
sensibilities and styles. The fust two women to play Blanche were Jessica
Tandy and Uta Hagen. They offer remarkable examples of the role's potential
for allowing different actresses to generate unique characterizations from the
same basic material.
In 1947 Irene Mayer Selznick was assembling her first production for the
Broadway stage - a new play by Tennessee Williams called A Streetcar Named
Desire. Jessica Tandy, who had recently given a brilliant performance in
Williams's one-act Portrait of a Madonna in Los Angeles, was Selznick' s first
choice for Blanche DuBois, a similar role. I When the play opened on
December 3, 1947, at the Barrymore Theatre, Tandy was Blanche, Marlon
Brando played Stanley Kowalski, Stella was played by Kim Hunter, and Mitch
by Karl Malden . Elia Kazan directed. The production drew very positive
reviews; many considered it Williams's most mature play to date. By the end of
the 1947- 48 season, Streetcar had won the Pulitzer Prize, the New York
Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award for the best play
presented that year. Tandy won the Tony Award for the best performance by an
actress .
Uta Hagen was playing Mrs. Manningham in Angel Street at the City Center
in January 1948 while the Streetcar management was casting the national tour
scheduled to begin the following fall. Elia Kazan saw Hagen in Angel Street
SUSAN SPECTOR
and felt he had found the actress to play Blanche DuBois in the second
company.2 Irene Selznick agreed: "Uta Hagen was giving an extraordinary
performance in a revival of Angel Street and she became our unanimous choice
for Blanche. She had the right looks, was the right age; she just wasn't the right
size. A tall cast was the solution, beginning with a hefty Stanley in the person of
Anthony Quinn, to tower over her."3
Interpretive and stylistic differences between Hagen and Tandy in the role of
Blanche became a constant theme of reviews for the next two theatrical seasons
when Hagen played Blanche, first in New York as Tandy's summer
replacement, then on the road with the national company, and finally for
another run with a second New York company. Both actresses played in what
was billed as Elia Kazan's production, they wore identical costumes designed
by Lucinda Ballard, and they worked on the same Jo Mielziner set. Tandy's
performance was shaped primarily by Kazan in rehearsal and conditioned by
the dominating presence of Marlon Branda. Hagen developed her characteriza-
tion independently, before entering rehearsal, and then worked with Harold
Clurman, who took over as the director of the road company.
Kazan drew his interpretation of the play from a letter Williams wrote to him
explaining his dramatic design for Streetcar: "There are no 'good' or 'bad'
people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by
misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's
hearts .... I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche.
Certainly pity. .. . and in order to do that, Blanche must finally have the
understanding and compassion ofthe audience .... It is a thing (Misunderstand-
ing) not a person (Stanley) that destroys her in the end. In the end you should
feel- 'If only they all had known about each other!'" (A Life, pp. 329- 30). In
Kazan's production, however, Marlon Branda's performance of Stanley
captured the audience's sympathy and identification. Kazan had hoped Jessica
Tandy would play Blanche as "a ' difficult' heroine, not one easy to pity , and for
the audience to be with Branda at first , as they were closer in their values to
Stanley than to Blanche. Then, slowly, Jessie and I and the play would tum the
audience's sympathies around so that they'd find that their final concerns were
for her and that, perhaps, as in life, they'd been prejudiced and insensitive" (A
Life, p. 343). In Kazan's opinion, that difficult negotiation of sympathy did not
occur. During the final rehearsals, Branda brilliantly and engagingly "unbalan-
ced" the equilibrium that both Williams and Kazan had hoped for. Within the
constraints of Kazan's production, Tandy 's characterization never achieved
that balance: "by contrast with Marlon, whose every word seemed not
something memorized but the spontaneous expression of an intense inner
experience - which is the level of work all actors strive to reach - Jessie was
what? Expert? Professional? ... Hers seemed to be a performance; Marlon was
living on stage" (A Life, p. 343).
When the play opened in New Haven, Kazan recognized that he had not
Alternative Visions of Blanche DuBois 547
solved this problem, nor was he going to: "The audiences adored Branda.
When he derided Blanche, they responded with approving laughter. Was the
play becoming the Marlon Branda Show? I didn' t bring up the problem,
because I didn't know the solution . I especially didn't want the actors to know
that I was concerned. What would I say to Branda? Be less good? Or to Jessie?
Get better?" (A Life, p. 345)·
Nevertheless, most New York reviewers praised Tandy' s performance more

