A Student Handbook to the

Plays of Tennessee Williams

 A Student Handbook to the
Plays of Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie

A Streetcar Named Desire
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Sweet Bird of Youth

STEPHEN J. BOTTOMS
PATRICIA HERN AND MICHAEL HOOPER
PHILIP C. KOLIN
KATHERINE WEISS

Edited by
KATHERINE WEISS
 Contents

Introduction Katherine Weiss

Chronology of Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
Plot
Commentary
Notes
Questions for Further Study
Stephen J. Bottoms

A Streetcar Named Desire

Plot
Commentary
Notes
Questions for Further Study
Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Plot
Commentary
Notes
Questions for Further Study
Philip C. Kolin
Sweet Bird of Youth
Plot
Commentary
Notes
Questions for Further Study
Katherine Weiss
Further Questions on Williams’s Plays
Further Reading
Copyright
 Introduction

Speaking in a slow southern drawl, an aged Tennessee Williams eloquently

told interviewer Bill Boggs, ‘I have never cared whether I shocked people.
People who are shocked by the truth are not deserving of the truth. And the
truth is something you need to deserve.’ This carefully crafted statement
by a man whose plays so often shocked and intrigued audiences for his
representation of taboo subjects seems to fly in the face of the imaginary
worlds so many of his characters create. It is tempting to align the
illusions that the Wingfields of The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois of
A Streetcar Named Desire, Margaret and Brick Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth
create with lies. Although they create fantasies to survive their brutal
realities and the past disappointments haunting them, his characters are
not liars. It is Laura, Amanda and Tom (not Jim), Blanche (not Stanley),
Maggie (not Sister Woman), and Chance and Del Lago (not Tom Junior),
whom audiences empathise with, perhaps even living with them in those
make-believe worlds. Williams, himself, has more in common with his
frail characters than, for example, Stanley or Mitch in Streetcar, who tear
down the Chinese lanterns to bring ugly realities to light. He is, as C. W.
Bigsby argues, ‘the protagonist of all his plays’,1 fleeing his own guilt and
trauma, and in doing so, is a truer, more vulnerable creature. In his
magical dramatic works, Williams gives voice to the weak by having them
create imaginary worlds that are not untruthful. The illusions belonging to
his characters, after all, do not offer the escape they desire. Their pasts, as
did Williams’s, haunt their imagination.
As children, Williams and his sister Rose lived on their imagination.
Williams recalled that their fantasies were a form of escape, especially
after having moved with his family to St Louis, Missouri, where Williams
and Rose felt like fugitives.2 The twelve-year-old Williams began to
channel his imagination into writing essays, short stories and poetry. At
the age of 16, still called Tom, he won his first prize placing third in a
literary contest for his essay, ‘Can a Wife Be a Good Sport?’; the prize was
the publication of the work. In these early years, his essays, stories and
plays, although the flawed work of an adolescent writer, were already
unique and poetic. But the early successes he had did not smooth the way
for Williams to become a professional writer. The journey entailed
changing his name to Tennessee, leaving college prematurely (years later
he resumed his education at another university), working in a shoe
warehouse, failing to be admitted into the Work Progress Administration
(WPA) and being fired from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) movie
studio, before Williams became America’s leading playwright, shocking
his critics and drawing large crowds to his plays.
Despite some success with writing leftist plays for a St Louis theatre
company called the Mummers and winning literary awards including the
National Institute for Arts and Letters Award for his play Battle of Angels,
it was not until the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945 that
Williams’s talent was confirmed, opening stage doors for him. On
Broadway, Menagerie ran for 561 performances and won several
accolades, including the New York Critics’ Circle Award. The years 1945
to 1963 were productive and successful for Williams. Two years after the
success of Menagerie, Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened,
running for an incredible 855 performances and winning Williams more
awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama. With Streetcar, Williams
dared to break more taboos than any other serious playwright of his time,
and in doing so, he created Blanche DuBois, one of the most memorable
female protagonists in American drama. Blanche is a figure that to this
day inspires directors. Woody Allen’s 2013 film, Blue Jasmine, starring
Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche in the 2009 Sydney Theatre Company
and Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Streetcar, is a less violent
rewriting of Williams’s masterpiece. In 1955, Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof drew the praise of critics and audiences, alike, running for 694
performances. This remarkable play won Williams his second Pulitzer
Prize. Breaking social barriers, the curtain rises, revealing a bedroom
occupied by Maggie and Brick. During this opening act, the audience
learns of their troubled marriage. In a daring move, Williams also
incorporates another off-stage homosexual couple, but unlike the
condemnation Blanche’s husband, Allan Grey, receives, Big Daddy accepts
the love that Jack Straw and Peter Ochello shared. Like Cat, Sweet Bird of
Youth confronts the audience with their desire to look into the bedrooms of
others. The voyeuristic pleasure gained in Cat and Sweet Bird resembles
that of the pleasure one gains from watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954
classic film, Rear Window. Wanting to gawk at the dirty laundry of others,
crowds flocked to the play when it debuted in 1959 even though New York
theatre critics received the play coolly. Sweet Bird ran for 375
performances.
Williams’s plays reveal his preoccupation with the South of his early
childhood. Although Tennessee loved the South and admired much about
the gentility he associated with it, the South he portrays in his plays is far
from idyllic. It is a place where the outsider, whether a man of colour, a
homosexual, a sex worker or a promiscuous woman can lose his or her life
through cruelty, violence or neglect. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella
tells her husband Stanley that Blanche has been destroyed by her marriage
to a ‘degenerate’ who, when caught with a lover, committed suicide. Later,
Blanche suffers a mental breakdown after losing Mitch and being raped by
Stanley. In Sweet Bird of Youth, the fate of Chance Wayne, a gigolo, is
paralleled to that of a black man who, before the play begins, has been
castrated for allegedly being with a white woman. The Southern small
towns in Williams’s plays are bigoted, dangerous spaces. The Mississippi
of Williams’s youth was wrought with racism. When not set in the Deep
South, Williams’s plays include traces of his family’s move to St Louis,
Missouri, where the young Tom felt overwhelmed by feelings of being
uprooted. The move, for Williams, was more than a disorienting
relocation. It meant living in a small cramped space, cut off from his
extended family. While the small Southern towns in Williams’s plays
represent danger, the Midwest urban spaces in his plays, as seen in
Menagerie, are suffocating while simultaneously being isolating.
Other biographical elements that appear in Williams’s plays are his
attempts to cope with his overbearing mother, his distant and often cruel
father, his homosexuality and his sister’s mental illness, which eventually
led to her lobotomy. Being taunted by his father as a ‘sissy’ was a life
event that became symbolic for Williams. He utilises memories of his
family to explore the weak when faced with the dominant and often unjust
masses. In Cat’s conclusion, Maggie says it best when she finds a way to
entice her husband to sleep with her, ‘Oh, you weak people, you weak,
beautiful people!’3 This statement is present in all Williams’s plays. Those
who the dominant in society see as weak, frail and sick are to him
beautiful people. Those who are considered strong in his plays are often
violent and crude. They lack the beauty of those who are fragile like Laura
with her glass unicorn. But what we see repeatedly in his plays is also the
destruction of beauty. The weak, beautiful people of his plays are
abandoned (as is Laura), raped (as is Blanche), crippled (as are Laura and
Brick), and castrated (as is Chance). The weak, too, are always alone even
when accompanied by others. They are lonely, as was Williams. Having
been in a committed relationship with Frank Merlo from 1947 to 1963,
Williams suffered greatly when Merlo died, turning once again to alcohol
and drugs to fight off his loneliness. Ultimately, however, he died alone in
a prestigious New York hotel room.
The events that cast the longest shadow on Williams were the
institutionalisation and lobotomy of his sister, Rose. While studying
playwriting at the University of Iowa in 1937, Williams learned that his
sister’s mental illness had worsened and that his parents had her sent away.
Six years later, they agreed to the procedure which transformed Rose into
a shadow of what she once was. Williams and his sister were very close;
the sister, who was just three years older than Williams, shared her
thoughts and imagination with him. The figure of a crippled or mentally
disturbed woman who would shatter the world of another appears in many
of Williams’s plays. His first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie, is
a ground-breaking memory play, in which Tom Wingfield, a thinly
disguised Tennessee, remembers his life in a cramped St Louis apartment
with his sister Laura and overbearing mother Amanda. Throughout the
work, as Stephen Bottoms reveals in his commentary, it becomes apparent
that Williams has drawn heavily on his life. Regardless of the biographical
material that arises in his drama, Williams’s plays nonetheless do not
function solely on an autobiographical level as the commentators of this
book assert. Bottoms reminds us that ‘if it is true that all of his work is in
some way autobiographical, it is equally true that none of it is’. Although
Laura Wingfield in Menagerie and Blanche DuBois in Streetcar are
images of Rose, Williams does not give us mere autobiography. He is
writing about the South, loneliness, the enemy called time, the falsehood
called the American dream or Cinderella Story and the difficulty of flight,
among other topics.
The chapters that follow provide a thorough commentary on four of
Williams’s most successful plays, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Stephen
Bottoms discusses Williams’s delicate balance between fact and fiction in
The Glass Menagerie. Bottoms makes a case for reading and seeing
Menagerie beyond Williams’s private guilt, arguing that Williams’s
‘theatrical magic’ lies in his ability to change the time of the events that
deeply affected him in order to incorporate a political dimension to his
work. Like Matthew Roudané who argues that ‘For Williams, the personal
insight and private doubts . . . outline the political concerns and moral
anxieties of a nation whose faith in the future, though ever present, seems
as indeterminate as the troubled heroes of Williams’[s] theatre’,4 Bottoms
invites us to see the play as a reflection of 1930s America and its relation
to the global world. Bottoms points out by drawing on his own production
of the play at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, in which he executed
Williams’s stage directions (dropped in its debut production) for screens
projecting images and legends, that Williams ‘avoids the usual mundane
trappings of conventional stage realism . . . and instead arrives at a kind of
heightened, intensified emotional reality through the play’s use of tight
focus and “sculptural” stillness’. Using these poetic techniques, Williams
takes the play out of the realm of realism and thereby elevates the play
beyond his own personal trauma.
Like Bottoms, Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper recognise the
importance of following the traces of biographical material in A Streetcar
Named Desire, and like Bottoms, they do so to explore Williams’s
exploitation of the biographical to reveal deeper concerns with America.
In their commentary, Hern and Hooper argue that Streetcar weaves
together many people Williams knew and in doing so he presents his
audience with a truly American context. Blanche and Stanley both
represent 1940s America. Blanche, the fading Southern belle, is found in
American classics, including the immensely popular novel, turned film,
Gone with the Wind. Indeed, Williams repeatedly draws on Margaret
Mitchell’s iconic novel and film. In Menagerie, Amanda tries to sell
magazine subscriptions, claiming that the new serial in it is a ‘Gone with
the Wind of the post-World-War generation!’5 And, Chance Wayne greets
Miss Lucy of Sweet Bird by comparing her to Scarlett O’Hara, the
protagonist of Gone with the Wind. While Blanche represents the old
South, Stanley represents the ‘new America, an immigrant, a man of the
city’. For Hern and Hooper, then, the tension in the play goes beyond the
biographical; its tension comes from the clashes between an old, dying,
but beautiful dream of the South (Belle Reve) and a new urban brutality of
New Orleans. Throughout Williams’s work these dichotomies are
represented not merely in his characters, but also in his detail to space.
The old, dying dream of America as a place of ample space, acres of land
and large porches to receive gentlemen callers is often remembered,
whereas the present reality is represented in the cramped apartments and
crowded streets of an urban landscape. Interestingly, when Stanley
discovers that Blanche prostituted herself after her beautiful dream slipped
out of reach, he has no sympathy for her. Instead, he rapes her, perhaps as
an attempt to conquer more territory in the new world.
In his commentary, Philip Kolin excavates Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to
examine American history, the South and the politics of the 1950s.
Undoing audience expectations of the romantic icons of Southern
plantation literature (most notably Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind),
Williams peoples his Mississippi Delta plantation with, what Kolin’s calls,
a ‘crass, menacing new South’. Kolin reminds us that the Pollitts swear,
tell dirty jokes, wish each other dead and fight over the future ownership
of the plantation. The vulgarity the Pollitts display is also found in
Blanche at times albeit not as openly. While she attempts to present
herself as refined, she reveals that it was ‘epic fornications’6 that lost
Belle Reve, and her bigotry when referring to Stanley as a Pollock is
painfully evident.
Cat, Kolin continues, also displays the fears and anxieties of the 1950s.
On the one hand, Brick’s fear of being associated with homosexuality is
just one example of 1950s repression. Brick’s dread of being labelled a
homosexual goes beyond the fact that homosexuality was illegal in
America, in 1955. Being identified as gay, for Kolin, symbolises ‘a crisis
in national identity politics’. Kolin points out that although some famous
American political figures were secretly in loving homosexual
relationships, the image projected outward was that of a hetero
masculinity. The injured Brick, then, attempts to stave off rumours of
being gay, as his buddy Skipper proved to be, by resorting to homophobic
slurs, calling Peter Ochello and Jack Straw an ‘ole pair of sisters’.7
Ironically, despite crudely asserting his hetero masculinity with his
obscene sexual suggestions and humour, it is Big Daddy, on the verge of
losing his empire due to cancer, who speaks with understanding about the
love between Straw and Ochello and homosexual desires. He understands
the love that the two men had for one another – itself an echo of Williams
and Frank Merlo’s secret marriage of 16 years. On the other hand, Kolin
shows how Cat’s motif of repression recalls the Red Scare. Gooper and
Mae’s whispering, eavesdropping and spying are reminiscent to the
techniques used by the House on Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC). While not as outwardly political as his contemporary Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams’s concerns with political wars and witch-hunts
are present in all of the plays included here: Tom in Menagerie references
the devastation that occurred in the First World War and the Spanish Civil
War; Stanley in Streetcar mentions the racist Louisiana governor and US
State Senator, Huey Long; and Sweet Bird’s Boss Finely is one such
corrupt and racist political figure. Williams’s plays use the family
structure, as Roudané and Bigsby note, to examine (albeit not solve)
America’s ugly politics.8
The last chapter examines the ways in which Sweet Bird of Youth
reflects 1950s America. In his 1959 play which he struggled with and
rewrote throughout the 1950s, Williams reveals the destruction of
preaching hate. Hate is explicitly sermonised by Boss Finley’s racist
propaganda; he is a politician who claims to have been called upon by God
to protect white women from non-whites. The preaching of hate is more
subtly approached in this play in its reference to the Korean War, an event
that has destroyed Chance. Although Chance and Del Lago call each other
monster, the audience recognises them as being less monstrous than Boss
Finley, his son Tom Junior or the war rhetoric that swayed men into battle.
Chance’s actions are desperate attempts to be someone.
In Sweet Bird, Williams also attacks the Cinderella story, a dream
represented in many American realist novels of the nineteenth century and
in the Hollywood dream. Chance ultimately is a dreamer, a man who
desperately wants to be someone in an America full of monsters. In the
process, he too has become a monster, resorting to blackmail and
contributing to the corruption and rot of his ideal love, Heavenly. In his
attack on Hollywood, Williams reveals that time is the enemy that
threatens the success and livelihood of all the characters on stage: Boss
lashes out at Miss Lucy because she reveals that he is growing too old to
be a lover; Del Lago is in flight after her comeback which confirmed to
her that she is growing too old to be a glamorous star; Heavenly is dried
up, old before her time, because of her inability to bear children; and
Chance is losing his golden hair which ultimately will limit his Hollywood
possibilities as well as number his gigolo days. The ticking of the clock at
the play’s conclusion reminds the audience that they, too, will fall victim
to time.
In the years that followed, Williams’s plays failed to dazzle theatre
critics and audiences. Most of his plays no longer were staged on
Broadway and many of them received dismal reviews. What are missing
from his plays of the late 1960s onwards are the tension and the need to
express topics that were considered taboos. Homosexuality, promiscuity,
racism and hate were not shocking anymore. The more open America
became the less convincing writing about fugitives was. Despite this, his
plays from 1945 to 1961 are still immensely popular, as is evident in the
production histories and reviews commented on here. They have been
labelled American classics. The topics that still scream out to us are that
of ageing, loneliness and time’s devastation. As such, the plays work best,
ultimately, when the costumes and sets are not updated but instead reflect
the time when the plays were written, and when they emphasise the eternal
anxieties of growing old and being alone.
Regardless of the waning success of his later plays, Williams continued
to write. In Where I Live, he provides insight as to why he did so. Quoting
Williams, Christine Day writes that he kept writing ‘not with any hope of
making a living at it, but because I found no other means of expressing
things that seemed to demand expression’.9 Williams, though not always
successful, was and remains an American stage artist. And, like another
creature of loneliness, Samuel Beckett, he finds himself ‘obligated to
express’10 that which may have seemed inexpressible and shocking. Like
Beckett, Williams struggles to create out of the bareness of the Second
World War, focusing on the weak and impotent. He, however, gives the
weak a beauty Beckett does not and Eugene O’Neill cannot. Tennessee
Williams’s personal lyricism, while having lost some of its potency in the
years after the death of his lover and with the increasing acceptance of the
other in American society, keeps the ugly and brutal forces at bay.
Katherine Weiss

Notes
 1 C. W. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume Two:
Williams, Miller, Albee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 19.
2 Bigsby, A Critical Introduction, 21.
3 Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with commentary and notes by Philip C. Kolin,
London: Methuen Drama, 2010, 115.
4 Matthew Roudané (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997, 6.
5 The Glass Menagerie (with ‘The Catastrophe of Success’), with commentary and notes by
Stephen J. Bottoms, London: Methuen Drama, 2000, 20.
6 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, with commentary and notes by Patricia Hern
and Michael Hooper, London: Methuen Drama, 1984 reissued 2009, 22.
7 Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 83.
8 See C. W. Bigsby, ‘Entering The Glass Menagerie’, in Roudané, The Cambridge
Companion, 29–44 and Roudané (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion, 6.
9 Tennessee Williams, Where I Live: Selected Essays, ed. Christine Day and Bob Woods, New
York: New Directions, 1978, x.
10 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn,
New York: Grove Press, 1984, 139.
 Chronology of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams: 1911–83

1908 Williams’s sister, Rose Isabelle, is born on 19 November in

Columbus, Mississippi.
1911 Thomas Lanier Williams III is born on 26 March in Columbus,
Mississippi.
1911– Rose, Tom and their mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, live with
18 Edwina’s parents, the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal
priest, and his wife Rosina Otte Dakin, chiefly in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, while father Cornelius Coffin Williams works as a
travelling salesman.
1918 Williams’s younger brother, Walter Dakin, is born on 21
February; the Williams family moves to St Louis, Missouri,
where father becomes a branch manager at the International
Shoe Company.
1926 Owing to financial pressure, Williams’s family moves to
cramped apartment at 6554 Enright Avenue, in downmarket
University City area of St Louis. After only one semester at
Soldan High School, Williams transfers to University City High
School.
1927 First publication, an essay, ‘Can a Good Wife Be a Good
Sport?’, was published in Smart Set.
1928 Publishes the first story for which he is paid – ‘The Vengeance
of Nitrosis’ – in Weird Tales. Goes on a European trip with his
maternal grandfather.
1929 In September, Williams enters the University of Missouri and
joins Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. In October the stock market
crashes resulting in the Great Depression.
1932 Williams’s father withdraws him from the University of
Missouri. There are conflicting accounts as to whether
Williams leaves university because of his family’s financial
 difficulties or because he failed ROTC (Reserve Officers
Training Course). Williams’s father starts him as a clerk at the
International Shoe Company, a job that Williams loathes.
1935 First production of Williams’s one-act play, Cairo! Shanghai!
Bombay!, by Memphis Garden Players, a group of amateur
actors. Williams’s family finally moves out of Enright Avenue
apartment to a two-storey house on Pershing Avenue, thanks to
improvements in economic climate.
1936 In January, Williams enrols at Washington University in
St Louis and writes the one-act play Twenty-Seven Wagons Full
of Cotton.
1937 Writes a full-length, leftist play, Candles to the Sun, about a
coal-mine strike, staged by the Mummers, amateur group of
actors, in St Louis. Rose is committed to Farmington
(Missouri) State Mental Hospital; Williams is heartbroken and
feels tremendous guilt.
1937– Studies playwriting at the University of Iowa with Edward
9 Charles Mabie, nicknamed ‘the Boss’; Mummers stage Fugitive
Kind. Graduates from Iowa with a BA in English. Writes
another leftist play, Not about Nightingales, about a prison riot
in Pennsylvania. Becomes a vagabond, travelling to New
Orleans where he possibly has his first homosexual experience
in the French Quarter.
1939 Meets Audrey Wood, his agent for over 30 years. Signs his
name Tennessee Williams for the first time in a short story
‘Field of Blue Children’ in Story Magazine. Receives a $100
prize in a competition organised by the Group Theatre (where
Elia Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thatcher, is one of the readers)
for his collection of one-act plays American Blues. Wins a grant
of $1,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation.
1940 Studies playwriting with John Gassner and Erwin Piscator at
the New School for Social Research. His first professional
production of the play, The Battle of Angels, has a disastrous
Boston tryout on 30 December and closes on 11 January 1941
after the City Council protests about its sexual content.
1941– Travels around the country, writing one-act plays, stories and
2 poems; visits Key West for the first time; has the first of his
four cataract operations. Collaborates on You Touched Me! with
Donald Windham. Works on short stories, including ‘Portrait of
a Girl in Glass’, later developed into The Glass Menagerie.
Meets Jordan Massee, Sr, a model for Big Daddy.
1943 Works for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) on a screenplay The
Gentleman Caller (later becomes The Glass Menagerie) but is
fired after only six months. Rose has a prefrontal lobotomy,
leaving her mentally challenged for life; the operation is
referenced in Suddenly Last Summer.
1944 National Institute for Arts and Letters awards Williams $1,000
for Battle of Angels. Margo Jones, theatre founder and long-
time friend, directs the one-act play The Purification at the
Pasadena Playhouse in California. The Glass Menagerie
premieres in Chicago on 26 December.
1945 After a successful run in Chicago, The Glass Menagerie,
Williams’s first big success, runs for 561 performances on
Broadway, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award,
the Donaldson Award and the Sidney Howard Memorial Award.
You Touched Me!, by Williams and Donald Windham, adapted
from D. H. Lawrence’s short story, opens on Broadway in
September to tepid responses. He publishes 13 one-act plays in
Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton.
1947 A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, opens on
3 December at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway and runs
for 855 performances, spawning 2 road companies. The play
makes history by winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama,
Donaldson Award and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
(first play ever to win all three). Williams meets his long-time
companion and lover Frank Merlo (1929–63), a US Navy
veteran.
1948– British premiere of Streetcar directed by Laurence Olivier,
9 starring wife Vivien Leigh. One Arm and Other Stories, a
collection of sexually explicit stories, is published. Summer and
Smoke opens on Broadway. British premiere of The Glass
 Menagerie, directed by John Gielgud, with Helen Hayes as
Amanda.
1950 First (and worst according to Williams) film adaptation of The
Glass Menagerie released by Warner Brothers. The novel The
Roman Spring of Mrs Stone is published.
1951 The Rose Tattoo opens in New York for 306 performances.
Warner Brothers releases film of Streetcar, also directed by
Kazan and designed by Jo Mielziner; produced by Irene
Selznick, former wife of David O. Selznik, producer of Gone
with the Wind. I Rise in Flames, Cried the Phoenix published.
1952 Streetcar wins National Film Critics’ Circle Award. Williams is
elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Publishes
the story ‘Three Players of a Summer Game’, the genesis of Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof.
1953 Camino Real, with gay characters and themes, opens on
Broadway.
1954 Hard Candy (another collection of explicit fiction) is published.
Works on drafts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Kazan insists on
major revisions.
1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premieres on 24 March on Broadway and
runs for 649 performances, winning Williams his second
Pulitzer Prize and third New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award;
film of The Rose Tattoo released. Reverend Walter Dakin dies
at the age of 97.
1956 Baby Doll screenplay condemned for sexual content by the
Catholic Church. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens in Paris
(16 December); it is banned in Ireland. First book of poetry, In
the Winter of Cities, is published.
1957 Orpheus Descending (revision of Battle of Angels) closes in
New York after 68 performances. Cornelius Coffin Williams
dies.
1958 Film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is released by MGM,
directed and co-written by Richard Brooks; it is Williams’s
biggest box-office hit. Suddenly Last Summer opens Off-
Broadway. British premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof using
 Williams’s original third act is staged at a private club because
of ban by Lord Chamberlain.
1959 Sweet Bird of Youth, with antagonist Boss Finley, opens for 375
performances on Broadway. Screen version of Suddenly Last
Summer is released.
1960 Williams’s comedy Period of Adjustment opens in New York
for 132 performances. Film of Orpheus Descending, set in a
hellish Delta, is released under the title of Fugitive Kind.
1961 Williams’s last Broadway success, The Night of the Iguana,
wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and runs for
316 performances. Film versions of Summer and Smoke and The
Roman Spring of Mrs Stone come out.
1962 The first film version of Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by
Richard Brooks and starring Paul Newman as Chance Wayne
and Geraldine Page as Alexandra Del Lago, is released. The
film version of Period of Adjustment, starring Jane Fonda, is
released. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens at
Spoleto Festival, Italy.
1963 The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens on Broadway.
Frank Merlo, Williams’s long-term lover, dies of lung cancer.
1964 Film of The Night of the Iguana is released, starring Richard
Burton as a drunken clergyman.
1965 First major revivals of The Glass Menagerie open in both New
York and London. American production at Brooks Atkinson
Theatre is highly acclaimed and runs for 175 performances with
Maureen Stapleton as Amanda, George Grizzard as Tom, Piper
Laurie as Laura. London revival at Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
1966 Slapstick Tragedy (The Mutilated and The Gnadiges Fraulein)
closes after only seven performances. CBS television
production of The Glass Menagerie airs.
1967 First version of The Two-Character Play, about a brother and
sister, opens in London.
1968 The Kingdom of Earth opens in New York. Film version of Milk
Train, retitled Boom!, is released. The Seven Descents of Myrtle
 (later titled Kingdom of Earth) opens on Broadway for 27
performances; the play contains graphic sex scene.
1969 In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel premieres in New York for 23
performances. Williams is awarded the Gold Medal for Drama
by American Academy of Arts and Letters. Williams is
committed to psychiatric unit of Barnes Hospital, St Louis, 27–
28 June. Stonewall (named after the gay bar) Riots erupt in
New York City, marking the start of the Gay Liberation
movement. Williams is baptised a Roman Catholic in Key
West.
1970 Dragon Country: A Book of Plays is published. Williams
appears on the David Frost Show and for the first time publicly
admits his homosexuality.
1971 Out Cry (rewritten version of The Two-Character Play) opens
in Chicago. Williams splits with his agent, Audrey Wood.
1972 Small Craft Warnings moves to Broadway for 200
performances; Williams plays the role of Doc, a drunken,
disbarred physician – the only time he acts in a professional
production of his plays. Williams wins National Theatre
Conference Award.
1973 ABC television version of The Glass Menagerie, with
Katharine Hepburn as Amanda, Sam Waterston as Tom, airs.
1974 Eight Mortal Ladies: A Book of Stories is published. Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof opens at the American Shakespeare Festival
Theatre, Stratford, CT, with Williams’s final, new third act.
1975 Williams is given the Medal of Honor for Literature by the
National Arts Club. Memoirs published, as well as a novel,
Moise and the World of Reason. Red Devil Battery Sign,
occasioned by Watergate, is staged in Boston and New York.
First Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Broadway
revival of Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Irene Worth, opens at
the Harkness Theatre.
1976 Eccentricities of a Nightingale (revision of Summer and Smoke)
premieres in New York. This is (An Entertainment) premieres in
San Francisco. Williams is president of the jury at the Cannes
Film Festival.
1977 Demolition Downtown opens in London. Vieux Carré opens in
New York, only to close after a mere 11 performances. Second
book of poetry, Androgyne, Mon Amour, published. First
televised Cat on a Hot Tin Roof airs.
1978 A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur opens in New York for 36
performances.
1979 Receives Presidential Arts Achievement Award.
1980 President Jimmy Carter presents Williams with Medal of
Freedom. Edwina Dakin Williams dies at the age of 95. The
poorly received Clothes for a Summer Hotel, about Zelda
Fitzgerald’s madness, opens on Broadway. Julie Haydon,
Menagerie’s original Laura, plays Amanda in short-lived New
York revival.
1981 Something Cloudy, Something Clear opens Off-Broadway; last
of Williams’s plays to be professionally produced while he was
alive.
1983 Williams dies on 24 February in New York at the Hotel Elysée
(Elysian Fields, the ‘Land of the Happy Dead’ in Streetcar)
after choking on a medicine-bottle cap. Broadway revival of
The Glass Menagerie opens with Jessica Tandy as Amanda.
Runs 92 performances.
1984 Showtime (cable television) airs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
reshown on PBS television in 1985.
1985 Collected Stories is published. London revival of Menagerie at
Greenwich Theatre, with Constance Cummings as Amanda.
Also on stage in London is the premiere of Sweet Bird of Youth
at the Haymarket Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter and
starring Lauren Bacall.
1987 Cineplex Odeon releases film version of The Glass Menagerie,
directed by Paul Newman with Joanne Woodward as Amanda
and John Malkovich as Tom.
1988 British revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Howard
Davies, uses Williams’s original 1955 script, the first
production of the play in Britain in 30 years.
1989 London revival of Menagerie at Young Vic, with Susannah York
 as Amanda.
1990 Davies directs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for its Broadway revival.
1994 The London revival of Sweet Bird of Youth opens at the
National Theatre. Roundabout Theatre mounts New York
revival of Menagerie, with Julie Harris as Amanda and Calista
Flockhart as Laura.
1995 Donmar Warehouse mounts acclaimed London revival of
Menagerie, directed by Sam Mendes with Zoë Wanamaker as
Amanda and Claire Skinner as Laura. Transfers to West End’s
Comedy Theatre after initial run.
1996 Rose Williams dies on 5 September at the age of 88.
1998 Not about Nightingales premieres at London’s Royal National
Theatre. Written in 1938, the play was rediscovered in the
1980s by Vanessa Redgrave. Corin Redgrave stars as warden
Boss Whalen.
2004 Festival of Tennessee Williams Plays at the Kennedy Center.
2005 Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, including
13 previously unpublished one-acts, is released.
2008 Dakin Williams dies on 20 May. The Traveling Companion and
Other Plays (12 previously uncollected experimental plays) is
published. First professional production of Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof with a black cast on Broadway (to London, 2009).
A Note on Quotations from the Plays

Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from the four plays that follow are
taken from the Student Editions published by Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, with page numbers from those editions given in parentheses.
The Glass Menagerie

commentary and notes by

STEPHEN J. BOTTOMS
 Plot

The Glass Menagerie is divided into seven scenes. These are of uneven
length: in production, the interval follows Scene Five, since Scenes Six
and Seven are easily the longest in the play. The scenes are written in
episodic form, which means that, rather than each scene simply leading
directly on to the next in a single narrative trajectory, each scene (or
‘episode’) has its own internal narrative, largely self-contained in its
action and themes. Of course, each also contributes to the development of
an overarching plot, yet in several instances we are led to understand that
long periods of time have elapsed between scenes: taken as a whole, the
play’s narrative is spread out across a large part of 1938, from winter to
summer. Perhaps it is useful to think of the play as operating like a series
of inter-related paintings, each one of which presents a key component in a
much bigger narrative, and which together build up to create an
impression – but perhaps not a conclusive understanding – of that ‘whole
story’. Williams shows us enough to give us a strong sense of the way that
the Wingfield family operates (and indeed disintegrates), but also leaves
much that is mysterious or uncertain. The reason for this approach is clear:
could the ‘whole story’ of any family be told on stage in two hours?

Scene One (Opening Narration)

The play opens with a scene-setting narration from the storyteller

character, Tom. He addresses the audience as if he knows he is standing in
a theatre, in the same time and place as the audience, and asks us to
imagine ourselves into the past, the 1930s of his youth. (When the play
was first produced, in 1944, it was easy for audiences to imagine Tom as a
real person talking about his own family history. More than fifty years
later, Tom would have to be a very old man to exist in the audience’s
‘present time’, so instead today he seems more like a mysterious chorus
figure, standing outside of time itself.) Tom briefly sketches in ‘the social
background of the play’, referring to the Great Depression and the
economic problems then facing America, and also to the Civil War taking
place in Spain (1936–9). His reference to Guernica, which alludes to the
merciless aerial bombing of the Spanish town of that name in April 1937,
implicitly locates the action of the play after that event. His reference to St
Louis, on the end of a brief list of American cities (and with a slight pause
after he has mentioned it), obliquely indicates the setting for the action
which is to follow.
Having alluded to the real time and real place of the story, Tom then
goes on to complicate matters by stressing that what we are about to see is
not actually ‘realistic’ at all. We are not going to see a photographic
reproduction of his life in the 1930s, but his life as he remembers it. We
will view the action through the lens of Tom’s self-confessed nostalgia,
and this is going to affect everything from the lighting of the stage to the
music we hear. By stressing the way that memory can play tricks on us,
Tom is implicitly warning us that we should not necessarily take
everything we see at face value. We have to understand that the events we
are about to see are being depicted the way Tom remembers them, rather
than as some straightforward, objective reality. For example, Tom’s
description of the ‘larger-than-life-size photograph’ of his absent father,
which looms over the living-room setting, seems to suggest that the size of
the image has grown artificially large in his memory – thereby reflecting
the length of the shadow which the father’s memory still casts over the
characters in the play. Tom also lets it be known that he might at times
wilfully distort or manipulate the facts (as he remembers them) for the
sake of dramatic or poetic effect. Referring to the gentleman caller, he
tells us unashamedly that ‘I am using this character . . .’. The overall
effect of this opening speech is double-edged: the audience is
simultaneously drawn into Tom’s memory-world and – thanks to such
comments – set at something of a critical distance, left to puzzle over what
might be ‘real’ and what might be distortion or invention.

