Desire is a rattle-trap trolley screeching and shaking its way through post-war New Orleans. Desire is “the opposite of death,” compensating for bitter, elderly relatives in their “long march to the graveyard” and the inch by inch loss of the “Beautiful Dream” (Belle Reve) of the aristocratic old South and the lingering fantasy of chivalric standards of Southern womanhood. Desire is a con, masquerading as love, blocking the memory of a death sentence delivered to a young lover. Desire is a ravenous hunger for acceptance, family, understanding, and safety. But in this play, to ride “Desire” means one must suddenly change to “Cemeteries” and get off in “Elysian Fields,” not a serene, heroic afterlife, but one’s own steaming, personal hell. Death is always close.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) first encountered New Orleans in 1938. Born in Columbus, Mississippi, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the 27 year-old Williams was in his vagabond mode, drifting, picking up boyfriends, and traveling after finally graduating from the University of Iowa. He was also in the process of re-inventing himself. He had just submitted his first plays to a contest sponsored by the famous Group Theatre. He was claiming he was 23 years old. He stopped signing himself by his birth name “Thomas Lanier Williams” and began calling himself by a nickname given him by his fraternity brothers during his short, alcohol-fueled sojourn at the University of Missouri. He transformed himself from the timid, artsy, “sissified” Tom Williams of his childhood into the dashing, poetic “Tennessee Williams.”

And New Orleans was a revelation. On the one hand, it was muscle and machine, an immense port city with a thriving industrial base. On the other, especially in the French Quarter (the Vieux Carré), it was Bohemia—European but decadent, raffish, run down but rich in seedy elegance, color and lively characters. It was an accepting society, a blessing for a closeted-at-home homosexual man. The streets were smoky with liquor and jazz, welcoming experiment, music, art, and people of mixed pasts. The new-minted Tennessee found his spiritual home here and would often return. In the meantime, in 1938, he lingered a few months, then pushed on to new adventures in California, where he was to learn that this Tennessee Williams he had created had won the play-writing contest and was invited to New York.

Mostly Tennessee returned to New Orleans in his heart and, when he came to write about it, he peopled it with dream versions of the folks closest to that heart, his own family.

Williams was the child of two mightily mismatched partners. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was the daughter of an Episcopal priest, which gave her an upper-class status—though no wealth--in her small Mississippi town. Edwina became the model for all the antiquated Southern belles fixated on the past that her son would write about. Edwina acted the fine lady part, despite her social and financial circumstances, and was able to tell the delicate lies that shielded herself and her children from the truth. She adored and over-protected Tom, her clever, effeminate boy, and her daughter, Rose, who could never achieve the social Southern belle dreams of her mother and drifted little by little into schizophrenia. Tom and Rose were extremely close to each other, remaining so throughout their lives.

Tom’s father was Cornelius Coffin Williams, a successful, hard-driving traveling salesman for a shoe company. Cornelius was often absent on the road, but at home was a domineering, swaggering male presence, frightening to Tom and Rose. He loved to drink and play cards and fought with the other men in his circle to a point where one of them bit off his ear. He’s an absent presence in The Glass Menagerie and the powerful authoritarian model behind Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s easy to dismiss Cornelius as a bully who frightened his clever son, but Tennessee himself recognized that his father was a much more multi-dimensional force. Cornelius was handsome, genial, and very smart. In his man’s code, a good man provided for his family. He hustled, worked hard, and was never unemployed during the Depression. As frustrating and bewildering as he found his older son Tom to be, Cornelius gave him financial support until Tom (now Tennessee) was well into his thirties and he found him temporary jobs whenever he came home. Cornelius found it so much easier to relate to his younger boy, Dakin, who was more a “regular guy,” but he never deserted his strange older son. And so, while we are watching Stanley Kowalski behave boorishly, bullying his sister-in-law, hitting his wife, dominating his friends, smashing dishes, and growing loud and violent in his drink and his poker, Williams also balances the portrait with Stanley’s charisma and charm, his loyalty, his magnetism, virility, and vitality. If he is a savage animal, Stanley is an animal defending his mate, his lair, and his family against an intruder who actively seeks to destroy his happiness. While Blanche calls him a survivor of the stone age, he is also in fact the future (as it looked in the late ‘40s), pragmatic, mechanically adept, crude, and full of ambition.

Blanche DuBois is an even more complicated amalgam. She is, like Edwina Williams, the Southern belle refusing to give up the past—unlike her accommodating younger sister, Stella. She carries the flag for poetry and music, for “new light that’s come into the world {and} tenderer feelings . . . in this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching.” But the fallen Blanche has lost almost everything—her money, her husband, her family, her ancestral home, her job, her reputation and her self-respect. The “white” virginlike Blanche is a tramp who pretends to be still pure. The only thing she has left is Stella, of whom she is also a little jealous. Her desperation has made her as much a predator as is Stanley. Williams also drew on his beloved sister Rose for this character, for by the lights of her upbringing, Blanche has failed to survive as a perfect flower of Southern womanhood. Like Rose, too, she is vulnerable and mentally fragile as she drifts towards madness. And, as he admitted, Tennessee himself is in Blanche. He knew, from his own family, what it was to be the unwelcome outsider. As a promiscuous gay man who never admitted his sexuality to his parents, Williams—like Blanche--knew what it was to have sexual guilt, to play different parts for different people, and to keep dark secrets.

The epic antagonism between these two characters and their opposing views of the world is at the core of the play. In two tiny rooms, throbbing with married lust, sticky with humidity and steaming with heat, Stanley and Blanche battle for Stella’s loyalty, each using their sharpest weapons. Almost like a classical tragedy, they move inevitability, inexorably towards the conclusion, the “date” they have had “from the beginning.” The sheer audacity of the sexuality and psychological violence of Streetcar left the critics and audiences in 1947 gasping and it won Tennessee Williams both the Critics Circle and the Pulitzer Prizes and led to an Oscar-winning motion picture. More than this, however, A Streetcar Named Desire is an angry, longing, and loving exploration of Williams’ own family romance. It is flowers for the dead.

© 2009 by Eileen Warburton

For further reading:
Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Da Capo Press (Reprint) 1997
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday, 1975


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.