than Branda' s. For example, Howard Barnes in the Herald Tribune, Brooks
Atkinson in the Times, and Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror found her work
"haunting and volatile," "almost incredibly true," and an "acting tour de force,"
and they passed over Branda's performance with real praise but little comment
or analysis .4 William Hawkins, however, writing in the World-Telegram,
seems to identify the problem of sympathy between audience and character in
much the same way Kazan did. "Iessica Tandy ... infallibly projects the two
essential planes of the character. One is the immediate unrelenting hopeless-
ness of the woman, and the other her desperate falseness. She makes her pathos
repellent rather than sympathetic, giving the play credibility and a tumultuous
effect on the emotions." For Hawkins , Blanche is not a likeable character, but
she is touching. In contrast, the same reviewer comments on Brando's
"astonishing authenticity. His stilted speech and swift rages are ingeniously
spontaneous, while his deep-rooted simplicity is sustained every second."
Branda overwhelms questions of Stanley's morality with the rushing appeal of
his spontaneity.
In his review of Kazan 's production, Harold Clurman argued in the New
Republic that Kazan and Tandy were unable to shift the audience's sympathies
toward Blanche in the last third of the play. Stanley's "low jeering is seconded
by the audience's laughter, which seems to mock the feeble and hysterical
decorativeness of the girl's behavior. The play becomes the triumph of Stanley
Kowalski with the collusion of the audience, which is no longer on the side of
the angels. This is natural because Miss Tandy is fragile without being touching
(except when the author is beyond being overpowered by an actress).'"
Clurman felt that Kazan's direction distorted Williams's theme, "that aspira-
tion, sensitivity , [and] departure from the norm are battered, bruised and
disgraced in our world today" (Divine Pastime , p. 12).
On 8 April 1948, Hagen contracted to play Blanche on tour through
September 1949; the nrst road booking would be nve months in Chicago, from
September 1948 through January 1949. But nrst she would replace Tandy in
New York during Tandy's six-week summer vacation. (For the nrst two weeks
of Tandy's vacation, Hagen would play Blanche in New York with the
principals of the national touring company, but then for the next month she
would be rehearsing with the national company during the day while
performing with the principals of the original New York company in the
evenings.)
SUSAN SPECTOR
Hagen had almost three full months to prepare the role of Blanche DuBois
before replacing Tandy on July 3. "Once I knew I was going to be in it I started
work on the play. I thought I would be influenced by Tandy's interpretation, so
I refused to see the production. ,,6
Working closely with Herbert Berghof,' Hagen painstakingly studied the
script of Streetcar - developing in detail an imagined background for Blanche,
analyzing her changing relationships with other characters in the text, and
discovering events from Hagen's own life that allowed her to see herself as the
character within the framework of the script. Hagen described her "system of
study" in a newspaper interview for the Chicago Herald-American on 18
October 1948: "she went through the play scene by. scene, asking herself what
her intentions were with each line, each scene. 'When I finally got to
rehearsal,' she says, 'I had a well defined notion of what I was doing. '" Her
independent identification with Blanche led inevitably to distinctive interpreta-
tions of the major actions in the script, at times radically different from those
chosen by Tandy and Kazan.
After this extensive but isolated preparation, the four Summer replacements
- Hagen, Anthony Quinn, Mary Welch and Russell Hardie - began formal
rehearsals on stage in the theatre with director Elia Kazan only three days before
they stepped into the leading roles in Streetcar on 3 July 1948. According to
Hagen's recollection, "In those three days I just barely learned the costume
changes: nine major changes, and the longest time I think is twenty seconds
[from a dress) into the ballgown for the rape scene [in Act III, scene 4). That one
was a total change - tiara, pearls, earrings, shoes and the whole jazz- in twenty
seconds. I'll never forget it. At the first performance all I remember is trying to
get through the whole thing mechanically." These brief summer replacement
rehearsals were separate from the more elaborate national tour rehearsals
planned for August.
The new principals in Streetcar were reviewed by the press at a matinee on 5
July. Despite their acutely foreshortened warm-up together, on 6 July Robert
Garland wrote in the Journal-American that the new cast's "teamwork, its
concern with the play rather than the players, is definitely superior. In its
present aspect ... Tennesee Williams' latest - and some say, greatest -
American tragedy is obviously more masterly." Garland singled out Hagen's
work particularly: "Even if our heroine is more sinned against than normal, her
playwright-imposed sufferings are almost unbearably acute beneath the artistry
of newcomer Uta Hagen. Healthier and heftier than Jessica Tandy's, Miss
Hagen's Miss DuBois manages to break your heart in two.'"
William Hawkins of the New York World-Telegram also acknowledged in
his 6 July review that "this cast has not yet had anything like the breaking-in that
the original group had before its opening, [yet) the course of the play and the
separate performances proceed with .extraordinary clarity .... Miss Tandy has
all the technique and infinite intelligence to portray the mental deterioration of a
tragic Southern belle, so that her every move and word is completely
explicable. Miss Hagen has that, too, but she adds a romantic quality that
emotionally shakes an understanding onlooker right to the soles of his feet."
Hawkins describes the impact Hagen achieved at this early moment in her
performances of the role: "This Blanche is not a woman who is just going to
pieces mentally. Her emotions and her very femininity disintegrate before your
eyes. In the beginning the persistence of her romantic vanity is quite terrifying.
Her desperate hunger for flattery and her obvious blandishments to draw