Scene One (Amanda)

Having described his father’s abrupt departure ‘a long time ago’, Tom ends
his own narration rather abruptly and we move straight into a scene from
his past. His mother, Amanda, calls him in for dinner. Seconds later,
though, we seem to have jumped forward into the middle of the meal, and
Amanda is berating Tom for eating too hastily. This stitch in time, coming
after only three lines of regular dialogue, further underlines the point that
what we are seeing is conditioned by Tom’s memory of what is significant.
This first episode in the play is, in effect, a portrait of Amanda, but we are
seeing first the way Tom remembers Amanda – calling for him to hurry to
the table, nagging him about the way he eats, telling him he smokes too
much. Instantly she appears as a pressure and a burden on Tom.
As the scene develops, however, Amanda begins to talk about her own
memories of her youth (or rather, Tom remembers her remembering). Now
she begins to be fleshed out as a character in her own right. In some ways
she seems quite comic, recalling a golden age of gentility in the Deep
South which must surely be her own romanticisation of the past: do we
really believe, for instance, that she once had seventeen gentlemen callers,
or is that a statistic that is exaggerated a little further each time the story
is told? Has she, likewise, romanticised the fates of her various old
boyfriends (a drowning, a shooting, etc.) so that they now sound like
events from some old melodrama? Amanda’s memories further emphasise
the theme of the past being unstable, and subject to reinvention, which
Tom himself has already introduced. Towards the end of her monologue,
though, we come to recognise the emotional truth underlying Amanda’s
romanticism: she feels that the glory of her youth was lost because of her
decision to marry Tom’s and Laura’s father, a choice which took her away
from the old Southern ways of Blue Mountain and into this cramped,
modern, urban apartment. Nostalgia and regret dominate Amanda’s life –
or at least her life as Tom presents it in this first scene.
We are also given the impression that this scene is one which took
place, with slight variations, many times over: the tale Amanda tells is
apparently one that her children have heard time and again. The scene
ends, however, with the focus of attention shifting slightly toward Laura:
Amanda apparently wants to be able to live vicariously through her
daughter, to see her receive the kind of attention from gentlemen callers
which she herself claims she received in her long-ago youth. Laura,
however, is not the kind of girl to attract male admirers, and in the scene’s
final lines we glimpse briefly both her loneliness and the source of her
alienation from her uncomprehending mother.
Scene Two (Laura)

The conclusion of Scene One thus sets us up for a fluid progression into
Scene Two. Here, our attention is focused on Laura herself, although since
she is a much quieter figure than her mother, she does not present herself
through monologue as Amanda has. Laura’s story is instead told more
through her interaction with her mother, and we are shown a particular
incident – during the winter months – in which Amanda returns home to
confront Laura. Amanda has just discovered that Laura has only been
pretending to attend a secretarial course at a business college each day, and
that in fact she has been absent from the college for the last six weeks.
Laura has to face the anger and indignation of her mother, and to try to
explain why she dropped out, and why she could not bring herself to tell
Amanda about this earlier. She is clearly terrified by the memory of the
typing course, which made her feel physically sick because she could not
cope with its pressures, but she is perhaps even more afraid of her
mother’s disappointment in her, which is why she has been pretending that
she was still taking the course.
What we see in this scene, then, are two different kinds of ‘acting’.
Laura attempts, rather pathetically, to keep up the illusion that she is
studying: she rushes to hide her glass animals when Amanda returns home
and pretends to be quietly studying her typewriter chart. Her mother, by
contrast, decides to play out her revelations as full-blown melodrama: the
stage directions specify ‘a bit of acting’ after Amanda’s first line –
suggesting that she is putting on an air of bitter disappointment so as to
emphasise her daughter’s humiliation. She then goes on to play out the
story of her trip to Rubicam’s Business College as a blow-by-blow account
in which she even mimics the voice of the woman she spoke to, so that we
can imagine the whole dialogue that took place (as Amanda tells it, this
was a rather terse, or even bitchy exchange). Amanda uses the story as a
weapon against Laura, missing no opportunity to twist the knife by
pointing out that, if Laura is not going to learn a job skill, then she has no
future (‘what is going to become of us?’). Laura, meanwhile, cannot stand
up to her mother and responds only with inarticulate sounds of
helplessness (‘Oh’), and by taking refuge in trying to wind up her Victrola,
an action which only infuriates her mother further.
 It becomes clear during this scene that Laura has been hiding not only
from her mother but also from life outside the apartment. She has created
an imaginary world for herself, into which she retreats whenever she can,
and especially when she is placed under pressure. This imaginary world
revolves around three of her personal possessions. First, there is the
collection of tiny glass animals (the menagerie of the play’s title) which
we see her cleaning lovingly at the scene’s opening. Second, there is the
old Victrola record player left behind by her father, which is the ostensible
source for the nostalgic, faraway music which accompanies the whole play
(and which is described so carefully by Williams in his production notes).
Laura’s third precious possession is her high school yearbook, which she
treasures chiefly because of the pictures it holds of Jim, the unrequited
love of her life. In this scene, Laura plucks up courage to show her mother
the yearbook, after Amanda has finally stopped ranting at her and has
asked, with apparent pity, whether or not she ever ‘liked some boy’.
Invited to speak about something she really cares about, Laura finally
finds a voice and begins to enthuse about Jim and all his exploits as ‘high
school hero’. It becomes clear from her comments that he barely knew her,
but that she particularly treasures the few moments when she spoke with
him, and the fact that he even had a nickname for her. (Jim would ‘holler,
“Hello, Blue Roses!”’ whenever he saw her, she tells us: the hollering
indicates that she only really saw him in passing at a distance.)
Laura also preserves a six-year-old newspaper clipping, presumably
tucked inside the yearbook, which details Jim’s engagement to Emily
Meisenbach (‘It says in the Personal Section’, rather than ‘it said’,
indicates that she still has the clipping with her). She seems to see his
having married as marking the end of her one and only hope of ever
having a happy relationship with a man, but that hope had clearly only
ever been based on a dream, a longing, rather than anything more solid.
Here we see the depths of Laura’s isolation and lack of faith in herself, and
Amanda too, seeing as if for the first time that Laura does (or at least did)
dream of loving a man, resolves to help her find one to marry. This, in her
view, is the only realistic alternative to the secretarial career which Laura
has thrown away. Ironically then, we see that it is Laura’s mention of Jim
which prompts Amanda to find a ‘gentleman caller’ for her – a caller who,
when he later appears, is in fact that same Jim.
 If that seems rather too convenient a plot twist, we must remember a
further underlying factor in this scene; namely, that Tom does not actually
appear in it. If he was not there, how could he ‘remember’ these events?
Perhaps what we see here is only the way Tom imagines that it must have
taken place, based on what he learned about it afterwards, or even what
Tom wants to have taken place, for the sake of neatness in his plot. He
does not draw our attention to this point, of course, and it is not vitally
important that we notice it, but if we are aware of it, this adds further to
our sense that what we are seeing is a fabrication of memory and
imagination.

Scene Three (Opening Monologues)

Tom reappears to assert his presence as narrator at the opening of Scene

Three, explaining how – as winter moved into spring – Amanda’s
campaign to find a gentleman caller for Laura began to bring added
emotional pressure to the already tense relations among the Wingfields.
Amanda’s preoccupation with this idea, we are told, only added further to
Laura’s chronic nervousness and to Tom’s discomfort at home. It also
apparently prompted Amanda herself to take up a telesales position to earn
extra money ‘to plume the bird and feather the nest’ (i.e. to put toward
making Laura’s appearance and possible dowry more appealing to
prospective suitors). We next see Amanda at work making one of her
telephone sales pitches, and here again her talent as a performer becomes
apparent. She first gushes with sympathy for one of her friends from the
D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution: a respected women’s
organisation), and then tries to talk up the latest pulp fiction story in the
Homemaker’s Companion. Her hard-sell approach is underlined by the
absurdly exaggerated claims she makes for the story as a successor to
Margaret Mitchell’s classic Civil War novel, Gone With the Wind.
Comically though (and perhaps Tom’s sense of irony is again apparent
here), her friend finds an excuse to hang up on her in mid-sentence.

Scene Three (Tom)

Scene Three proper finally brings the focus back to Tom himself, and his
sense of being trapped in his home and his job (as a clerk at a shoe
factory), unable to find the time or privacy in which he can pursue his
interest in literature. He dreams of becoming a writer, but Amanda even
attempts to censor what he can read, banning D. H. Lawrence’s novels
from the house. Tom resents this, not least because he himself pays for the
upkeep of the house out of his wages. Yet Amanda is still in charge of the
home through sheer force of will. Tom is frustrated, powerless and
penniless, and in this scene, prevented by his enraged mother from simply
leaving the house as usual, he erupts into a blazing row with her. As each
grows angrier, they become more hurtful towards each other, Amanda
eventually accusing Tom of lying about his nocturnal habit of going to
movies, and suggesting that he is really spending his nights getting drunk.
Tom reacts to this with an impassioned monologue in which he desperately
tries to make her understand how unhappy he is and how much he is
sacrificing for her and Laura, yet she seems unwilling to listen. He
therefore gives up and instead becomes blisteringly sarcastic: he too now
proves himself a gifted ‘actor’ as he launches into a parody of what he
believes she is waiting to hear, confessing to all kinds of bizarre,
exaggerated nocturnal sins. Losing his head completely, he concludes by
openly mocking Amanda, calling her a witch, and attempting once again to
storm out of the door. In the process, he accidentally flings his coat in the
direction of Laura’s treasured glass menagerie, breaking something as a
result. Laura, who has witnessed this whole scene, is understandably
horrified, but so too is Tom himself, who stops dead in his tracks when he
realises what he has done to Laura’s treasures. Amanda, preoccupied with
Tom’s insults and oblivious to Laura, declares that she will not speak to
Tom until he apologises to her, and storms out leaving her children to
clean up the damage.
Although this scene seems to revolve around Tom and his struggles with
his mother, it is important to note that Laura is present throughout,
suffering through their fighting. Indeed, Williams specifies that she is to
be lit differently and more clearly than either of the other characters: he
thus creates a kind of split focus on stage, so that the audience remains
strongly aware of Laura throughout the scene, again noticing her isolation
even within the family. Yet it also becomes clear in this scene that there is
more to Laura than helpless shyness, since the one occasion when she
plucks up courage to intervene in Tom and Amanda’s argument is when
Tom is on the verge of swearing at his mother. This moment, echoing a
similar such intervention during Scene One, demonstrates that Laura is
very much aware of the need to maintain a careful emotional balance in
the house in order for the family to function. She will try to intervene in
the situation if Tom and Amanda are in danger of doing something they
will regret. Sadly for her, though, in this scene she remains powerless to
stop Tom building himself into a rage, or his consequent damage of her
treasured glass collection.

Scene Four (5 a.m.)

Scene Four depicts events in the Wingfield household early one morning
in spring. In practice, though, it is really two separate scenes. The first,
shorter scene takes place at 5 a.m. (the time chimed by a nearby church
clock), when Tom returns home very drunk from one of his nocturnal
sprees. The second begins, according to Laura, at ‘nearly seven’. In
between these scenes we also hear the clock striking six, Amanda’s
consequent calls of ‘Rise and Shine!’, and Tom’s sleepy protests.
Apparently he sleeps on for nearly an hour longer than he is supposed to.
That missing hour is marked only by a few moments on stage during
which the lighting increases slightly in intensity. In effect, what we as the
audience witness are the moments in which Tom himself is awake (or
semi-awake), which are – of course – the way he would remember these
events.
The short scene at five in the morning is intriguing for the audience
because it confirms for us Amanda’s suspicions that Tom does not merely
go to the movies at night (we can assume that no movie-theatre opens that
late). Yet the mystery of what has occurred during Tom’s lost hours
remains unanswered: when Laura – awakened by his drunken fumbling for
his doorkey – asks him where he has been, he simply explains that the
movies had ‘a very long program’, and goes on to describe the magician’s
stage show which he also saw as part of the same bill. There is, of course,
no particularly good reason why we should believe this story. He says the
magician gave him whisky, but that could be just an embroidered cover
story. Likewise, he could have found the rainbow-coloured scarf which he
gives to Laura at some open-all-hours backstreet jumble shop. We might
legitimately choose to believe that he did get it from ‘Malvolio the
Magnificent’, as he claims, but the point is that neither we nor Laura have
any way of knowing for sure (and since Malvolio is a character in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, even that name could be a private literary
joke of Tom’s). What is clear, however, is the underlying emotional truth
of this scene: Tom’s desperation to escape the suffocating, ‘nailed up
coffin’ of his home life has caused him to stay out all night and to lose
himself in alcohol. As a result, he can catch only a couple of hours’ sleep
before having to go back to work. There is the unmistakable sense, as Tom
climbs into bed, that something will have to give soon in this situation.

Scene Four (7 a.m.)

The later part of this scene opens with Laura pressing Tom to wake up, and
to apologise to Amanda for what he said in Scene Three, as she is not
speaking to him. We might conclude that this is the morning after that row
took place, although it is by no means certain (perhaps there has been
frosty silence in the house for days!). Moreover, Amanda’s mention later
in this scene of Tom having come home drunk one night, in a ‘terrifying
condition’, seems to overlap with what we have just seen, and yet
presumably refers to another, earlier occasion. These touches leave us with
the impression that the situations depicted in these scenes are by no means
one-off occurrences.
After waking Tom, Laura is sent out for groceries, leaving her brother to
confront Amanda. A lengthy series of stage directions indicates a sort of
comic, silent-movie sequence taking place between them – all averted eye
contact and awkward clearing of throats – before Tom finally plucks up the
courage to apologise for calling her a witch. This acts as a kind of trigger,
releasing the torrents of Amanda’s pent-up emotion. If she has appeared
rather falsely melodramatic at times in previous scenes, we now begin to
get a deeper and more sympathetic impression of her. Although she cannot
quite find it in herself to apologise for her sometimes cruel behaviour, it is
clear from her explanation how much she really loves and cares for her
children, and that it is circumstances which have made her as hard and
embittered as she is. We realise here that Amanda’s struggle to bring her
children up and provide for them, in very difficult economic times,
without the support of a husband, has made her who she is. And now it
becomes clear that her continual nagging at Tom (over drinking his coffee
too fast, eating a proper breakfast, staying out at night drinking, etc.) is
born out of genuine, and not entirely misplaced concern for his welfare.
Likewise, Amanda’s insistence on discussing Laura’s situation with Tom is
driven by her awareness that something needs to be done for her; whereas
Tom himself – however much he loves his sister – has seemed too
preoccupied with his own unhappiness to think clearly about helping her.
Amanda confronts him directly with this point towards the end of the
scene, accusing him of thinking only about himself. This is a moment
which in a way sums up the tensions between mother and son, for she is at
once quite right in her criticism and overly harsh, failing to understand
things from his point of view. This scene summarises, perhaps better than
any other in the play, Williams’s deeply humane awareness that, while an
individual’s behaviour might seem cruel or selfish from the outside, it may
well become understandable or even sympathetic when one tries to
appreciate circumstances from that individual’s point of view. On several
occasions in this scene, both Amanda and Tom seem simultaneously
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in their words and actions.
A further complicating factor is that it seems Amanda and Tom are
never very likely to appreciate each other’s points of view fully, because
they are fundamentally unable to communicate. Amanda admits that she
does not know how to express to him what she feels in her heart, and the
irony is that it is in this moment of helpless inarticulacy that mother and
son actually seem closest: he understands her because he has had exactly
the same difficulties in expressing himself. Elsewhere in the scene,
though, Tom is conspicuous for his failure even to attempt to help Amanda
understand him, despite her unusual openness to him. He continues in this
scene to evade her questions about where he goes at night, and offers only
facetious, one-line retorts to her attempts to talk about his job. Perhaps he
knows that telling her where he really goes, what he really thinks, would
only hurt and upset his mother more, and this is why he sidesteps her
pestering. (Sure enough, in the one moment when he does speak freely, she
instantly responds with a lecture on bourgeois, ‘Christian’ ethics.) Yet
Tom, by failing to respond fully to his mother’s fumbling attempts at
communication, only adds further to the gulf of understanding between
them. Their situation seems intractable.
Yet another subtext in the scene is, quite simply, Amanda’s obvious fear
for her own future. She finally confronts Tom with her knowledge that he
has been in touch with the Merchant Marine, and must be thinking of
running away to sea. This would deprive the family of his warehouse wage
and plunge them into poverty. Amanda insists that she is not concerned for
her own future, only for Laura’s, but in this she is clearly being
disingenuous (‘I’m old and don’t matter!’). Her insistence that Tom help
find a potential husband for Laura is clearly motivated as much by her
own concern to be provided for in old age as it is by love for Laura. Again
we are aware of how the understandable instinct for self-preservation can
become mixed up with the more noble motive of concern for others. For
Williams, there are no easy, unambiguous explanations for people’s
behaviour. Similarly, when Tom finally agrees to find a gentleman caller
for Laura, it seems to be driven as much by the guilt which Amanda has
stirred up, and by his own desire for her to stop pestering him, as by any
sense of brotherly love for his sister. Tom seems to remain justifiably
sceptical that a husband is what Laura really needs, or indeed that she
could attract one (a point he makes explicitly in the next scene). Yet
Amanda, the bit between her teeth, plunges ahead with her campaign; after
Tom has left for work, his promise made, she returns to her fundraising
telesales campaign. The repetition of her sales pitch here seems like a
sadly ironic touch: she disappears again behind the brittle façade of the
performer, after a scene in which she has allowed herself to appear more
vulnerable than at any previous point in the play.

Scene Five (Annunciation)

This scene takes place some time later, on a spring evening warm enough
for Tom to sit outside smoking on the fire escape after dinner. He is driven
outside, once again, by Amanda’s pestering, although on this occasion
(perhaps learning from their conversation before) she seems to be making
more of an effort to be constructive rather than simply nag him. She
suggests that if he gave up smoking, he could afford to improve himself
with a nightschool course, but Tom, dreaming of escape, is not interested
in learning to be an accountant.
On the terrace, he steps out of the scene itself to address the audience as
narrator once again. Accompanied by the sound of dance music, he
wistfully describes his fascination with watching the goings-on in the
dance hall across the alley, and – more seriously – his sense that its
sensuous pleasures provided a kind of welcome distraction from the
impending sense of doom which was felt that spring of 1938 by anyone
paying attention to the news from Europe. Tom’s newspaper headline notes
that General Franco, the fascist leader, has scored another victory in the
Spanish Civil War, while in his narration Tom alludes to the misguided
attempts of Western leaders, like the British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain, to appease Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler by signing a deal in
Munich which would allow Germany to annex large parts of
Czechoslovakia. As Tom’s last line here makes clear (‘all the world was
waiting for bombardments’), a second world war seemed imminent,
despite Chamberlain’s belief that he had secured ‘peace in our time’.
The appearance of such a speech, at this juncture in the play, functions
to bring an added sense of ominousness to what follows: Tom announces
to Amanda, who has followed him out onto the terrace, that Laura is
finally to have a gentleman caller. Although this news is delivered in one
of the most playfully light-hearted exchanges between mother and son in
the entire play, its location after Tom’s rumours-of-war speech provides a
dark counterpoint to their good humour, a sense that the news of Jim’s
imminent arrival might itself herald a disaster of smaller scale but of
similar irreversibility.
Tom’s announcement that Jim will come for dinner tomorrow night
sends Amanda into a whirl of panicked preparations. Tom insists that no
fuss is necessary, although he also finds amusement in his mother’s
predictable reaction to his news (which is perhaps partly why he drops it in
so casually and at such short notice). He then responds with a kind of wry
disbelief as Amanda begins to grill him with questions about every detail
of Jim’s background, career and appearance. She also does not let slip the
chance to do a little reminiscing about her own days of receiving
gentlemen callers in Blue Mountain. Amanda has very fixed ideas about
what to look for in a potential suitor, and it eventually emerges that the
ambitious Jim is indeed eminently suitable (if with a few regrettable
foibles). Tom attempts gently to remind his mother that Jim has not even
met Laura yet, let alone asked for her hand in marriage, but Amanda is not
to be deterred. Once again, an ironic reversal takes place here as Tom –
faced with a mother so intent on pursuing her quarry that she will not
admit to the problems on her doorstep – forcibly reminds her of Laura’s
acutely shy and withdrawn personality, which will be an obstacle to any
attempt at engineering a romance for her. Tom finds himself saying to his
mother almost exactly the same lines as she said to him at the end of the
previous scene, when trying to remind him of his responsibility to his
sister. Williams thus subtly points out the way that we can all lose sight of
the obvious when blinded by our own preoccupations. Unlike his mother in
the previous scene, though, Tom gives up trying to press his point home,
and simply takes the familiar option of walking out. His wearily evasive
explanation that he is going to the movies predictably infuriates his
mother, but even this will not deter her from her path now that a
gentleman caller is imminent: the scene concludes with Amanda dragging
Laura out of the kitchen and onto the fire escape so that she can make a
wish on the moon for happiness. It is a poignant climax to the first half of
the play: Amanda is willing to draw even on the fragile sense of hope
provided by the softly glowing heavens, as if this alone might provide her
family with a way out of its current, self-destroying stasis.

Scene Six (Opening Narration)

The audience is welcomed back from the interval by Tom, who begins a
lengthy narration about Jim O’Connor, the imminent gentleman caller.
Jim, it emerges, not only works in the shoe warehouse with Tom, but was
also at the same high school. Tom speaks wryly but also a little enviously
of Jim’s near-legendary status as all-round high school star, a career which
contrasted sharply with his own insignificance. Yet he also notes how
Jim’s ambitions after high school were thwarted, apparently by the
economic realities of the Depression, which have placed him on the same
plane of apparent mediocrity as Tom himself. Now, they seem almost to
rely on each other. Jim, Tom tells us, finds reassurance in knowing that
Tom, at least, remembers his former glories and thus, perhaps, his future
potential. Yet it is also clear that Tom finds reassurance in knowing that
Jim understands at least a little about him: Jim is the one person in Tom’s
life who seems to acknowledge and even encourage (if only
lightheartedly) his ambition to be a poet.
Tom concludes his narration, however, by shifting our attention to the
fact that Jim and Laura had known each other slightly at high school. He
tells us that, when he invited Jim to dinner, he did not know whether or not
Jim would even remember Laura when he met her. Tom also indicates that,
at this time, he was unaware quite how much Jim’s memory meant to
Laura (he only remembers her speaking ‘admiringly of his voice’). The
older Tom who is narrating, knowing the results of this meeting with
hindsight, does not give anything of his plot away, but clearly suggests to
us – through the sense of portent in this last paragraph – that the play is
now beginning to move toward events of life-changing significance.

Scene Six (Preparations)

The lights come up across the stage to show us an apartment which looks
far neater and more ‘presentable’ than it has been in the first half of the
play. Amanda has ‘worked like a Turk’ to get it ready for the visit, and is
now doing the same for Laura herself, who stands sheepishly in a new
dress as Amanda fixes its hem. It is clear, however, that Laura is being
made to feel very uneasy and pressurised by all the fuss her mother is
making – especially when Amanda insists on artificially enlarging her
bosom using powder puffs. Laura does not feel pretty or alluring, and
being forced to put on a show like this only makes her still more self-
conscious than usual. By stark contrast, though, the opportunity to dress up
prettily is one which fills Amanda with excitement, a point which becomes
very clear when she reappears, after a brief absence, in her old cotillion
dress. She proceeds to ‘sashay’ around the room while reminiscing at
length about her days as a debutante in Blue Mountain. She seems to have
rediscovered her youthful vigour, and although we might suspect that her
memories of those days are somewhat rose-tinted, her excitement is
nonetheless entertaining and even infectious for an audience: her story
about her obsession with jonquils is one of the most straightforwardly
entertaining moments in the play. The fun ends quite suddenly, however,
when Amanda recalls how those golden days abruptly came to a halt when
she met Laura’s father.
Bringing herself back to the present, Amanda notes that it is about to
rain: this is an unfortunate omen for the evening which renews the sense of
foreboding that Tom established earlier. That foreboding deepens further
as Laura asks her mother to repeat the name of the man who is coming to
dinner. She then hesitatingly reveals to her mother what we have already
guessed; that this is the same Jim she knew and loved in high school. This
is the last straw for her: she cannot face the pressure any longer and tells
Amanda that she will not be able to meet their visitor. Amanda tells her
not to be so foolish, and almost immediately the doorbell announces Tom
and Jim’s arrival. Ordered by her mother to answer it, Laura grows almost
hysterical with terror, pleading not to be made to go, until finally Amanda
commands her with such force that she meekly goes to the door (as
Amanda disappears into the kitchen). Yet having opened the door and been
introduced to Jim by Tom, Laura instantly turns tail and retreats to the
security of her Victrola, leaving Tom and Jim to entertain themselves.

Scene Six (Jim and Tom)

Feeling very awkward with the situation in the apartment, Tom too takes
his usual way out and steps out onto the fire escape to smoke. Jim opts to
follow him almost immediately, rather than be left alone with only the
newspaper for company, and begins goodnaturedly to lecture Tom on the
self-improving benefits of taking a public speaking course – no doubt
responding to Tom’s obvious discomfort with ‘company’. Tom, though,
rejects the advice and ignores Jim’s attempts to suggest that he needs to
improve his performance at work. Tom finally reveals that he no longer
cares how he fares at the warehouse, because he is on the point of running
away to sea. In an impassioned speech, Tom explains that he is sick of
watching movies, of watching life happen to other people, and that he is
now determined to seize a new life for himself. Jim dismisses Tom’s
dreams as empty fantasy, but his uncharacteristic harshness here (he calls
Tom ‘you drip’) perhaps suggests that the contempt he feels is really for
himself, a disgust at his own failure to rise above mediocrity. Here is Tom,
a nobody at high school, apparently showing more guts than he in
dreaming of escape. Tom is plainly thinking of pursuing a dream wherever
it takes him, no matter what the risks, whereas Jim’s life – by contrast – is
a model of playing safe and seeking to work one’s way gradually up the
career ladder.
The men’s discussion is interrupted by Amanda’s rather startling arrival
on the terrace – all girlish vivacity and swinging cotillion dress. Without
giving the men a chance to draw breath, she launches into a chattering
monologue, flirtatiously addressing Jim as if he were a gentleman caller
come to call on her. Once again she quickly finds a way into talking about
her own youth in the Deep South; once again she ends up dwelling on her
own choice of husband. We begin to see a certain circularity in Amanda’s
train of thought here (this is the second time in the scene that a speech has
ended on this subject), but more important than what she says here is our
awareness of her apparently incessant need to talk. It seems as if this is her
way of dealing with nervousness and excitement. In this respect her
behaviour stands in marked contrast to that of Laura, whose crippling
shyness means she cannot even bring herself to face Jim. When Amanda
finally calls her in from the kitchen, where she has taken refuge, she
collapses in a faint from sheer nervous exhaustion. With the strange
appropriateness of a dream (or perhaps of doctored memory), a
thunderstorm breaks out outside at the same instant. Tom picks his sister
up and lays her down on the sofa before taking his place at the dinner table
with Jim and Amanda. The scene closes with grace being said for the
meal, as rain comes down outside and as the audience watches not only the
diners, but Laura too, alone and terrified.

Scene Seven (Jim and Laura)

Time has passed and the meal is now finishing. Laura remains where she
was. However, almost as soon as the lights have come up to reveal this
tableau, they are cut out again, simulating a power blackout in the
apartment. Amanda, still flirting shamelessly with Jim, lights candles and
persuades him to come into the kitchen with her to look at the fuse box.
We hear their voices from offstage and watch Tom and Laura wait silently
on the darkened stage, until Amanda returns having concluded that the
electricity has been cut off because Tom forgot to pay the power bill. Jim
knows that Tom deliberately did not pay it, in order to use the money to
join the Merchant Marine (as he explained in the previous scene), but Jim
opts to cover for Tom by joking about his forgetfulness. Amanda now
steps back from her flirtatious hostess role (although she cannot resist one
last little anecdote about her candelabrum), and none-too-subtly drags
Tom to the kitchen to help wash the dishes. She thus leaves Jim alone with
Laura – as she clearly had always intended to do.
Clutching the candelabrum and a glass of dandelion wine, Jim hesitantly
approaches the sofa where Laura is still hiding. The simple words ‘Hello
there, Laura’ initiate what is by far the longest dialogue sequence in the
play: the encounter between Jim and Laura lasts for a full half-hour of
playing time on stage. This intimate, physically static scene (i.e. the stage
picture remains much the same throughout, neither character moving very
much) needs to be especially carefully handled in production so as not to
lose the audience’s attention, but when well performed it is compulsive
viewing, for what we see developing during Jim and Laura’s conversation
is – in effect – the entire cycle of an evolving relationship. The scene goes
from very nervous first contact, through a gradual building-up of Laura’s
confidence thanks to Jim’s gently insistent attention towards her, and
arrives at real mutual enjoyment of each other’s company. Unfortunately
for Laura, though, things then begin to fall apart, as Jim brings about
unintentional damage to her most treasured glass animal – the unicorn.
When he then belatedly realises that she is in love with him, he grows
nervously awkward before finding a way to confess to her that he already
has a steady girlfriend, Betty, to whom he is engaged to be married. Within
the space of half an hour, Laura is brought out of her shell, has her most
fantastic hopes built up, and then watches them vanish into nothing.
One of the most noticeable things about this scene is how genuinely
decent and well-intentioned Jim seems to be. We actually know very little
about him prior to their dialogue, other than what Tom has told us, and
what we do know has been mostly to do with his ambitiousness and
popularity. It becomes clear, though, that he has not been spoiled by his
successes – or perhaps that, as he himself suggests, his humbling
experiences at the warehouse have helped make him more mature and
down-to-earth. He still has high hopes for himself, but his concern in this
scene is not to talk about himself (as might be expected). Despite Laura’s
terrible shyness and initial lack of responsiveness to him, he works very
hard to draw her into a real, two-way conversation. First, he invites her to
sit with him, then to move closer into the light, and then – after talking
casually to help put her at her ease a little – he questions her directly about
her obvious shyness. Laura responds to his apparently genuine concern for
her by plucking up the courage to ask him about his singing career, and
from here it is a short step to Jim realising where he has seen her before.
They begin to reminisce laughingly about high school, and although
Laura’s mention of her crippled foot brings about a few moments of
awkward embarrassment for both of them, Jim nevertheless tries to
overcome this setback and continue the conversation by attempting to
persuade her that she has no need to be so self-conscious about herself.
When the conversation turns towards memories of The Pirates of
Penzance, the high school operetta in which Jim starred, Laura produces
first her yearbook and then a copy of the show’s programme. She
confesses that she saw him perform ‘all three times’. It would be easy for
Jim to be embarrassed as he begins to realise the extent of Laura’s
adulation of him, but he playfully offers to sign the programme for her, six
years too late, and jokes about the diminished value of his autograph.
Shortly after that, Laura learns that Jim did not in fact marry – nor ever
intended to marry – the girl who had announced their engagement in the
personal column of the newspaper. The news that he is free of other ties,
combined with the fact that Jim clearly likes her and wants to encourage
her to have more confidence in herself, allows Laura to begin to fantasise
that her dreams about loving Jim might just come true. (Obviously, this is
not stated explicitly in the text itself, but the implication is there
subtextually.) The extent of Laura’s newfound willingness to open up to
Jim, to allow him into her private world, is now demonstrated as she
shows him her glass collection, and particularly her most loved piece – a
tiny, fragile unicorn that she refers to not as ‘it’ but as ‘he’. Despite Jim’s
protestations, she trusts him to hold this treasure in his hand – just as if
she were trusting him to hold her heart. They joke gently about the unicorn
as if it had a personality, Laura now showing a sense of wit and humour
which has previously remained hidden, and which Jim has brought to the
surface.
After putting the unicorn down, there is a momentary lull in the
conversation, suggesting a certain awkwardness about what they could
discuss next after such an intimate exchange. Jim tries to cover his unease
by commenting first on the size of his shadow, then on the weather, then
on the music from the Paradise Dance Hall. He leaps on the idea of having
Laura dance with him, and, despite her protests, sweeps her up and helps
her to dance a waltz. Here we see, in miniature, an echo of the course of
their whole encounter, as she moves stiffly at first but gradually gains in
confidence and enjoyment. This makes the result of their dance all the
more tragic: accidentally bumping into the table where Jim had placed the
unicorn, they knock it off onto the floor. Picking it up, Laura discovers that
its horn has been broken off. She tries to assure Jim, who is shocked at the
damage he has done, that it really does not matter that much to her, but it
is clear from what we know of Laura that this is a desperately sad moment
for her. Her most loved possession has been irreparably damaged. We
might also speculate that this breakage is symbolic of Laura herself being
irreparably hurt, either by this moment or by what follows shortly
afterwards. Yet, equally, we can see an admirable strength and dignity
emerge in her at this moment, as she struggles against her own grief to put
Jim at ease through her gentle humour. It is almost as if she is repaying the
kindness he has shown, throughout the scene, in trying to put her at ease.
Touched by this moment, Jim attempts to express to Laura just how
special she appears to be to him. She is lost for words, but he too is unable
to articulate fully, almost as if what he is feeling is inexplicable even to
himself. He tries to suggest that he feels for her just what he would feel for
a much-loved sister, and that he wants to aid and encourage her as he
would his own sister, but seconds later the pair of them have stumbled into
a passionate kiss. This is a crucial turning point, just as was the breaking
of the unicorn. Jim pulls away from the kiss, cursing himself for losing
control, but Laura seems simply stunned. Reduced once again to silence,
she offers no response to his various attempts to return to casual
conversation as if nothing had happened, and so Jim finds himself
explaining, haltingly and awkwardly, that he should not have kissed her,
and cannot be a boyfriend to her, because he is already engaged to be
married. There are two possible readings of his actions here. One is that he
really had been just foolishly lost in the moment, that the kiss meant
nothing, and that he looks on Laura as he would a fragile younger sister.
The second and still sadder interpretation would be that he has seen
something in Laura which he loves deeply, but that – because he is already
engaged – he feels he must stay faithful to Betty, despite the fact that all
he can really say in praise of her is that ‘in a great many ways we –
get along fine’. Jim is a responsible, respectable young man who feels he
must ‘do the right thing’ by his fiancée. Yet, according to this reading of
events, that means depriving both Laura and himself of possible
happiness. Fate and social custom have conspired against them both.
Still more striking than Jim’s obvious awkwardness and conflicting
feelings is the way in which Laura responds to this outpouring of excuses.
After quietly absorbing the fact that her dream of being with him is over
not only for tonight but for ever, she finds the strength and presence of
mind to offer him the broken unicorn as a gift. This, she tells him, is a
souvenir. The words hang in the air, conjuring an extraordinary mixture of
emotional possibilities. Is she giving him a gift out of love? Is she asking
him to take a small part of her with him? Is she even quietly accusing him
of an act of destruction? (Is she saying, in effect, ‘keep this to remember
how easy it is to hurt people’?) It is impossible to tell, and Jim has no
chance to ask, because the moment is shattered by Amanda’s loudly
unsubtle entrance bearing lemonade. Jim, Laura and the audience alike are
jarred rudely out of a deeply intimate moment, and Amanda’s chatter
resumes as if it had never left off, except that now it seems horribly,
painfully invasive and inappropriate. Amanda, of course, has no idea what
she has interrupted, and when Jim tries to make his excuses and leave, she
pressures him to arrange a date to come again. He explains quietly about
his obligations to Betty, and now it is Amanda’s turn to have her hopes
reduced to dust. There is nothing left to say but the conventional
pleasantries, and Jim exits as hastily as decency will permit.
Amanda, unlike Laura, is not the kind of person to accept humiliation
quietly, and she calls Tom in from the kitchen to accuse him of playing a
cruel joke on them all. When he realises what has happened, Tom protests
his innocence, insisting he had no knowledge of Jim’s engagement (a fact
which Jim himself has already confirmed), but Amanda does not want to
listen to him. She needs someone to blame, and Tom is the most
convenient target for her final, furious outburst. She also, however,
unthinkingly rubs salt into Laura’s wounds by describing her as a jobless,
unmarried cripple: her own previous attempts to reassure Laura that she is
not crippled now seem shockingly hollow. Laura, however, has retreated to
her usual silence and does not react. Tom, likewise, resorts to his usual
tactics and storms out of the apartment. The family seems to be right back
where it started, except that this time, Tom claims, he is not going to the
movies. And, as he tells us moments later in his closing narration, he ran
away for ever shortly after this fateful night. For him, Jim’s visit was the
straw which finally broke the camel’s back.

