A Street Car Named DesireTennessee Williams

Background Info

• Born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Mississippi

• Father-traveling salesman and heavy drinker• Sister-mentally ill• A near fatal childhood illness (diphtheria), coupled

with a protective mother, kept him from the company of other children.

• Moved 16 times in 10 years

His weak physical condition, combined with the influence of his mother, earned him the ridicule of both other children and his highly masculine father, who nicknamed Williams, “Miss Nancy”.

• Williams turned to writing as an escape from the cruel world around him.

• Lost his closest friend, his sister Rose, to mental illness.

• In 1938 after receiving a degree from the University of Iowa, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he began to live openly as a homosexual.

This was the beginning of a life of sexual promiscuity, which also defines many of his characters (including Blanche).

• Williams changed his name to Tennessee.• By 1940, Williams’s sexual and social identity had

been established.• Williams—highly successful at this point in his

life—floods his work with sex, violence, and personal destruction.

• His greatest characters are outcasts—usually because their sexual desires put them at odds with conventional society.

• Williams explores the role of” the outsider” (artist, dreamer, crippled, disturbed, sexually deviant) and the desire to escape.

Achievments• 1944: The Glass Menagerie opened in NYC and won

the prestigious NY Drama Critics’ Circle Award• 1947: A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the

Barrymore Theater in NYC – won another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize

• 1955: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – won another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize

• In total, he wrote 25 full-length plays, 5 screenplays, 70 one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, 2 novels, poetry, and a memoir.

• “Desire” is a central word in Williams’s work, but not necessarily meaning lust; it is the struggle to attain, through sex, some psychological and spiritual state that is always unattainable.

• Blanche will say, “Death […] the opposite is desire.”

• Williams became increasingly dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol, especially after the death of his long time partner, Frank Merlo.

• Williams died in 1963 in a NYC hotel room after choking on the top of a plastic pill bottle.

Important Characters in Streetcar

Blanche DuBoisStella- Blanche’s younger sisterStanley- Stella husband, a Polish immigrantMitch- friend of Stanley’s and love interest of Blanche

Methods

• Psychological realism and realism of setting combined with anti-realistic devices:

• Dialogue mixed with direct address, soliloquy and confession

• Isolation of characters by lighting• Frequent use of symbols and significant

names and of music to enhance mood.

Themes to consider

• As time passes, losses always accrue• The struggle to preserve personal values• The outsider/fugitive in a hostile group• The ambiguity of morality• The search for relief from the anguish of

life• Fear of dying and longing to live.

Drama Timeline

Classical Greek Theater5th Century BCE- 500 AD

Recall the massive power for Oedipus…

Medieval Theaterapproximately 500 – 1500

morality playsexample: Everyman

Everyman receives Death’s summons, struggles to esacape and finally resigns himself to necessity. Along the way, he is deserted by Kindred, Goods and Fellowship- only Good Deeds goes with him to the grave.

Renaissance & Restoration English Theater late 1500s-1700s

Shakespeare’s comedies and tradgedies

Restoration plays were very bawdy, sexually explicit.

Neoclassical Theaterlate 1700s to 1875plays took on decorum, and adhered

to religious principleselaborate scenery and costumesmany plays contained political subject matter

• Modern Theater:1875-1945

Comedies rise in popularity

Example: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

• REALISM: heavily influenced by the realistic impulse – a desire to bring the stage experience closer to ordinary human experience, to show “a real chair in a real setting”

• NATURALISM: studies psychologically complex characters in complex social, domestic, and personal situations. Naturalism differed from realism in its Individual characters were seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within, and harassed by social and economic pressures from without.

• invented the “box set” – flats arranged to form connected walls enclosing three sides of the stage w/the 4th wall removed so that the audience could look into a stage room that spatially seemed like a real one

• the previous cylindrical design of the theater in the late-18th that attempted to accommodate as many people as possible was replaced by the fan-shaped auditoriums which were intended to create better acoustical, visual, and spatial arrangements for actors and spectators

Contemporary Theater 1945-PresentCounter-realistic movements emerges,

including: symbolism, expressionism, and surrealism

Theater of the Absurd