compliments are spine-tingling pathos ."
Hawkins identifies in Hagen's work the same intensity and moment-by-
moment reality that Kazan had found so captivating and dominating in Marlon
Brando's performance. "Miss Hagen has a rare quality for inner conviction.
She can hold an audience breathless because she projects an implicit belief in
what is happening to her on stage. The long narration of her first marriage grips
one with a suspense that promises a shocking climax ."
While some critics had commented on Jessica Tandy's limited emotional
range as Blanche - Harold Clurman, the most severe of them, wrote that the
role "demands the fullness and variety of an orchestra. Miss Tandy's register is
that of a violin's A string" [Divine Pastime , p. 15) - Hawkins was shaken by
Hagen's variety and power. "She also has a startling emotional range. When
she wants to get rid of her no longer honorable suitor, and runs across the stage
crying 'Fire!' one is prompted to look for a near exit, not to escape any
conflagration but to flee from her wildness."
Despite the evident success of these replacements in the cast of Streetcar,
both Kazan and Hagen found even their brief period of rehearsals together
surprisingly difficult and unpleasant. They found they had different perceptions
of the role of Blanche and different expectations about rehearsing a show
already in progress.
Both Kazan and Hagen believed that they each followed some form of the
Stanislavski Method. For example, apparently developed before initial
rehearsals with Tandy, Kazan's working notes describing his goals for Blanche
conclude with an unexceptionably lucid summary of "internal" acting, the
Method actor's craft: "The only way to understand any character is through
yourself. Everyone is much more alike than they willingly admit. Even as
frantic and fantastic a creature as Blanche is created by things you have felt and
known, if you'll dig for them and be honest about what you see. "9 And Hagen
later illustrated this concern about "identifying" with her role in an interview
with William Hawkins for the New York World-Telegram, 12 August 1949:
"People ask me how I can substitute something of myself for Blanche as she
feels about being run out of town in this play. I grew up in a small town where
my father was a professor, my brother played the fiddle, and I wanted to act and
talk about art. There were always things you covered up to be a regular fellow.
That's the same process inside you as Blanche's pretending she's a lady."
550 SUSAN SPECTOR
But in their brief rehearsal period, rather than working on such specific and
personal substitutions and actions necessarily unique to each perfonner of the
role, Kazan concentrated on presenting generalized attitudes and overall
images for Hagen so she could achieve the physical and psychological image of
Blanche which he had preconceived. In his working notes, these images were to
shape Blanche as a "stylized character," more specifically, "a butterfly in a
jungle looking for just a little momentary protection" (Notebook, pp. 302,
30 I). This kind of characterization seems appropriate to Kazan's vision of the
playas a "poetic" rather than "realistic" or "naturalistic" tragedy, but it was an
"external" approach to characterization, antithetical to the techniques and
working vocabulary used by Hagen.
Hagen had worked on detailed reconstructions of imagined events and
people from Blanche's past, on moment-by-momentchanges in on-stage action
and motivation, and on her ultimate "identification" with the role. The results
of her work brought her to see her character differently, more sympathetically,
than Kazan had done . In his working notes on the play Kazan made it clear that
Blanche was the symbolic representative of a noble and civilized but
nevertheless dying tradition; for Kazan, no matter what she may have signified,
in her function she was reduced to the prototypically frail woman who
parasitically usurps the independence of a man in order to survive. Though
Kazan understood the intrinsic worth of the other side of Blanche's character -
her adherence to civilized values - his basic sympathies and his most powerful
imaginative descriptions were associated with Stanley: "One of the important
things for Stanley is that Blanche would wreck his home. Blanche is dangerous.
She is destructive. She would soon have him and Stella fighting . He's got
things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a
phony, corrupt, sick, destructive woman. This makes Stanley right!" (Note-
book, p. 307) . In his working notes, Kazan then comments on the social and
cultural cost Stanley's vision of the world imposes on our community: "Are we
going into the era of Stanley? He may be practical and right. .. but whatthe hell
does it leave us?" Kazan has no articulated response to his own question. W
During their three intense days of rehearsal together, Hagen recalls that she
"had many fights with Kazan" about her interpretation of the role. Kazan was
never comfortable reworking his theatrical productions after they had opened;
actors and producers had to cajole or threaten him even to attend "touch-up"
rehearsals . " Hagen remembers exchanges with Kazan where she would say, "I
want to work on this section and on that scene," and he would reply, "Oh, I'm
bored with this play by now." More troubling was Kazan's attitude to Hagen's
role. "I would say, 'How can you ask Blanche to do that?' (l forget what it was.)
And he said, 'Well, I'll tell you frankly, I hate Blanche. '" The summer
replacement rehearsals ended without any resolution of their conflicts.
During July, Irene Selznick cast .the minor roles for Streetcar's national
company. Aware of the difficulties between Hagen and Kazan , and recognizing
Kazan's lack of interest in working with the new cast, she hired another
director. "Irene called me up mid-summer and said, 'Oh, I got you another
director,' " Hagen recalls. "My heart sank and I said, 'Who is it?' And she said
'Clurman .' I went through the rooffor joy." Kazan had been both angered and
impressed by Clurman's critical review of his production , especially since he
and Clurman had a long association beginning with the Group Theatre in the
1930S when Kazan had been by turns Clurman's srudent, stage manager, and
assistant director. Most recently, however, their year-long directing partner-