Closing Narration

Significantly, though, Tom’s final speech to the audience makes no attempt

to justify his leaving. He knows full well, in retrospect, that his
departure – however necessary it was for his own sanity and his own hopes
for future happiness – was a betrayal of his family and, most particularly,
of his sister. Indeed, as he makes tragically clear to us, his escape did not
mean freedom for him at all, because he is still helplessly imprisoned by a
sense of guilt at having left Laura alone when she must have most needed
his love and support. The bleakly poetic tone of this final narration
reminds us, again, that everything we have been watching is memory, or
perhaps even – in the case of Jim and Laura’s scene – simply an imaginary
construction of what might have happened between them. Tom’s
description of being haunted by memories of his sister suggests that he has
spent many long, painful hours dwelling on the events of that night and on
what must, or might, have occurred while he was in the kitchen with
Amanda. The entire play, it seems to us now, has been an attempt on Tom’s
part to exorcise the ghosts of that night, and now that the play is over,
there is nothing further to say. But as Laura blows out her candles for the
last time, there is no guarantee that Tom has succeeded in his exorcism.
Perhaps he will have to come back and perform it all over again, night
after night. Perhaps he is doomed to repeat this story forever – trapped by
his guilt, by his memories, and by simply not knowing what became of his
mother and his sister after he deserted them.
 Commentary

The Glass Menagerie is often thought of as Tennessee Williams’s first

major play, because it was this piece that first brought serious critical and
public attention to his work when, in 1945, its premiere production
became the hit of the theatrical season – initially in Chicago and then in
New York.1 Two years later, the arrival of A Streetcar Named Desire
confirmed Williams as a world-class playwright with a distinctive, poetic
voice. It is often forgotten, however, that Williams had already written a
great many plays before his success with Menagerie, and indeed that
other, far less acclaimed works appeared on Broadway in the wake of each
of his first two hits (You Touched Me later in 1945, and Summer and Smoke
in 1948). Williams wrote prodigiously, and in a wide range of styles,
always following his own creative instincts rather than any preconceived
notion of what would make a commercial or critical success.
As a result, there was (and indeed still is) debate over the artistic merit
of much of his output, some of which was misunderstood or simply
dismissed during his own lifetime. This is true, particularly, of the work he
produced in the last two decades of his life: after a string of successes
during the 1950s, his last Broadway hit, Night of the Iguana (1961), was
followed by flop after flop until his death in 1983. Yet, Williams kept
writing, determined that he had something to express regardless of
whether or not the commercial theatre wanted to hear it. In the 1990s, a
serious reassessment of his work began in the subsidised theatre sector,
with many directors believing that much of his work – and particularly his
later work – had been unjustly neglected. Along with the many revivals
and reassessments which resulted from this interest, an early, previously
unproduced work from the late 1930s, Not About Nightingales, was
unearthed and produced at Britain’s Royal National Theatre in 1998,
before finding its way to acclaim on Broadway.
All of this is relevant here because it helps us to understand the pivotal
significance of The Glass Menagerie in Tennessee Williams’s career. It
was this play which plucked Williams out of the penniless obscurity in
which he had lived for most of his adult life (he had just turned thirty-four
when the Broadway production opened). If Menagerie had not proved
successful for him at that time, it is possible – or even probable – that he
would never have achieved widespread recognition. With this piece,
Williams finally succeeded in finding a dramatic mix which made his own
avowedly experimental instincts accessible to a large, popular audience –
an audience which understood that this was a play quite different from
what was then considered ‘normal’ Broadway fare, and yet was drawn in
by its humour, subtlety and emotional complexity. Williams, who always
remained ambivalent about the seductive nature of success, had stumbled
upon this winning combination of experiment and accessibility almost by
accident, and it was a fine balance which he found great difficulty in
striking again. To this day, The Glass Menagerie remains the most
frequently produced of his plays, and arguably the most popular with
audiences. Although A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955) – which both achieved a similarly fine balance of conventional and
innovative elements – tend to be cited by critics as Williams’s greatest
achievements, Menagerie retains a unique appeal all its own. Moreover,
when discussed, it often provokes the most intensely personal responses
from Williams enthusiasts.
What, then, makes this play so peculiarly appealing? A large part of the
answer to this question seems to depend, quite simply, on the fact that this
is a play about a family. There are, of course, many plays about families,
but few of them really take the whole family as their central focus: Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), for example, is mostly concerned
with the relationship between a father and elder son, with the mother and
other son portrayed as little more than props to this action. Salesman,
moreover, clearly attempts to deliver a message about the insubstantiality
of the American dream of material success. Williams, by contrast, has no
governing agenda in Menagerie other than to write as truthfully as he can
about his four characters – their strengths, their weaknesses, their hopes
and fears – and how they function together in the claustrophobic proximity
within which he places them. ‘If anyone ever wrote more shrewdly and
feelingly about family politics than Williams does here’, the critic
Benedict Nightingale has commented, ‘I don’t know him.’2 That
assessment pinpoints the fact that, while Williams has no ‘message’ to
peddle, the very act of writing as honestly and even-handedly as this about
the shifting power struggles and tortured love within a family situation is
in itself revelatory. Partly thanks to the episodic structure of the play,
which allows Williams to shift the focus of his attention slightly for each
scene, we are given the opportunity to see all four characters express
themselves and their individual perspectives. We are also, very
importantly, given the chance to make up our own minds about these
characters: Williams does not try to tell us what to think about them, or
tell us that any one of them is more right or wrong, good or bad, than the
others. Audience members are thus allowed the space to reflect quite
personally on those aspects of the family’s story which connect most
closely with their own experiences. ‘No one among critics or audiences
could understand why this ostensibly slight play affected them so deeply’,
Lyle Leverich writes of the premiere production, before pointing out that
the play’s concerns – though very specific in time and place – are also to
some extent universal: ‘What they witnessed was the tragic failure of three
family members to understand one another in their intertwined love’
(Leverich, 563).
Nowhere is the play’s openness to personal interpretation and response
more apparent than in relation to the character of Laura. If one had to say
that the play is more ‘about’ any one of its characters than the others, it
would probably be fair to argue that this is, ultimately, Laura’s play. It is,
after all, Tom’s guilt over leaving his sister which eventually turns out to
be the main motive for him telling the story of the play. And yet Laura has
far fewer lines than any of the other characters (including Jim, who only
appears in the last two scenes). She spends long periods sitting silently on
stage watching the others talk, fight and laugh, and when she does speak, it
is often simply in direct response to what others have said. We have
largely to guess at what is going on inside Laura’s head, and yet it is
precisely because of this that she is a figure who commands such intensely
personal responses from audiences. All we really know about her is that
she is very fragile and shy, and in the absence of further reliable
information, we tend to see her as a mirror for our own inner shyness and
fragility (or that of someone we know). Many people will claim to feel
something in common with Laura, which is to say that they fill in the
blanks of the character’s silence with some of their own most private,
sheltered emotions. Laura comes to embody the vulnerability that we all
hide and suppress in order to be able to function in ‘a world lit by
lightning’ – a world of relentless noise, competition and pressure. She also
embodies, more particularly, the experience of unrequited love, of having
your heart broken – even unintentionally – by someone you adored but
who did not adore you back. Most of us can identify directly with that, and
Williams’s play succeeds in tapping right into our memories of those
experiences. Perhaps, just as Tom’s telling of his story seems to act as a
kind of exorcism for his own tortured memories, so the play itself can
facilitate a kind of emotional healing for the audience members
themselves, as deeply personal feelings are brought to the surface and
confronted through identification with Laura’s plight.

Autobiography or Fiction?

The Glass Menagerie was also, of course, very personal for Tennessee
Williams himself. His real name was Thomas Lanier Williams, and in his
youth he was always known as Tom, until he chose for himself his literary
alias. An awareness of that fact instantly alerts us to the possibility that,
on some level, the Tom of the play is a depiction of Tennessee himself, and
that his memories and his need to exorcise them are more than merely
fictional. Indeed, Menagerie is Williams’s most blatantly autobiographical
play – and this from a writer whose every work was to some degree a
reflection of his own history. However, as Williams himself once
remarked, if it is true that all of his work is in some way autobiographical,
it is equally true that none of it is. Menagerie is a fiction which draws
heavily on Williams’s own experiences of young adulthood in St Louis,
Missouri (the city in which the play itself is set), but the details of the
story are also fictionalised, enhanced and rearranged in numerous ways.
The events of the play are not revelations of a personal history but the
component parts of a distinct, poetic vision dealing with themes of
memory and loss, isolation and interdependence, to name but the most
obvious. Williams clearly drew heavily on personal experiences in
constructing his narrative, but was in no way limited or bound by them.
Even a cursory examination of the various biographical accounts of
Tennessee Williams’s life show us just how much the play owes to his own
background. From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, a period which
encompassed the worst years of America’s Great Depression, the Williams
family lived in a small St Louis apartment (at 6544 Enright Avenue)
almost identical to the one in which the play is set. In this ugly, cramped
building – remembered with such lyrical disgust in Williams’s opening
stage directions – he learned first hand about the pettiness and degradation
of lower-middle-class existence. It was also from this apartment that he
could often hear the strains of music from a nearby ballroom,
imaginatively recreated in the play as the Paradise Dance Hall.
Like Tom, Williams also had to listen frequently to his mother – Edwina
Dakin Williams – reminisce longingly about the Deep South. The daughter
of an Episcopalian minister who had had a series of parishes, she had spent
most of the formative years of her youth in Tennessee, before moving even
further south to Mississippi, after graduating from high school shortly
after the turn of the century. Here she was able to play to the full the part
of the Southern belle, as a member of one of the last generations to
attempt to keep alive the traditions of the antebellum (or pre-Civil War)
South.3 Indeed, family accounts suggest that Edwina was known on
occasion to receive thirty gentlemen callers in a single day, a figure which
makes Amanda Wingfield’s seventeen seem quite modest in comparison.
However, like Amanda, Edwina made the ‘mistake’ of falling in love with
a travelling representative of the Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph
Company, Cornelius Coffin Williams. After they were married, Edwina at
first remained at home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, while Cornelius
continued to travel about, and their two elder children, Rose and Thomas,
were born there. (Clarksdale reappears in many works by Tennessee
Williams – The Glass Menagerie included – under the alias ‘Blue
Mountain’.) Eventually, however, Cornelius’s company required him to
settle in St Louis, Missouri, and he moved his young family there. Neither
northern nor southern, Missouri had been a free state during the Civil War.
Edwina always felt like a fish out of water there, and idealised her past in
the South just as does Amanda in the play.
If Amanda is clearly based on Edwina, Laura is equally clearly based on
Tennessee’s sister Rose. Like Laura, Rose loved to play old Victrola
records, and would even teach her brother the steps to dances she knew.
Like Laura, Rose once enrolled after school at Rubicam’s Business
College (the name in the play is unchanged) in order to learn typing and
shorthand, but could not handle the pressure of the coursework. She
stopped going to the classes without telling her mother, and would wander
about the city until it was time to go home; events which are recreated in
every detail in Scene Two of the play. Amanda’s subsequent decision to
have Tom find a gentleman caller for Laura from among the employees of
the shoe warehouse is also based on actual events. Tennessee himself
worked for a period in the soul-deadening ‘celotex interior’ of the
Continental Shoe Company for the princely sum of sixty-five dollars a
month (exactly Tom’s wage in the play). His workmates there included
Stanley Kowalski, whose name he was to immortalise in A Streetcar
Named Desire. However, the boy whom he apparently did once bring home
to meet Rose – Jim Connor – was actually known to him through the
college fraternity of which he had been a member. In the event, it turned
out that Connor already had ‘strings attached’ – just as Jim O’Connor has
in the play.
Although much of the play’s action is based on real-life events, it is also
clear that Williams adapted and manipulated these details for his own
purposes. For example, the episode at Rubicam’s Business College and
Edwina’s campaign to find callers for Rose actually took place several
years apart, in 1930 and 1934 respectively, rather than a few months apart.
In 1930, aged twenty, Rose had in fact had no trouble attracting male
visitors (whereas Laura has apparently never had any), but by twenty-four
she was in danger of being ‘left on the shelf ’; hence her mother’s
campaign. This is typical of Williams’s tendency carefully to rearrange
actual experiences into new dramatic contexts. Thus, in the play, both
Laura and Tom are said to have attended Soldan High School right up to
graduation (or failure to graduate), but though Rose and Thomas did attend
the actual St Louis school of that name, neither was there for more than a
term, after which each moved elsewhere. Williams created a past in which
both siblings attended the same school at the same time in order to lend
greater emotional weight to the story of Jim’s visit. Furthermore, to help
give Jim and Laura’s relationship a ‘history’ (which the real-life Jim and
Rose never had), Williams borrowed the story of the word ‘pleurosis’
being misheard as ‘blue roses’ from the family anecdotes of a childhood
friend whose father was a surgeon with German-speaking patients who
misunderstood his English (see Leverich, 87–8). Williams found a way to
take what had been a private joke and give it poetic resonance, ‘Blue
Roses’ becoming the treasured pet name Jim had for Laura.
 Other appropriated stories include Jim’s account of taking his fiancée on
a boat-trip upriver to Alton – which came directly from Williams’s own
memory of doing just that with an old girlfriend (see Leverich, 82).
However, perhaps the most significant such ‘borrowing’ is the image of
the glass menagerie itself, which – in real life – seems to have belonged
not to Rose but to Mrs Maggie Wingfield, a resident of Clarksdale during
Tennessee’s childhood years. Mrs Wingfield, who was obviously the
source for the name of the family in Menagerie, used to keep her
collection of glass animals on display in her front window. This fact,
discovered by Williams’s authorised biographer Lyle Leverich, contradicts
Williams’s own story – sometimes told in interviews – that Rose had
indeed kept glass animals, and that he had helped add to her collection. As
Leverich points out, Williams was a notorious fabricator of such personal
stories – ‘the dramatist dramatizing himself ’ (Leverich, xxiv). According
to Rose and Thomas’s younger brother, Dakin (who has no equivalent in
Menagerie), Rose had some glass ornaments, but ‘just two or three
pieces . . . very cheap little things, probably purchased at Woolworth’s’.4
Williams seems to have extrapolated from this small detail, marrying it
with the memory of Mrs Wingfield’s window, to create a symbolic
representation of (as he himself put it) ‘the fragile, delicate ties that must
be broken, that you inevitably break, when you try to fulfil yourself ’
(quoted Devlin, 10).
The danger of causing damage in the process of trying to fulfil
yourself is further emphasised in the play’s narrative by virtue of another
notable deviation from Williams’s own family history. In Menagerie,
Tom’s father – the ‘telephone man who fell in love with long distance’ –
has long since abandoned his family, leaving them to the untender mercy
of fate in order to follow his own dreams. In real life, however, Cornelius
Williams traded his telephone job for one with a shoe company (which is
why young Thomas was able to find work with them), and stayed for the
rest of his life in St Louis. He never did leave his family, even though he
and his wife were constantly fighting – at considerable cost to the
emotional stability of their children. Williams, by effectively rewriting his
family’s history as if his father had left them, achieves several dramatic
purposes. For one thing, he is able to concentrate more tightly on depicting
the remaining three members of the Wingfield family, who are each
haunted in different ways by the absence of the father-figure. For another,
he is able to render the father as a mysteriously romantic figure, a roamer
of the world, rather than the stuffily unimaginative working man that
Cornelius seems to have been. Tom thus has a father-figure whom he can
aspire to emulate – and yet at the same time, the father’s selfish desertion
of his family has entrapped Tom more tightly than Williams himself ever
was. Tom has to be the main breadwinner for the family, and his own
struggle over whether or not to leave thus has far greater consequences
than it actually did for Williams. His mother and sister will be deprived of
an income by his departure, and Tom himself will thus inevitably be
haunted by guilt at leaving them.
Of all the play’s rearrangements of historical fact, arguably the most
telling is Williams’s decision to locate the dramatic action very
specifically around 1937 and 1938. These years are clearly alluded to by
Tom’s various oblique narratorial references to the bombing of Guernica,
the Spanish Civil War, and Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease
Hitler. However, the period of Williams family history which the play
draws on was actually much earlier in the decade (around 1932–4). By
1938, the Williamses had moved out of Enright Avenue into a better home,
Tennessee was at university in Iowa, and Rose had been committed to a
sanatorium for the mentally unstable. The decision to locate the play in
this year suggests two motives on Williams’s part, the one obvious and the
other far more private. Clearly, there is a wish to relate the events of the
play to the broader historical realities of 1938, with the sense of
foreboding and the threat of war which seemed to be in the air at that time:
Williams wanted to parallel the domestic crisis of the play with far greater
crises in the world at large, creating an interwoven narrative of public and
private calamity. Moreover, as Christopher Bigsby has pointed out, the
allusion to Chamberlain – the British Prime Minister who thought he had
secured ‘peace in our time’ by dealing with Hitler – ‘is an invitation to
read the events of the play ironically’. With historical hindsight and
distance, we see that, in their own ways, each of Williams’s characters is
as guilty as Chamberlain of blinding himself or herself to the stark
realities of their situation, and of indulging ‘the desire to live with
comforting fictions, rather than confront brutal truths, a doomed and
ultimately deadly strategy’ (Bigsby, 1997, 35).
On a still more personal level, the choice of 1937–8 also perhaps
implies that Williams is attempting to deal, in his own allusive way, with
the greatest tragedy of his family life – Rose’s descent into schizophrenia.
It was this event, more than any other, which troubled Williams for the
rest of his life, not only because of his own helplessness to do anything
about it, but also because of a sense of guilt: he himself had been too
preoccupied at this period – in trying to complete his stop-start university
career and to find publishers for his writing – to be of much assistance to
Rose at the time when she most needed his love and help. In subsequent
years, Williams repeatedly attempted to exorcise the memory of his
sister’s decline through his writing, and it can be no mere coincidence that
Tom Wingfield’s abandoning of his helpless, shy sister to face the future
alone shares exactly the same historical timetable as Tennessee Williams’s
failure to prevent his schizophrenic sister being committed to a
sanatorium. (Rose was to remain institutionalised for the rest of her long
life.)
The Glass Menagerie, then, can be read on one level as an attempt to
find a way of dramatising the undramatisable. Not wishing to humiliate
his beloved sister further by depicting Laura as insane, Williams
imaginatively translated the memories of Rose’s decline into a different,
quieter kind of tragedy. The depiction of Laura’s shyness and
vulnerability – of the shattering of her tiny unicorn and of her fragile
hopes for love – stands in as a kind of personal metaphor for the still more
delicate state of Rose’s mind. (Laura’s crippled leg is also, of course,
indicative of her fundamental difference and isolation from the rest of the
world.) Crucially, though, Laura’s situation is also far more
comprehensible to an audience than is actual madness: we can sympathise
with her as a person with acute emotional difficulties, whereas a
schizophrenic character on stage would inevitably be viewed as something
frighteningly alien to most people’s experience. By hitting on the story of
the gentleman caller, Williams found a way not only to face his own
family’s demons but also to translate them into terms which seem
universally accessible and applicable. That, surely, is a hallmark of great
writing.

Earlier Versions
An examination of Williams’s various writings in the years preceding the
appearance of The Glass Menagerie demonstrates that he struggled long
and hard to find a satisfactory way of translating his sister’s story into
fictional terms. An early, unpublished one-act play titled If You Breathe, It
Breaks tells the story of Mrs Wingfield and her three children (a girl and
two boys), and focuses on the daughter’s love for her glass menagerie and
her mother’s attempts to find her a gentleman caller. Similarly, a short
story titled ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ tells a tale almost identical to the
one in Menagerie: many lines which eventually appeared in the play were
first used here, and the closing paragraphs were adapted with little
alteration to become Tom’s closing speech. One noticeable difference
between these early treatments of the story and Menagerie itself, however,
is that the sketches actually give us more information about ‘Laura’ – her
personality and character – than does the play. In If You Breathe, It Breaks,
for instance, the daughter rejects her mother’s attempts to find her a caller,
saying that she prefers to be a ‘front porch girl’ and watch boys go by
without them coming to see her. In ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass’, Jim comes
to call and Laura is let down just as in the play, but she seems eerily calm
and unaffected by his revelation about his fiancée Betty, commenting
simply that ‘People in love take everything for granted’ (Williams,
1967, 111). This and other moments in the story suggest that this Laura is
rather otherworldly, or perhaps even a little simple. She asks at one point,
for example, whether real stars actually have five points like the ones on
Christmas trees. The narration also describes her fascination with a
romantic novel called Freckles, which she reads parts of over and over
again, apparently because she is strangely in love with the story’s hero.
(This is the equivalent of Menagerie’s focus on Laura’s yearbook and on
the pictures of Jim it contains. In the last scene of Menagerie, Laura even
refers to Jim as ‘Freckles’, a hangover from the earlier story.) Such
touches, however endearing, also make the Laura of the story version seem
more than a little odd. Perhaps they were quite faithful to Williams’s
experience of his sister’s own oddness, but he seems to have realised that,
by having Laura say less – thus making her less odd and more
mysteriously shy – the play would be more profoundly affective for an
audience.
Biographical accounts indicate that Rose herself was in fact anything
but quiet and restrained. Though undoubtedly very vulnerable, she
apparently ‘looked and talked’ very much like her mother – that is, she
would chatter away incessantly just as Amanda does in the play
(Leverich, 77). As a young woman, she had no shortage of young men
wishing to date her, and she recorded lists of them in her journal, but none
seems to have shown sustained interest – partly, it seems, because of her
nervous chattering. By age twenty-four, an unmarried virgin, she was
growing desperate enough that she even sexually propositioned one of her
dates (a colleague of Thomas’s from the shoe company, in fact). At the
time, this was an unforgiveable breach of social customs: according to
their brother Dakin, Thomas was sufficiently shocked by Rose’s actions to
corner her at home and tell her, loudly, that she disgusted him (see
Leverich, 142). Given this information, it is perhaps not surprising to
discover that, in the years prior to writing The Glass Menagerie, Williams
created several short pieces which seem to allude to the more unsettling,
sexually provocative or taboo-breaking side of Rose’s behaviour and
incipient schizophrenia. A short story entitled The Dark Room (1940), for
example, depicts an Italian mother explaining to a social worker that her
‘crazy’ daughter never comes out of her permanently darkened bedroom.
Eventually she reveals that the girl is regularly visited in the dark by an
ex-boyfriend, and that as a result she is pregnant. This is a bizarre,
grotesquely funny little piece haunted by the implications of madness.
Two other short plays deal more seriously with sexually provocative
young women perceived from their brother’s point of view. The Long
Goodbye (1940) depicts a young man sitting in the same apartment as
Menagerie is set in, watching removal men take away the furniture and
reminiscing about his sister, whom he sees as if in a dream. Some
unnamed fate seems to have befallen her, as a result of which she has lost
all self-control: ‘I used to have high hopes for you, Myra. But not any
more. You’re goin’ down the toboggan like a greased pig. Take a look at
yourself in the mirror. [You look] like a whore, a cheap one’ (Williams,
1945, 176). The Purification (1940) – a strangely poetic one-act fable
which seems heavily influenced by Lorca’s Blood Wedding – also depicts a
young man conjuring up his now vanished sister from memory, but here
the girl’s loss is lamented in poetry. The language strongly suggests that
Williams was thinking of Rose’s madness when he wrote this piece: ‘For
nothing contains you now, / no, nothing contains you, / lost little girl, my
sister, / not even those – little – blue veins / that carried the light to your
temples’ (Williams, 1945, 59–60). The twist in this play is that the young
man seems to have had an incestuous affair with his sister, a crime for
which he finally decides to take his own life. Williams was to comment in
later years that his relationship with Rose had indeed bordered on a kind of
sexless incest – that their attachment to each other was the deepest one in
either’s life, and ‘perhaps very pertinent to our withdrawal from
extrafamiliar attachments’ (quoted Leverich, 142).
For many, the most touching of these early one-act plays is This
Property Is Condemned, in which a young boy named (again) Tom
encounters a girl named Willie on a deserted railway embankment. Willie,
Williams tells us in his stage directions, ‘is a remarkable
apparition . . . dressed in outrageous cast-off finery. . . . There is something
ineluctably childlike and innocent in her appearance despite the make-up.
She laughs frequently and wildly with a sort of ferocious, tragic abandon’
(Williams, 1945, 197). This seems to be his most direct attempt to
dramatise, in metaphoric terms, his sister’s schizophrenic condition, and
the result is an eerily affectionate portrait of someone who exists
completely outside the normal human world. Willie talks wildly about
how she is now homeless, cast out of the house in which she grew up,
which now bears a sign, ‘This Property is Condemned’. The label seems to
apply as much to the character as to the building.
An analysis of these various short plays leads to the necessary
conclusion that the character of Laura in The Glass Menagerie is not, as
some commentators have suggested, simply an attempt to dramatise Rose
straightforwardly, as Williams remembered her. Rather, Laura is just one
manifestation of Williams’s many, varied attempts to exorcise his sister’s
memory. Still other, later variations on the same theme include Cathy in
Suddenly Last Summer (1958), who is held in a mental hospital and is in
danger of being lobotomised – as was Rose – if she does not stop
‘babbling’. Laura is in fact one of the quietest and most seemingly sane of
Williams’s many troubled young women, and the one with whom – as has
been noted – audiences seem most able to empathise. One might even
argue that Williams himself seems to understand more about Laura than
he does about some of his other young female characters. If that is the
case, it might well be because he – like many audience members after
him – was able to project something of his own vulnerability and shyness
onto this strangely quiet character.
 Indeed, the available evidence suggests that Laura is based as much on
the young Tennessee as she is on Rose. Most notably, the entire scenario of
her tragically unrequited love for Jim is one which draws directly on
Williams’s adoration of Hazel Kramer, rather than on any infatuation of
Rose’s. Williams and Hazel were inseparable friends throughout most of
their teenage years, and he was apparently convinced that the two of them
would eventually marry and start a family. This, obviously, was before he
had come to terms with his homosexuality, but even in later years
Williams would describe Hazel as ‘the great extra-familial love of my
life’ (quoted Leverich, 72). Hazel did not, however, feel the same way
about him. Instead she met and fell in love with Ed Meisenbach, who was
taller and much better looking than young Thomas, and the two of them
eventually married. According to his biographers, it took Williams years
to come to terms with Hazel’s ‘betrayal’, years during which he was
perceived by many as acutely shy and withdrawn. Understandably then, in
The Glass Menagerie, Williams seems to be attempting an exorcism of
these events too, at the same time as exploring his sense of guilt and
responsibility in regard to Rose. With the sexes reversed, the character Jim
O’Connor is as much Hazel Kramer as he is Jim Connor the fraternity
man, and Ed Meisenbach is even worked mischievously into the play as
‘Emily Meisenbach’, the ‘kraut-head’ whom Jim was supposedly due to
marry after high school. Given such information, one might speculate that
the closeness of the relationship between Tom and Laura can be
interpreted as reflecting the interdependence shared by two parts of the
same psyche – with Tom as the controlled, ironic, public voice of the poet,
and Laura as his private loneliness and vulnerability (a contrast of the
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sides of one self?). But perhaps that would be
to venture too far into the realms of psychoanalysis. The real interest of
the play, after all, lies not in any window it opens to the writer’s mind, but
in the way that an audience can connect these characters with feelings and
experiences of their own.

Theatrical Magic

The deft touch with which Williams rewrote and restructured his private
family history to create a more universally accessible narrative was
mirrored, very importantly, by the similarly free-handed approach he took
in rewriting the rulebook of theatrical convention. Considered in relation
to the staid, naturalistic fare which was standard in the American theatre
in the 1940s, The Glass Menagerie constituted a minor revolution of
stylistic innovation, and the play’s originality in that time helps to explain
why, in many ways, it still seems so fresh today, more than half a century
later. ‘In this play’, the New York Times critic Clive Barnes commented
when reviewing the 1975 Broadway revival, ‘there was once a new dawn
for the American theatre. And, naturally, dawns always survive’ (quoted
Arnott, 22–3).
That new dawn, it should be noted, had been preceded by a false dawn
or two. Williams, always the experimentalist, had pushed his instinct for
theatricality rather too far in writing what became his first full-length,
professionally produced play, Battle of Angels. This complex allegory of
good, evil and the struggles of the creative spirit proved too bewildering
for audiences when first mounted in Boston in 1940, and the production
was cancelled before its intended move to Broadway. Part of the problem
had been the play’s over-reliance on elaborate stage effects which created
a minefield of possible technical hitches (the cue sheet reportedly called
for ‘endless sound effects, drums, guns, lightning and thunder, offstage
pinball machines, wind, rain, guitars, songs, “hound-dawgs” and musical
noises’: quoted Leverich, 391). Indeed, on one night of the short-lived run,
a pyrotechnic device almost torched the audience. Williams had to wait a
full four years before The Glass Menagerie gave him a second chance at
mainstream recognition, and in this play he applied the painful lessons of
Battle of Angels by creating a far subtler, less bombastic piece which
would stand or fall on the quality of the writing and acting rather than on
the efficiency of the stage management.
The primary innovation of Menagerie lay in its very simplicity.
Williams’s notebooks for the period leading up to his writing of the play
include an important meditation on his struggle to find a new working
method. Most conventionally realistic theatre, he believed, was dull and
prosaic, and his concern was to create a kind of stage poetry, which had
accounted for the overreaching ambition of Battle of Angels. He had
concluded, however, that he needed to seek ‘apocalypse without delirium’,
by exploring muted understatement rather than elaborate spectacle: ‘I have
evolved a new method which in my own particular case may turn out to be
a solution. I call it the “sculptural drama”. . . . I visualize it as a reduced
mobility on stage, the forming of statuesque attitudes or tableaux,
something resembling a restrained type of dance, with motions honed
down to only the essential or significant’ (quoted Leverich, 446). It was
from this principle that Williams derived the episodic structure for The
Glass Menagerie: rather than adhering to the then-conventional practice of
presenting a play’s action in two or three extended acts, he broke his
narrative down into seven scenes, each of which could serve to depict a
distilled, ‘sculptural’ image of a situation, a relational dynamic between
characters. These scenes rarely call for much physical action, and to
prevent them becoming merely dully static, great precision is required
from directors in creating on stage the kind of moving portraiture which
Williams calls for, so as to encapsulate visually the emotional
circumstances of each scene. Some of his stage directions help to
emphasise this point explicitly. At the beginning of Scene Five, for
example, he writes of Amanda and Laura ‘removing dishes from the table
in the dining room . . . their movements formalized almost as a dance or
ritual, their moving forms as pale and silent as moths’ (38). At the end of
Scene Seven, Amanda is described as sitting with Laura in a silent tableau
in which the only movements are her ‘slow and graceful, almost dancelike
[gestures], as she comforts her daughter’ (96).
The charged stillness and deliberate understatement of the play helps
to focus the audience’s attention on the subtleties of the immediate
moment. The forward narrative thrust of most conventional, realistic
drama is thus suspended – at least partially – and we are enabled to find a
heightened awareness of both the visual presence and emotional
undercurrents of the scene at hand. When Menagerie first appeared, this
technique caused some bewilderment among critics, who were unable to
account for the strange power of a play whose plot seemed so simple and
even uneventful: ‘The lack of action in The Glass Menagerie is a bit
baffling at first’, noted the New York Herald Tribune, ‘but it becomes of no
consequence as one gets to know the family’.5 The process of ‘getting to
know’ the family is assisted greatly by the peculiar intimacy created by
the play’s relative stillness. ‘Be prepared to listen and not cough’, New
York Daily News critic John Chapman warned his readers in 1945, ‘else
everybody but [Jim, played by Anthony] Ross will be almost inaudible in
the back of the house. But I would not have it otherwise. A higher key
might dispel the enchantment.’ As Chapman implies, the quietness was
not a result of flawed performances, but of the play itself, which needs to
be played so delicately. The extended tableau of Scene Seven, in
particular, in which Jim and Laura barely move from their seats on the
floor around the candelabrum, has to create the illusion of being a deeply
private conversation between two people sitting only inches away from
each other. The scene is still frequently described by reviewers as both the
highlight of the play and the point at which audiences are held in a kind of
rapt silence, as they strain to hear a conversation which must necessarily
be pitched in as hushed a tone as the theatre’s physical size will permit.
In short, then, Williams’s concern in writing The Glass Menagerie was
to avoid the usual, mundane trappings of conventional stage realism (a
manner in which, unfortunately, it is often presented), and instead arrive at
a kind of heightened, intensified emotional reality through the play’s use
of tight focus and ‘sculptural’ stillness. As he says in the production notes
preceding the published text, his concern is not with creating the
‘photographic likeness’ of a family’s life, in a ‘straight realistic play with
its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes’, but with achieving ‘a more
penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are’. As if to trumpet
this point from the very start, Tom declares in his opening monologue that
the play ‘is not realistic’: rather, it attempts to evoke the hazy atmosphere
of memory, and to achieve this, Tom explains, it uses dim, ‘sentimental’
lighting and background music to underscore scenes (common in cinema
but not theatre). Technical stage devices are thus employed in a far subtler
but no less significant way than they were in Battle of Angels. As Williams
stresses in his production notes, the lighting and music are no mere
appendages to the play but an integral part of his concern to create ‘a new,
plastic theatre’ – by which he means a theatre that provides a three-
dimensional sensory experience, as opposed to being primarily verbal or
literary.
In America in the mid-1940s, Williams’s staging ideas were highly
unusual, but their successful employment in a play which proved so
popular meant that Menagerie became extremely influential. The use of
evocative music, atmospheric lighting and semi-transparent sets to create
a heightened, even dream-like, new form of stage realism – which became
known internationally, for a time, as ‘the American Style’ – was first seen
in Menagerie, and then subsequently developed in other Williams plays
such as A Streetcar Named Desire, and by other playwrights like Arthur
Miller, who freely acknowledges the profound influence of Williams’s
work on the development of his own ideas for Death of a Salesman. One of
the key staging devices in all these works was the use of gauze scenery,
which when lit from the front can create the illusion of a solid wall, but
which can then vanish almost completely when lit from behind. Williams
made explicit use of this device in writing the stage directions for
Menagerie, so that scenes behind the gauze could appear or dissolve
magically, as they might in one’s memory. Jo Mielziner, the legendary
American set and lighting designer who worked on the premiere
productions of all Williams’s and Miller’s most famous plays, once stated
that, if Williams ‘had written plays in the days before the technical
development of translucent and transparent scenery, I believe he would
have invented it.’ Such devices, Mielziner stressed, ‘were not just another
stage trick’ when used by Williams, but ‘a true reflection of the
contemporary playwright’s interest in – and at times obsession with – the
exploration of the inner man’ (quoted Bigbsy, 1984, 49–50).
That phrase ‘the inner man’ was a familiar one among artists of the first
half of the twentieth century, not least because of the emergence – first in
Germany and then, in different forms, elsewhere – of ‘expressionism’.
This was an aesthetic approach used in theatre, film and painting, which
involved a rejection of the everyday surfaces of realism in favour of
nightmarish imagery suggesting an outward ‘expression’ of the ‘inner life’
of either the artist or of the drama’s protagonist. Typically, expressionist
works were characterised by the use of heavily symbolic settings, stark
black and white lighting, looming shadows, and so forth, to evoke a sense
of inner, psychic turmoil (or angst, to use the German word). Williams
was exposed to such ideas early on in his artistic formation (it is known,
for example, that his high school mounted a production of Eugene
O’Neill’s expressionist play The Hairy Ape in 1931), and they seem to
have been very important to him: in his production notes for Menagerie he
refers to ‘expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama’
as helping inspire his concern to create a ‘new plastic theatre’. Menagerie
itself can be seen as expressionist insofar that it explores Tom’s inner
turmoil by depicting his memories – obviously an ‘expression’ of his inner
mind – with the help of appropriately ‘dreamlike’ lighting and sound.
 However, this is not an expressionist play per se, any more than it is a
straightforwardly realistic one. For while expressionism would normally
assume a tight, central focus on the struggles of the central character (as is
the case, for instance, with The Hairy Ape), Tom is in many ways the
character least central to the play’s narrative action (which focuses on
Amanda’s attempts to find a gentleman caller for Laura, and the results of
the caller’s visit). Moreover, in Scene Three, at the point when Tom is
having his most impassioned row with his mother, Williams specifies that
Laura is to be lit more clearly than either of them, as if her reactions to the
fight should be the real centre of attention. This is a good example of
Williams’s repeated use in the play of a kind of split focus effect, whereby
the audience’s attention is drawn in two directions at once, allowing a
choice of what to look at. This strategy, as the critic David Savran has
astutely pointed out, is antithetical to expressionism, and seems to have
more in common with surrealism (see Savran, 94–6). This was another
school of modernist aesthetics which was concerned less with the idea of
expressing a central, governing consciousness than with the way that the
workings of the subconscious mind – experienced through dreams and the
spontaneous connections of memory – can seem both entirely irrational
and strangely appropriate, producing images that are laterally linked by
some hidden, subliminal logic. One need only look at the paintings of
René Magritte or Salvador Dali to see how multiple images or
contradictory ideas can co-exist in the same pictorial space, so as to create
not a centrally focused image but a kind of dream landscape.
The clearest indication of The Glass Menagerie’s ‘surrealist’ side is
Williams’s directions for the use of magic lantern slides during the
performance of the play; he suggests various captions and images which
are to be projected onto a section of the stage set’s (semi-transparent)
walls. Clearly this device extends his use of split focus, as the audience’s
attention will sometimes be drawn away from the actors to the projections,
but for this very reason Williams’s suggestions for projections are almost
always ignored by producers. Eddie Dowling, directing the premiere
production, dispensed with them because he believed they were too
strange and unwieldy, and although Williams still insisted on having them
included in the published script, it has often been assumed that Dowling
was correct, and that the author had not really thought his ideas through
properly. Some critics have even suggested that Williams’s interest in this
device represented a misguided attempt to borrow from the German
political theatre of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Williams had had
personal experience, in the early 1940s, of working with Piscator at New
York’s New School for Social Research, but he came to despise Piscator
and his methods. Although he was perhaps inspired by the German
director’s use of film sequences and titles in his plays, his own interest in
such devices had very little in common with Piscator’s attempts to drum a
political message into his audiences by using, for instance, documentary
film footage. Rather, Williams’s suggestions for his magic lantern slides
indicate an extension of his concern for the creation of a highly
atmospheric theatrical experience.
Magic lanterns are an early form of slide projection which produce
quite hazy, unfixed images. Playing on this quality, Williams outlines a
series of titles and images which suggest an attempt to evoke something of
the evocative, illogical logic of dreams, rather than the political
didacticism of Piscator. For example, the very first projection, in Scene
One, is ‘Ou sont les neiges’, which is part of a famous line by the French
poet Villon: ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ The phrase translates as ‘Where
are the snows of yesteryear?’, and for those familiar with it, it would
automatically conjure a certain sense of nostalgia, as it does in its original
context. Even for those unfamiliar with the source (or even with French),
there is an oddly evocative feel to the phrase. Williams is using it as a
kind of shorthand to generate in his audience the kind of wistful emotions
which are associated with nostalgic remembrance. And yet at the same
time, his fragmenting of the quote, and its repetition later in the same
scene, in its entirety, creates a strange sense of disjuncture: the phrase
seems oddly broken, but recurs insistently, just as – in dreams – words
sometimes nag at us which seem both obscure and eerily significant.
A similar use of repetition occurs in Scene Two. At the start of the
scene, an image of blue roses is projected on the screen. Blue roses do not,
of course, exist in real life, and the projection of the image is bound to
provoke questions for audiences because it precedes any mention of blue
roses in the dialogue itself (Laura explains later in the scene that this was
Jim’s nickname for her in high school). However, when the words are
eventually mentioned, the spectator’s mind is likely to connect back to the
floating, poetic image of blue roses seen previously. Williams thus creates
a strange, elliptical link between present and past moments, looping
backwards in time rather than obeying the usual, logical linearity of
dramatic narrative.
Throughout the play, the use of projections operates in suggestive ways
like this, opening up strange connections and resonances rather than
making specific, definable points. Titles are also used to provide a kind of
ironic commentary on the dramatic action – as for instance when Jim
informs Amanda that he already has a steady girlfriend. A caption reading
‘the sky falls’ accompanies Amanda’s stunned pause, underlining just how
much this means to her in a manner which is both mischievously witty and
oddly moving. It should be noted that not all of Williams’s projection
ideas are as telling as this, partly because he never had the chance to see
them ‘road-tested’ in production and so amend the text appropriately. He
does, however, specify that productions should experiment with and
extrapolate from his suggestions. The common decision to dismiss the
projections as an inappropriate appendage to the action is unfortunate,
because a whole dimension of Williams’s conception for the play is thus
lost. Even audiences of the acclaimed London production of 1995 (which
experimented with staging in various innovative ways) only saw a
watered-down version of the projection idea: the director Sam Mendes
opted to use title captions at the beginning of each scene (some of them
different from those in the script), but not to try out any of the other
phrases or images suggested by Williams.
It is sometimes possible, however, in smaller-scale productions, to see
all Williams’s ideas put into practice. In the interests of seeing what might
happen if the projection device were given a chance, I myself chose to
direct a production in 1999 in which the projections were an integral part
of the show. Instead of a magic lantern, we used modern video technology
to create fluid, dream-like image sequences inspired by Williams’s
suggestions. Audience reactions to the production made it clear that we
had successfully disproved the conventional assumption that the
projections would distract from, rather than enhance, the actors’
performance of the dialogue. The critic for Glasgow’s Herald newspaper
commented that the production had brought ‘yet another layer to an
already multi-faceted play, without detracting from the vital fragility that
is the drama’s core’. For me, that judgement demonstrates that Williams
knew exactly what he was doing in his suggestions for the play’s staging.
Menagerie draws on and hybridises elements of realism, expressionism
and surrealism to create what is still – more than fifty years on – a highly
original theatrical experience.

