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Director's Notes

A Streetcar Named Desire

It is natural that I should notice the many recent revivals of Tennessee Williams’ plays, although my understandable alertness to all things Tennessee does not entirely explain my notice.  Williams’ plays seem to be popping up “like daisies in spring” these days.   Nor does the affection that theatre people have for these masterpieces entirely explain this renewed interest.  Theatre artists gaze upon the prospect of Williams’ many challenges with both admiration and fear.  Most of us were trained on Streetcar, and Menagerie, and Cat.  The prospect of a full production is exhilarating.   

Still, the affection American theatre artists have for Williams’ particular kind of poetic realism does not explain the surprising enthusiasm I have felt as we have prepared this production.  Surely, the characters of Streetcar are both deep and rich, and the scale of their struggles is fascinating.  To watch Stanley and Blanche descend into their madness and violence is like watching some horrifying accident, or seeing buildings fall down.  Just as surely, the world of Tennessee Williams is as rich in beauty as it is steeped in decadence.  Like New Orleans itself, Stanley and Stella’s home is steamy and rancid, but it also houses a haunting beauty, “like something gold you let go of.”  In this emotional swamp, music swirls, a cool breeze cuts in and sometimes with it comes something pure, real, and hopeful.

In Tennessee Williams’ world hope doesn’t last long.  It is buried by a more brutal reality.  Or, perhaps better expressed using Streetcar imagery: consumed in the heat of the flame.  From this perspective, Williams is as political and subversive as he is lyrical and darkly entertaining.  During his life, Williams saw a lot of America.  He travelled from American city to city, from the south to the north, with money and without, famous and infamous.  He called himself, and those like him, “the fugitive kind.”  Always feeling like an outcast, Tennessee Williams was every bit an American.  Never emotionally far from his roots in the South, he was celebrated by both the literati and the famous in the North, and then dropped by all like an old, disgusting shoe.  Williams’ own memoirs recount this story with acerbic humor, as if he saw himself as a character in one of his plays.  And so, he was.    

The plays, inspired by his experiences, try to get to the core of the American character.  He does not find it pretty.  In his characters, Williams sees Americans on an emotional and moral knife-edge.  Founded on high ideals and expressing with pride that there is “justice for all,” Williams rails at the more hidden, darker side -- the part of our nature that buries the weak, the delicate, the fugitive kind, with brutality and ruthlessness.  We Americans wrestle with these contradictions in our history and mythology endlessly, as along with the audacity of hope and the shining city on the hill, there is also Wounded Knee, slavery and civil war, My Lai, Birmingham and Oklahoma City.  Our national character is forged on these contradictions and they clamor angrily from time-to-time. Tennessee Williams found great drama in them. 

We are better for it that he did.

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