ship, begun in 1946 - in which they pooled their earnings and collaborated on
one another' s productions - dissolved when Kazan wanted to work more
independently and found he was far more successful in commercial theatre and
Hollywood (A Life, pp . 123, 300). Reviewing the moment in his auto-
biography, Kazan wrote: "When it came time for us to put out a road company.
I found that I no longer had the energy or the will to deal with that excellent,
strong-minded actress Uta Hagen , so - whether out of curiosity or perversity,
or both - I prevailed on Irene to offer Harold the job" (p. 352).
At this point in his career Clurman "was very broke," Hagen later learned ,
"and Irene offered him a lot of money .... Kazan let Clurman do it only on the
proviso that Clurman would not get any program credit or be mentioned in any
publicity. " Indeed, Clurman's work on Streetcar was never acknowledged
during the run of the show, and as recently as 1982 in her autobiography
producer Irene Selznick said nothing ofClurman's influence. Hagen, however,
repeatedly talked about Clurman's direction at press and radio interviews, but
she spoke out only after the road company left New York.
Hagen had worked with Clurman before. Only one year before, he had
introduced Hagen to Method acting techniques in a quickly-forgotten 1947
production of The Whole World Over, a comedy by Konstantine Simonov .
Using ideas and practices he had developed with the Group Theatre in the
1930s, in The Whole World Over Clurman refused to accept what he felt to be
Hagen's cliched notions of an ingenue. At the flIst rehearsal she had used her
"standard" approach when dealing with such a character. "I came in at the first
rehearsal ," Hagen said, "fixing line readings right away. And Clurman said,
'Don't do that! ' I really felt like the rug was pulled out from under me."
"Clurman opened a new world in the professional theater for me," Hagen
wrote in RespectJor Acting. "He took away my 'tricks.' He imposed no line
readings, no gestures, no positions on the actors. At flIst I floundered badly
because for many years I had become accustomed to using specific outer
directions as the material from which to construct the mask for my character,
the mask behind which I would hide throughout the performance. Mr. Clurman
refused to accept a mask. He demanded me in the role. ""
In sharp contrast to her frustrating exchanges with Kazan, the New York
rehearsals with Clurman were "a very happy experience." The director and
actress had not discussed their individual interpretations of Blanche before
552 SUSAN SPECTOR
meeting at the first rehearsal , but when work began they agreed that Blanche
was the victim of a destructive society rather than a madwoman disrupting a
healthy world. From the outset their working rapport amazed the cast. "People
used to say, 'In another twenty years you won't have to talk anymore. You will
just say, "Harold," and take a breath, and he'll nod or shake his head.' We were
absolutely one - in terms of the meaning of the play, the functioning of
Blanche, what should happen - throughout."
As he had done with Hagen in The Whole World Over, Clurman demanded
that each of the actors in the national company of Streetcar create their
characters out of personal experience. Clurman refused to accept his actors'
stereotyped impressions of Southerners, for example. The role of Stella's
upstairs neighbor, Eunice, was played by Peggy Rea; it was her frrst Equity job.
Terrified of failing, Rea desperately imitated Peg Hillias , the actress who was
playing the role on Broadway. But the two women had nothing in common.
Hillias was tall and thin; Rea short and chubby. At an early rehearsal , after Rea
had said her first line - "What's matter honey? Are you lost?" - in an artificial
Southern drawl, Clurman said, "All right. Let's everybody stop." Rea
remembers that she "wanted to die. And then he said, 'Peggy, where are you
from?' I said, 'Mississippi. Vh - Louisiana or Mississippi.' And he said,
'Peggy, where are you from?' 'Me?' 'Yes.' I said, 'Oh God, Los Angeles,
California.' He said, 'Right! And I want to talk to everybody about this. I don 't
want to hear any more Southern accents in this show. I've heard enough!' What
he meant was -'You!' 'Where are you?' 'Who is up there?"·' 3
In Hagen's opinion, Clurman had the ability to make "every actor look the
best they have ever been. And that's not just me; that's everybody .... And
that's why he was great in Streetcar. " Hagen found many of his productions
over the years "clumsy in terms of visualization and sound, just awkward. His
great failing was production - technical things. Nothing ever worked. But in
Streetcar he had an already finished production by Kazan, who was a master of
that kind of thing. Every sound effect, every music cue, everything was perfect.
Within that production Clurman made the actors flower. To me Kazan didn't. It
was one of the best things Clurman ever did, and he didn't get credit for it. "
When Jessica Tandy returned from her six week vacation in Nova Scotia, she
went to see Streetcar from out front. In an article in the New York Star,
8 August 1948, she talked about the differences between her version of Blanche
and Hagen's:
It was like re-discovering the play. I had a wonderful time watching Uta .... She's a
dream of an actress, perfect dream 1She' d never seen me act the part before taking over,
so she came to it with a fresh approach. She didn't copy me, but I intend asking if I can
steal from her. I'd see her do some clever bits of business and I'd kick myself for not
thinking of them myself. I can't describe them exactly - a little gesture here, a trick
there. Take the way Blanche accepts the train ticket. It' s the last straw. It dawns on her
she's not wanted, has to go home. The way I accept that ticket it's an internal emotion,
expressed. But the way Uta handles it, it's dramatically external; you can see stark
futility, helpless rage, mount on her face, the beginning of her complete crumbling away
into madness.
Hagen's physical stature and personal attributes of character made her Blanche
quite different from Tandy's. Clurman was later to describe Hagen as a