Playing the Roles

As should by now be clear, The Glass Menagerie has to be seen in

production in order for one to gain a full impression of Williams’s vision.
The play as written is simply the blueprint for a visual, sculptural, musical
event, a fully conceived example of ‘a new plastic theatre’. Simply to read
the words on the page is akin to reading the score of a concerto without
actually hearing it. That said, it should also be stressed that the successful
presentation of The Glass Menagerie’s ‘vital fragility’ on stage depends,
above all, on the work of the actors. No amount of inventiveness in
direction or design will help a production if the characters are not
presented persuasively.
To an extent, of course, that is true of any play, but it is especially true
of a piece requiring such restrained understatement in its performance.
Menagerie calls for a uniformly strong, ensemble cast (as opposed to a
cast dominated by one or two stars), in which each actor is able to make
apparent the many different sides of his or her character. Williams’s notion
of a ‘sculptural’ drama is useful in underlining the fact that this play
operates to present each character from a number of different
perspectives – almost as if the audience were moving around a three-
dimensional sculpture to gain a complete picture of it. Viewed from one
angle, for example, Amanda might appear to be an oppressive, selfish
monster of a mother, yet from another she seems deeply caring. The key to
any production of this play lies in the actors’ ability to create the kind of
heart-rendingly human portraits which allow us to understand and even
sympathise with each character, as well as seeing clearly his or her flaws
and mistakes. Ultimately, what makes The Glass Menagerie so moving is
that it presents neither villains nor victims, but four characters who are all
seeking, in their own ways, to ‘do the right thing’. The desperate irony of
the situation is that their seeking – so often at cross-purposes – leads them
inexorably to create their own small tragedy.

Amanda
Amanda is the most obviously complex and multifaceted of these
characters, and Williams acknowledges as much in his initial character
notes. His description of ‘a little woman of great but confused vitality’
immediately indicates some of her contradictions, as does his note that
‘there is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as to
laugh at’. In Amanda, Williams presents us, unapologetically, with a
detailed portrait of his own mother, Edwina Dakin Williams. His own
conflicted feelings toward a woman he both adored and resented are
readily apparent here. Whereas all the other characters in Menagerie are –
as has been noted – creatively adapted from their real-life counterparts,
the biographical evidence suggests that Amanda’s characterisation
represents a fairly direct attempt on Williams’s part to portray Edwina as
he saw her, in all her complexity. Edwina herself often denied any
connection to the character, but at other times would reportedly play up
the link for her own benefit – a pattern of contradiction which would be
plausible coming from Amanda herself. Certainly almost every detail of
the characterisation is consistent with Amanda’s real-life model – from
her incessant chattering to her moments of desolation, from her romantic
attachment to the old South to her discomfort in St Louis, from her loudly
voiced dissatisfaction with her husband to her reminiscences about her one
true lost love (Duncan J. Fitzhugh in the play; John Singleton in real life:
see Leverich, 31). According to his brother Dakin, Williams’s depiction of
Amanda was so true to life that Edwina could have sued him for
plagiarism: he claims that not only turns of phrase but also entire speeches
(such as Amanda’s opening monologue about not eating too fast) were
lifted almost verbatim from Edwina’s repertoire (see Leverich, 567).
Williams’s sheer attention to detail in creating this portrait meant that
the character of Amanda was at the very heart of the play as originally
conceived. After Williams submitted an early treatment to his agent,
Audrey Wood, she encouraged him to concentrate his attention on
Amanda, and Williams replied that ‘yes, the central and most interesting
character is certainly Amanda and in the writing the focus would be on her
mainly’ (quoted Leverich, 509). Sure enough, Amanda dominates the stage
for large portions of the play, with her chattering monologues and her
forceful arguments with her children. And yet she is not, in the final
analysis, ‘the central character’: a play’s protagonist needs to be seen to go
on an emotional journey and, finally, to be somehow changed by it, but
Amanda, of all the characters in Menagerie, is the one who changes least.
Her final, screaming rage at Tom simply reiterates all the qualities and
flaws we have seen throughout the play, as her passionate concern for her
daughter’s well-being becomes mixed up with selfishness and unthinking
cruelty (in a particularly harsh blow, she even refers to Laura as ‘a
cripple’, despite insisting throughout the play that she does not see her as
one). Williams, it seems, had to present Amanda as he saw his mother – as
an unchangeable force rather than as a dramatic subject capable of
emotional evolution. The play is written in such a way that, however much
we may come to sympathise with her – understanding that her over-
protectiveness, for example, is a result of years of having to hold the
family together by sheer force of will – we nevertheless always view
Amanda from the outside rather than as a character to identify with
directly. We see her, in short, through Tom’s eyes.
The challenge for any actor playing Amanda, therefore, is to find her
way ‘inside’ a character that the play itself seems to view from the
‘outside’ – to inhabit the part in such a way that its external pyrotechnics
seem supported by a plausible inner emotional life. For while Amanda is
certainly the ‘flashiest’ part in the play, she is also the hardest for an actor
to flesh out convincingly. She is, as one critic observes, ‘the play’s
dominating force. Her asphyxiating, over-protective concern for her
grown-up offspring combined with an irritating manner, a genteel
dottiness and a tendency to live in the past, requires an actress with a
larger than life persona and a formidable technique’ (LTR, 1995, 1279).
The play’s original production succeeded in large part thanks to the fact
that just such a person was found to play Amanda: Laurette Taylor, one of
the great stars of the American theatre, who had been out of favour with
producers for some years because of her unreliability due to alcoholism,
was persuaded to make a final, glorious ‘comeback’ to play this part. She
herself came to see her performance in Menagerie as the crowning
achievement of her career, and certainly the critics saw that first
production as being very much Taylor’s show. ‘Miss Taylor’s performance
is one of the most superb that I have ever seen in the theatre’, commented
the reviewer in New York’s Morning Telegraph, while the World
Telegram’s Burton Roscoe noted simply that ‘I can’t say anything
adequate’ to describe her: ‘You can’t describe a sunset. . . . I never hope to
see again, in the theatre, anything as perfect.’
 In subsequent years, the part of Amanda has been played by a string of
star actresses. As one of the few truly complex, challenging roles for
middle-aged women in the contemporary repertoire, it has attracted the
likes of Helen Hayes (who played Amanda in the London premiere in
1948, and then again in New York in 1956), Maureen Stapleton (who
appeared in New York productions in both 1965 and 1975), Jessica Tandy
(New York, 1983), Susannah York (London, 1989), Julie Harris (New York,
1994) and Zoë Wanamaker (London, 1995). The part has also been played
on screen by Gertrude Lawrence (1950 film version), Katharine Hepburn
(1973 television version) and Joanne Woodward (1987 film version). In
the hands of such performers, the role of Amanda has been successfully
played as the tour de force that it is, although Laurette Taylor’s
performance remains the most celebrated of all.
Today, the part of Amanda is considered the definitive depiction of the
‘ageing Southern belle’, a female type who appears in many other plays
and movies, always lamenting the loss of the old, pre-Civil War days of
debutante balls and gentlemen callers. This is so much the case that in
1994, the American playwright Christopher Durang even wrote an
affectionate parody of The Glass Menagerie entitled For Whom the
Southern Belle Tolls (in which ‘Lawrence’ receives a ‘feminine caller’
who breaks the most treasured swizzle stick in his collection). The portrait
of the mother in this play is a satirical pastiche of the stereotypical
Southern belle, but one cannot help feeling that Durang has somewhat
missed the point of Williams’s portrait of Amanda, which is already
highly satirical and ironic. Amanda, after all, must have been born in the
last decades of the nineteenth century (Edwina was born in 1884), and so
is far too young to remember the pre-War days herself (the Civil War
lasted from 1861 to 1865). Even assuming that all her romantic memories
of her youth are true, they must necessarily be memories of a Southern
culture which was, even then, looking backwards to idealised, bygone
days. Moreover, Williams makes very clear that Amanda’s memories are
themselves an inextricable mix of fact and rose-tinted fiction. His decision
to portray her attempting to peddle cheap romantic fiction over the
telephone is a further, wryly ironic touch: Amanda’s picture of herself as a
Southern belle seems to owe as much to reading pulp novels like Gone
With the Wind as it does to her actual youth. Williams, through his portrait
of Amanda, cuttingly satirises the tendency of many Southerners of his
day to romanticise a golden age that never was. He may also have been
thinking of his mother’s tendency to ‘perform’ her own constructed idea of
Southernness: the daughter of mid-Westerners from Ohio, Edwina chose to
cultivate and maintain a genteel Deep South accent throughout her life,
despite living the majority of it in urban St Louis. Clearly, any actor
playing Amanda should be careful to explore the emotional complexities
lying behind her adoption of stereotypical Southern belle behaviour, rather
than simply playing her as a comic old woman. As Williams stresses in his
character notes, she must not be played as a type, but as a distinct
individual with unique assets and flaws.
Notably, however, one aspect of Amanda’s ‘Southernness’ which
Williams does not explore in any detail in the play is her racism. Race
issues are dealt with more fully in other Williams works, but in
Menagerie, Amanda’s casual references to ‘darkies’ and ‘niggers’ pass
without comment. When the play was first written, this would simply have
been accepted as a standard (if regrettable) part of the vocabulary of a
person like Amanda: for her, blacks are simply the social inferiors she was
brought up to regard them as. Yet today – words such as ‘nigger’ are
particularly inflammatory and controversial – many people are likely to
find the play’s failure to query Amanda’s racism problematic. One option,
of course, is simply to cut or change the offending words. In 1989,
Washington DC’s Arena Stage chose this option when mounting a revival
of the play with an all-black cast. Ruby Dee, who played Amanda in that
production, rejected criticisms of the casting choice by insisting that the
play’s story could plausibly apply to a black family as well as a white one,
and that even Amanda’s memories were believable because there were, in
fact, property-owning blacks in the old South. Few reviewers found either
the production or Dee’s explanation convincing, but it is intriguing to note
that two years later, when San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theater also
presented an all-black production, the notices were much more favourable.
In this instance, not a word of the script had been cut, so a black Amanda
was heard to refer to ‘the darky’. An unsettling double focus effect was
thus created, with the play’s language appearing to be contradicted by the
visual sign of skin colour: this production did not pretend the Wingfields
were a black family, but presented a white family played by black actors.
This approach allowed for an implicit critique of Amanda’s racism to be
apparent in the very staging of the play. It was the kind of overtly
theatrical strategy which one suspects Williams himself might have
approved of.

Tom
Another controversial issue, which would never have occurred to
audiences when the play was first staged, is raised by the unanswered
question of exactly where Tom goes at night. He repeatedly insists that he
simply goes to the movies, but his story is never entirely convincing,
especially as he periodically returns to the apartment in the small hours of
the morning, blind drunk. Various critics have suggested in recent years
that Tom – like Tennessee Williams himself – might be gay, and that The
Glass Menagerie can be seen as an example of a ‘closet drama’ in which
homosexuality is never mentioned, but into which those ‘in the know’ can
read a hidden gay subtext. According to this theory, Tom’s nocturnal
activities might include attending gay bars, which would certainly help
explain why he feels unable to discuss his whereabouts with his mother.
There is, however, nothing to support this reading besides speculation,
and there are many legitimate objections to it. For one thing, Williams
himself did not begin to experiment with homosexuality until after he had
left St Louis: during the period of his life fictionalised in Menagerie, he
was still lusting hopelessly after Hazel Kramer. Accordingly, the character
Tom sometimes seems very lonely and unloved – as is most clearly
indicated by his reference in Scene Five to his voyeuristic watching of the
couples making out in the dark alleyway beside the apartment: ‘this was
the compensation for lives which passed like mine, without change or
adventure’ (39). Even so, the debate over where Tom goes at night is
indicative of the shadowy uncertainties which seem to shroud this
character: despite his being the play’s narrator and moving force, he seems
to be the one about whose motives and behaviour we can be least sure. It
could be argued that Williams, in portraying Tom as a version of his
younger self, chose to surround him with ambiguity precisely because he
himself felt very uncertain and ambiguous about his own identity at that
time. In that sense, the question of Williams’s sexual orientation – which
was clearly part and parcel of his youthful confusion and anxiety – does
perhaps have a significant, subtextual role in the play.
The critic David Savran, who has written very shrewdly on the gay
dimensions of Williams’s work in his book Communists, Cowboys and
Queers, could be summing Tom up when he refers to ‘the never-quite-
whole subject that commandeers Williams’s work’, who is ‘unable to
claim the position of “hero” or even “protagonist”. Instead, [he] is
constantly decentered and dispossessed, stumbling through a dramatic
structure that is similarly decentered and unstable’ (Savran, 98). Whereas
Amanda is an intricately drawn, fully filled-out portrait of a woman seen
from the outside, Tom is at once a character to whom we have more direct
emotional access (as the play’s narrator) and of whom we know less. His
mysteriousness is underlined, in particular, by the fact that he operates on
a hazy borderline between the past events he is describing and the
unspecified ‘present’ from which he narrates to us. In playing the role, an
actor must decide whether he is presenting two clearly distinct Toms –
older and younger – or whether in fact the older Tom is reliving the events
himself. The latter possibility would make his behaviour in the scenes
themselves even more uncertain (did he ‘really’ say this ‘back then’, or is
he rewriting his words in retrospect?), and it should be noted that it is this
latter possibility that Williams himself seems to call for in specifying that
Tom appears at the start ‘dressed as a merchant sailor’. Since the actor
playing Tom has no opportunity to change into clothes more appropriate to
his warehouse-working days (at least during the first scene), we thus see
the character enacting the events of his past while wearing the uniform of
the future career into which he will escape at the end of the play. Again, it
is a shame that this costume specification is a stage direction so often
ignored in production, because it underlines vividly the ambiguous
doubleness (or even the double vision) which seems to surround Tom
throughout the play. The younger Tom needs urgently to leave his family
and St Louis, but he also needs to stay, for Laura’s sake; the older Tom
looks back with fond nostalgia, but also with haunted guilt. As his final
speech makes particularly clear, Tom is constantly reliving the past in his
present, and the collision of those two worlds seems to be steadily driving
him to distraction.
It is interesting to note that Williams himself remained extremely
ambivalent about his portrayal of Tom in the play, agreeing with a number
of his critics that ‘the narrations are not up to the play’ (quoted
Arnott, 23). That judgement is, to say the least, a questionable one, given
that Tom’s narrations do so much to contextualise, comment on, and
ironise the events depicted in the scenes. The play would be much the
poorer (and more sentimental) without the frame of critical perspective
which the narrations place around the action. Moreover, without the
narrations, we would know still less about Tom, who remains so peripheral
to so many of the scenes – watching from the dark like the movie-viewers
he describes to Jim in Scene Six, rather than participating directly. The
opening of Scene Four, in which Tom comes home drunk at 5 a.m., is one
of the few moments in the play when our attention is focused exclusively
on Tom’s personal conflicts, and even this was a late addition to the text. It
was written by Williams to prevent the play’s first director Eddie Dowling,
who was also playing Tom, from inserting his own drunk scene to give
himself a ‘star turn’ moment. Williams later conceded that the scene he
was required to add ‘does little harm to the play’, but Lyle Leverich is
more accurate in his assessment that it is positively beneficial – that
Dowling’s instincts about what the play needed were right, even if his
methods were questionable (see Leverich, 552–3). Williams had written
Tom from such a personal, ambivalent perspective that he needed an
objective eye to point out where the character needed fleshing out a little.
In the final script, Williams strikes just the right balance between mystery
and clarity in his characterisation of Tom.

Jim
By comparison with Tom, the role of Jim seems quite straightforward. He
is, as Williams specifies in the shortest of his character notes, ‘a nice,
ordinary young man’, and that is indeed, on one level, all that needs to be
said about him. Although Tom admits, in his opening narration, to using
this character as a symbol more than a person, his comment applies more
to the idea of the gentleman caller as it is deployed through the first half
of the play than it does to Jim himself. In my own 1999 production, we
extended our non-naturalistic approach to the play by having the caller
visible through most of the first act, as a ghost-like figure standing at the
window of the apartment, and occasionally moving through the living
space. This idea, which was very effective visually, was inspired by Tom’s
description of the caller as a ‘specter’ who ‘haunted our small apartment’
(19). However, once he was on stage as Jim in Scene Six, the actor playing
Jim (Jack Fortescue) found that he had to shed all sense of ghostliness and
become very ordinary and human.
 Unlike the three Wingfields, Jim is in touch with the realities of the
outside world, and seems happy to function according to social
conventions such as climbing the career ladder and marrying a nice girl
from the same religious background. Indeed he seems, by some distance,
to be the most well-adjusted character in the play. He has apparently
experienced his fair share of disappointments, which makes him able to
sympathise with Laura, and he has dreams and ambitions for himself just
as does Tom, but he has managed not to let these haunt him. There is no
reason not to suppose that, when he leaves at the end of the play, he will go
off to lead a happy, ordinary life with Betty and find a solid (if
unspectacular) career in radio or television.
Some have argued that Jim’s ordinariness is intended by Williams to be
seen as dully oppressive, and certainly the forces of conformity are seen as
dangerously destructive in other Williams plays. It might be possible to
play Jim as a crass, rather oafish character whose jolly exclamations such
as ‘comfortable as a cow!’ and ‘Hey there Mr Light Bulb!’ seem grating,
and whose dreams of ‘Knowledge – Zzzzp! Money – Zzzzzzp! – Power!’
seem hollow and greedy (82). Yet to do so would be to miss not only the
playfulness of these lines (‘I guess you think I think a lot of myself!’), but
also to remove the emotional depth from Jim’s entire encounter with
Laura. If he were played as a blundering corporation man, Laura’s
adoration of him would seem merely foolish, and the aftermath of the kiss
between them would lack dramatic tension. An audience has to be
convinced that Jim is fundamentally a good person, and to want – for
Laura’s sake – to see a relationship between the two of them begin to
flower. The tragic irony of the situation is only apparent if we are
convinced that he is trying to ‘do the right thing’ – first, in trying to
encourage Laura and bring her out of herself (which leads him,
unwittingly, into a romantic entanglement with her), and secondly in
deciding to tell her about his fiancée Betty. He himself seems trapped by
convention at that point, having to return to his ‘steady girl’ even though
he seems to see something more indefinably radiant in the crippled Laura:
both of them thus suffer because of his basic decency.
Reviewers of the 1995 London production made a particular point of
praising Mark Dexter for his performance as Jim. According to What’s
On’s Graham Hassell, Dexter had ‘the personable ebullience of a young
James Stewart, a good-intentioned young old fogey’ (LTR, 1995, 1685).
The Financial Times critic Ian Shuttleworth concurred that ‘Jim’s smug
self-satisfaction [is] offset by a genuine warmth and sympathy’, and that
Dexter ‘is visibly “doing” Jimmy Stewart: there could be no finer model
for such a figure’ (ibid.). In the original 1945 production, Anthony Ross
was also singled out by critics – almost as often as Laurette Taylor
herself – for his remarkably sympathetic performance as Jim. According
to the Wall Street Journal, Ross ‘did the most perfect job of all’.
Interestingly, praise such as this is rarely if ever accorded to actors playing
the part of Tom, even though that role might seem, on first inspection, to
be the more significant. For where Tom always remains in the margins of
the play, a facilitator more than a star player in his own drama, Jim
controls the ebb and flow of events in the final, climactic scene between
himself and Laura – an encounter described, even as early as 1945, as ‘one
of the most amazing love scenes ever written’ (New York Journal-
American).

Laura
One of the most notable things about that crucial scene is that Jim and
Laura’s conversation is somewhat one-sided. Jim, who aspires to social
improvement through acquiring skills in public speaking, tends to talk a
lot even when he is most nervous (this much he shares with Amanda),
whereas Laura rarely speaks in anything other than short, hesitant
sentences, and several times retreats into complete silence. The great
difficulty for an actor playing Laura, throughout the play, is that the part is
primarily reactive rather than active: Laura almost always responds to the
words and actions of others rather than initiating anything herself. Her
responses, moreover, frequently come in the form of loaded silence.
Somehow, given very little to work with in terms of dialogue, the actor has
to convey an almost unearthly delicacy – to embody the most fragile and
vulnerable feelings imaginable by an audience. In this regard, playing
Laura is perhaps an even bigger challenge for an actor than playing
Amanda.
Tellingly, Williams’s intentions for the way Laura is to be perceived are
made most apparent not in his character notes (though these are well
detailed) but in his lighting suggestions. ‘The light upon Laura should be
distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light
used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas . . . where
the figures are radiant in atmosphere that is relatively dusky.’ Clearly,
while Williams saw Jim as the most bluntly realistic character in the play,
Laura – by contrast – is intended to be iridescent, representing the most
sheltered and treasured of our inner hopes. How, exactly, is an actor to
carry this off? To begin with, there are practical issues to consider, such as
not overplaying Laura’s limp. If she seems too awkward in her movements
(or even grotesquely comic, as I have seen in one misguided instance), the
audience may look at her with a pity, but will be unlikely to identify with
her directly. Williams’s insistence that Laura’s limp ‘need not be more
than suggested on the stage’ is important because it focuses attention not
on an actual physical handicap, but on an inner vulnerability: Laura feels
that her ‘clumping’ is more obvious than it is because, as Jim astutely
observes, she is suffering from an ‘inferiority complex’ – feeling herself to
be worthless in the eyes of the world.
Yet while these considerations can be discussed between director and
actor, a successful portrayal of Laura is dependent, ultimately, on casting.
An actor has to be found who can project a kind of ethereal yet vivid
presence, and this is not something which can be learnt or acquired.
Notably, in most major productions, casting directors have opted for quite
slender actresses – presumably because they can more readily appear
fragile. This was certainly true of the original Laura, Julie Haydon, in the
1945 production (Haydon eventually went on to play Amanda in a 1980
New York revival), and more recent Lauras have included waif-like figures
such as Amanda Plummer (New York, 1973), Martha Plimpton (Chicago,
1999), and Calista Flockhart – best known as the alarmingly thin star of
television’s Ally McBeal (New York, 1994). Perhaps the most celebrated
performance of Laura to date, however, was that in Sam Mendes’s 1995
London production at the Donmar Warehouse: ‘Claire Skinner delivers a
luminous performance, arousing a magnificent pity without ever becoming
simply pitiful’, commented Ian Shuttleworth (LTR, 1995, 1685). ‘The pale,
tremulous centre of this production is Claire Skinner’s Laura’, concurred
Time Out’s Jane Edwardes: ‘even when her brother and mother are having
one of their frequent rows, one’s main concern is with what effect it will
have on her’ (ibid.). Such comments suggest that Skinner’s award-winning
performance was directly in line with Williams’s intentions for the part.
Crucially, though, Skinner also demonstrated that the part requires far
more than an emphasis on either physical or mental fragility. Critics were
quick to point out the underlying strengths of the character as she played
it. Robert Butler, in the Independent on Sunday, wrote of Skinner’s
urgency and freshness, counterbalancing the usual hesitancy and
dreaminess, and stressed that, ‘above all, she has an exceptional quality of
stillness’ (LTR, 1995, 1280). It is important for any production to find
such qualities in Laura, so that she does not become merely a victim – and
so that the narrative in general does not become merely ‘sentimental’ or
‘mawkish’. This ‘tough, delicate masterpiece’ of a play (Jeremy Kingston
in The Times) is made all the more moving because ‘the playwright knew,
as so many of the subsequent directors have not, to leaven the torment
with darts of grim humour; nowhere is this more touching than when
Skinner’s Laura strives to alleviate Jim’s guilt at having accidentally
broken the horn off her favourite glass unicorn whilst dancing with her’
(Shuttleworth). The moment described here is central to the play, as Laura
forces back her desperate disappointment at the damage to her most
treasured possession, and tries to assure Jim that ‘It doesn’t matter. Maybe
it’s a blessing in disguise’ (86). She even jokes about the unicorn being
happier now that he can blend in with the other horses and appear ‘less
freakish’, and in so doing she succeeds in putting Jim at ease again despite
her own pain. This is a key example of the hidden emotional strength
which Laura demonstrates at pivotal moments throughout the play
(another one comes minutes later as she gives Jim the unicorn as ‘a
souvenir’). In performances such as Claire Skinner’s, one realises that
Laura is, paradoxically, the most resilient of the characters in the play, as
well as the most delicate.
And yet if this is the case, we must ask whether Tom’s despairing guilt
at the end of the play is justified or not. The closing narrative suggests
that, in leaving St Louis, Tom has abandoned Laura to some terrible fate of
loneliness and isolation, yet Tom can be wrong – as the play makes very
clear. Desperate regret may indeed have been Williams’s legitimate
feelings about his own sister’s committal to a mental institution, but there
is nothing in the play besides Tom’s narrative to suggest that Laura has
been consigned to a similarly hopeless fate. Indeed, if anything, the
unexpected strength she finds with which to comfort Jim for his
blundering suggests that she might be able to find it in herself to recover
from the blows she receives. Perhaps the damage Jim causes really is ‘a
blessing in disguise’. In my own 1999 production, Elly Reid – playing
Laura – found that one of the most crucial moments in deciding her
character’s fate was the ‘Yes!’ which Laura utters after Amanda asks her
whether or not she wishes the best for Jim in the future (94). This is also
Laura’s final line in the play, and if it is delivered in a downbeat or tearful
way, Laura is left appearing broken and empty. Yet if, as Elly chose to do,
Laura looks up with a smile, fighting back her own sadness in order to
bless Jim, to thank him for his goodness to her, then a quite different
possibility is registered. Perhaps, we speculate, she can now find it in
herself to ‘get over’ Jim, and move on. In our production, at the moment
in Tom’s final speech when he speaks of feeling his sister touch his
shoulder, Laura actually did step up to him, place a hand on his shoulder,
and look longingly at him as if to say – across time and space – ‘Tom,
please don’t torture yourself, I’m doing fine!’ Tom, of course, remained
lost in his own torments, but many audience members commented how
unexpectedly hopeful they found the play’s ending, as a result of the way
Elly played it.
Our approach to the play was partially inspired by Paula Killen’s one-
woman show, Still Life with Blue Roses (Chicago, 1997) – one of a
growing number of creative responses to The Glass Menagerie (others
include Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and a 1993 dance
adaptation by New York’s Classic Stage Company, intriguingly entitled
Faith Healing). Killen, clearly a great admirer of the play, took as her
starting point the fact that Laura, although central to Menagerie, never
really has the chance to speak for herself. In the first part of Still Life with
Blue Roses, she sits on a couch in a candlelit set reminiscent of that in
Menagerie, and – as Laura – explains to the audience that, while she
appreciates Tom’s efforts to write about her, she wishes that he had made
the effort to find out how she really felt about things. Killen’s wryly
amusing commentary is, implicitly, a feminist critique of the tendency of
male authors to place their female characters in silenced positions where
they seem powerless to help themselves, and are dependent on or
subjected to the actions of men (in this case, Jim and Tom, who both leave
Laura abandoned). Turning this situation on its head, Killen has her Laura
leave St Louis. Part two of Still Life is in the form of a public lecture, as
Laura presents a sequence of film clips to her audience, documenting her
attempts to move to Hollywood and make a movie of her life. Again the
presentation is both very funny (especially her attempts to get the casting
right) and very poignant, making full use of imagery and titles from
Williams’s neglected ideas for projections to form a new narrative in
which Laura takes control of her life as a modern, media-conscious
woman. The irony is – probably quite deliberately on Killen’s part – that
one is left by the end with a real sense of loss, a feeling that Laura’s fragile
uniqueness has somehow been mislaid amid the rough and tumble of
modern life, and that she (like her unicorn before her) has become ‘just
like all the others’.
Responding to Still Life with Blue Roses, I wanted to see if it was
possible to present Menagerie in such a way as to bring out a sense that
Laura, though largely silent, is still in some way the author of her own
narrative, rather than the helpless puppet of Tom’s. We discovered,
interestingly, that there are numerous points in the play which lend
themselves to this idea. Even moments as simple as when she accidentally
calls Jim ‘Freckles’ can be rendered in such a way as to suggest that such a
slip betrays a whole world of private passions which remain hidden within
her, but which might one day begin to find their way out into the world.
Still more telling, in our production, was the point in Scene Four when
Tom falls asleep, as Laura watches over him. At this point, a simple glance
from Laura up to the audience was enough to suggest that, just maybe, she
is quietly presenting us with a kind of alternative narrative to Tom’s own
story. He believes himself to be in control of the memories he is
presenting, but in moments such as those when he ‘sleeps’ or is absent
from the stage, we can perhaps glimpse another possibility.
Experiments such as this one demonstrate clearly that there are many
different ways to approach The Glass Menagerie, and many possible
readings to be found. Far from being the mawkishly sentimental piece it is
sometimes thought to be by those who have not properly explored its
many layers of emotion, wit, irony and theatrical inventiveness,
Menagerie remains a rich source of material to be tapped afresh by each
new generation of actors, directors and designers. Yet while it is
demonstrably a play which constantly lends itself to new interpretations
and adaptations, it also remains, at base, a very simple and moving
narrative about a family, which has the power to speak to us all about
memory and loss, love and hope.
Production History since 2000 (by Katherine Weiss)

