The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Dec. 15, 1947

A Streetcar Named Desire (by Tennessee Williams; produced by Irene Selznick) goes off the track now & then—which is a small price to pay for its staying off the beaten track entirely. It is a fresh, vivid drama, revealing that the author of The Glass Menagerie is not only much more of a poet than most of his fellow playwrights, but much more of a realist as well.

A Streetcar Named Desire* shows a Southern neurotic on the last lap of a downhill journey. Massed behind Blanche Du Bois are the genteel decay of her small-town forebears, the sudden suicide of her homosexual husband, the soiled annals of her nymphomaniac whoring, the loss of her reputation, her job and her home. Unable to face the truth, she has fashioned a dream world in which she is highbred, sought after and straitlaced. Her dream is her main luggage when she arrives destitute in New Orleans to “visit” her sister Stella and Stella’s roughneck Polish-American husband Stanley.

Stanley sees through Blanche’s yarns and posturings at once. When he finds her snootily trying to wreck his marriage and slyly trying to hook his pal, he gets the goods on her and lets fly.

The play could stand more discipline; along with an absence of formulas there is sometimes an absence of form. And it could stand more variety: only the clash between Blanche and Stanley (brilliantly enacted by Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando) gets real emotion and drama into the play. As in much recent writing about the South, the ugliness is easily offset by the fascination, and the South itself seems warm, vaporous, even visible in Streetcar, like steam on a windowpane.

Mississippi-born Playwright Williams, 33, perhaps the surest weaver of vapors now writing for the U.S. stage, is a stocky, rather intense-looking fellow. He got that look, he explains, during his many years as a “rootless, wandering writer . . . clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers”—years in which he worked as bellhop, elevator operator, movie usher, teletypist, warehouse handyman and verse-spieling waiter in a Greenwich Village bistro.

In 1945 came “the catastrophe of success”—Broadway’s delight over The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams (a name he had substituted for his real one, Thomas Lanier Williams, which “sounded too much like William Lyon Phelps”) suddenly felt like “a sword cutting daisies” and hurried off to Mexico to work toward his high theatrical goal: “Great theater,” says he, “is the highest and purest form of religion.”

* New Orleans trolley-car routes actually bear such startling labels as “Desire” and “Cemeteries.”