personality with "robust and sensuously potent elan" and a "fierce will to
expression and histrionic facility" (Divine Pastime , p. 115). In Blanche, Hagen
found a character who embodied the histrionic and self-dramatizing aspects of
her personality. "Using herself' in this role led to a characterization at once
vividly flamboyant and completely believable. In contrast, Tandy had built her
version of Blanche out of different innate resources; her characterization was
also convincingly "true" but without Hagen's dramatic pyrotechnics.
In succeeding months many critics tried to pinpoint the more subtle
differences between the two actresses. Eric Bentley, in Theatre Arts ,
November 1949, argued that as Tandy played her, Blanche "was more or less
mad from the start." In contrast, in Hagen's performance she "is driven mad by
Kowalski (on top of many antecedent causes)." In Bentley 's opinion, Hagen 's
interpretation was closer to the play Williams wrote.
On 6 September 1948, the second company of Streetcar began its national
tour at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shortly before the
curtain went up Hagen received a telegram from Tennessee Williams: "DEAR
UTA MY HEARTIS WITH YOU TONIGHT BODY COMES LATER LOVE
TENNESSEE. "" The opening of this company's run under Harold Clurman 's
direction was an artistic triumph for Hagen . The next day Harold V. Cohen of
the Pittsburgh Post Gazette called Hagen's Blanche DuBois "the kind of
performance acting text-books can be built around .... This is probably among
the most exhausting roles on record, and it is performed with unbelievable
insight and clarity.""
The Streetcar engagement was quickly sold out, and local newspapers
printed feature stories on Hagen' s work. Variety reported on 15 Septemberthat
it was the "first time that kind of news-column attention in Pittsburgh has gone
to actresses other than Hayes, Cornell, Bankhead, Lawrence and Fontanne."
Streetcar moved to the Hams Theatre in Chicago on 21 September. Hagen
amazed the Chicago critics by her transformation from "a rather pallid
Desdemona" in 1945 (when she appeared in the Paul Robeson-Margaret
Webster production on tour in Chicago) into "a sensitive and powerful
performer" in 1948. Her portrayal was compared to Laurette Taylor's Amanda
in The Glass Menagerie which had opened in Chicago in 1944:" ... it has to an
exciting degree the same inner, unerring brilliance . It seems to bubble out of an
inexbaustible well of inspiration ." The acting of Uta Hagen "actually deserves
that much-abused theatrical adjective <great, '" said one reviewer; another
554 SUSAN SPECTOR
wrote that if "there is Art with a capital A in A Streetcar Named Desire, it is