Since its successful debut, The Glass Menagerie has become a favourite
for audience members across the world and an American staple in
introductory drama courses and anthologies. Williams’s 1945 memory
play remains relevant to twenty-first-century audiences despite its
references to Guernica, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression and
the film Gone with the Wind. Its popularity lies in both its economic
realities, as twenty-first-century Americans face a recession, and in its
memorable characters – a family of three struggling with their own
financial hardships. For these reasons, the play continues to be performed
on major and small stages in America, the United Kingdom and Europe.
This well-crafted play with strong characters is perfect for seasoned
actors, university students and amateurs.
Gregory Mosher’s 2004 revival of The Glass Menagerie at the Kennedy
Center in Washington DC was named a ‘fresh interpretation of a familiar’
classic by Brett Ashley Crawford. What Mosher brought out, according to
Crawford, was ‘the social and economic realities of the family’. While on
the surface, the production looked traditional, the focus on more than just
Tom’s subjected memory, for Crawford, made this production stand out.
The cast was also praised. Sally Field portrayed Amanda as ‘a hard-
working, frustrated woman and mother whose actions emerge from a
maternal desire for happiness for both her children and security for her
daughter’. Peter Marks of the Washington Post calls Field’s Amanda a
‘woman of southern refinement worn down by poverty and worry’. He also
commends Jennifer Dundas as Laura and Jason Butler as Tom, calling
them ‘marvelous foils for Field’s Amanda, pushing back when Amanda’s
will of granite threatens to crush them, yielding when the mother herself
appears ready to crumble’. Mosher’s direction was lauded by Dolores
Gregory of Curtain Up for being even-handed, ‘mining the comedy
organically from small moments – the incongruity of Amanda’s
plantation-era wardrobe in the drab apartment, the look on Tom’s face
when he inspects his mother’s attempt at redecorating’. The only criticism
reviewers such as Gregory found was in the oversized photograph of the
father hanging on the wall. She, like many reviewers, felt as though
Mosher was taking Williams’s set description too literally.
 Despite much promise, David Leveaux’s 2005 production at the Ethel
Barrymore Theatre in New York City was not well received. For Ben
Brantley of the New York Times, the production was miscast and
misdirected. Jessica Lange’s Amanda Wingfield was much more
reminiscent of Blanche DuBois; Christian Slater’s Tom was a ‘red-hot
roughneck’ rather than Williams’s poetic narrator and son; and Sarah
Paulson’s Laura was flat, registering ‘the single sustained note of an
anguished, terrified 2-year-old’. Such a Laura could hardly enchant Jim.
Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway agrees with Bentley. He points out
that the production was flawed, and noted that Slater’s performance was
stiff and stolid. Murray, unlike Bentley, recollected one salvageable
moment in the production, ‘the climatic encounter between Jim and Laura’
which he felt was ‘truly on track’. This moment was saved by Josh Lucas
(Jim) who subtly suggested Jim ‘too is trapped in the past’.
In 2007, Lange again was cast as Amanda, this time in Rupert Goold’s
production at London’s Apollo Theatre. Michael Billington of the
Guardian, too, found Lange a less than convincing Amanda, stating that
Lange ‘never persuaded [him] that she inhabited a world of fantasy’.
Likewise, other reviewers found fault with Lange, but more generally
enjoyed the production as a whole. Philip Fisher of British Theatre Guide
reminds his readers that a Hollywood star does not always make the show.
Although he was dissatisfied with Lange’s performance, he called the
show a ‘brilliant, dreamy production’ largely as a result of Paul Pyant’s
lighting design and Matthew Wright’s set design.
In 2010, the Salisbury Playhouse toured its production of The Glass
Menagerie, visiting London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow, among other
major cities in the United Kingdom. According to the Guardian’s Lyn
Gardner, the production tried too hard to be experimental, adding film
footage of Amanda as a young woman awaiting her gentlemen callers. The
film images, Gardner argues, made the play seem ‘too blowsy and way too
melodramatic’. While other reviewers agreed that the film footage was a
mistake, Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph applauded the acting,
stating that although Imogen Stubbs looked a bit young for the role, her
Amanda was splendid; she ‘catches [Amanda’s] spirit of fretful, neurotic
devotion’. Tom (Patrick Kennedy), Laura (Emma Lawndes) and Jim (Kyle
Soller) were equally well cast. All in all, this production was well received
by London theatre critics.
 In spite of the success of the Salisbury Playhouse, London’s Young Vic
Theatre, only months thereafter, went on to stage their own production of
Williams’s classic. London theatre critics unanimously applauded Joe
Hill-Gibbins’s production. Among the attributes of the production was its
fidelity to the author’s intentions. Even Michael Billington of the
Guardian, perhaps the only critic not wholly satisfied, acknowledged that
he could ‘forgive the production’s dutiful obeisance towards the gratuitous
expressionist trappings’ because ‘[a]ll this is exactly what Williams
wanted’. The acting, too, was admired. Paul Taylor of the Independent, for
example, noted that ‘Sinéad Matthews and Kyle Soller [who had just
completed the role in the Salisbury Playhouse production] are beyond
praise in the climatic, candle-lit scene in which the fragile romantic hopes
of Laura are raised and then dashed by the gentleman caller’s well-
meaning but ill-considered attention’. Charles Spenser of the Telegraph
like Taylor, expressed his gratitude for a ‘terrific cast’ which does ‘this
beautiful play proud’.6 Sarah Hemming of the Financial Times, among
other reviewers, praised Deborah Findlay’s Amanda, noting that she
‘makes Amanda a complex composition of delusion and pragmatism,
beadily busy and then unbearably sad’. Reviewers also commended Leo
Bill’s Tom for, as Paul Taylor noted, capturing ‘the character’s cabin fever
and frantic frustration’. Spencer applauded Bill’s decision to base Tom
Wingfield on Williams, ‘the artist as a young man, with nervy intensity
and moments of raw pain and anger, capturing both the aching love of the
brother for his sister and the frustration of the writer who longs to escape
this claustrophobic home for wider horizons beyond’.
In 2009 to 2010, the Long Wharf Theatre Company in New Haven took
their production of the play to Off-Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre and
Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum Theatre. Charles McNulty, writing for
the Los Angeles Times, praised Judith Ivey, as did most reviewers, for
stealing the show; her Amanda was so natural it was ‘almost Darwinian’.
Equally pleased with her performance, Charles Isherwood of the New York
Times, wrote of Ivey’s performance: ‘The lively allure of the flirt Amanda
once was still shines in her girlish smiles, piping laughter and ebullient
lapses into reveries on the golden days of her youth.’ In addition to Ivey’s
performance, many reviewers noted the director Gordon Edelstein’s
changes to the script. McNulty posited that Patch Darragh embodiment of
Tom as a ‘gay man who has yet to fully acknowledge his secret to himself ’
was an effective new interpretation. Finding this and other changes
refreshing, Charles Isherwood, Paul Hodgins and Charles McNulty
favoured Edelstein’s transformation of Tom as a writer creating the
characters for us while he types away in his New Orleans residence.
However, Carol Jean Delmar of Opera Theater Ink argued that the
rewriting of the older Tom ‘diminishes the impact of the climax found in
the original version’. Tom has succeeded in becoming a writer in
Edelstein’s version whereas in Williams’s original, Tom may still be
struggling.
Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Company worked with Northwestern
University graduate directing and design students for their 2012
production of The Glass Menagerie. Other than some grumbling over
Aaron Roman Weiner’s Tom who was ‘a bit monotonous, and doesn’t feel
as natural in the space as the others’ according to Paul Kubicki of Stage
and Cinema and that Weiner and Kathy Scambiatterra (Amanda)
‘occasionally confuse[d] Williams’[s] poetry for complicated southern
pastoralism’ according to Johnny Oleksinski of New City Stage, the
production received positive reviews. Oleksinski recommended the
production, stating that not only is the Steppenwolf Garage a ‘terrifically
appropriate space’, but also the ‘classic Gentleman Caller scene . . . is
gloriously realized in director Laley Lippard’s claustrophobic production’.
Shortly after the Steppenwolf ’s run ended, Chicagoans could once again
see Williams’s fragile family play. The Mary-Arrchie Theatre production
of Williams’s classic is a different beast altogether. This experimental
production, featuring the older Tom Wingfield as a bearded, grizzly
homeless man haunted by the past, was highly recommended by reviewers
and loved by audiences. Mary Shen Barnidge of the Windy City Times
poignantly wrote, ‘You won’t find a single classroom cliché anywhere in
Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s astonishing production, which restores
the expressionistic motifs incorporated into the text by the author.’ Hedy
Weiss, in her review for the Chicago Sun Times, noted that unlike the
portrayal of Tom in most productions, Hans Fleischmann (who also
directed the production) depicts him as a ‘homeless alcoholic, still poetic,
but living in an alleyway where he has amassed an enormous collection of
glass bottles – a powerful “reflection” of his crippled sister’s delicate
“glass menagerie”’. Along with praising Fleischmann’s Tom, Justin
Hayford of the Chicago Reader commended the production for its ghostly
quality, noting that ‘Joanne Dubach’s Laura and Maggie Cain’s Amanda
inhabit that environment like specters emerging from Tom’s tortured
brain’. Through its experimentation, this production appears to have
accomplished returning the focus to Tom Wingfield’s struggle. While
Amanda has stood out in productions of the recent past, predominately
because of casting choices, Fleischmann’s production casts Tom as our
protagonist.
The most recent revival of The Glass Menagerie is the American
Repertory Theatre’s 2013 Broadway production at the Booth Theatre,
starring Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto as Tom, Celia Keenan-
Bolger as Laura and Brian Smith as Jim. The production was also staged at
Harvard University, Massachusetts. The director John Tiffany and creative
team worked together on the Tony Award winning Once. Together again,
they put on a beautiful production of Williams’s classic. New York Times
reviewer Ben Brantley lauded praise on the production, stating that it was
‘such a thorough rejuvenation of Tennessee Williams’s 1944 drama that
[he] hesitates to call it a revival’. Brantley continues his praise; Jones, he
told his readers, was ‘perhaps the greatest stage actress of her generation’
to play Amanda Wingfield. Jeffrey Gantz of the Boston Globe agrees with
Brantley, writing that ‘This Amanda dominates the stage, as if she were
still the belle of the ball, and she dominates her children, leaning into Tom
right from the start.’ Despite Cherry Jones’s domineering presence on
stage, the strength of Zachary Quinto as an ‘irritating, exasperating, and
selfish’ Tom was, for Gantz, also memorable. Worth noting, too, are the
applause Celia Keenan-Bolger (Laura) and Brian J. Smith (Jim) received
by reviewers. Metrowest Daily News’s David Brooks Andrews described
Keenan-Bolger’s Laura as ‘completely lovable, beautiful, and
heartbreaking’. Brantley noted that Smith was simply excellent. With
revivals like John Tiffany’s as well as experiments like Hans
Fleischmann’s, Williams’s The Glass Menagerie will surely continue to
dazzle audiences.
 Notes

The notes below explain words and phrases from the play, with page
numbers referencing the Student Editions published by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama. They are intended for use by foreign-language students
as well as by English-speaking readers.

page
3 hive-like conglomerations . . .: compares the cramped identical units
of an apartment block to the cells of a beehive.
3 interfused mass of automatism . . .: suggests that the American
lower-middle class has been trained to behave like robots, without
individuality, and continues the idea of worker bees.
3 poetic license: the freedom to use poetic imagination.
3 garbage cans: dustbins.
4 proscenium: arch which surrounds stage in some theatres.
4 portieres: a curtain over door.
4 whatnot: a stand with shelves for knick-knacks.
4 doughboy: American infantryman.
4 Gregg shorthand diagram: chart indicating conventions for
secretarial note-taking.
5 Braille alphabet: alphabet for the blind; system of raised dots which
can be ‘read’ by the fingertips.
5 In Spain there was revolution . . .: refers to the revolt against the
Republican government by the Fascist leader General Franco in
1936, which sparked the three-year-long Spanish Civil War.
5 Guernica: refers to the ruthless aerial bombardment of the town in
April 1937 by German bombers fighting for Franco.
5 emissary: messenger.
5 mantel: shelf over fireplace.
5 skipped the light fantastic: danced.
6 ‘Ou sont les neiges’: ‘Where are the snows?’ (French). Part of a
well-known quotation ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ (‘Where are the
snows of yesteryear?’) from a poem by François Villon; an
expression of nostalgia.
6 drop-leaf table: a table with a hinged flap which can be used to
make it larger or dropped to take up less space.
6 scrim: gauze screen which becomes transparent when lit from
behind.
6 mastication: chewing.
7 Metropolitan star: singer at the Metropolitan Opera.
7 blancmange: gelatine-based dessert.
7 darky: offensive term for African-American.
7 gentleman caller: term for suitor visiting a young lady in the Old
South.
8 nigger: offensive term for African-American.
8 Parish house: church hall.
8 planters: owners of large cotton farms (plantations).
8 Mississippi Delta: region of the Deep South in which the Mississippi
river broadens before flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
9 elegiac: an elegy is a song of lamentation; Amanda looks
nostalgically to the past.
9 Government bonds: investment certificates guaranteed by US
government.
9 beaux: boyfriends.
9 Memphis: biggest city in the state of Tennessee.
9 Wall Street: New York City’s financial district.
9 Midas touch: refers to the mythical King Midas, whose touch would
turn objects to gold.
10 in a fugitive manner: as if running away.
10 old maid: spinster.
11 cloche hats: bell-shaped hats.
11 pocketbook: handbag.
11 D.A.R.: Daughters of the American Revolution: an organisation of
respectable middle-class women.
13 a swarm of typewriters: a disorientating image of many typewriters;
the phrase suggests them buzzing like bees.
13 Rubicam’s Business College: further education college in St Louis,
Missouri.
14 Famous-Barr: department store.
14 up the spout: disappearing like steam from a kettle.
14 Victrola: brand name of an early record player.
14 courting pneumonia: risking catching severe illness from the cold.
15 The Crust of Humility: phrase suggesting the scraps of dried bread
given to beggars.
16 phonograph: early form of record player.
16 nervous indigestion: stomach pains resulting from stress.
16 occupy a position: take up a wage-earning occupation.
16 yearbook: annual high school publication detailing the achievements
of that year’s class members.
16 ‘The Pirates of Penzance’: comic operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan.
17 the Aud.: high-school auditorium.
17 debating: competition in public speaking and rhetoric.
17 jolly disposition: a happy temperament.
17 pleurosis: disease involving inflammation of membrane covering
lungs.
17 Soldan: name of a high school in St Louis, Missouri.
17 Personal Section: part of newspaper dedicated to readers’
announcements.
17 not cut out for: not designed for.
19 fiasco: ludicrous or humiliating failure.
19 archetype of the universal unconscious: refers to the psychological
theories of C. G. Jung, who believed that the same basic character
types recur in the dreams and mythologies of all human cultures,
and represent aspects of underlying psychological needs.
19 specter: ghost.
19 feather the nest and plume the bird: provide money and beautiful
clothing to make a daughter more attractive to potential suitors.
19 roping in subscribers: attracting regular customers for a journal.
19 matrons: mature married women.
19 serialized sublimations: refers to episodic magazine stories;
‘sublimation’ is a concept of psychologist Sigmund Freud, who
believed that the human being’s animal instincts for sex and pleasure
are suppressed and so rechannelled (sublimated) into more
‘respectable’ forms by societal convention.
19 delicate cuplike breasts . . . (etc.): satirises politely restrained
manner in which women’s magazines of the period alluded to sex.
19 Etruscan sculpture: sculpture from early pre-Roman Italy.
19 glamor magazine: fashion magazine.
20 sinus condition: inflammation of the air passages between skull and
nose.
20 Christian martyr: one who suffers for the faith.
20 ‘Gone with the Wind’: episodic romantic novel of the American
Civil War by Margaret Mitchell; made into blockbuster movie in
1939.
20 Scarlett O’Hara: heroine of Gone with the Wind.
20 post-World-War generation: those who came of age in the years
directly after the First World War (1914–18).
20 hold the wire: stay on the telephone line.
20 hung up: cut off telephone communication.
21 that insane Mr Lawrence: refers to poet and novelist
D. H. Lawrence, whose controversial books (such as Lady
Chatterley’s Lover) treated sex with unusual frankness and
explicitness.
22 gesticulating shadows: suggests wild hand gestures and pointing
from Amanda and Tom, being cast in shadow form on ceiling.
23 moping, doping: suggests Tom behaving as if miserable and
exhausted.
23 celotex interior with fluorescent tubes: suggests claustrophobic
working environment, with industrial wall cladding and no natural
 light.
24 opium dens, dens of vice, etc.: secret locations for illegal activities
such as drug-taking.
24 tommy gun: light machine gun (invented by J. T. Thompson).
24 cat houses: brothels.
24 czar of the underworld: leader of organised crime ring.
24 whiskers: beard.
24 El Diablo: the Devil (Spanish).
26 Garbo picture: film starring Greta Garbo.
26 travelogue: documentary film about exotic journey.
26 newsreel: before the days of television news was shown in the
cinema.
26 organ solo: many cinemas were still equipped with the organs which
had accompanied silent films and these sometimes provided musical
interludes.
26 Milk Fund: charitable organisation.
27 pitchers: jugs.
27 Kentucky Straight Bourbon: type of whisky.
27 two-by-four: standard size of strips of wood.
29 Sticks and stones . . . (etc.): Amanda’s variation of the old proverb,
‘Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt
us.’
29 gloomy gray vault of the areaway: dark, narrow passage between tall
apartment buildings.
29 satirical as a Daumier print: refers to nineteenth-century French
artist, Honoré Daumier, famed for satirical caricatures.
30 Ave Maria: Roman Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary, often sung.
30 right-hand bower: ‘a right bower’ is the knave of trumps, a useful
card in card games, possibly with connotations of being a bit of a
rogue. Here the phrase also suggests a right-hand man or trusted
deputy.
31 natural endowments: talents and abilities.
31 Purina; Shredded wheat: breakfast cereals.
32 Spartan endurance: ability to endure great difficulties or
deprivation. In ancient Greece, the citizens of Sparta were famous
for living lives of austere simplicity, without luxuries or comforts.
33 inquisition: intense questioning; interrogation.
33 Jolly Roger: flag of pirate ship, with image of skull and crossed
bones.
34 to punch in red: to arrive late for work.
35 handwriting on the wall: a prophecy of future doom (Biblical
reference).
35 Merchant Marine: Merchant Navy.
35 Young People’s League: church-based social group.
36 wool muffler: scarf; neck-warmer.
37 horsey set: rich people who own horses.
37 Long Island: affluent suburb of New York City.
38 Annunciation: announcement (usually refers to the story of the
Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary of her pregnancy).
38 Franco: General Franco, leader of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil
War.
39 ash pits: where ash from home fires was disposed of.
39 Berchtesgaden: country retreat of German dictator Adolf Hitler.
39 Chamberlain: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain;
responsible for discredited policy of ‘appeasing’ Hitler by allowing
him limited territorial expansion in Europe.
39 hot swing music: type of upbeat jazz.
40 sphinx: inscrutable creature of ancient Egypt; lion with a woman’s
head; spoke in riddles.
42 putting on: teasing.
43 work like a Turk!: work very hard.
43 chintz: cotton printed with coloured design.
43 Durkee’s dressing: type of spiced dressing for fish.
44 cowlick: tuft of hair sticking up from head.
44 get-up: energy and initiative (‘get-up-and-go’).
46 homely: plain-looking, or perhaps rather ugly.
47 eloquent as an oyster: ironic epithet referring to Tom’s frequent
silences (i.e. his mouth is shut as tight as an oyster shell).
50 senior class: final-year high school students (17–18 years old).
50 glee club: singing group specialising in merry songs.
50 White House: official home of the President of the United States.
51 folks: family.
52 Gay Deceivers: padding for brassière.
53 Possess your soul in patience: wait patiently.
53 voile: thin, semi-transparent material.
53 jonquils: flowers of narcissus family; similar to daffodils.
53 cotillion: in America, a formal coming-out ball for debutantes.
53 cakewalk: energetic dance competition from the Deep South
(developed from African-American slaves or servants dancing
wildly for a prize of a cake).
53 sashay: ostentatious, gliding walk aided by big skirts.
53 quinine: bitter medicine used for malaria.
54 dogwood: small tree with white flowers and purple berries.
57 goings on: activities; occurrences.
57 ‘Dardanella’: popular tune.
58 ‘Post Dispatch’: St Louis Post Dispatch; local newspaper.
59 Dizzy Dean: famous baseball player.
59 sell you a bill of goods: Jim is saying he will try to persuade Tom to
‘buy into’ an idea he is ‘selling’.
59 executive positions: jobs with managerial status within corporations.
59 helluva lot: ‘hell of a lot’; a very great deal.
60 incandescent marquees and signs: the brightly-lit advertising
hoardings above and outside theatres, etc.
60 first-run movie houses: cinemas where films appear first before
general release.
61 gassing: talking emptily (‘hot air’).
61 hogging it all: selfishly holding on to everything.
61 dark room: interior of cinema.
61 Gable: Clark Gable, the movie star.
62 Union of Merchant Seamen: trade union for sailors.
63 stand-offish: distant; unfriendly.
64 angel-food cake: simple cake made of flour, sugar and egg-whites.
68 howdy-do: bothersome business.
68 Benjamin Franklin: American statesman (1706–90), also famous for
his scientific experiments and the invention of the lightning
conductor referred to here.
69 Mr Edison: Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb.
69 Mazda lamp: brand of electric lamp.
70 Gypsy Jones: famous evangelist.
72 Wrigley Building: headquarters of Wrigley’s chewing-gum
corporation.
72 Century of Progress: large exposition in Chicago celebrating
American achievements of nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
75 clumping: suggests the dull, hollow sound made by a braced or
wooden leg when it makes contact with floor.
76 ‘The Torch’: title of Soldan High School’s yearbook.
78 beleaguered: constantly pestered by; weighed down by.
79 kraut-head: derogatory term for person of German descent.
80 inferiority complex: psychoanalytic term for person who thinks of
him- or herself as insignificant, inferior to others.
82 electro-dynamics: study of electricity in motion, or of the interaction
of electric currents.
83 unicorn: mythical, horse-like creature with single horn on its
forehead.
84 cutting the rug: dancing.
84 is your program filled?: at a ball a gentleman would book a dance
with a lady in advance and his name would be written on her dance-
card or programme.
88 Stumblejohn: clumsy, awkward person.
89 Life Savers: brand of American peppermints.
89 drugstore: chemist’s shop, usually selling a variety of goods
including refreshments.
90 Alton: town in Illinois just up the Mississippi from St Louis.
90 Centralia: Missouri town over 100 miles west of St Louis.
91 macaroons: sweet biscuits made of almonds.
92 maraschino cherries: cherries preserved in liqueur, used for
decorating cocktails.
92 outdone with him: peeved or miffed.
92 it’s only the shank of the evening: the night is young.
93 go steady with: have longstanding relationship with.
93 cat’s not out of the bag: secret has not been revealed.
94 Wabash depot: train station on Wabash Avenue.
94 jalopy: dilapidated motor car.
95 I’ll be jiggered!: expression of astonishment.
97 the world is lit by lightning: refers poetically to the brash modern
era of bright lights and noise, in which Laura’s extreme delicacy is
helplessly out of place.
 Questions for Further Study

1 Whom do you regard as the central character in this play, and why? In
developing your argument, make sure you consider possible reasons
why other characters might or might not also be seen as central.
2 In what ways do Amanda’s rose-tinted memories of her past impact on
her hopes for her family’s future? And do those hopes impact
positively or negatively on her children’s present well-being?
3 Choose a scene in which Laura’s silences seem to you particularly
acute. Provide an analysis of the scene’s ‘subtext’ by explaining what
you think she is thinking and feeling in her quietness. How might this
subtext best be brought out in a performance of the scene?
4 In what ways do we see Tom struggling with his conscience during the
play, and to what extent are we encouraged to sympathise with him in
his struggle? Does the presence in the play of the ‘older’ Tom, as
narrator, mean that we see the younger Tom’s anxieties in a different
light than we might otherwise?
5 Why do you think Tom describes Jim as ‘the most realistic character in
the play’? To what extent does Jim’s ‘realism’ suggest a contrast to the
‘idealism’ or ‘romanticism’ of the other characters?
6 Consider the significance of the absent father-figure to the action of
the play. In what ways does Williams succeed in rendering this absence
as a kind of ghostly presence?
7 The Glass Menagerie is presented by Tom as a ‘memory play’ about
his own past. How important is this framing of the play’s events as
memory to our understanding of the action? (Would it matter if Tom’s
monologues were cut?)
8 Consider how differently the play’s events would be presented if we
were to see them from the point of view of one of the other characters,
instead of Tom. You should consider whether the play’s key dramatic
moments might be ‘remembered’ differently, but make sure you also
think about such elements as scene structure, and the choice of which
 events are significant to show on stage in the first place (rather than
just describe in narration).
9 Why do you think Williams divided the play into seven ‘scenes’ of
such irregular lengths, rather than using longer ‘acts’ (two, three or
four) of more even length, as was the convention at the time? (It might
help to contrast the play with a more conventional piece of the same
period, such as Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.)
10 What does an awareness of Tennessee Williams’s personal family
history add to an understanding of The Glass Menagerie? What are the
possible advantages or drawbacks of viewing the play in this light?
11 What role does the idea of ‘the South’ play in The Glass Menagerie,
given that it is set in St Louis Missouri (which is a Southern state, but
not in ‘the deep South’)? How might an understanding of the history of
America’s north/south divide aid an understanding of the play?
12 Williams carefully sets the play’s action in 1938, during the Spanish
Civil War, and on the verge of the Second World War. How significant
is this historical location to an understanding of the play’s action?
13 Williams insisted that The Glass Menagerie is not ‘a straight realistic
play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes’, and in the
opening monologue, Tom also stresses that ‘it is not realistic’. What is
meant by the term ‘realism’ in drama, and to what extent do you think
this play resists or questions the ‘rules’ of realism?
14 How is Williams’s notion of ‘sculptural drama’ (see commentary, 50)
realised through his stage directions for the play? Consider some of the
ways in which this sculptural quality is made apparent in particular
scenes or moments in the play, and discuss the ways in which you think
it relates to or enhances the play’s narrative.
15 If you were to direct a production of The Glass Menagerie, would you
seek to follow or to disregard Williams’s suggestions for the projection
of images and titles to accompany the stage action? Give reasons for
your choice, using specific examples to support it.
16 Analyse Williams’s decision to set the whole play in a single, cramped
apartment. What ‘role’ does this setting play in the action of the play,
and in the light of your analysis, what are the most important
considerations for a set designer working on the play?
17 Choose two characters in the play, and discuss the moment(s) in the
action when you think they display the most tenderness towards each
 other. Contrast this with discussion of moments in which there is
particular tension or hostility between them. What do these contrasts
tell us about the characters’ relationship?
18 Choose one or two of the play’s characters, and analyse the ways in
which they can be seen, on occasion, to be ‘play-acting’ or ‘performing
a role’ for the benefit of other characters. Consider some of the
contrasting motives (conscious or unconscious) underlying such role
play, and the degrees of deception (or self-deception) involved.
19 Consider the extent to which any one or two of the play’s characters
can be seen to be avoiding or hiding from the truth of their situation(s).
To what extent are we encouraged to sympathise with, or to criticise,
this self-deception?
20 Look in detail at the long dialogue between Jim and Laura in Scene
Seven. Analyse the emotional journeys on which both characters go
during the course of this almost static scene, considering the (possibly
differing) ways in which each understands the significance of
particular moments. In the light of your analysis, what would be the
key advice you would give to actors performing the scene?
21 Do you see the play, ultimately, as a tragedy or a kind of bittersweet
comedy? Be sure to research the meaning of these terms, and to
explain your reasoning carefully.
22 Williams is often credited with initiating what became known as ‘the
American style’ of post-war drama, thanks to the way that plays like
The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire blend aspects of
domestic realism with more fluid states suggesting dream or memory.
Consider some of the ways in which Williams established this ‘style’
in Menagerie, and compare and contrast his approach to that of Arthur
Miller in Death of a Salesman (another prime case of ‘the American
style’).
1 The production opened in a try-out version at Chicago’s Civic Theatre on 26 December 1944,
and gradually gathered press and public attention. It transferred to the Playhouse Theatre, on
Broadway, in March 1945, and ran there for 561 performances.
2 From Nightingale’s Times review of the 1995 London production of Menagerie. Reprinted in
the London Theatre Record, 1995 volume, 1283. Subsequent reviews from the same source
are annotated parenthetically using the abbreviation LTR.
3 The American Civil War had taken place between 1861 and 1865, with the Southern states
fighting for the right to break away from the United States and form their own Confederacy.
The heavy defeat suffered by the Confederacy, and the South’s enforced acceptance of the
Union, meant that southern traditionalists shifted the battle to the field of culture instead,
striving to keep alive the traditional, pre-war social customs in the face of the rapid
industrialisation brought in by Northern capitalists after the war. These customs, of course,
included a sharp divide between classes and races; hence Amanda Wingfield’s casually
unthinking references to the ‘nigger’ servants of her youth.
4 Quoted on xi of Robert Bray’s Introduction to The Glass Menagerie, published by
New Directions 1999.
5 This quotation – along with all subsequent quotations from reviews of the 1945 New York
premiere – is taken from material held in The Glass Menagerie press clippings folder at New
York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Clippings are unpaginated.
6 Note that Stephen Bottoms in his commentary argues that a crucial element to the play’s
success was an all around strong cast rather than casting one star to carry the play (56).
 A Streetcar Named Desire

commentary and notes by

PATRICIA HERN and MICHAEL HOOPER
 Plot

Scene One

On an evening in early May, Blanche DuBois arrives at Elysian Fields in

New Orleans to find her younger sister, Stella, with whom she hopes to
stay. She is disconcerted to discover that Stella, who is married to Stanley
Kowalski, the son of Polish immigrants, has a small apartment in a shabby
house in the French Quarter (Vieux Carré). Blanche is evidently nervous
and helps herself to a drink of whisky. When Stella returns, Blanche greets
her excitedly but cannot conceal her shock at Stella’s way of life. Stella,
however, is happy, fulfilled by her relationship with Stanley. Blanche
defensively confesses to the loss of Belle Reve, their family home in
Mississippi, to pay off debts accumulated, she claims, through the
dissipations and deaths of older generations of the DuBois family. Stanley
returns with two friends: Steve lives upstairs with his assertive wife,
Eunice; Mitch lives with his invalid mother. Stanley accepts Blanche’s
presence with good humour but little ceremony. She is ruffled by his lack
of refinement. She reveals that she was married when very young and that
her husband died.

Scene Two

The following evening, while Blanche is in the bath, Stella tells Stanley
about the loss of Belle Reve. She is unconcerned, but he suspects Blanche
of keeping to herself the profits from the sale of the estate – profits which
he believes he has a legal claim to as Stella’s husband. When Blanche
appears, he demands to see the documents concerning Belle Reve. Blanche
is distressed when he snatches a bundle of papers, poems written by her
young husband, then she hands him a box full of legal documents. He
justifies his attitude on the grounds of his legal rights and his concern for
the future of the baby Stella is expecting. Blanche and Stella go out for an
evening together, leaving the apartment free for Stanley’s poker game.

Scene Three

Stanley, Steve, Mitch and Pablo are still playing when Stella and Blanche
return. It is nearly 2.30 in the morning. Blanche is struck by the relative
gentleness and politeness of Mitch. Stanley grows more belligerently
drunk; finally he hurls a radio out of the window and then hits Stella, who
is immediately shepherded upstairs by Blanche. Sobered by a cold shower,
Stanley calls in anguish for Stella to come back to him. Slowly she
descends the stairs. They embrace, then Stanley carries her into their flat.
Blanche is appalled by Stella’s reconciliation with Stanley, but is soothed
by Mitch.

Scene Four

Next morning Stella tries to explain to Blanche the way her relationship
with Stanley works. She accepts his sporadic violence as inseparable from
the passion they share. Blanche hopes to persuade Stella to leave Stanley,
planning a future for herself and her sister, to be financed by an old
admirer who is now apparently a millionaire. Stanley overhears part of
this, but, when he appears, Stella’s fierce embrace demonstrates that her
loyalties remain with him.

Scene Five

Upstairs Steve and Eunice are brawling. On his return from bowling,
Stanley frightens Blanche by asking her about a man called Shaw and a
disreputable hotel called the Flamingo in Laurel, the town where Blanche
was an English teacher. When he leaves, Blanche anxiously seeks
reassurance from Stella that nothing unpleasant is known about her. She is
expecting Mitch for a date and is desperate for him to provide her with a
secure future. Between Stella’s departure and Mitch’s arrival, Blanche
flirts with and kisses a young man who calls to collect subscriptions for a
newspaper.

Scene Six

Blanche and Mitch return from an unsuccessful evening out. Blanche is

coquettish but appears offended when he tries to kiss her. She complains of
Stanley’s hostility. Mitch talks about his mother. Blanche then speaks of
her youthful and very short-lived marriage, which was destroyed when she
discovered her young husband in bed with another man: she had later
voiced her disgust, and her husband had rushed out and shot himself.
Mitch puts his arms around her and kisses her.

Scene Seven

It is 15th September, Blanche’s birthday. Blanche is singing in the bath;

Stella is decorating a cake. Stanley enters, armed with the destructive truth
about Blanche’s recent past: she has been promiscuous, slipping out at
night to answer the calls of soldiers who were returning, drunk, to their
barracks near Belle Reve, then, after leaving Belle Reve, she has lived like
a prostitute in a cheap hotel while also teaching in the local school. Finally
she lost her teaching post for trying to seduce a seventeen-year-old pupil
and was, effectively, driven out of Laurel. Stella tries to defend her sister,
talking of the unhappiness of Blanche’s early life and of her short-lived
marriage. She is horrified to hear that Stanley has told Mitch all he knows.
Blanche emerges happily from the bathroom but is frightened as she
senses that something threatening has happened.

Scene Eight

As the birthday meal ends, in an atmosphere made tense by Mitch’s non-

appearance, Stanley erupts into fury when Stella criticises his manners. He
presents Blanche with a bus ticket back to Laurel. She rushes out to be
sick. Stella turns angrily on Stanley but suddenly feels the first
movements of childbirth and asks him to take her to the hospital, leaving
Blanche alone.

Scene Nine

Mitch arrives, unshaven and a little drunk. He is hurt and angry at having
been deceived. Blanche no longer denies but tries to excuse her
disreputable past as being a refuge from her grief and guilt at the death of
her husband. She asks for Mitch’s protection, but he clumsily tries to rape
her. He retreats in confusion when she calls out ‘Fire!’

Scene Ten

Stanley returns from the hospital, to find Blanche dressed up in a

crumpled evening dress and wearing a cheap tiara. She claims to have
received a cable from the oil millionaire inviting her on a Caribbean
cruise. Stanley becomes aggressive when Blanche starts to lie about
Mitch’s attitude to her. She tries to ward off Stanley’s sexual advances
with a broken bottle, but he disarms her easily and carries her off to the
bed to rape her.

Scene Eleven

Some weeks later, Stanley and his friends are again playing poker. Stella is
packing Blanche’s trunk while Blanche is in the bathroom. Unbeknown to
Blanche, they are awaiting the arrival of a doctor and a nurse from a State-
run institution for the mentally sick, to which Stella has reluctantly agreed
to have her sister committed. Stella has decided that she cannot believe
Blanche’s account of Stanley’s assault upon her; for her own sake and that
of her new baby, she must reject her sister and align herself with her
husband. Blanche imagines that she is going on holiday with an admirer,
but is frightened by the appearance of the nurse. However, when the doctor
addresses her courteously, she goes willingly with him, leaving Stella in
distress, holding her baby. Stanley tries to comfort her and starts to make
love to her.
 Commentary

Williams’s Writing: Repressed Self-knowledge?

In the introduction to a collection of letters from Tennessee Williams,

Donald Windham wrote: ‘his art sprang from his repressed self-
knowledge’.1 Windham went on to infer that Williams used his plays and
stories as a way of translating himself into an acceptable fiction.
Tennessee Williams himself often emphasised the close connection
between his writing and the circumstances of his own life; he, however,
did not describe the process as being an evasion of the truth nor an attempt
to glamorise his own image. In interviews and articles written in his
middle years, he was able to stand back from earlier experiences and
observe the foundations of his work being laid down in his childhood and
adolescence. Certain elements are clearly visible in both life and art; for
example, the distress and guilt he felt at the lobotomy of his sister Rose
(which was carried out when he was away at college) feature in Suddenly
Last Summer where Catharine fights to remain intact in the face of Mrs
Venable’s determination to destroy her memories and her mind. In his
short story The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin, Williams
describes the shock of seeing a loved sister grow into a disturbingly
separate young woman:
I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared
for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together. [. . .] And it was
then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an
explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist
of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some way that
seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying
that I started writing. (See Remember Me to Tom, 79)
The relationship between the aspiring writer and his shy, emotionally
vulnerable young sister is also explored in The Glass Menagerie. In that
play, too, the spirit of Miss Edwina, Williams’s mother, finds a body and
voice (although she herself denied the relationship). Williams was a sickly
child, so his early years were spent close to his mother, an intimacy
heightened by Miss Edwina’s dissatisfaction with her husband. As the
daughter of a Southern preacher – a man respected in his own
community – she was never wealthy, but enjoyed a degree of social
prestige when growing up, protected from poverty, insecurity or harshness.
As the disillusionment of marriage closed in on her, so her youth glowed
more rosily in retrospect, as she herself wrote:
Life is as unpredictable as a dream. Once I was young and gay and
danced night after night with beau after beau, the belle of the ball.
Then a handsome young man from a fine family came along, fell in
love the first time he saw me and asked my hand in marriage. How
was I to know this charming youth would turn into a man of wrath
and that I and my children would live by his side consumed by terror.
(Remember Me to Tom, 88)
This insistent nostalgia and puzzled, defensive self-pity echo, too, through
the words of Amanda, the mother, in the first scene of The Glass
Menagerie:
AMANDA: My callers were gentlemen – all! Among my callers
were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi
Delta – planters and sons of planters! [. . .] There were the Cutrere
brothers, Wesley and Bates. Bates was one of my bright particular
beaux! He got in a quarrel with that wild Wainwright boy. They shot it
out on the floor of Moon Lake Casino. Bates was shot through the
stomach. Died in the ambulance on his way to Memphis. [. . .] And I
could have been Mrs J. Fitzhugh, mind you! But – I picked your
father!
It is interesting to note the reference here to the violent death of a young
man, his life apparently blighted by passion for the Southern belle in
whose memory he still has a picturesque existence. This idea becomes
more potent in A Streetcar Named Desire.
The father-figure in The Glass Menagerie is ‘a telephone man who fell
in love with long distances’, as Tom remarks in the opening monologue,
yet who once had an innocent look that fooled everybody, even Amanda’s
father. He is conspicuous by his absence. This was a situation familiar to
Williams as a child for his father was then out on the road, selling shoes.
When he was promoted to a desk-job as sales manager, the rest of his
family huddled together, it seems, away from his rages and his drinking
and his angry disappointment in his wife and his eldest son – a Stanley
Kowalski in middle age, with all the shared sexual passion in his marriage
spent. When in middle age himself, Tennessee Williams was able to view
his father more objectively:
His was not a nature that would comply with the accepted social
moulds and patterns without a restlessness that would have driven
him mad without the release of liquor and poker and wild weekends.
(Remember Me to Tom, 202)
In a letter written from Rome in 1955 to Kenneth Tynan, Williams saw his
relationship with his father even more distinctly as simply one element in
his own emotional development:
I used to have a terrific crush on the female members of my family,
mother, sister, grandmother, and hated my father, a typical pattern for
homosexuals. I’ve stopped hating my father. [. . .] He was not a man
capable of examining his behaviour toward his family, or not capable
of changing it. [. . .] I find him a tragic figure now, not one that I
dislike any longer. (Letters to Donald Windham, 301)
Not only do Tennessee Williams’s mother, sister and father appear
recognisably in the plays, but Williams was also acutely aware of the
effect on his own nature and creativity of his inheritance and upbringing.
His capacity for deep depression, for example:
I have plunged into one of my period neuroses, I call them ‘blue-
devils’, and it is like having wild-cats under my skin. They are a
Williams family trait I suppose. Destroyed my sister’s mind and
made my father a raging drunkard. In me they take the form of
interior storms that show remarkably little from the outside but which
create a deep chasm between myself and all other people, even deeper
than the relatively ordinary ones of homosexuality and being an
artist. (Letters to Donald Windham, 91)
Williams’s homosexuality figures large in his letters and Memoirs,
although – perhaps not surprisingly – his mother’s account of him makes
no reference to it, recalling instead Tennessee Williams’s childhood
affection for a local girl called Hazel, a relationship apparently wrecked
by his father. Miss Edwina explains her son’s lack of a wife:
Tom has said to me he never intends to many. [. . .] ‘I have no idea of
ever marrying. I couldn’t bear to make some woman unhappy. I’d be
writing and forget all about her.’ (Remember Me to Tom, 240)
Williams’s letters to Donald Windham sometimes conjure up an absurd
caricature of himself as affectedly promiscuous and flighty, particularly
those letters written from Key West in Florida where there was a bohemian
colony and where homosexuality, although still illegal under state law, was
tolerated by the authorities so long as it did not make itself widely
conspicuous or troublesome. In the ‘Vieux Carré’ of New Orleans, too, he
found an appealingly freewheeling way of life among artists, writers and
jazz musicians in bars and brothels. He is reported to have said:
If I can be said to have a home, it is in New Orleans where I’ve lived
on and off since 1938 and which has provided me with more material
than any other part of the country. I live near the main street of the
Quarter which is named Royal. Down this street, running on the same
tracks, are two streetcars, one named DESIRE and the other named
CEMETERY. Their indiscourageable progress up and down Royal
struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on the
life in the ‘Vieux Carré’ – and everywhere else for that matter.2
He was somewhat defensive about this lifestyle on occasion,
understandably so in view of Miss Edwina’s carefully cultivated
respectability.
As the world grows worse, it seems more necessary to grasp what
pleasure you can, to be selfish and blind, except in your work, and
live just as much as you have a chance to. (Letters to Donald
Windham, 22)
The urge to seek refuge from unhappiness in the pursuit of pleasure,
however destructive to self and others, is an aspect of Blanche DuBois’s
fall from grace. Her horror at the discovery of her young husband’s
homosexuality perhaps reflects the kind of response Williams himself had
encountered or feared. On the other hand, Blanche may be a ‘cover’ for a
male character, a homosexual, given a female mask by Williams so as to
avoid having to confront his own feelings about himself – an example of
that ingenious self-preservation referred to by Donald Windham. In that
case, Blanche’s shock at finding her boy-husband in bed with another man
echoes the intense jealousy and sense of betrayal which Tennessee
Williams expresses in letters at the ending of a love affair. In an
assessment of Williams, written after his death, Murray Kempton stressed
the importance of Williams’s homosexuality to his creativity.
We cannot appreciate Tennessee Williams without putting his
homoeroticism into full account; and that may explain why women
thought him more lovingly than men. [. . .] At bottom those plays of
his that live most vividly in the mind tell us about how men must
look to women – ogres to be appeased, small boys to be put up with,
or, if one’s luck turns for the better, strangers who will accept you and
keep you safe. (New York Book Review, 31.3.1983)
Tennessee Williams described his writing as a cathartic or purging
process, a way of coming to terms with his life:
In my case, I think my work is good in exact ratio to the degree of
emotional tension which is released into it. In a sense, writing of this
kind (lyric?) is a losing game, for steadily life takes away from you,
bit by bit, step by step, the quality of fresh involvement, new,
startling reactions to experience; the emotional reservoir is only
rarely replenished, by some such crisis as I’ve described to you at
such length and most of the time you are just ‘paying out’, drawing
off. (Letters to Donald Windham, 306)
A Streetcar Named Desire grew out of the turbulence of Tennessee
Williams’s relationships, but also out of the crisis he refers to in the
letter – the months in 1946 when he endured the terror of believing that he
was suffering from incurable pancreatic cancer. A morbid, shuddering
preoccupation with the physical ugliness and the inevitability of death
permeates the whole play.
The strong connection between the experiences and relationships of
Tennessee Williams’s life and the events and characters of his plays
explains the intensity and vividness of his writing, but it has also been
seen as a limitation, not least by Williams himself:
Frankly there must be some limitations in me as a dramatist. I can’t
handle people in routine situations. I must find characters who
correspond to my own tensions. If these people are excessively
melodramatic [. . .] well, a play must concentrate the events of a
lifetime in the short span of a three-act play. Of necessity these events
must be more violent than in life. (Tennessee Williams: Rebellious
Puritan, 246)