promulgated by Miss Hagen." Yet another declared that in this role "Miss
Hagen emerges as a major star. "16
"On opening night the customers stood up and cheered," Robert Pollack
reported the next day in the Chicago Sun-Times, in a review that more sharply
focuses on Hagen's extraordinary "star" quality. "And after the curtain went
down for the last time the crowds gathered about the stage door as if on the hunt
for Rita Hayworth or Clark Gable. The carriage trade, palms blistered, made
hesitant comparisons to legendary figures like Bernhardt and Duse .... She is a
young woman but an old-fashioned actress. She will have nothing to do with
false reticence or discreet playing. She demands to be heard and seen and she
specializes in the particular kind of exaggeration that separates brilliant
mumming from the behavior of people in the real world." Bernard Beckerman
has described such performers as "not merely celebrities. They are outsize
actors who infuse their roles with a measure of daemonic power. This power
arises from them, and yet possesses them in some unaccountable way. '01 7
Working with a technique that permitted and encouraged exploration and
growth in a role, in a company that had been rehearsed so they had that
technique in common, Hagen saw her experience in the long national tour as a
remarkable gift. "I knew that 1 was having an enormous success. I knew that I
was adoring playing it, that we had a wonderful company, a wonderful rapport,
that we knocked our brains out at every single performance. So that was all
very , very rewarding." While in Chicago, at the request of members of the cast
Hagen began offering a series of professional classes, teaching the approaches
to acting she had learned and adapted from Harold Clurman and Herbert
Berghof and had been offering in classes she gave in New York. Peggy Rae
remembers that actors in the Streetcar company had "a golden opportunity to
watch her in performance. Uta was always impressing on us, 'Use yourself!
Use yourself!' She would always say, 'If anything happens onstage, use it! Use
it, my dear.' We were in the throes of our classes, and one night in a Streetcar
performance, just before the rape scene, a nail-polish bottle flew off the
dressing table and spilled. And Uta picked it up and looked at it, thought about
it and dealt with it. She put it back in place just as if this was supposed to
happen. 1 was watching and 1 thought, 'How wonderful! She used the nail
polish.' "18 Such awareness of the interactions between "reality" and "playing"
and between the accidents and the designs of dramatic performance gave the
actors resources to deal with repeating the same script over and over again.
On 26 February 1949, the national company of Streetcar played its last
performance in Chicago, next opening at the Davidson Theater in Milwaukee
on 28 February. "At first we fell into the usual touring trap," Hagen wrote in
1949·
We became quite concerned over who had the most comfortable room, who had
discovered a really good restaurant. who won at poker the night before. We were thrown
into a sudden proximity that is difficult for the most ideal group.
But we quickly worked our way out of this rut and found new outlets. We began to
study languages, to visit museums, to discover new and old authors , and because of
these outlets we had a fresher tie through the play. and suddenly found that because we
had already played the play for six months, we were quite ready to accept the challenge
of the new town, audiences, theaters and critics, and that gave us Dew impetus and
helped our spontaneity of performance. 19
In contrast, the original cast at a similar stage in their work during their fIrst
season's performances had asked for additional help from Kazan: it had not
been forthcoming. According to Kazan, "there was no use pretending; shows
don't keep up in a long run, they deteriorate, even when the actors work hard to
improve their performances" (A Life, p. 347). But Hagen's application of the
Method to long-term problems of repeated performance instead brought her
greater spontaneity: "Whenever I'm in a long run in something I enjoy playing,
I know I get better and better and better. That's true with everything I've ever
played any length of time. I free myself more and more and more from whatever
had been a preconceived shape or form. "20
Over the next three months the company stayed from one to three weeks each
in Detroit, Cleveland , SI. Louis, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Critics continued
to write glowing reviews of the production and Hagen's performance. She
stayed with the national company until the end of May 1949, when she returned
to join the New York cast on I June.
"I can't describe to you how you are missed," Mary Welch (the national
company's Stella) wrote to Hagen when the tour moved on to Minneapolis with
Judith Evelyn as its new Blanche. "For a few days the morale, esprit, the faith
even of the entire company was gone .... Suddenly, after raving for months, we
knew how truly great your performance is, how incredibly spiritual - how
lucky we were to witness the unraveling and the beauty of the depths of your
soul. "2r
This "unraveling" was a goal Kazan evidently tried to help his actors achieve.
Describing the genesis of performances which stay indelibly in an audience's
memory, he said, "My own opinion is that they do because the actors - whether
by technique or by accident - gave you pieces of their lives, which is cenainJy
the ultimate generosity of the artist, and they did it unabashed. You were the
witness to a fInal intimacy. These artists spoke to your secret self, the one
you hide" (A Life, p . 146). Kazan had helped Brando create this kind of
performance, establishing his portrayal of Stanley in Streetcar as an exemplar
of the Method in action. In the opinion of many observers, Hagen's work on
Blanche seems to have achieved similar impact.
Hagen opened in New York with Ralph Meeker as Stanley and Carmelita
Pope as Stella on 2 June 1949. Elia Kazan flew out from Hollywood, taking
SUSAN SPECTOR
time off from the film he was directing, to give them two rehearsals before
opening, which in Hagen's opinion was not enough "time to 'get with' one
another." In an interview for Cue on June 25 she said the result was "a desperate
performance. Nothing meshed."
Once again, however, the critics praised her work and struggled to articulate
the differences between her performance and Tandy's. "Miss Hagen's
performance is astonishing," wrote Arthur Pollack in the Daily Compass on 3