An American Context

The early plays of Tennessee Williams were successful in the 1940s and
1950s perhaps because they offered violence, morality, spectacle and
romance in American settings, played out by characters that often
managed to be both highly individual and representative of particular
aspects of American life and tradition. Streetcar draws upon at least three
of these American traditions, which had been projected effectively for
twenty years by the cinema. There was a nostalgic interest in America’s
past, particularly in the romance of the years before and during the Civil
War. Mid-twentieth-century urban Americans were intrigued and charmed
by the idea of the South, by the picturesque elegance of a landed élite who
flaunted their inherited wealth and their studied gentility. Morality was
satisfied by the knowledge that this privileged brilliance was doomed to
defeat in the Civil War and would then present an image of decorative
decay. Blanche DuBois and Belle Reve belong to that tradition,
crystallised for a mass audience by the highly successful film of Gone
with the Wind, starring an English actress, Vivien Leigh, who later played
Blanche in the film of Streetcar.
Another aspect of America’s past given a wide appeal through the
cinema was the folklore of the Wild West. Westerns showed home-grown
heroes proving their worth in combat against savages and bandits and
sticking to their friends through thick and thin – just as Stanley feels
bound to protect Mitch after their time together in the army. These films
also reinforced an idea of women either as child-bearers and home-makers
or as whores, golden-hearted or otherwise. Stella is a home-maker and
child-bearer; Blanche is neither, so might then be expected to be one of the
other kind and ‘no good’.
If Blanche belongs to the crumbling grandeur of the Southern
plantations, Stanley is a new American, an immigrant, a man of the city.
He is the one amongst his group most likely to make his mark in a world
of industry and commerce, a world full of machinery like cars and
locomotives. He asserts his maleness and lack of refinement; where he
cannot dominate sexually he uses force. He shows, perhaps, the more
acceptable face of that macho urban jungle pictured in the Hollywood
gangster movies of the 1930s.
Popular entertainment, principally the cinema, offered Americans
certain images of what it meant to be American. This was an idea equally
important to the first or second generation immigrants from Europe as to
those who thought of themselves as ‘real’ Americans with a pedigree
reaching back to the Pilgrim Fathers or the Huguenots. Tennessee
Williams’s early plays dealt in familiar concepts so that even when aspects
of his plots or the ideas expressed were shocking, they nonetheless were
accessible to a wide audience, not only on Broadway but also, later, as
successful films.
Theatre, during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, changed under the impact
of new techniques and forms from Europe. These influences were brought
to America by touring companies, by refugees from political oppression in
Europe, by the influx of avant-garde films and by Americans returning
from the Continent, excited by what they had seen. In the 1920s two
important theatrical groups were formed: the semi-professional
Washington Square Players in New York, and the amateur Provincetown
Players, who were associated with the early works of the dramatist Eugene
O’Neill. The Washington Square Players developed into the wholly
professional Theatre Guild which became one of the most influential
organisations in the New York theatre world. The 1920s also saw the birth
of various political groups; for example, those brought together in the
Workers’ Dramatic Council. The Federal Theatre was set up as part of
Roosevelt’s New Deal to encourage playwrights to use the theatre to
celebrate or at least dramatise contemporary life. In 1931 Lee Strasberg,
with Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman, founded the Group Theatre,
which trained a new generation of actors and directors, Elia Kazan, for
example, who later directed Streetcar for stage and screen. It also
encouraged young dramatists with a serious social or political message,
men like Clifford Odets, whose play Waiting for Lefty (1935) called for
organised action against workers to fight against their fall in living
standards. It sought ‘an alliance of the men of mind, of vision, the artists,
with the People, consciously working towards this creative end’.3 It was
the Group Theatre that gave the young Tennessee Williams significant
encouragement in 1938 by giving him a special award for his collection of
one-act plays, American Blues. A number of American dramatists were
experimenting with a lyrical, heightened style of dialogue and extended
speeches full of vivid imagery or highly rhythmic phrases, sometimes
approaching the intensity and musicality of verse drama. This rhetorical
style was complemented by non-naturalistic staging – as in Thornton
Wilder’s Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), or many of
Eugene O’Neill’s experiments in style, of which The Hairy Ape (1922) will
stand as an example. Here is the opening stage direction:
The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should
by no means be naturalistic. The effect sought after is a cramped
space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel. The lines of
bunks, the uprights supporting them, cross each other like the steel
framework of a cage.
Thus Tennessee Williams’s early plays were borne in on a swelling tide
of new American drama now able to take possession of major theatres in
the big cities, especially New York, and to become recognisably distinct
from the European imports, while still benefiting from the new technology
and the versatility demonstrated by European theatre. The need for a
national identity had been sharpened by America’s involvement in the two
World Wars, as was the need to re-appraise the values and demands of
American society. According to the critic Travis Bogard, through the
1920s, 1930s and 1940s many plays were concerned:
with an aspect of the national past that gives them a strong emotional
lever against the depressing present and the failure of the American
dream. [. . .] The characters cling to their dreams tenaciously. [. . .]
Their dreams are never fulfilled except in the fantasies of nostalgic
romances and operettas. The sterner statements insist that the thrust
of American materialism has destroyed all such dreams and left man
destitute in a soulless world, a wasteland.4
 A selection of drama reviews from the New York Times for the years
1945 to 1947 gives an impression of what New York audiences were being
offered at the point when Tennessee Williams emerged as a significant
writer. In 1945, along with The Glass Menagerie, there was a Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical about a fairground roustabout’s doomed romance
with a nice all-American girl in a small fishing community. This was
playing across the street from another Rodgers and Hammerstein show,
Oklahoma, a lyrical celebration of America’s mid-West where farmers and
cowboys learned to live and love in energetically choreographed harmony.
At the same time, Elia Kazan – first director of A Streetcar Named
Desire – was directing Deep Are the Roots by Arnaud D’Usseau, a play
dealing with the position of negroes in the American South. Also in
production was Home of the Brave by Arthur Laurents about the
experiences of a young Jewish soldier in the Pacific campaign of the
Second World War. During 1946 New York saw translations of Anouilh’s
Antigone, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Satre’s Huis Clos. An
English company led by Laurence Olivier brought over a version by W. B.
Yeats of Sophocles’ Oedipus, as well as Sheridan’s The Critic. There was a
production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (described by the
critic Brooks Atkinson as ‘a trifle seedy’) and of Shakespeare’s Henry
VIII. The most conspicuously American production was another musical –
this time combining showground glamour with Wild West nostalgia –
Annie Get Your Gun by Irving Berlin.
1947, similarly, offered home-grown musicals, such as the rather fey
Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow as well as the more serious Street Scene,
based on a play by Elmer Rice, with music by Kurt Weill. Street Scene was
praised by Brooks Atkinson as ‘a musical play of magnificence and glory
[. . .] it finds the song of humanity under the argot of the New York
streets’. As in 1946, there were several imports from Europe, but there was
also the successful debut of the young American writer, Arthur Miller,
whose All My Sons, directed by Elia Kazan, dealt with the conflict for
Americans between private and public loyalties in the context of the recent
war. Its characters and setting were immediately identifiable by the
American audience of 1947; its action was tragic. At moments the
dialogue moved from the recognisably naturalistic to a more highly
charged kind of rhetoric through which the questions of morality
confronting the characters were imbued with a wider significance. It was
enthusiastically received:
The theatre has acquired a genuine new talent [. . .] [The play] is a
pitiless analysis of character that gathers momentum all evening and
concludes with both logic and dramatic impact. (Brooks Atkinson,
New York Times, 30.1.1947)
In December 1947 came A Streetcar Named Desire, another Kazan
production. The play was both a commercial and a critical success:
It reveals Mr Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose
knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is
profoundly human. [. . .] Out of poetic imagination and ordinary
compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story. (Brooks
Atkinson, New York Times, 4.12.1947)

Southern Roots and European Influences

Tennessee Williams was not only carried in on a twentieth-century tide of

American drama dealing with the contemporary American situation, but
also buoyed up by a strong current of specifically Southern writing, which
had become powerful in the nineteenth century and was still significant.
Some of this literature from the South celebrated with nostalgia the
chivalry and romance associated with the landowners of the Southern
States prior to the Civil War (1861–65) and the doomed gallantry which
became part of the folklore of the war itself. Other plays and novels,
however, saw flaws in the pre-war and post-war South, while still
fascinated by the South’s charisma. There was, for example, William
Faulkner (1897–1962), with his series of novels set in North Mississippi
(thinly disguised as Yoknapatawpha County), including The Sound and the
Fury (1929) and Go Down Moses (1942). Lillian Hellman in her novels
The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946) showed
treachery, greed and ambition in an Alabama family, the Hubbards, using
melodrama as a vehicle for morality – it was an indictment of that
materialism which she felt was corroding the once bright metal of
American society.
 Colouring this writing was the influence – still strong in the South – of
the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), whose historical
romances such as Kenilworth, The Talisman and Ivanhoe drew upon a
picturesque notion of medieval and sixteenth-century courtliness, the
chivalric clash between good and evil amidst castellated towers or the
pavilions of crusading knights. Nineteenth-century European Gothic
fiction (supernatural melodramas in feudal locations) found an echo in the
macabre tales of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), such as
Fall of the House of Usher (1839), and in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-
Told Tales (1857) and The Scarlet Letter (1859). Both men were still much
in vogue in the twentieth century with Poe in particular being seized on by
the cinema as well. The quivering horror of Tennessee Williams’s Blanche
DuBois in the face of the city’s squalid vitality and her accounts of the
sickness eating away at the splendour that had once been Belle Reve recall
Poe’s story of the decline of the Ushers, whose painfully acute sensibility,
both physical and emotional, rendered them unfit for life outside their
decaying mansion in which they too decayed with a diseased beauty.
Tennessee Williams’s work grew not only out of this courtly-Gothic
Southern heritage, but also out of a European culture that offered writers
as attractive to him yet as diverse as the Russian playwright and story-
writer, Chekhov (1860–1904), the Swedish dramatist Strindberg (1849–
1912), the Norwegian playwright Ibsen (1828–1906) and the English
novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). Ibsen’s influence on American
drama can be seen also in the early plays of Arthur Miller: tragedy moved
out of the courts of princes and the heroic past, into a recognisably
contemporary setting, concerning itself with the middle classes or with
semi-skilled workers living in the crowded city suburbs of a money-
making nation. In many of Ibsen’s dramas, such as Rosmersholm or
Ghosts, the action shows the eruption of some guilt, thought to be safely
buried in the past, into the carefully constructed respectability of middle-
class family life. The dramatic tension becomes more powerful as the
audience grows more aware of the degree of pretence involved in the
characters’ image of themselves and senses the gradual but relentless
revelation of a once-submerged horror. The climax comes when the central
characters suffer the confrontation of past and present: the thing they have
fled from corners them. Then they either acknowledge the justness of this
and endure retribution for past guilt with the dignity traditionally
associated with a tragic protagonist, or they may try to retreat even further
into pretence, perhaps into madness. This tragic model was well suited to
Tennessee Williams for it offered a means of dramatising through vividly
characterised and recognisable individuals his sense of the South’s past
being still active and often destructive in modern America.
A Streetcar Named Desire makes it clear that for Williams the act of
fleeing always becomes the act of reliving the past. Flight forces the
presence of the past on his characters as the presence of what they
attempted to flee. (Donald Pease in Tennessee Williams:
A Tribute, 840)
A Streetcar Named Desire shows the conflict between traditional values:
an old-world graciousness and beauty running decoratively to seed versus
the thrusting, rough-edged, physically aggressive materialism of the new
world. The presentation of a way of life is closely bound up with the
evocation of a particular place; this ‘place’ both defines and explains those
characters who are identified with it, and so the chopping down of a long-
prized orchard or the gradual dissipation of an ancient estate gives
expression to the decline of those characters themselves and of their sort
of world. In this, Tennessee Williams harks back to images and emotions
present in the plays of Anton Chekhov. Blanche DuBois is of the same
breed as Chekhov’s charming, elegantly selfish, admiration-seeking,
ageing women, such as Madame Arkadina in The Seagull (1895) and
Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard (1903). Interestingly Blanche
explains that her name means ‘White woods’ (30), ‘Like an orchard in
spring!’ But whereas Chekhov’s women are still vivaciously staving off
despair and the admission of defeat, Blanche is seen in her final struggles.
In A Streetcar Named Desire the conflict between two ways of life is
concentrated within the battle between Blanche and Stanley. The old
civilisation vested in Blanche is demonstrably decadent; her only means of
survival in the modern world is to batten onto someone else and live off
their emotional, physical and material resources, like a decorative fungus.
Stanley is full of aggressive, virile energy, both contemptuous of and
intrigued by the once privileged gentility of the Belle Reve world. The
dramatisation of such a clash in sexual terms – the old world associated
with febrile femininity, the new with a charismatic but brutal
masculinity – had been tried earlier by August Strindberg. There are some
interesting parallels between Streetcar and Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888).
In his preface to Miss Julie Strindberg outlined his objectives and
analysed the response he anticipated for his characters. He justified his
choice of subject:
It is still tragic to see one on whom fortune has smiled go under,
much more to see a line die out. [. . .] The fact that the heroine
arouses our sympathy is merely due to our weakness in not being able
to resist a feeling of fear lest the same fate should befall us. [. . .] I
have suggested many possible motivations for Miss Julie’s unhappy
fate. The passionate character of her mother; the upbringing
misguidedly inflicted on her by her father; her own character; and the
suggestive effect of her fiancé upon her weak and degenerate brain.
Strindberg referred to
that innate or acquired sense of honour which the upper-classes
inherit. [. . .] It is very beautiful, but nowadays it is fatal to the
continuation of the species. [. . .] The servant Jean is the type who
founds a species, we trace the process of differentiation.
Strindberg saw Jean’s survival and strength as arising less from his class
origins than from his masculinity.
Sexually he is an aristocrat by virtue of his masculine strength, his
more finely developed senses and his ability to seize the initiative.
His sense of inferiority arises chiefly from the social milieu in which
he temporarily finds himself.5
Strindberg emphasises a deliberate naturalism both in the setting of the
play – the large kitchen of a Swedish manor house, on a midsummer’s
eve – and in its references to the routines of life. However, both Miss Julie
and Jean can speak in heightened prose, using imagery and thought-
associations which give the play a poetic, more universal quality. In this,
too, Streetcar is reminiscent of Miss Julie:
MISS JULIE: I have a dream which recurs from time to time, and I’m
reminded of it now. I’ve climbed to the top of a pillar, am sitting there,
and I can see no way to descend. When I look down, I become dizzy, but
I must come down – but I haven’t the courage to jump. [. . .]
 JEAN: No. I dream I’m lying under a high tree in a dark wood. I want
to climb, up, up to the top, and look round over the bright landscape
where the sun is shining – plunder the bird’s nest up there where the
gold eggs lie. (Strindberg: Plays One, 116)
In Streetcar Stanley’s syntax remains unrefined, but his words are
nonetheless imaginative:
STANLEY: I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the
place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how
you loved it, having them coloured lights going! (68)
Another writer who deals with the clash of lifestyles and moralities
often in sexual terms and in heightened language is D. H. Lawrence.
Tennessee Williams’s early admiration for Lawrence was noticed and
lamented by his mother, who felt that Lawrence’s writing lacked delicacy.
One afternoon he walked in with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I
picked it up for a look – Tom said I had a veritable genius for opening
always to the most lurid pages of a book – and was shocked by the
candour of the love scenes. [. . .] I didn’t like the book or D. H.
Lawrence as a person. [. . .] I didn’t admire anything I heard about his
character or how he treated his wife, who deserted her husband and
children for him. The one play of Tom’s I have not read or seen is I
Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, his poetic version of Lawrence’s
last few hours on earth. (Remember Me to Tom, 33)
It is in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that Lawrence describes the meeting rather
than the conflict between a woman of the upper class and a man of peasant
stock (though educated and sensitive enough not to be a prisoner of his
class). The conflict is between that virile new man and the effete
aristocracy from which his mistress comes – much as Stanley challenges
Stella’s family origins rather than Stella herself. Like Stella, Constance
Chatterley is happy to be pulled off her column and to have the coloured
lights going. After the gamekeeper, Mellors, has made love to her,
in her heart the queer wonder of him was awakened. A man! The
strange potency of manhood upon her. [. . .] She crept nearer to him,
nearer, only to be near to the sensual wonder of him.6
Connie’s sister Hilda, however, feels threatened and alienated by his overt
sexuality:
 He was looking at her with an odd, flickering smile, faintly sensual
and appreciative.
‘And men like you’, she said, ‘ought to be segregated: justifying their
own vulgarity and selfish lust’. (256)
One justification that even Connie herself allows for the relationship is
Mellor’s value as a stud, to revitalise the impotent aristocratic stock.
Similarly, Blanche sees Stanley as essentially animal, a stud:
BLANCHE: He’s just not the sort that goes for jasmine perfume! But
maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost
Belle Reve and have to go on without Belle Reve to protect us. (23)
And later:
BLANCHE: What such a man has to offer is animal force and he gave
a wonderful exhibition of that! But the only way to live with such a man
is to – go to bed with him! (39)
In fathering Stella’s child Stanley has completed his function in Blanche’s
eyes, so now she feels that she and Stella can leave him behind with the
brutes and go forward to a life enriched by ‘such things as art – as poetry
and music’ (41).
The conflict between innate sexuality and a consciously acquired
civilisation, present in A Streetcar Named Desire, is also a recurring theme
in Lawrence’s work, often expressed in a very stylised prose full of images
drawn from nature or the elements, darkness and light, earth and fire.
Lawrence’s kind of lyricism and this striving for the power of myth
through imagery infused with a sense of ritual are features observed also
in Tennessee Williams’s work. For instance:
In its sympathetic portrayal of our yearnings for transcendence, its
realistic depiction of our inherent limitations, and its utter insistence
on the necessity of imbuing with religious significance the rare and
transient communion of man with his fellow, Williams’s drama is a
myth for our time. (Judith J. Thompson in Tennessee Williams: A
Tribute, 684)
Such a response from a serious critic indicates the potency of these images
and allusions. There are many such examples of Williams’s reaching for
‘religious significance’:
 BLANCHE: And then the searchlight which had been turned on the
world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there
been any light that’s stronger than this – kitchen – candle . . .
MITCH: You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be –
you and me, Blanche? [. . .]
BLANCHE: Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly! (57)
One final instance of techniques which Lawrence and Williams share
concerns the use of ‘symbolic’ names. The opening passage of Lawrence’s
autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913) works on two levels: it
describes the Nottinghamshire mining community in which the Morel
family lives, but the names imbue the scene with the aura of myth or
religious allegory:
‘The Bottoms’ succeeded to ‘Hell Row’. Hell Row was a block of
thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill
Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two
fields away. [. . .] Mrs Morel was not anxious to move into the
Bottoms, which was already twelve years old and on the downward
path, when she descended to it from Bestwood. (Sons and Lovers,
Penguin, 7–9)
Tennessee Williams employs a similar device at the beginning of Streetcar
when Blanche describes her journey to Stella’s apartment:
BLANCHE: They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then
transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at –
Elysian Fields!
EUNICE: That’s where you are now.
BLANCHE: At Elysian Fields?
EUNICE: This here is Elysian Fields. (5)

Structure: Eleven One-Act Plays United by a Purpose?

The plot is simple. It moves from hope and frustration to destruction

and despair. The characters themselves provide probability for every
 action. [. . .] Each scene is constructed like a one-act play, Williams’s
forte. (Tischler, 140–3)
Plot in the normal sense there is not too much of, for it is men and
women in their moods of hope, despair, pretence, terror and
uncertainty with whom he is concerned. Yet the play is purposeful.
(Elinor Hughes, The Boston Herald, 4.11.1947)
It has no plot, at least in the familiar usage of that word. It is almost
unbearably tragic. (Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 14.11.1947)
Plot ‘in the familiar usage’ implies a sequence of actions or events so
organised as to give them a sense of logical progression from a beginning,
through a middle, to an end that seems ‘right’. What is the significance of
the description of A Streetcar Named Desire as a collection of one-act
plays? It suggests that each scene describes one situation or deals with one
event fully enough for it to stand alone: with an exposition, a crisis and
some kind of resolution. It is possible to approach any of the scenes in this
way. Scene One, for instance, introduces us to an environment, precipitates
an action through the disruptive arrival into the Kowalski home of
Blanche, and seems to offer a resolution in Stanley’s acceptance of her. Or
Scene Six: a man and a woman (in fact, Mitch and Blanche) return from an
unsuccessful date. The audience is told why there is tension between them:
he desires her, but is clumsy; she wishes to encourage him, but is anxious
to preserve his respect for her. He reveals his vanities and insecurities, and
gives an insight into the relationship with his mother which underpins his
character. She reveals a tragedy in her past, giving an acceptably complete
account of her marriage and widowing. The scene ends with them coming
together – apparently a happy resolution. What welds these potentially
self-sufficient segments into a cohesive play is not only the continuity of
the characters, but also a clear relationship between the scenes which does
give a sense of progress towards the final solution and achieves a unity of
subject, theme and action.
The fact that each scene contains enough information to make its action
comprehensible means that certain elements recur throughout the play –
the story of Blanche’s past, for instance – but since their relationship to the
immediate situation changes from scene to scene this does not appear
merely repetitive. In the first scene, the outline of Blanche’s marriage is
quickly drawn as part of the initial exposition, and her extreme sensitivity
to its memory demonstrated – with the symbolic sound of the polka
merely a faint suggestion, having little obvious significance beyond
nostalgia at that point. In Scene Two, the reference to Blanche’s dead
husband is part of her skirmishing with Stanley; it introduces the idea of
her guilt but offers no further explanation. In Scene Six, her description of
the boy she married and then destroyed, the account heightened by the now
ominous strains of the polka, becomes part of the action, drawing Blanche
and Mitch together for mutual support. In Scene Nine, Blanche offers the
death of her young husband as the reason for her subsequent fall from
grace, as a mitigating circumstance to lesson her guilt rather than a cause
for the guilt itself. This time Mitch does not comfort her but condemns
her, so her last hope of redemption by love and of future happiness – or, at
least, future security – is destroyed. Each reference to the short-lived
marriage strips away a layer of Blanche’s protective pretence, until she is
forced to stand exposed in the harsh glare of the unshaded light. When
what she really is is then rejected, there is no other possibility left for her
except retreat into an enclosed world of her dreams. The play’s tension and
energy come from the audience’s growing awareness of the past rising
inexorably to the surface where it will erupt explosively into the present; it
is this which gives Streetcar its sense of being ‘purposeful’.
The structure of the play departs from well-established theatrical
practice in having no act divisions. The eleven scenes follow upon each
other without any formalised arrangement into three, four or five phrases.
This is appropriate to a sense of the relentless movement towards
Blanche’s final catastrophe. It is also, perhaps, a product of Tennessee
Williams’s experiences as a screen writer in Hollywood: writing for the
cinema rather than the theatre most often requires the dramatist to think in
terms of a sustained sequence of relatively short episodes, capitalising on
the effects made possible by crisp cutting from one image or event to the
next. It is worth noting that many of his plays have transferred to the
screen with considerable success.
Although the play is also concerned with the relationship between Stella
and Stanley, Blanche is the organising factor: the action begins with her
arrival and ends as she is led away to the mental hospital. It is significant,
however, that the action is confined within the Kowalski apartment and its
immediate surroundings; we do not, for instance, travel with Blanche from
Laurel or on to the state institution. By maintaining this ‘unity of place’
Williams is doing more than merely following the ‘rules’ laid down by
Aristotle for classic drama. He is also drawing attention to the fact that
Streetcar explores the continuing human need to secure a territory, a
home, and defend it against intruders. This is a basic animal drive, well
described by Konrad Lorenz in On Aggression (London, Methuen, 1966).
Professor Lorenz progresses from a study of aggression and appeasement
patterns in animals, linked to the demands of territorial possession, sexual
effectiveness and self-preservation, to a view of human behaviour as
displaying essentially the same patterns, although sometimes in a more
oblique or sophisticated form. The rituals of threat, appeasement, sexual
display, defence and retreat have the power to involve an audience because
they appeal to deeply rooted responses which are universal and vigorous.
The plot of A Streetcar Named Desire is, in part, Stanley’s recognition of
Blanche as a potentially dangerous invader of his territory; he cannot, as
some animals might, accept her as part of his herd of brood mares, or, in
human terms, as an addition to his harem. The impossibility of such an
arrangement is demonstrated when he rapes her; Blanche is not shown
accepting this as an initiation into a new role within Stanley’s household,
and Stella is prepared to cast her sister out rather than allow her to remain
as a rival for Stanley’s favours. Earlier on, Blanche makes a bid for
possession of Stella when she tries to persuade her sister to leave Stanley
and set up a new home with her. In both phases of the struggle, Blanche is
defeated.
It has been suggested that what might be regarded primarily as a plot
decision – a basis for the selection and organisation of events – is more
importantly the key to the playwright’s intended ‘message’ and moral
attitude. By setting the play in the Kowalskis’ territory, Tennessee
Williams is possibly indicating that Stella and Stanley are rightly the
survivors in their world of vitality and birth, whereas Blanche’s world is
Belle Reve, a place of decayed gentility, of death, which must be rejected
if life is to go on.