June. "Jessica Tandy was more pathetic as the girl who dreamed large, lovely
and neurotically romantic dreams and ended as a prostitute. She let her deeper
feelings alone to show themselves. Miss Hagen counts them one by one, drags
them out and makes a little drama of every one of them. She is after them each
minute, thinking, scheming to clarify them, spending her slender but
inexhaustible energies precisely, making every movement count. ... Miss
Hagen does all this as if the play were music and she were playing it phrase by
phrase, movement by movement working a crescendo, resolving it all at the
end. She had planned it beautifully."
Perhaps the most balanced description of what distinguished the two
performances came from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times on 12 June
1949·
Usually it is possible to decide which of two actresses gives the betterperfonnance in

the same role. But that is an impossible decision to make in the present instance. For
Miss Hagen, who is sturdier physically than Miss Tandy, is giving an original
performance that is thoroughly her own and that is overwhelming in the last harrowing
act very much on her own terms.
In Miss Tandy's acting Blanche's mental collapse was closer to the surface
throughout the play and the agony of the last act was implicit in the preliminary scenes.
Blanche had slipped into the limbo of the psychopathic world before the time of the play,
Miss Hagen's performance is more deliberately outlined. Although her Blanche is
overwrought from the beginning, the evil furies attack her at specific moments in the
narrative and she slips over the borderline in the course of the play.
This is a point of view that leaves the first act with less significance than it had in Miss
Tandy's performance. But it fills the last act with terrifying wildness. Miss Hagen is a
decisive actress of great strength and power who has constructed the part with lucid
deliberation, artfully underscoring the meaning of individual scenes. When the
malevolence of the world tortures Blanche beyond the point of endurance, Miss Hagen
reaps the reward of her method and vividly describes the agony, fright and loneliness
of a woman who has been pushed out of human society into the pitiless seclusion of
madness. No matter how it is played, this is a painful conclusion to an unequal contest
between the decadence of a self-conscious civilization and the vitality of animal
aimlessness.
Admiring both Tandy and Hagen, Atkinson recognizes how a viewing of

alternative characterizations can lead to greater appreciation of the dramatic

experience designed by the playwright.
Tennessee Williams agreed with Atkinson's even-handed appraisal of
Hagen's and Tandy's work. At a party in 1951, Hagen was angered by a remark
by Williams which she interpreted to mean that Williams felt she had been
miscast as Blanche. In an apologetic note to clear the air, he wrote, "I was
thrilled and enchanted by you as Blanche, as God is my witness. 1 think I was

trying to say that you created the part so brilliantly under a physical handicap
because you have a stature, a magnitude, an irrepressible sweep and power that
made you a bit against type for the extreme fragility of the part. This, mind you,
was only in contrast to the physical, the particular bodily attributes of Jessica,
her transparent slightness and frailty. It would be impossible for me to say, even
if 1 wanted to or there was any reason to, which of you gave the better
performance. Nobody living in the theatre could have touched either one of you
in it. "'12
Hagen would continue playing Blanche for nearly a year with a variety of
other principal players, flrst in New York at the Barrymore Theatre, and then,
starting on 26 December 1949, on the road again in Philadelphia, Rochester,
Toronto, Buffalo, New Haven and Boston. After a two month break during
which Hagen played Lady Macbeth on the Kraft Television Theatre with E.G.
Marshall as Macbeth, the final engagement of Slreelcar began at the City
Center in New York on 23 May 1950. "The rehearsal and performances at the
City Center were strenuous to say the least," Hagen reported in a letter to her
father on 30 May. ''That is such a huge bam and has reputedly the worst
acoustics in the country. Although in rehearsal I'd discovered a host of new
things about Blanche, when it came to performance and an over-dimensional
projection, everything went right out of the window. "'3
Critics agreed that the production was hampered by poor acoustics, but they
said that Hagen's performance was better than ever: "She has deepened what
was already an impressive portrait. " '4 "Most interesting in the performance [of
Blanche] are the facets of characterization that have been added since the
play was last seen here. " . The direction of the character's disintegration is
clearer than it has ever been. "25
Hagen's work on Blanche was an example of how, by using her own
experience to create characterization, she was able to elaborate and sustain her
work on the role. Though she had played it for two years, it seems she never
stopped finding new ways to enrich her performance. Slreelcar closed at City
Center on II June 1950. Between 1948 and 1950 Hagen had gone from an
actress of promise to one of the most highly praised performers of her time.
Blanche had transformed her position in the American theatre; she had become
an esteemed proponent of the "internal" approach to acting which emphasized
spontaneity of performance and artistic identiflcation between performer and
role .
558 SUSAN SPECTOR
Hagen's Blanche under Clunnan's direction left audiences feeling they had
watched a delicate woman driven insane by a brutish environment epitomized
by Stanley Kowalski. Tandy's Blanche under Kazan's direction left audiences
feeling that a madwoman had entered an alien world and after shaking that
world had been successfully exorcised. The play accommodated both interpre-
tations and moved audiences deeply in both versions. Directors ' ideas and
actresses' interpretations and native gifts account for the most striking
differences in these results. Within two years the American theatrical
community had experienced two versions of a major new play. These
alternative enactments of A Streetcar Named Desire illuminated not only two
visions of an important theme - the role of the artistic temperament in an alien
environment - but also the craft of acting as it was beginning to be practised in
this country, an approach exemplified by Marlon Brando's Stanley and
reinforced by Uta Hagen's Blanche.
NOTES
1 Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York, 1988), pp. 339-40. All further
quotations from Kazan's autobiography will be cited as A Life.
2 Interview with Hagen, May [979.
3 Irene Mayer Selznick, A Private View (New York, 1983), p. 322.
4 Newspaper reviews here quoted appeared on 4 December 1947.
5 Review rpt. in Harold Clunnan, The Divine Pastime: Theatre Essays (New York,
1974), pp. 16-17 · Hereafter cited as Divine Pastime .
6 Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotations are taken from interviews with
Hagen conducted in May and October 1979.
7 Herbert Berghof was an established teacher in 1948 . One of the founding members
of the Actors' Studio, he had emigrated to the United States in 1939 from his
native Vienna, where he had studied at the Royal Academy of Art under Alexander
Moissi and Max Reinhardt, and played leading roles in some hundred plays
throughout Europe, In 1941 he began teaching with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic
Workshop of the New School for Social Research, He later joined the faculty of
the Neighborhood Playhouse, and in 1945 he began his own acting school. Hagen
and Berghofhave operated the HB Studio together since 1947; they were married
in 1957.
8 Though in his initial review of Streetcar on 4 December 1947, Garland had written
that Tandy had "many merits as Blanche DuBois," he felt that she suffered from
"a none-tao-pleasant voice and a leaning toward monotony,"
9 Ella Kazan, "Notebook for A Streetcar Named Desire ," in Toby Cole and Helen
Krich Chinoy, eds., Directing the Play: A Sourcebook of Stagecraft (New
York, 1953), p. 303; emphasis in original. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Notebook.
10 One significant answer was offered by Harold Clunnan in his review of Streetcar,
"For what is Stanley Kowalski? He is the embodiment of animal force, of brute
life unconcerned and even consciously scornful of every value that does not come
within the scope of such life . ... His mentality provides the soil for fascism,
viewed not as a political movement but as a state of being" (Divine Pastime,
p. 16).
II See for example A Life, pp. 231 and 347.
12 Uta Hagen with Haskel Frankel, Respect/or Acting (New York , 1973), p. 8.
13 Interview with Peggy Rea, April 1979.

14 Telegram from Tennessee Williams to Uta Hagen , 6 September 1948. In Hagen's
private collection.
]5 Karl Krug of the Pittsburgh Sun·Telegraph found even more effusive ways to
praise Hagen: "I feel certain that the Modem Drama's most vivid miracle was
perfonned on the stage of the Nixon Theater last evening as Miss Uta Hagen, an
actress of wondrous charm and unfailing talent, bettered, by far, the Broadway
perfonnance of Miss Jessica Tandy in Mr. Tennessee Williams' powerful tragedy ,
A Streetcar Named Desire. I bestow this laudation on Miss Hagen not without
careful thought nor from hearsay. For, only a few weeks ago, I bore first-hand
witness to Miss Tandy's Blanche DuBois in New York' s Barrymore Theater.
Indeed, Miss Hagen's wistful, conniving and miserable faded Southern belle
brings a more complete poetic beauty to Mr. Williams' appealing authorship. Not
in my time , and neither, probably, in the time of hundreds of other playgoers,
has the valiant old Nixon started a new season more auspiciously .. . Not since the
late Jeanne Eagles struck the fires of immortality into her Sadie Thompson of
Rain, has there been a more consistently compelling portrayal than that of Miss
Hagen as the pitiful, neurotic Blanche DuBois. Miss Hagen's heart-rending
performance is so genuine that it sparks the imaginative writing of Mr. Williams to
even loftier heights." Both reviews were published on 7 September 1948 .
16 Robert Pollack, Chicago Sun-Times, 22 September 1948; Claudia Cassidy, The
Chicago Tribune, 23 September 1948; Sydney J. Harris . Chicago Daily News ,
23 September 1948; William Leonard, Chicago Journal of Commerce. n.d .;
Charles Finston, Chicago Herald American, 23 September 1948.
17 Bernard Beckerman, "The American Shakespearean Actor," in Georgianna
Ziegler, ed., Shakespeare Study Today (New York , 1986) , p. 80.
18 Interview with Peggy Rae, April 1979.
19 Uta Hagen, "Uta Hagen Returns on 'A Streetcar Named Desire,'" New York
Herald Tribune , 29 May 1949.
20 According to Harold Clunnan, the Stanislavski Method was designed for the actor
"who has to repeat a part many times at specific hours ." Such an actor gains "a
greater mastery over his interpretation which without some form of conscious
control tends to vanish through the capriciousness and fluidity of what is called
inspiration" (Divine Pastime, p. 77).
21 Letter from Mary Welch to Uta Hagen, n.d . In Hagen 's private collection.
22 Letter from Tennessee Williams to Uta Hagen, 7 April 1951. In Hagen ' s private
collection.
560 SUSAN SPECTOR
23 Letter from Uta Hagen to Oskar Hagen, 30 May 1949. In Hagen's private
collection.
24 Brooklyn Eagle, 24 May 1950.
25 William Hawkins, New York World-Telegram, 24 May 1950.

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Nevertheless, most New York reviewers praised Tandy' s performance more

assistant director. Most recently, however, their year-long directing partner-

quite different from Tandy's. Clurman was later to describe Hagen as a

wrote that if "there is Art with a capital A in A Streetcar Named Desire, it is

helped our spontaneity of performance. 19

performance is astonishing," wrote Arthur Pollack in the Daily Compass on 3

Usually it is possible to decide which of two actresses gives the betterperfonnance in

Admiring both Tandy and Hagen, Atkinson recognizes how a viewing of

alternative characterizations can lead to greater appreciation of the dramatic

thrilled and enchanted by you as Blanche, as God is my witness. 1 think I was

13 Interview with Peggy Rea, April 1979.

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