From The Poker Night to Streetcar: Approaches to Character

Tennessee Williams arrived at A Streetcar Named Desire through a series

of stages, called variously The Poker Night, The Primary Colors and The
Moth, gradually building up the plot and characters from a basic situation
involving an unmarried teacher meeting a prospective husband while on a
visit to her younger sister and brother-in-law. At first the action was set in
Chicago, then Atlanta in Georgia, then in New Orleans. Originally the
central family was Italian, then the brother-in-law became Irish while the
sisters changed into Southern belles. Finally Williams settled on the
Polish-American and Southern combination. Throughout all the phases, he
had a fixed idea about the style of the setting:
A symbolic link is forged between Stanley and the powerful modern
engines of the railroad, and Williams once considered ending the play
with Blanche throwing herself in front of the train in the freight-
yards. (Vivienne Dickson in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, 159)
Stanley’s development is interesting. He begins, in the first draft, as
‘a weakly good-looking young man. He has a playful tenderness and
vivacity which would amount to effeminacy if he were not Italian’.
(Quoted by Vivienne Dickson, 163)
In his Irish phase, in The Primary Colors, the Stanley character – here
called Ralph – becomes more assertive. Williams adds in associations
with hunting and death – the character is a salesman of ‘mortuary goods’.
At this stage, too, Williams suggests both the character’s latent femininity
and his attraction to Blanche. She rejects him:
I think you have a very wide streak of the feminine in your nature.
You think you’ll obscure it by acting with the greatest possible
vulgarity. But what you sometimes really remind me of is a vicious
little fourteen year old girl that I’ve had in my class for two years.
If one remembers that view of Blanche as a disguised male, Stanley’s
initial effeminacy is significant in the light of Williams’s homosexuality.
Williams agreed in an interview that Blanche was in some ways a
projection of his sense of himself; the relationship between Blanche and
Stanley then becomes fraught with danger, with complications and social
taboos underlying the surface conflict.
In his mature form, in A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley has a force of
character which has been interpreted as excitingly life-giving on the one
hand, and brutally destructive on the other:
 The child of immigrants, he is the new, untamed pioneer, who brings
to the South, Williams seems to be saying, a power more exuberant
than destructive, a sort of power the South may have lost. (J. H.
Adler, in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, 41)
But:
Stanley, in his ignorance and insensitivity, destroys both Blanche’s
hope and her illusion. He sees through her pose without
understanding why she needs one. He thinks merely that she feels
superior to him and he wishes to destroy her composure to make her
recognise that she is the same as he, a sexual animal. (J. M. McGlinn
in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, 514)
Or:
The conflict between Blanche and Stanley allegorizes the struggle
between effeminate culture and masculine libido.7
Stanley has also been described as a twentieth-century Pan-Dionysus –
that is, a modern embodiment of the ancient spirits of anarchic sexuality
and the pursuit of pleasure, capable of impulsive cruelty to those who try
to censor or confine them. Tennessee Williams’s stage directions stress
certain qualities in Stanley: his strength, his vitality, and his virility:
Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes.
Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with
women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence,
dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male
bird among his hens. (13)
It would be interesting to know whether Tennessee Williams’s reference to
the brilliant cockerel amongst his hens contains any of the conscious irony
there would be if he had in mind the old fable of Chanticleer, the subject
of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Chanticleer is a farmyard cock, a richly
feathered male bird among his hens, whose sexuality is so rampant that it
becomes absurd. For example, he longs to mate with his favourite hen,
Pertelote, on their perch at night, but the beam is so narrow they would fall
off. Then:
The absurdity of the farmyard rooster as a sexual creature is also stressed
in A Streetcar Named Desire by the story that Steve tells in Scene Three
(25). Tennessee Williams’s decision to have Capricorn as Stanley’s
astronomical birth sign is similarly ambivalent: it carries pagan
associations with the god-goat Pan, but the goat is also traditionally
associated with low sexuality, animal lust (consider how Shakespeare’s
Iago uses it to denigrate Othello). Williams describes Stanley as ‘the
gaudy seed-bearer’ and the images of his mind as ‘crude’ – both adjectives
suggesting vulgarity and lack of refinement. On the other hand, Stanley’s
sexual pleasure is the ‘complete and satisfying centre’ of his character. Is
there irony here? Does the phrase expose rather than simply describe
Stanley’s chief quality and indicate the limitations of his life? It is
important to notice that Stanley is not wholly selfish in his sexuality; he
gives as well as takes pleasure. Certainly he gives Stella enough to sustain
their relationship, at least at this stage of their marriage. When he is
shown as the unapologetic sexual male, Stanley often appears formidable;
however, there are moments when his affectation of worldly wisdom can
make him seem foolish – even to Stella:
STANLEY: I got an acquaintance that deals in this sort of
merchandise. I’ll have him in here to appraise it. I’m willing to bet you
there’s thousands of dollars invested in this stuff here!
STELLA: Don’t be such an idiot, Stanley!
STANLEY: And what have we here? [. . .] A crown for an empress.
STELLA: A rhinestone tiara she wore to a costume ball.
STANLEY: What’s rhinestone?
 STELLA: Next door to glass. (18)
He is like a bull in a china shop, massively inept, in his ramsacking of
Blanche’s papers (21–2), whereas she here emerges with some dignity and
humour. She succeeds in making him look ‘somewhat sheepish’, but he
regains status by revealing himself as the father of Stella’s expected child.
Stanley’s code of morality is clear-cut and simple, ruthlessly so. He
defends his territory, his wife and his friends against invasion or
imposition:
STANLEY: Mitch is a buddy of mine. We were in the same outfit
together – Two-forty-first Engineers. We work in the same plant and
now on the same bowling team. [. . .] I’d have that on my conscience the
rest of my life if I knew all that stuff and let my best friend get caught.
(62)
There are areas of his self-esteem which he protects forcefully:
STANLEY: I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not
Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred per cent American, born and
raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t
ever call me a Polack. (67)
Yet he is able to rape his wife’s sister while his wife is in hospital giving
birth to his child. He justifies it to himself by seeing the event as pre-
determined, as if by mutual consent, like the inevitable and proper mating
of animals. Blanche’s terrified defiance of him with a broken bottle
shatters the last fragile social taboos and, calling her ‘Tiger – tiger’,
Stanley responds to her gesture as part of a wild mating ritual. Even at this
moment there is a possible irony, a mockery beneath the dramatic
intensity, in the picture of Stanley, inflated with that ‘animal joy in his
being’, picking up Blanche’s inert form and carrying it off. It offers an
image familiar to any cinema-goer who has seen Hollywood classics such
as the 1932 King Kong in which the massive ape with the sentimental heart
carries Fay Wray’s limp body off to his lair. When Stanley says, ‘We’ve
had this date from the beginning’ (81), it is as if twentieth-century
conventions and moralities fade away in the face of the primeval sexual
drive of male to female.
It is, nonetheless, important to believe that Stanley loves Stella, not
merely with animal desire but with deep-seated feeling which sometimes
expresses itself with tenderness, sometimes with anguished need. When
she retreats upstairs after he has hit her, he is racked by shuddering sobs
and falls on his knees before her as she returns to him, before carrying her
back into their dark apartment. After Blanche’s departure at the end of the
play, Stella sits sobbing on the steps, holding her new baby; Stanley leaves
his card game to seek reassurance that she is still bound to him body and
heart:
STANLEY (voluptuously, soothingly). Now, honey. Now, love. Now,
now love. (He kneels beside her and his fingers find the opening of her
blouse.) Now, now, love. Now, love . . . (89–90)
Elia Kazan’s Notebook for ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ traces his
approach to the play as a director. Here he discusses Stanley’s inner
conflicts and dominant traits:
He wants to knock no-one down. He only doesn’t want to be taken
advantage of. His code is simple and simple-minded. He is adjusted
now . . . later, as his sexual powers die so will he; the trouble will
come later, the ‘problems’. [. . .] Why does he want to bring Blanche
and, before her, Stella down to his level? . . . It’s the hoodlum
aristocrat. He’s deeply dissatisfied, deeply hopeless, deeply cynical.
[. . .] But Blanche he can’t seem to do anything with. She can’t come
down to his level so he levels her with his sex. [. . .] Stanley is
supremely indifferent to everything except his own pleasure and
comfort. He is marvellously selfish, a miracle of sensuous self-
centredness.8
Stella, according to Kazan, is driven by her determination to hold onto
Stanley, so that even her sister becomes a possible enemy. In her marriage
to Stanley her womanhood has flowered; she is about to move into a
further stage of her life-cycle – to become a mother as well as a mate.
Blanche not only appears as a rival for Stanley’s favours, but tries to force
Stella back into a childhood rôle, calling her ‘Precious lamb!’ and
‘Blessed baby!’ and ordering her about:
BLANCHE: You hear me? I said stand up! (STELLA complies
reluctantly.) You messy child, you, you’ve spilt something on that
pretty white lace collar! (9)
Blanche also tries to undermine Stella’s belief in the worth and rightness
of her marriage to Stanley:
BLANCHE: I take it for granted that you still have sufficient memory
of Belle Reve to find this place and these poker players impossible to
live with. (39)
Her challenge forces Stella to define the nature and value of her
relationship with Stanley. She stands by her love for him, which, it is true,
has its centre in ‘things that happen between a man and a woman in the
dark – that sort of make everything else seem unimportant’ (39–40).
Blanche attempts to dismiss this as ‘brutal desire’, which will drag Stella
back with the animals in a primitive life without beauty. Her failure is
demonstrated as Stella turns to embrace Stanley ‘fiercely and in full view
of Blanche’ (41) while Stanley smiles in triumph over his wife’s shoulder.
Kazan suggests that Stella’s commitment to her marriage costs her dear:
Stella is a refined girl who has found a kind of salvation or
realization, but at a terrific price. She keeps her eyes closed, even
stays in bed as much as possible so that she won’t realise, won’t feel
the pain of this terrific price. [. . .] She’s waiting for the dark where
Stanley makes her feel only him and she has no reminder of the price
she is paying. She wants no intrusion from the other world. (Twentieth
Century Interpretations, 25)
It is possible to see Stella as the crucial battleground over which
Blanche and Stanley fight, possession of which ensures final victory. She
is then a key figure; her changing attitudes signal the movement of the
action. When she allows Blanche to lead her out of the apartment after
Stanley’s drunken violence, the balance of power shifts towards Blanche.
When Stella chooses to return to Stanley, Blanche is left in defeat. At the
end of the play it is suggested that her loyalty is now to her child, as she
sits with the baby on the steps outside the apartment, weeping for the
sister she has allowed to be taken into a kind of captivity, and neither
responding to nor rejecting Stanley’s advances. There are problems in
accepting Stanley’s and Stella’s marriage, as described by Blanche in
Scene Four. From a woman’s viewpoint especially, there may be
disconcerting implications:
 How did Stella ever get over those critical hurdles – Stanley’s table
manners, Stanley’s preference in dress? [. . .] Did Stanley rape Stella,
too, just by way of a how-do-you-do? Do all women burn to be raped?
Is this the locker room fantasy that is Williams’s version of animal
purity?
It is hard to know what is more unpleasant in this image: the overt
sentimentality it expresses, or the latent brutality it masks: a
fascination with the image of the helpless creature under the physical
domination of another, accepting his favours with tears of gratitude.
(Marion Magid in Twentieth Century Interpretations, 78)
The rhetoric here is extravagant; however, it raises an important issue. In
the play, it is suggested (only to be quickly denied) that during their
courtship Stanley’s lack of refinement and his forcefulness were disguised
or, perhaps, made seem acceptable by his Master Sergeant’s uniform.
Stella perhaps was wise to recognise in him the best available alternative
to the decadence of Belle Reve:
STELLA: The best I could do was make my own living, Blanche. (11)
This is Stella’s self-justification for what might otherwise seem a betrayal
of her family and heritage; she asserts herself at the expense of all that
Belle Reve has stood for and Blanche has tried to cling to. To some, it is
Stella’s selfishness rather than her submissiveness that characterises her:
Stella ignores the needs of others and eventually adopts her own
illusion. Life with Stanley – sex with Stanley – is her highest value.
Her refusal to accept Blanche’s story of the rape is a commitment to
self-preservation rather than love, and thus Stella contributes to
Blanche’s disintegration. (J. M. McGlinn in Tennessee Williams:
A Tribute, 514)
Her marriage gives her a purpose. Her new motherhood ensures a
continuing rôle even if Stanley’s desire for her should fade. Blanche offers
her nothing except a return to childish dependence and both emotional and
material insecurity. The final image of the play, however, suggests that
Blanche’s intrusion and expulsion have irrevocably changed the nature of
Stella’s relationship with her husband and her chosen way of life.
Blanche’s outstanding characteristic, according to Kazan, is
desperation; her chief motivation is the urgent need to find protection:
‘The tradition of the old South says it must be through another person.’
Her problem arises from this Southern tradition,
her notion of what a woman should be. [. . .] Because this image of
herself cannot be accomplished in reality, certainly not in the South
of our day and time, it is her effort and practice to accomplish it in
fantasy. Everything she does in reality too is coloured by this
necessity, this compulsion to be special.
Kazan reminds any actress attempting the rôle that it requires considerable
emotional versatility – ranging from imperious self-assertion to fluttering
helplessness, from feverish gaiety to pathetic terror. She must alternately
alienate and engage the sympathy of the audience.
The audience at the beginning should see her bad effect on Stella,
want Stanley to tell her off. He does. He exposes her and then
gradually, as they see how genuinely in pain, how actually desperate
she is, how warm, tender and loving she can be (the Mitch story), how
freighted with need she is – then they begin to go with her. They
begin to realize that they are sitting in at the death of something
extraordinary [. . .] and then they feel the tragedy. (Twentieth Century
Interpretations, 22)
The tragic flaw that undermines her heroic and admirable qualities is,
then, her need to be special, which isolates her from others. Allied to this
is her refusal to accept what is innate in her – part, that is, of her common
rather than her unique humanity – her sexuality. She denigrates it as mere
‘brutal desire’, thinking of it as ‘a rattle-trap streetcar, that bangs through
the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another’ (40) while she
yearns for a ‘Cadillac convertible, must have been a block long’ (37) or ‘a
cruise of the Caribbean’ (76). She harbours dreams of a happy-ever-after
ending to her story in which she as ‘a woman of intelligence and breeding,
can enrich a man’s life – immeasurably!’ (78). She longs to be protected
against the dangers of fading physical beauty and old age:
BLANCHE: Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But
beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the
heart – and I have all of those things – aren’t taken away, but grow!
Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute
 woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. (A
choked sob comes from her.) (78)
Kazan sees Streetcar as resembling a classical tragedy, with Blanche like
Medea or some doomed Greek heroine, pursued to madness by the Harpies
within her own nature, with Nemesis (the spirit of retribution) dogging her
heels and baying for vengeance against her for the death of her boy-
husband and for her sinning. She is capable of exciting pity and terror in
the audience – the responses described by Aristotle as the hallmarks of
tragedy.
‘Pity’ implies a compassionate concern; the audience must be able to
believe in and care about the character. She must have, at least, a dramatic
reality. How is this created? She is given a past that makes sense of her
present and that makes her future fate both consistent and ‘right’. Stella
refers to Blanche’s upbringing and her sensitivity, in defence of her
behaviour (58). She also speaks of Blanche’s traumatic marriage and
widowing, ‘an experience that – killed her illusions’ (61). Blanche herself
explains and justifies her desperate search for protection from poverty and
physical decline when she describes the squalid horror of
All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father,
mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put
in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! [. . .] Which of them
left us a fortune? Which of them left a cent of insurance even? Only
poor Jessie – one hundred to pay for her coffin. That was all, Stella!
And I with my pitiful salary at the school. (12)
Blanche’s early lessons have been bleak: gentility brought no lasting
earthly rewards; marriage brought pain and horror; material possessions
seeped away; the body swelled or shrivelled in death. As she says to Mitch
(who cannot understand her), desire seemed to be the opposite of all that
death, a possible antidote to the dying and the despair, so she caught the
habit, became addicted. In her final fantasies (85), she yearns for the
hygienic expansiveness of the sea, for a picturesque death without pain or
disfigurement or loneliness (‘my hand in the hand of some nice-looking
ship’s doctor’), for a clean, bright funeral which will be like a return to
youthful romance, and the hope of eternal happiness in heaven.
The Aristotelian ‘terror’ comes from the audience’s recognition that
Blanche’s destruction is inevitable, that she cannot free herself from the
contradictions of her own nature nor shake off the burden of guilt she has
carried ever since her husband’s death. It is a tragic irony of her situation
that the only way she can attract the special attention she craves, the
protection she seems unable to survive without, is by exploiting the
sexuality she feels debases her and which ultimately debars her from the
hoped-for haven of a second marriage. She describes her dilemma
defensively, but with clarity:
BLANCHE: I was never hard or self-sufficient enough. When people
are soft – soft people have got to court the favour of hard ones, Stella.
Have got to be seductive – put on soft colours, the colours of butterfly
wings, and glow – make a little temporary magic just in order to pay
for – one night’s shelter. That’s why I’ve been – not so awf ’ly good
lately. I’ve run for protection, Stella . . . protection. (45)
To Mitch she admits without coquetry that her youth has suddenly
vanished, that all she wants is a peaceful hiding place that is more than
simply a grave, that she has lied: ‘I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to
be the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!’ (72). The
‘if ’ is important; it leaves the moral issues unresolved. Blanche’s morality
is that of the aesthete, the dedicated seeker after beauty before all else.
Like Oscar Wilde (the Anglo-Irish playwright whose life and works were
designed to celebrate beauty and wit rather than more conventional moral
standards), Blanche holds to the belief that ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful
untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’.9 For her, too, it is important that
her life should resemble a work of art, and that art, poetry and music
should be the flag she carries ‘in this dark march toward whatever it is
we’re approaching’ (41). It is fitting that she should be a teacher of
English. Not only does this make credible her often rather literary and
poetic language, but it also fits her search for magical beauty at the
expense of common-or-garden reality. It is her business ‘to instil a bunch
of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne and
Whitman and Poe’ (31). The images associated with Blanche generally
imply fragile beauty, transience: an orchard in spring, its blossom bound to
fall at the short season’s end; a softly tinted butterfly or a moth, driven to
seek warmth and brilliance from a flame that will sear its beauty then
consume it.
 As well as making sense in human terms, the character of Blanche has
been seen as embodying a number of concepts or themes: the Soul
subjected to physical existence and thus to ‘the apishness and brutality of
matter’ (Leonard Quirino in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, 85); a Jungian
Great Mother Figure, a kind of white witch (‘A Gallery of Witches’
N. M. Tischler); the representation ‘in her frail spirit [of] the decline and
fall of a long line of decadent Southern aristocrats’ (New York Daily News,
4.12.1947); ‘beauty shipwrecked on the rock of the world’s vulgarity’ (The
New Republic, 22.12.1947); ‘the symbol of art and beauty, this poor flimsy
creature to whom truth is mortal’ (Mary McCarthy in Twentieth Century
Interpretations, 99). Elia Kazan sees her, on the one hand, as a doomed
dinosaur approaching extinction, and, on the other (with a male arrogance
worthy of Stanley Kowalski), as:
a heightened version, an artistic intensification of all women. That is
what makes the play universal. Blanche’s special relation to all
women is that she is at that critical point where the one thing above
all else that she is dependent on – her attraction for men – is
beginning to go. Blanche is like all women, dependent on a man,
looking for one to hang on to: only more so! (Twentieth Century
Interpretations, 24)
Equally one might say that Blanche is ‘an artistic intensification’ of a
common male conception of ‘all women’, and her dependency on a man is
the expression of their commonly cherished hope – hence the play’s
universality.
Mitch is important to the plot of Streetcar as he represents the
possibility – however pallid – of future happiness or security for Blanche,
that hope which makes her ultimate catastrophe all the more poignant. He
also serves to emphasise the strengths and vividness of both Stanley and
Blanche by offering the contrast of his own weakness and insipidity. One
feels that Blanche would have had to stoop to marry him, to confine her
nature within his soft-centred mediocrity. Mitch sometimes emerges as a
comic foil for Stanley; for example, his overscrupulous concern about the
way he perspires seems funny after Stanley’s easy: ‘My clothes’re stickin’
to me. Do you mind if I make myself comfortable? (He starts to remove
his shirt.)’ (14). When Stanley charges after the pregnant Stella in drunken
fury, Mitch’s response sounds positively spinsterish: ‘This is terrible’ (31).
The way he is routed by Blanche’s cries of ‘Fire!’ is absurd and makes
Stanley’s subsequent domination of her seem all the more powerful.
In the early drafts of the play, the key struggle is between Blanche and
the prospective suitor, rather than between Blanche and her brother-in-law.
Subsequently the character becomes weaker, but in the final stage of A
Streetcar Named Desire Williams adds two important elements to make
Mitch’s rejection of Blanche more credible, since one might otherwise
expect her to mould his weakness to answer her own needs. Williams
emphasises Mitch’s reverence for and dependence on his invalid mother,
who will be outraged by Blanche’s lifestyle. Also, before confronting
Blanche, Mitch has tried to nerve himself by drinking more than he is
accustomed to. It is difficult to be sure how sympathetic a character he is
meant to be: Stanley treats him with tolerant superiority, yet feels a loyalty
to him; his own gentleness and hesitancy come as a relief after Stanley’s
blustering towards Blanche; his concern for Stella’s well-being and his
courtesy towards Blanche are appealing and believable. Yet his gentleness
comes out of weakness rather than strength: his advances to Blanche are
hesitant because he is doubtful of his power to please; his capacity for
affection and tenderness has long been absorbed by a sickly mother and a
dead girl; he appears childish to his friends (28); he is embarrassed by his
body functions (52); he lacks the experience or the insight to see through
Blanche’s affected demureness, and then lacks the wisdom to recognise
her worth once his first illusions have been shattered. He responds to
Blanche’s cry for help with injured self-esteem; then his attempt to take
sexual advantage of her is a fiasco; even the words of his rejection of her
are weak – he doesn’t think he wants to marry her anymore. Williams
describes him as clattering awkwardly down the steps and out of sight. His
inadequacy highlights the desperation that drives Blanche to say (47): ‘I
want his respect. [. . .] I want to rest! I want to breathe quietly again! Yes –
I want Mitch . . . very badly! Just think! If it happens! I can leave here and
not be anyone’s problem . . .’ (47). There is a truth behind the account she
gives Stanley of her final encounter with Mitch:
BLANCHE: But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is
not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and it is
one thing of which I have never, never been guilty. And so I told him, I
said to him, Thank you, but it was foolish of me to think we could ever
 adapt ourselves to each other. Our ways of life are too different. We
have to be realistic about such things. (78)
Is Mitch guilty of ‘deliberate cruelty’ in that rejection of Blanche, either
in its meaning or its manner? Or, like Blanche when feeling betrayed by
her boy-husband, is he simply unable to cope with this new reality, so hits
out like a child then runs away?
When he reappears in the final scene, he is evidently dogged by shame
and an impotent fury. He splutters with incoherent rage against Stanley,
using the language of their card-playing:
‘You . . . you . . . you . . . Brag . . . brag . . . bull . . . bull’ (82). When he
hears Blanche’s voice, his arm becomes nerveless and ‘his gaze is
dissolved into space’ (83). He ducks his head, as if to hide from her, and
remains hunched over the table, sullen and ashamed, when the others stand
to let her pass. He cannot bear to look at her; undignified and cowardly
evasion is all that is left to him. Only when Blanche is fighting for
survival against the grim nurse is he stung into movement, but he is
blocked by Stanley and his wild accusation merely ridiculed:
MITCH (wildly): You! You done this, all o’ your God damn
interfering with things you –
STANLEY: Quit the blubber! (He pushes him aside.)
MITCH: I’ll kill you! (He lunges and strikes at STANLEY.)
STANLEY: Hold this bone-headed cry-baby! (88)
Mitch collapses, sobbing helplessly over the table. He, like Blanche, will
have to find some way of trying to escape from the guilt and the sense of
personal failure, or he will be finished. Perhaps he will translate the whole
experience into a wistful memory to keep alongside his silver cigarette
case from the strange, sweet, dead girl, with its significant inscription:
And if God choose,
I shall but love thee better – after death! (29)

Poet of the Theatre/Successful Showman?

In the letter to Tynan already referred to, Tennessee Williams describes his
writing as ‘lyric’. This implies two important characteristics: first, that the
writing has a musical quality rather than being prosaic or naturalistic, and,
secondly, that it is an expression of the writer’s personal experience or,
more significantly, of his thoughts and feelings about that experience. The
‘truth’ or ‘reality’ is, therefore, highly subjective and the play’s success is
dependent on the dramatist’s ability to present his personal perspective on
life so persuasively that, for the duration of the play at least, the audience
can understand and sympathise with that personal vision. Williams was,
by his own admission, engrossed by his own biography, using the colourful
facts of his life to create the patterns of his work and, at the same time,
using that process of translation from life to literature as a means of
freeing himself from emotions and memories which otherwise haunted
him.
In A Streetcar Named Desire there are recurring themes and terrors:
death, for instance. His mother recalls Tennessee Williams saying:
We are all desperately afraid of death, much more than we dare admit
even to ourselves. (Remember Me to Tom, 252)
This terror was but one element, according to Miss Edwina, in her son’s
general anxiety:
Tom is so mild in looks and manner you would never suspect a
violent feeling stirs in him. Yet violence is the way we fight fear and
Tom has said he always had to contend with the ‘adversary of fear’
which gave him ‘a certain tendency toward an atmosphere of hysteria
and violence in my writing, an atmosphere that has existed in it from
the beginning’. (Remember Me to Tom, 253)
A sense of the inexorable decay of beauty accelerated by the brutality of
much of modern, urban life linked his fear of personal disintegration with
his nostalgia for the tattered romance of the Old South – a nostalgia he
could hardly escape, being Miss Edwina’s son. She approvingly records
this:
Another time he declared, ‘I write out of love for the South. [. . .] But
I can’t expect Southerners to realize that my writing about them is an
expression of love. It is out of regret for a South that no longer exists
 that I write of the forces that have destroyed it’. (Remember Me to
Tom, 213)
The third theme dominant in much of his work, and certainly in Streetcar,
is the nature and effects of human sexuality: its voracious energy, its
disguises, the attempts made to control or domesticate it by self-
consciously civilised sections of society, the subsequent conflicts, the
relationship between love and lust, between emotional and physical needs.
Any poet of the theatre, rather than of the study, has a vocabulary
beyond words – the three-dimensional images of the stage itself. The first
production of Streetcar was designed by Jo Mielziner, a man who had
come under the influence of German Expressionist stagecraft while
working in Berlin. The wish to communicate the feeling of the play
through its set was reflected in the sloping telegraph poles and lurid neon
lights surrounding the ornate but crumbling façade of the pale old
apartment house in Elysian Fields. Tennessee Williams’s stage directions
are emotionally coloured. At the opening of the play,
the sky that shows round the dim white building is a peculiarly tender
blue, almost turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism
and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. (3)
For Scene Three, The Poker Night, his directions are very specific,
indicating the visual tradition he is drawing on:
There is a picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlour at night. The
kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw
colours of childhood’s spectrum. (24)
He stresses the relationship between the image of the set and the nature of
the characters framed within it; the card players are ‘as coarse and direct
and powerful as the primary colours’, with a childlike – or childish – lack
of delicacy and sophistication, having no subtle shading or nuances. At the
end of the play, when Blanche feels like a hunted animal finally at bay,
Williams calls for her state of mind to be expressed visually in a wholly
unnaturalistic but perhaps poetic – or theatrically shocking – way:
She rushes past him into the bedroom. Lurid reflections appear on the
walls in odd, sinuous shapes. (86)
These horrid reflections of her panic fade when she is soothed by the
doctor’s courteous gesture. As she is led out, like someone blind, the
lyricism of the surrounding turquoise sky becomes grimly ironic.
This visual projection of Blanche’s inner life is complemented by the
pattern of sound Williams calls for – primarily the use of music and
chanted street-cries – creating a ritualistic or dreamlike feeling. The
lyricism of the opening picture (3) is given voice by the ‘blue piano’
which, Williams explains, ‘expresses the spirit of the life which goes on
here’. It is eloquent of the ‘infatuated fluency’ of the Old Quarter’s
picturesquely self-consuming culture. Later the strains of a polka become
more and more insistent as the truth of Blanche’s past moves closer and
closer to her present refuge. At first it is faint in the distance (15), then, as
she speaks to Mitch of her widowing, the polka sounds more strongly, in a
minor key, shifting into a major key as Mitch moves towards her with
awkward compassion. When Blanche is discovered alone at the beginning
of Scene Nine, the polka is rapid and feverish. She sits tense and hunched,
no longer dressed in a near-virginal white but in a scarlet robe:
The music is in her mind; she is drinking to escape it and the sense of
disaster closing in on her and she seems to whisper the words of the
song. (69)
It is important to remember when reading the play that the music in
Blanche’s mind is also heard by the audience in the theatre. Tennessee
Williams uses a theatrical device to draw the audience into Blanche’s
nightmare; she and they share the same experience at this moment and so
the audience may be persuaded to believe in the truth of this vision. This
may be felt as the power of poetry in the theatre, or it may be seen as
successful showmanship.
It is not only Blanche’s passions and qualities that are expressed through
emotive sounds. Stanley, for example, is associated with the powerful note
of a locomotive engine – modern, brutally impressive machine-muscle. In
Scene Four (40), his invasion of the sisters’ conspiracy is covered by the
sound of an approaching train; so, too, is his feigned withdrawal before his
victorious reclamation of Stella. It is, therefore, significant that when
Blanche is telling Mitch of her marriage, the most harrowing memory is
signalled by the roar of an oncoming locomotive:
 She claps her hands to her ears and crouches over. The headlight of
the locomotive glares into the room as it thunders past. (56)
Similarly, the beginning of the last phase of the movement towards
Stanley’s rape of Blanche in Scene Ten is marked by the roar of an
approaching locomotive which forces Blanche to crouch and press her fists
to her ears while Stanley, grinning, waits between her and her means of
escape.
Stanley has his music, too. When he is full of anguished rage at Stella’s
retreat upstairs, his violent gesture of hurling the telephone to the floor is
accompanied by ‘dissonant brass and piano sounds’ (33). The transition
from his howl of ‘STELLAHHHHH!’ to the intense sensuality of their
reunion is achieved by the moaning of a low-tone clarinet. His sexual
domination of Blanche in Scene Ten is blared out by ‘the hot trumpet and
drums from the Four Deuces’.
This deliberate orchestration of the play’s emotional movement is
‘lyricism’ in its most literal sense. When the script is read, the lyric device
can be appraised intellectually as one of the several formal elements of the
play as a whole. The idea of it is interesting. In the theatre, however, the
power of these sounds is not intellectual but makes a direct appeal to or an
assault upon the audience’s feelings.
The language of the play is shaped by two needs: character-
identification and thematic development. On a naturalistic level, the
characters are placed socially and individually by the words they use and
the structure of their sentences. Stanley’s sentences are generally short,
with a simple syntax: challenging questions are followed by single-
statement answers, with key words hammered home:
STANLEY: You know what luck is? Luck is believing you’re lucky.
Take at Salerno. I believed I was lucky. I figured that 4 out of 5 would
not come through but I would . . . and I did. I put that down as a rule. To
hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you are lucky.
(82)
His vocabulary is drawn from his day-to-day interests: card-playing and
betting (20), the popular culture of films and songs (20), slang (88), lively
but hackneyed over-statement (18). Nonetheless, there is a patterning of
imagery, a kind of poetic rhetoric (i.e. language used deliberately to create
a desired effect or to make a specific point – here, this ‘point’ about those
values and forces that Stanley embodies). The language of games-playing
has not only an obvious naturalistic reference, but also expresses a
gambler’s fatalism and his faith in his strength as someone favoured by
Fortune (82). It is a male-oriented philosophy: ‘seven card stud’ (25),
‘One-eyed jacks are wild’ (24), ‘What do you two think you are? A pair of
queens?’ (65). It supposes a way of life played by a set of rules which
might seem arbitrary, even unfair, to an outsider and which must take into
account the action of forces beyond human control, where the urge to
compete and conquer is celebrated and losers may be called upon to
surrender all they have. The poker games that Stanley is seen playing are
aggressive, individualistic. Initially he is seen losing to Mitch, Blanche’s
most promising ally, but by the last scene he is winning every hand (82).
Depending as it does on the skilful manipulation of the hands that
chance deals out, the card game is used by Williams throughout
Streetcar as a symbol of fate and of the skilful player’s ability to
make its decrees perform in his own favour at the expense of his
opponent’s misfortune, incompetence, and horror of the game itself.
(L. Quirino in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, 78)
Stanley also echoes or answers images used by Blanche. Her fear of bright
light is in opposition to Stanley’s delight in ‘them coloured lights’ that he
‘gets going’ with Stella. The effect of the imagery is emphasised by a
strong gesture in the final scene when Stanley speaks dismissively of
Blanche’s impact on his life, then tears her paper lantern off the light:
STANLEY: You left nothing here but spilt talcum and old empty
perfume bottles – unless it’s the paper lantern you want to take with
you. You want the lantern? (He crosses to dressing-table and seizes the
paper lantern, tearing it off the light bulb, and extends it towards her.
She cries out as if the lantern was herself . . .) (87)
Blanche’s language, too, works both naturalistically and symbolically.
With her, however, the symbolism is a more conscious part of the
character’s style. It is consistent with what the audience learns of her life
and of her early character that she should move from breathless flirtation
to deliberate rhetoric (22) and scatter literary allusions through her
conversation (Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe). But the
insistence of the motifs, like the strains of the polka, gains momentum and
demands attention: there is the image of Desire as a streetcar banging (a
word with sexual connotations) through the narrow thoroughfares of the
Old Quarter, taking Blanche first to Cemeteries then, if she is lucky, to
Elysian Fields – that area of the classical underworld reserved for the
blessed. There is a bitter irony that she who seeks happiness so fervently
should be driven out of Elysium as a sinner for whom there is no apparent
redemption. Like a moth, to which Williams compares her, she is a
creature of the night, shrinking from strong light yet fatally drawn to the
flame of passion. The songs she sings, although recognisably of the period
in which the play is set, comment figuratively on her situation and make
her seem not so much an individual as part of that romantic tradition of
‘captive maids’ brought from ‘the land of the sky blue water’ (16) into ‘a
Barnum and Bailey world. Just as phony as it can be [. . .] a honky-tonk
parade’ (60), whose promise of happiness could be fulfilled only ‘If you
believed in me!’ In the final scene she seems to belong to another
recognisable tradition, that of Shakespeare’s Orphelia – the delicate,
loving maid driven to madness by the betrayals and brutality of the world
she has been unluckily born into. Unlike Ophelia, Blanche does not sing in
her final defeat, but she echoes Ophelia’s pathos and poignant lyricism in
her dreams of a beautiful death on the water and in the refrain-like
repetition of key words (‘sea’, ‘death’) and the ironic purity of the
cathedral chimes. So much so, that Laertes’s heart-wrung response to his
sister Ophelia’s madness is, perhaps, the kind of response Tennessee
Williams aspires to as Blanche is led away:
Thoughts and affliction, passion, hell itself
She turns to favour and to prettiness.
(Hamlet, IV, vi)

Production History of A Streetcar Named Desire

The premiere
Directed by Elia Kazan, the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire was on
Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre. Opening on 3 December 1947, after
tryouts in Boston, New Haven and Philadelphia, it ran for an impressive
855 performances and won Tennessee Williams the Pulitzer, Donaldson
and New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards. Kazan, who went on to direct
the 1951 film version and four other works by Tennessee Williams, was
already a well-established theatre and film director when Williams’s
agent, Audrey Wood, and the play’s producer, Irene Selznick, persuaded
him to take on the project. He became a great driving force behind the
play, instigating many changes to the original script (over a hundred), as
he would with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and keeping detailed notes on the
play’s characters and themes that would later be published.
Working closely with Kazan, the Broadway production’s designer, Jo
Mielziner, carefully balanced the play’s realism and its expressionism.
Thus the set suggested both the spartan apartment in its rundown
neighbourhood and the dreamy romanticism of Blanche. The latter was
partly achieved through the complex series of lighting effects and the
insubstantial walls of the tenement building. The production’s music,
composed by Alex North, followed Williams’s careful layering effect – the
music of the Varsouviana on top of the blue piano, for example – and
included miscellaneous sound effects to capture the vibrant French
Quarter.
Blanche DuBois was played by Jessica Tandy who, following Kazan’s
interpretation of the play, suggested that the character had already become
mentally unstable at the outset. The other three principal characters were
played by lesser known actors: a young, and largely unknown, Marlon
Brando played Stanley Kowalski; Mitch was played by Karl Malden who
had been with Brando at The Actors Studio; and Kim Hunter took the role
of Stella, a character who, in Kazan’s view, had to be both passionate with
her husband and reflect the considerable sacrifices she has made to be with
him. These last three actors would all go on to appear in the 1951 film
adaptation.
The huge success of the premiere led to the play going on tour across
the United States. Two companies were established, the more successful of
which being the one that cast Uta Hagen as Blanche and Anthony Quinn as
Stanley. Hagen, also involved with the Broadway production, was a far
more physical Blanche who, contrary to Tandy, suggested that the
character’s madness was induced by Stanley. Quinn studied Brando’s
interpretation of the role closely, but, despite bringing a greater
brutishness to the character through his larger frame, he was not able to
match the complexity of Brando’s characterisation.
Other American productions

Streetcar was revived in New York at the City Center Theater in

Manhattan in February 1956. It proved to be a controversial production,
Tallulah Bankhead’s bold interpretation of Blanche attracting much
negative criticism, even from Williams himself (he later retracted this in
the New York Times). Bankhead’s Blanche was both funny and aggressive –
markedly different to Tandy and Hagen’s portrayals – and, for the critic
Brooks Atkinson, the comedy was out of keeping with the character.
Writing in the New York Times on 16 February 1956, he argued that
Bankhead’s personality was ‘worldly and sophisticated, decisive and self-
sufficient: it is fundamentally comic’ (cited in The Selected Letters of
Tennessee Williams, vol. II, 603). In her defence, Bankhead’s Southern
background meant that she could bring greater realism to the role.
Four more New York productions of note were those at the Vivian
Beaumont Theater in 1973, the Circle in the Square Theater in 1988, the
Barrymore in 1992 and Studio 54 in 2005. The first of these, a twenty-fifth
anniversary revival, was directed by Ellis Rabb and featured Rosemary
Harris as Blanche and James Farentino as Stanley. Although Brendan Gill
found it ‘not merely a worthy successor to the original but an illuminating
companion to it’ (cited in Kolin, 2000, 93), the majority of reviewers
judged it unnecessarily nostalgic and overblown: Rabb filled a large stage
with noisy extras, thus detracting from the play’s essential claustrophobia.
There were also problems with the acting. Harris’s Blanche was,
paradoxically, too strong (certainly for Farentino’s Stanley) and too
emotional. Farentino, appearing naked at one point, sublimated some of
Stanley’s strength in a strong sense of being wronged.
The Circle in the Square production was directed by Nikos
Psacharopoulos and starred Blythe Danner as Blanche. Psacharopoulos had
already developed a reputation for directing Streetcar in Williamstown
(Massachusetts) two years before, but, apart from Danner, the principal
parts were changed for New York. Aidan Quinn took the role of Stanley
and, although criticised for his lack of physical presence, he brought
slyness and verbal dexterity to the part. Psacharopoulos was able to give
the play greater relevance to his audience by emphasising both the
importance of truth in a post-Watergate era and the role of women after
the rise of feminism. The production was also notable for its staging:
eschewing the proscenium, the theatre’s artistic director, Theodore Mann,
defended the positioning of the audience on three sides in a horseshoe
effect by stating that it was easier to become part of the play.
In contrast, the highly publicised 1992 production at the Ethel
Barrymore Theater attempted to recreate Kazan’s more conventional set.
However, the director, Gregory Mosher, was ultimately unable to capture
much of the play’s poetry, and Jessica Lange as Blanche failed to transfer
her considerable skills as a screen actress to the stage. She was
overshadowed by another film actor, Alec Baldwin, who played up
Stanley’s vulgarity, acknowledging the influence of Brando.
The English actress, Natasha Richardson, took the role of Blanche at
Studio 54 in Manhattan in 2005. This Roundabout Theatre Company
production was directed by Edward Hall and was much talked about for
the casting of John C. Reilly as Stanley. To many, he was the antithesis of
Brando’s creation, being neither menacing nor erotic (he had previously
played Mitch in Chicago, a role to which he seemed much more suited).
Indeed, though Richardson was more than able to suggest the sexual
experience of Blanche, there was little chemistry between the two
adversaries. Amy Ryan’s Stella, also unable to connect with Reilly’s
Stanley, was, according to Ben Brantley of the New York Times, the
production’s ‘anchor of authenticity’.
Two established film stars, Faye Dunaway and John Voight, took the
roles of Blanche and Stanley for another twenty-fifth anniversary
production of the play at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles in 1973.
The director, James Bridges, tried to break with tradition, but, like
Mosher, ended up draining the play of much of its poetic strength. Faye
Dunaway received mixed reviews: for some, she rose above the rest of the
production; however, despite being chosen by Williams, it was felt she
was too young and tried to bring too much comedy to the part. Voight
consciously underplayed Stanley with the result that the character lost
much of his force. He was even overshadowed by Mitch, played by the
very good Earl Holliman.
In 1976, Jack Gerber directed the husband and wife team of Geraldine
Page and Rip Torn at the Academy Festival Theatre in Lake Forest,
Illinois. This production was gritty and violent, the uncompromising set,
complete with strewn rubbish and a continually burning light, being
complemented by Page’s robust Blanche and Torn’s (overly) menacing and
vulgar Stanley.

London productions

The first London Streetcar opened at the Aldwych Theatre in October

1949. The sold-out run lasted for 326 performances until August 1950 and
was a success, despite considerable moral condemnation from members of
the clergy and politicians alike. Vivien Leigh (Blanche) was directed by
her husband, Laurence Olivier, and the part of Stanley was taken by Bonar
Colleano; Renee Asherson was Stella and Bernard Braden was Mitch. The
production drew heavily on the Broadway premiere, using the same sets
and music, and Olivier even studied Kazan’s notes assiduously. However,
Leigh interpreted the role of Blanche differently to her American
predecessors and this was underlined by a greater fidelity to Williams’s
notes about costume. Her role was compromised somewhat by cuts
enforced by the Lord Chamberlain: for example, there was to be no
reference to Allan Grey’s homosexuality, a crucial aspect of her past that
determines much of her subsequent behaviour. Leigh won praise for her
interpretation and Colleano, intentionally more subtle than Brando, was a
worthy Stanley.
The 1974 London production at the Piccadilly Theatre encountered no
censorship issues. Directed by Edwin Sherin, it starred Claire Bloom,
Martin Shaw and Joss Ackland (Mitch). Arguably, Bloom’s turbulent
personal life prepared her well for the part of Blanche, allowing her to
realise that the character’s ‘neediness only brings suffering’ (from Leaving
a Doll’s House, cited in Kolin, 2000, 100). She was widely praised for a
moving performance that captured both the vulnerability of the character
and her determination to ensnare Mitch, and she won awards from both the
Evening Standard and Variety. Shaw was an intelligent and proud Stanley,
whereas Ackland offered an older Mitch, sensitive but lumbering.
The 2002 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the National
Theatre was directed by Trevor Nunn and starred Glenn Close as Blanche
and Iain Glen as Stanley. Close’s involvement was criticised by the actors’
union, Equity, as depriving British talent of a chance to take the role, but
she gave a consummate performance. Michael Billington, writing in the
Guardian, said that she ‘oozes fluttery condescension and coy gentility’
and John Peter for the Sunday Times lauded the interpretation as
‘thrillingly theatrical but unostentatious, and as powerful, intelligent and
moving as anything I have seen on this stage’. Glen was elegant and
graceful, but, for Peter, he was also ‘like a matador: ruthless, confident,
provocative, alert’.

Other premieres around the world

Curiously, the short Mexican premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire (Un

Tranvía Llamado Deseo) in December 1948 and the follow-up run in May
1949 were the work of a Japanese director, Seki Sano. Influenced by
Stanislavski, Sano had a semi-professional acting company called the
Teatro de la Reforma, and it was this troupe that gave nine performances at
the Palacio de Bellas Artes and then a hundred performances at the Teatro
Esperanza Iris in Mexico City. Also one of the translators, Sano helped to
make Williams’s play both popular and respected in Mexico. María
Douglas, though young and inexperienced, gave a powerful performance
as Blanche, capturing, on the one hand, her arrogance and flirtatiousness
and, on the other, her victimisation. Playing opposite her was an ex-boxer,
Wolf Ruvinskis, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, emphasised Stanley’s
physical and verbal aggression.
The Italian premiere of Streetcar was at the Eliseo Theatre in Rome on
21 January 1949. Directed by Luchino Visconti, who would come to be
known outside Italy for films like The Leopard (1963), the production
highlighted the play’s class struggle against a fussily realistic backdrop.
Visconti was aided in this by his young set designer, Franco Zefferelli, the
future director of the film of Romeo and Juliet. Zefferelli created a messy
and drab apartment – simultaneously realistic and romantic – and a
cacophony of sounds that reproduced both the noisy vitality of the Quarter
and Blanche’s breakdown. Rina Morelli played Blanche simply but
effectively, concentrating on her tragic decline in a hostile world. Vittorio
Gassman’s Stanley was a mixture of spontaneous violence and great
tenderness, while Marcello Mastroianni (also destined to be successful in
the world of film) was a young and sexy Mitch, very different to Karl
Malden in the Broadway premiere. Williams attended the opening night
and strongly approved of the production; it ran for just over a month.
The Swedish premiere took place at the Gothenburg City Theatre on 1
March 1949, where Ingmar Bergman was the resident director. Able to
benefit from a revolving stage, complete with inner and outer sections,
Bergman’s production added an extra building in the form of a movie
theatre called Desire or the Pleasure Garden. Constantly playing A Night in
Paradise, this cinema immediately suggested the play’s main theme, while
the film’s title could apply to both Stanley’s wedding night and his rape of
Blanche; there were also echoes of the Paradise Dance Hall in The Glass
Menagerie. An apple tree stood near the cinema – perhaps a reference to
Blanche’s explanation of her name as ‘an orchard in spring’ – visibly
dropping its leaves as the play progressed. Blanche was played by Karin
Kavli, an actress who impressed critics with her range of emotions;
Anders Ek was a primitive but innocent Stanley.
Consistent with the Italian and Swedish premieres, the French
production of Streetcar also involved a celebrated filmmaker: Jean
Cocteau. His adaptation of the play began on 19 October 1949 and ran for
233 performances at the Théâtre Edouard VII in Paris. Cocteau’s
translation was rather loose in places, and his adaptation included many
black extras, male and female, to help capture the spirit of New Orleans –
memorably dancing in the background during the rape scene, for example.
The play’s set was notable for a series of transparent backdrops
illuminated by important symbols or miniature scenes. Blanche was
played by a comedienne, Arletty, who, at the age of forty, managed to
capture all of the character’s aristocratic grandeur; Yves Vincent’s simian
Stanley was no match for her.
The Bungakuza Dramatic Company mounted the first Asian production
of Streetcar in Tokyo in 1953, at a time when American culture, including
the already released film version of the play, was starting to have an
influence. The director, Ichiro Kawaguchi, like Seki Sano in Mexico, was
influenced by Stanislavski, and he made every attempt to recreate the
world of the play faithfully. Blanche was played by Haruko Sugimura, a
highly respected actress who went on to become identified with the role,
even reviving it in 1987. Though she was prone to exaggeration in her
performance, and though Japanese critics found it hard to sympathise with
Blanche’s character, there was considerable praise for Sugimura’s
interpretation, in which she captured much of the character’s stature.
Kazuo Kitamura (Stanley) was less successful: his inexperience was
evident and he mistakenly tried to copy Brando.

Alternative productions

As well as the many international variations of Streetcar, there have been

several productions which have foregrounded black actors or black
interpretations of the play. In some cases – Jefferson City, Missouri
(1953), Los Angeles (1955 and 1956), New Orleans (1984), Chicago
(1987), Washington DC (1988) – the cast was all black; in other
productions – West Berlin (1974) and Berkeley (1983) – only one of the
parts was played by a black actor: that of Stanley. While these alternative
productions have opened up the text, freeing it from conventional
interpretations that may have taken the Broadway premiere as a point of
departure, they have, in some cases, involved necessary amendments to
the script – for example, omitting references to Stanley’s Polish ancestry
in the Berkeley production, or changing the number of his regiment during
the war so that it faithfully denoted a black one in the New Orleans
production. The Washington production at Howard University offered a
different racial dimension still: Blanche was supposed to be descended
from light-skinned Creoles, whereas Stanley was from the Sea Islands off
the coast of South Carolina and, therefore, noticeably darker. This
interpretation sought to highlight the racism that can be assimilated within
gradations of colour, not just between white and black.
Gender has also proved to be an area for reinterpretation of the play.
Here the collaboration of two companies, Split Britches and Bloolips,
produced the parodically titled Belle Reprieve in 1991, a show that drew
on many different styles and only really used Streetcar as its inspiration.
Blanche was transformed into a drag queen, played by Bette Bourne, and
Stanley became a butch lesbian, played by Peggy Shaw. Offering versions
of some of the scenes in the original play, Belle Reprieve also incorporated
songs, dance and a humorous script that parodied some of the serious lines
of Streetcar. The rape, out of tune with the comic tenor of the production,
was omitted. In short, the creators of Belle Reprieve aimed to deconstruct
and question sexual roles generally, and more specifically in traditional
versions of Williams’s play. Belle Reprieve premiered at Drill Hall in
London before moving to La MaMa and One Dream, two venues in New
York.

Film and television adaptations

The 1951 Warner Brothers film version, directed by Elia Kazan and filmed
in New Orleans, is justly famous. R. Barton Palmer explains that ‘its
startling differences from the standard Hollywood movie in the
representation of sexual themes eminently suited Williams’s play to be the
source of the first Hollywood production in a new genre: the adult art
film’ (‘Hollywood in Crisis: Tennessee Williams and the evolution of the
adult film’, in Roudané, 2001, 216). Starring three of the four main actors
from the Broadway premiere (Vivien Leigh, judged to have more box-
office appeal following her success with Gone with the Wind, replaced
Jessica Tandy as Blanche), the film also used the same costume designer,
Lucinda Ballard, and musical director, Alex North. Amid much critical
acclaim, Leigh, Kim Hunter (Stella) and Karl Malden (Mitch) all won
Oscars, but the project initially encountered significant problems with the
censors, the Production Code Administration headed by Joseph Breen.
Kazan and Williams were ordered to make sixty-eight cuts from the
Broadway version. These included removing all reference to
homosexuality and, most crucially, changing the outcome of the rape. In
theatrical productions, Stanley could escape punishment; however, the
film’s family audience would find that this was morally unacceptable.
Nevertheless, determined attempts were made to retain the spirit of the
original play. The rape, for example, was suggested by showing the viewer
Stanley gathering up Blanche’s defeated body in a cracked mirror; the film
then cuts to a cleaner hosing down a street, a crude but effective way of
indicating what has happened. However, Williams could never reconcile
himself to the enforced ending where Stella, clutching her baby, vows she
is never going to return to Stanley.
There have been two television adaptations of Streetcar, both of which
were made quite some time after the film. The first, broadcast on ABC on
4 March 1984, was directed by John Erman and starred Ann-Margaret as
Blanche, Treat Williams as Stanley and Randy Quaid as Mitch. Without
the restrictions imposed on the film, this adaptation could play up
Blanche’s flirtatiousness and depict the rape far more directly. Ann-
Margaret was tougher than previous Blanches and did not suggest the
character’s madness until the rape scene. Treat Williams recreated the
muscular build of Brando’s Stanley, but his interpretation of the character
was too one-dimensional. Beverly D’Angelo’s Stella forgave her husband
easily and passionately.
The second television adaptation reunited Jessica Lange and Alec
Baldwin (they had appeared in the 1992 Broadway revival) and was
broadcast on 29 October 1995. It was directed by Glenn Jordan and
featured the comic actor, John Goodman, as Mitch. Lange’s screen
Blanche was considered an improvement on her stage creation, while Alec
Baldwin continued to impress as Stanley.

Opera and ballet versions

Given its musical content, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that A

Streetcar Named Desire became the inspiration for an opera performed by
the San Francisco Opera Company in 1998. The score was written by
André Previn, who conducted the first four performances at the War
Memorial Opera House, and the libretto was written by Philip Littell.
Previn steered away from the jazz that characterised Alex North’s score
for both the Broadway premiere and the film, choosing instead to create a
modern European sound. The three acts focused strongly on Blanche,
Previn firmly believing that her fate was irredeemably tragic.
Consequently, Littell gave the character several arias, though the rest of
the libretto had to follow Williams’s play fairly closely. The set, too,
reflected Blanche’s centrality: with its transparent walls and the faint tilt
of the apartment, it was easy to suggest the character’s state of mind,
particularly in the wordless rape scene where the stage split in two. Renee
Fleming (Blanche) was a soprano who came to the production with an
impressive reputation, and, for most, she did not disappoint, conveying the
character’s power and vulnerability. Rodney Gilfrey (Stanley, baritone)
was imposing but subordinate to Blanche, and Elizabeth Furtel (Stella,
coloratura soprano) was an effective contrast to Fleming, appropriately
cast as her sister and combining well with Gilfrey.
 Blanche was also intended to be the focus of a ballet based on Streetcar
choreographed by Valerie Betis. Premiering in Montreal at Her Majesty’s
Theatre on 9 October 1952, before moving on to Boston, Chicago,
Cleveland, St Louis and Broadway, the Streetcar ballet was performed by
the Slavenska-Franklin troupe. Lasting a mere forty minutes, Betis’
production bravely combined different dance styles, both classical and
modern, culminating in a chase through several doorways (symbolising
the rape) and Blanche’s being led off by Death.
Betis’s choreography was used again by the Dance Theatre of Harlem,
an African American company, in 1981 (Montreal), 1982 (New York) and
1986 (filmed in Denmark). This ballet, initially celebrating Tennessee
Williams’s seventieth birthday, incorporated flashbacks in a vibrant and
unconventional rendering of the original story.

Production History since 2005 (by Michael Hooper)

Interest in A Streetcar Named Desire since 2005 has shown little

abatement and the play has continued to be attractive to both large
commercial theatres and more modest acting companies working on
college campuses. Its worldwide appeal also persists.
A 2008 production in New Zealand, at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin,
created something of a stir by using a Maori actor, Jarod Rawiri, as
Stanley Kowalski. It was, though, Jude Gibson, the actress playing
Blanche DuBois, who earned most of the critical enthusiasm. One
reviewer, Terry MacTavish, raved that ‘the heart bleeds for her [Blanche]’
and that, as Williams intended, the character was given genuine valour.
Rawiri brought the necessary machismo to his role but MacTavish felt that
his ethnicity created a mismatch, a clash with Southern culture that was
‘jarring rather than illuminating’. Directed by an American, Jef Hall-
Flavin, this production was revived at the Provincetown Tennessee
Williams Festival the following year.
In 2009, a Sydney Theatre Company production, directed by Liv
Ullmann, proved successful both in Australia and on tour in America. The
then co-artistic director of the company, Cate Blanchett, was widely
celebrated for her role as Blanche. A stunning mix of power and
defencelessness, Blanchett, better known as a film actress, made the
Southern belle glide and flutter, according to Helen Barry, a reviewer for
Australian Stage; and, just as impressively, she managed to bring out the
character’s humour, too. Barry also praised Joel Edgerton as Stanley – for
the way he combined muscularity with a deftness of movement, and for
his psychological strength. The production successfully alternated
moments of theatricality with naturalism.
In 2009, another screen star who impressed reviewers and audiences
was Rachel Weisz when she took on the role of Blanche for London’s
Donmar Theatre production. Michael Billington, reviewing the production
for the Guardian, likened her to a young Hedy Lamarr and felt she brought
to the role ‘a quality of desperate solitude touched with grace’. Henry
Hitchings of the London Evening Standard found her mesmerising and
more than capable of capturing the many different sides to Blanche’s
character. Not all reviewers were quite so convinced, though. Michael
Coveney, writing for he Independent, felt that Weisz’s portrayal
overlooked Blanche’s ‘cutting cruelty and sheer drag queen bitchiness’.
Still worse, the physically impressive Elliott Cowan as Stanley was
deemed too English and, like others in the cast, he lacked a convincing
accent. Most critics agreed that Ruth Wilson admirably captured Stella
Kowalski’s conflicting emotions: the loyalty and passion she has for her
husband and her sympathy for her fragile elder sister. There was
consensus, too, on designer Christopher Oram’s set which, with its spiral
staircase and balconies, transformed the Donmar’s relatively small acting
space. In addition, this production was notable for bringing Blanche’s dead
husband, Allan Grey, onto the stage – a directorial decision that, not
altogether successfully, attempted to simplify Blanche’s incipient
schizophrenia.
The success of an African-American production of Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof in 2008 almost certainly paved the way for the first multiracial
Streetcar on Broadway, at the Broadhurst Theatre in 2012. Its director,
American playwright Emily Mann, justified the reworking of the play in
an interview for the Los Angeles Times by claiming it was always
Tennessee Williams’s wish to have African Americans playing the
principal roles. However, while the production promised to bring ‘a whole
new rhythm’ to the play, the actors cast in these parts – Nicole Ari Parker
as Blanche and Blair Underwood as Stanley – failed to capture crucial
aspects of their characters. According to Ben Brantley of the New York
Times, Parker was one-dimensional – manipulative and not in the least
vulnerable, so much so that Stella (Daphne Rubin-Vega) had little
sympathy for her; and Underwood was an irascible husband who carried
little sexual threat. Overall, Brantley found the production ‘torpid’,
characterised by flat dialogue and only briefly enlivened by part of the
Poker Night scene.
 Notes

The notes below explain words and phrases from the play, with page
numbers referencing the Student Editions published by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.

page
1 Hart Crane (1899–1932) was an American poet Tennessee Williams
particularly admired. This epigraph appropriately sums up the world
of the play (broken) and Blanche DuBois’s elusive search for love.
3 Williams’s stage directions are extremely detailed, almost cinematic
in scope. The French Quarter of New Orleans where the play is set is
poor and run down, yet Williams manages to invest it with
considerable beauty and poetry. His sensory exploration takes in
strong colours like the blue/turquoise of the sky, appropriate for
spring/early summer, and the dirty brown river; the smell of coffee
and bananas from the warehouses; and the atmospheric jazz piano, a
strong leitmotif in the play. The river and the railroad tracks
(Louisiana and Nashville) suggest transportation, an important idea,
and commerce, a world only briefly glimpsed in what is primarily a
domestic play. Elysian Fields is an appropriate name for the street,
Elysium being the resting place for the blessed in Greek mythology.
It is an ironic heaven that Blanche DuBois will be denied when she
comes to stay with the Kowalskis; death is a prominent theme in the
play. Williams’s comment that New Orleans is racially tolerant
might appear to jar with his own labelling of the ‘Negro Woman’,
but she is a minor figure who does not need to be individualised. The
term ‘negro’ would not have been considered pejorative when the
play was written.
3 White frame: a French colonial style of building: wood-frame
houses in-filled with stucco or plaster, with large windows and
 wooden verandahs.
3 She says St Barnabas would send out his dog to lick her and when he
did she’d feel an icy cold wave all up an’ down her: we enter the
play midway through a conversation between the negro woman and
Eunice Hubbel, the Kowalskis’ neighbour. Williams immediately
establishes the licentious atmosphere of this section of the city with
a reference to physical pleasure. St Barnabas (originally Joseph) was
born in Cyprus to Jewish parents. He converted to Christianity and is
mentioned in the New Testament. Williams’s image is, therefore, an
irreverent coupling of sex and religion.
3 Red hot!: a spicy tamale (Mexican dish of meat, crushed maize and
seasonings steamed or baked in maize husks) that adds to the steamy
atmosphere.
3 Don’t waste your money in that clip joint!: this refers to the already
mentioned Four Deuces, a bar that doubles up as a brothel. It is the
type of disreputable establishment that might be found in the
Quarter.
3 Don’t let them sell you a Blue Moon cocktail or you won’t go out on
your own feet!: matching the sky and the tonal colour of the piano,
this potent cocktail is a combination of blue curaçao and vodka or
gin.
4 They are about twenty-eight or thirty years old, roughly dressed in
blue denim work clothes: Stanley and Mitch are immediately
identified as working-class men.
4 STELLA comes out on the first-floor landing, a gentle young woman,
about twenty-five, and of a background quite different from her
husband’s: Stella’s gentleness contrasts with her husband’s obvious
brutality. Her very different social background preoccupies Blanche
later when she criticises her sister’s marriage.
4 He heaves the package at her. She cries out in protest but manages
to catch it: then she laughs breathlessly: Stanley is primitive, a
caveman bringing home the kill for his woman to cook. Stella’s
objection to his crude behaviour is soon replaced by a sense of
exhilaration.
4 Tell Steve to get him a poor boy’s sandwich ‘cause nothing’s left
here: a large sandwich filled with simple ingredients; a further
 indication of the plain lives these characters lead.
4– The stage direction here indicates that Blanche has come with the
5 intention of staying (she is carrying a small suitcase) but that she
cannot believe her sister has moved into such a poor neighbourhood.
Blanche is comically out of place, ridiculously over-dressed as if she
is attending a party in the affluent Garden District of New Orleans.
She is about thirty but will claim she is younger than her sister,
reflecting a deep and ongoing anxiety about ageing. Dressed in
white, she suggests innocence and vulnerability, two qualities she
tries to cultivate. The mention of light and the similarity to a moth
returns us to her age: she is attracted to brightness, to bold
characters, but a naked light cruelly exposes her age. One of the
working titles for the play was The Moth.
5 They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then one called
Cemeteries: the two streetcars embody the play’s interlinked themes
of desire and death and, therefore, have a symbolic value. Real
streetcars with these names were running in New Orleans when
Williams was working on the play.
5 I’m looking for my sister, Stella DuBois. I mean – Mrs. Stanley
Kowalski: Blanche is unwilling to accept the fact that her sister is
now a Kowalski and betrays herself here. The difficulty of the
adjustment is compounded by her horror at the tenement building.
6 Por nada: a variant on the Spanish ‘de nada’, meaning ‘think
nothing of it / you’re welcome’. The Mexican influence in the play
is strong – there are the tamale vendor, the Mexican flower seller
and Pablo, one of Stanley’s poker players.
6 Belle Reve?: the DuBois family home is an impressive plantation
house architecturally defined by its columns. It will remain a picture
or idea throughout the play, a symbol of a privileged existence that
has been forcibly relinquished, a way of life that has been
superseded. It seems almost certain that Williams wrongly assumed
‘rêve’ (dream) to be feminine and so his intended meaning of
‘beautiful dream’ should have been ‘beau rêve’ (the French word
‘rive’, meaning ‘shore’, is feminine). The house is a fantasy, a
version of the Old South that was never quite true.
6– The stage direction indicates Blanche’s defensiveness and her
7 nervousness. She is easily startled by the cat’s screech and then
instinctively looks for the bottle of alcohol. The way that Blanche
very deliberately washes up the glass implies that she is well
practised in deceiving people about her drinking. Alcohol steadies
her nerves and is a form of escapism.
7 Stella for Star!: her name literally means ‘star’ in Latin and, though
Blanche’s younger sister, she is the guiding light that has brought
Blanche to New Orleans. This is another example of the light
imagery in the play.
8 Only Mr Edgar Allan Poe! – could do it justice! Out there I suppose
is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir: we later discover that
Blanche was an English teacher and so her literary reference is
appropriate, if rather hurtful. The comparison with Poe’s Gothicism
brings out her sense of horror at the working-class neighbourhood
and underlines her poetic imagination. The ‘ghoul-haunted
woodland of Weir’ appears in Poe’s poem of 1847, ‘Ulalumé’.
9 The wire: the telegram.
9 But you – you’ve put on some weight, yes, you’re just as plump as a
little partridge!: the first indication that Stella is pregnant. She says
nothing about it for fear of her sister’s reaction and, because Blanche
is speaking so manically, there is no clear opportunity. Desperately
seeking reassurance about her own looks, Blanche tells Stella that
she has not put on any weight since Stella left Belle Reve,
simultaneously trying to make her sister feel guilty about leaving
when their father died.
10 Polacks?: Stanley’s Polish ancestry is repeatedly attacked by
Blanche in the confrontation between the aristocratic Old South
(French influenced, agrarian) and the modern working-class
experience (immigrant, urban). She has earlier shown her ignorance
when suggesting that Poles are ‘something like Irish’.
10 A different species: Stella knows that Blanche will compare Stanley
unfavourably with the men they used to go out with at home;
Blanche will later refer to Stanley as an ape, picking up on this
notion of a ‘different species’.
11 He’s on the road a good deal: Stanley’s job is never specified. He
works at a plant with Mitch but he also travels. Williams’s father,
 Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a travelling salesman with the
International Shoe Company before taking up a management
position which took the family to St Louis.
12 Why, the Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep!: Blanche
claims to have suffered a whole series of deaths at first hand as the
family has gradually been decimated. This image of death, the Grim
Reaper, mounting a military campaign against the family will be
replaced by desire in the form of army officers calling up to Blanche
for sexual favours.
13 Is Mass out yet?: the joke depends on ‘Mass’ being said with such a
drawl that it sounds like ‘my arse’.
13 Jax beer!: produced at the Jax Brewing Company in Jacksonville.
Interestingly, the company closed in 1956 after selling the Jax Beer
copyright to the Jackson Brewing Company in New Orleans.
13– Animal joy in his being . . . : Stanley is animalistic and sexual, a
14 Lawrentian figure (Williams was greatly influenced by the English
writer, D. H. Lawrence, and wrote the one-act I Rise in Flame, Cried
the Phoenix about the last days of his life). He seeks to control
women, regarding them as objects to satisfy and impregnate.
14 Why, I – live in Laurel: a town in Mississippi. Williams may wish to
suggest some notion of moral victory through the name.
14 Do you mind if I make myself comfortable?: Stanley is happy to
remove his shirt in front of a woman he has just met. Though
Blanche does not object, it is not the behaviour of a Southern
gentleman. In the 1951 film version directed by Elia Kazan, Vivien
Leigh as Blanche permits herself a lingering look at Marlon
Brando’s Stanley.
15 The music of the polka rises up, faint in the distance: another
musical motif, the polka is inextricably linked with the death of
Blanche’s husband, Allan Grey.
15 The boy – the boy died: Blanche’s husband is defined by the youth
Blanche craves. The memory of his death triggers feelings of guilt
so extreme that she is physically sick.
15 Galatoire’s: a restaurant in the Quarter. Stanley is resentful of Stella
and Blanche’s meal at a swanky restaurant, even though his poker
 night requires them to leave the apartment.
16 She’s soaking in a hot tub to quiet her nerves: Blanche makes the
bathroom her domain, a place of retreat where she can escape from
Stanley and cleanse her soul.
16 ‘From the land of the sky blue water, / They brought a captive
maid!’: Blanche’s song was composed by Charles Wakefield
Cadman (music) and Nelle Richmond Eberhart (lyrics) in 1909.
Appropriately, Blanche is already ‘a captive maid’, a prisoner in the
apartment.
17 Napoleonic code: New Orleans is in Louisiana, a state originally
settled by the French. Stanley likes to appear well-informed about
his rights, but, in reality, the code, which would give him ownership
of everything belonging to his wife, was probably unenforceable.
18 He hurls the furs to the daybed. Then he jerks open small drawer in
the trunk and pulls up a fist-full of costume jewellery: in his
attempts to get at the truth, Stanley is effectively unpacking
Blanche’s life. Blanche is a consummate actress, always playing a
role, and this is the actress’s wardrobe.
20 Lay . . . her cards on the table: as the poker party is imminent, this is
an appropriate metaphor. Though poker is a game of bluff, Stanley
likes transparency in life; he cannot bear Blanche’s evasions.
20 I like an artist who paints in strong, bold colours, primary colours:
colour imagery is important throughout the play. Blanche claims to
be attracted to simple, dynamic, uncompromising people, but she is
also repelled by them.
20 Now let’s cut the re-bop: Stanley is a man of action. He wants to get
back to what he sees as the central point because Blanche’s words
frustrate and unsettle him. He bullies her with the volume of his
voice, knowing that her nerves are affected by any sudden sound.
21 Atomizer: perfume spray.
21 If I didn’t know that you was my wife’s sister I’d get ideas about you:
though women are ‘the centre of his life’ (13), Stanley here observes
the taboo about relations with his wife’s sister; he reminds Blanche
that she should not be flirting with him.
22 Our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers
 exchanged the land for their epic fornications – to put it plainly!:
Blanche explains that the family’s property and wealth were
gradually lost through paying for sex. Such a history of debauchery
helps us, in part, to understand Blanche’s behaviour after the death
of her husband.
23 But maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve
lost Belle Reve: survival means adapting, inter-breeding; Blanche,
though appalled by Stanley’s materialism and lack of refinement,
understands their evolutionary priority.
24 The blind are – leading the blind!: Blanche realises that her bid to
find sanctuary is under threat from Stanley. She is confused,
directionless and throws herself on her younger sister.
24 The Poker Night: another working title for the play. The stage
directions call for bold colours – the green baize of the Van Gogh
painting, the primary colours of the men’s shirts, the red and green
of the watermelon, for example. The kitchen may be illuminated by
‘the raw colours of childhood’s spectrum’ but this is to be a game
for men ‘at the peak of their physical manhood’.
24 Portières: curtains hung over a doorway.
24 Anything wild this deal?: the language of the game frequently
applies to the players, particularly Stanley who, at this point, is bad-
tempered because he is losing. In the game, ‘wild’ means the players
can decide the value of the card.
24 One-eyed jacks: the knaves of spades and hearts in a pack of cards,
which, unlike the knaves of diamonds and clubs, are seen in half-
profile.
24 Ante up: raise the sum of money originally staked as a bet.
24 Chips: betting money, sometimes replaced by tokens of some sort.
25 Spade flush: high-scoring hand, made up entirely of spades.
25 Hurry back and we’ll fix you a sugar-tit: a sugar-tit is a baby’s teat
flavoured with sugar or syrup. Though he is his friend, Stanley
mocks Mitch’s close, somewhat Freudian relationship with his sick
mother. Williams took the character’s full name, Harold Mitchell,
from a roommate at the fraternity house he was living in while
attending the University of Missouri.
25 Seven card stud: mentioned again in the last line of the play, this is a
form of poker, but it also refers to the sexual attraction and potency
of Stanley.
26 Could I kibitz: Blanche feels excluded by the men’s game. With no
end in sight, she asks if she can look over the shoulder of another
player. Stanley rejects this idea out of hand, showing no
consideration for the women who have allowed the men to continue
their party all evening.
26 It makes me so mad when he does that in front of people:
understandably, Stella does not wish to be humiliated, but there is
also the insinuation that she does not mind violence in the lively
sexual relationship they share.
26 That one seems – superior to the others: Mitch clumsily holds on to
the towel as he exits the bathroom, but Blanche quickly notices a
courtesy and refinement in him that makes him closer to her notion
of a gentleman than any of the other poker players.
27 Is he a wolf?: Is he a sexual predator? Blanche ignores Mitch’s
closeness to his sick mother and wonders why he can be single. He
will turn into a sexual predator under the influence of drink in Scene
Nine.
27 One time [laughing] the plaster – [laughing] cracked: Stella jokes
about the vigorous sex lives of the men and their large wives. We are
reminded of the closeness of the apartments, the lack of privacy and
the inhibiting presence of Blanche on Stanley and Stella’s own sex
life.
28 Sounds like Xavier Cugat: the Latin American music on the radio
breaks the concentration required for the game and is a challenge to
Stanley’s selfishness. Xavier Cugat was a Catalan-Cuban-American
bandleader who helped popularise Latin music in America.
28 She returns his look without flinching: at this point in the play,
Blanche is strong enough to stand up to Stanley’s physical presence.
28 Get ants: get ants in your pants, become restless.
28 I’m going to the ‘head’. Deal me out: Mitch is going to the toilet but
he appears to have lost all interest in the game, distracted as he is by
Blanche’s presence.
28 Sure he’s got ants now. Seven five-dollar bills in his pants pocket
folded up tight as spitballs: Mitch’s restlessness is attributed to the
fact that he has been winning by the other men. The folded notes
suggest his excessive care with money, and this becomes another
jibe about his immaturity when Stanley says that the money will
eventually be deposited in a piggy bank given to him by his mother.
‘Spitballs’ – wads of paper chewed into small balls or pellets – also
seems to anticipate the name of their next game, ‘Spit in the Ocean’.
28 Quarters: 25-cent coins.
29 ‘And if God choose, / I shall but love thee better – after – death!’:
Sonnets from the Portuguese (no. 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
It is not surprising that Blanche recognises the quotation, but, more
importantly, it establishes a shared sense of loss with Mitch and the
way in which the dead still haunt the play. Though nebulous, Mitch’s
relationship with the ‘strange’ and ‘sweet’ girl proves that he has
been able to break free from his mother.
30 It’s a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the
two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring!: like the
plantation house, Blanche’s name reveals her French ancestry: she is
descended from the Huguenots – French Calvinists. She is innocent
and lost (in the woods). The orchard in spring also conveys youthful
fertility, obviously more applicable to Stella.
30 I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark
or a vulgar action: the paper lantern is one way that Blanche shields
herself from the truth (light). It is particularly important for Blanche
to continue the deception about her age (there are two references to
it on this page) and to establish standards of genteel behaviour.
30 Grade school or high school: the American system of education is
divided into grade school, an intermediate level, and high school, the
final stage, possibly leading to college or university education.
31 Bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos: bobby-soxers were adolescent
girls who wore the contemporary fashion for ankle socks, while
drug-store Romeos were the love-sick boys who hung around shops
where they could buy soft drinks.
31 Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe: the poet and short-story writer
Edgar Allan Poe has already been mentioned in connection with the
 apartment and the neighbourhood; Walt Whitman (1819–92) was an
American poet, best known for his collection Leaves of Grass, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was a nineteenth-century prose
writer, probably most remembered for his novel The Scarlet Letter.
31 She turns the knobs on the radio and it begins to play ‘Wien, Wien,
nur du allein.’ BLANCHE waltzes to the music with romantic gestures.
MITCH is delighted and moves in awkward imitation like a dancing
bear: the lively rhumba has been replaced by a formal Viennese
waltz (Rudolf Sieczynski’s 1913 composition ‘Vienna, City of My
Dreams’ or, as written here, ‘Vienna, Vienna, only you alone’). This
is a comic moment before Stanley explodes and throws the radio out
of the window. Mitch is a buffoon, obviously incompatible with
Blanche.
32 Poker should not be played in a house with women: Mitch repeats
this line to emphasise the discrete world of the men; invading their
territory leads to violence.
33 The Negro entertainers in the bar around the corner play
‘Paper Doll’ slow and blue: this was a hit song for the Mills
Brothers in 1943. It anticipates Stanley fondly calling Stella his
‘baby doll’ and serves to create a tenderer mood in which he seeks
forgiveness from his wife. Baby Doll was the title of a later
screenplay by Williams, turned into a notorious film by Elia Kazan
in 1956.
33 You whelp of a Polack, you! I hope they do haul you in and turn the
fire hose on you, same as the last time!: Eunice resorts to insulting
Stanley’s Polish background. She wants him to be punished while
realising that this behaviour characterises the Kowalskis’ marriage;
it will happen again.
33 They come together with low animal groans: Stella and Stanley’s
reconciliation will be primarily sexual, animalistic, though there is
tenderness and a recognition of Stella’s role as a mother – both to
the baby and Stanley.
34 All quiet on the Potomac now?: the Potomac is a river that runs into
the Chesapeake Bay. On one side it borders Maryland and
Washington DC; on the other, Virginia and West Virginia. Mitch’s
question, asked in the knowledge that these violent scenes are
 commonplace but short-lived, echoes the opening line of the sixth
stanza of a poem, ‘The Picket Guard’ (1861), by Ethel Lynn Beers
(1827–79): ‘All quiet along the Potomac to-night’. The poem draws
on telegrams sent by Major-General George B. McClellan during the
American Civil War when Union and Confederate armies occupied
opposite sides of the river. The line may have influenced the English
title of the famous novel about the First World War, All Quiet on the
Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque.
34 There is a confusion of street cries like a choral chant: another
musical variation. This conveys the busy activity of the area and
suggests the chorus of Greek drama.
35 Her eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquillity that is in
the faces of Eastern idols: the book of comics Stella is reading
suggests her childish simplicity; an image of being drugged captures
her state of post-coital bliss. Elia Kazan regarded this drugged state
as the spine of Stella’s character: she is under Stanley’s influence.
36 Why, on our wedding night – soon as we came in here – he snatched
off one of my slippers and rushed about smashing the light bulbs
with it: another reference to light and its source. While Blanche is
wary of the truth light exposes, Stanley and Stella seek darkness to
enjoy their physical, sado-masochistic relationship fully.
37 Of course you remember Shep Huntleigh. I went out with him at
college and wore his pin for a while: in her increasing desperation,
Blanche clings to figures from her past. Shep is remembered as an
honourable man, and the wearing of the pin as a pledge to each other
recalls knights displaying their ladies’ favours. Even though Blanche
claims to have met him recently and to know that he is an oil tycoon,
he remains an illusory saviour. His name suggests the desperate
pursuit of something.
39 Sometime today I’ve got to get hold of a bromo!: a bromide tablet
used to calm the nerves. Blanche’s dependence on alcohol and drugs
to sedate her and offer a means of escape anticipates Williams’s own
dependency in the sixties.
40 What you are talking about is brutal desire – just – Desire! – the
name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter,
up one old narrow street and down another: the metaphorical
 meaning of the title is made explicit here. Stella has admitted that
sex is the foundation of her relationship with Stanley and that it
almost makes everything else appear irrelevant. However, she also
says that she loves her husband. The noisy journey of the streetcar
complements the violent passion of the couple. The sexual slang of
‘bangs’ will become more obvious when it is repeated.
40 It brought me here. – Where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed
to be: another hint that Blanche is not as innocent as she would like
people to believe. Sex with various men has characterised her recent
past. However, she quickly juxtaposes her own desire with a plea for
sympathy at her present circumstances.
40 Then don’t you think your superior attitude is a bit out of place?: it
is literally out of place because Blanche has been applying the
standards of the Old South, those of Belle Reve. For all Blanche’s
misfortune, we sympathise with Stella here: her husband and whole
way of life are under attack; Blanche is about to launch her most
damning attack yet on Stanley’s primitivism.
40 Under cover of the train’s noise STANLEY enters from outside. He
stands unseen by the women, holding some packages in his arms, and
overhears their following conversation. He wears an undershirt and
grease-stained seersucker pants: Williams skilfully uses the sound
of the train to hide Stanley’s entrance and permit his eavesdropping,
so building up tension. Stanley will discover what Blanche really
thinks of him and this will intensify his attempts to expose her. The
packages remind us of his first entrance with the meat; and his dirty
appearance will offer a further visual confirmation of Blanche’s
words. Stanley’s trousers are made of a light fabric that puckers
easily; they are probably striped.
40– There’s even something – sub-human [. . .]: Blanche’s long speech
1 juxtaposes a world of primitive lust and violence with gauges of
civilisation – poetry and music. Stanley reverses the evolutionary
order and Blanche urges her sister not to get caught up in this
atavism.
40 In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little
beginning! . . . In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re
approaching: Blanche has already referred to the difficult task of
 nurturing an interest in literary culture among the young. Here she
states the fight against ignorance rather melodramatically.
41 STANLEY hesitates, licking his lips: Stanley is relishing the fight to
come. Appropriately, he is like a beast sizing up its prey.
41 Them darn mechanics at Fritz’s don’t know their can from third
base!: Stanley’s grubbiness can be explained by the fact that he had
to help the mechanics at the garage. He is practical, not
conventionally educated or sensitive. The baseball metaphor, ‘third
base’, points to another sphere of male interest that might exclude
women: professional sport. ‘Can’ has several slang meanings: a
toilet; someone’s backside; a car, especially adapted to get greater
acceleration; and a storage battery.
41 STELLA has embraced him with both arms, fiercely, and full in the
view of BLANCHE. He laughs and clasps her head to him. Over her
head he grins through the curtains at BLANCHE: the Kowalskis
present a united front. Stella may have allowed Blanche to speak at
length, but she will defend what she has got ‘fiercely’. Stanley’s
smile is smug and threatening. Vivien Leigh, playing Blanche in the
1951 film, has a moment of panic as she realises that Stanley might
have heard her tirade. Whether or not Williams intended this, the
blue piano and trumpet that follow capture the high tension at the
end of this scene.
42 ‘Most of my sister’s friends go north in the summer but some have
homes on the Gulf and there has been a continued round of
entertainments, teas, cocktails, and luncheons –’: the life of the
affluent Southerner, a social routine that Blanche might have
enjoyed in the past but which is now just a fantasy. The palm leaf
that she fans herself with further symbolises this world, but Blanche
is highly conscious of her lies as she writes them.
42 I wouldn’t mind if you’d stay down at the Four Deuces, but you
always going up: the disagreements of Steve and Eunice seem
intended to echo those of Stanley and Stella, though they often
appear more comic by comparison. Eunice is objecting to Steve’s
visits to one of the prostitutes working upstairs above the bar area of
the Four Deuces.
43 Daemonic: as if possessed by an evil spirit.
43 I’m compiling a notebook of quaint little words and phrases I’ve
picked up here: Blanche’s feigned ignorance of American slang is
immediately seized upon by Stanley who is keen to strip away her
prejudices. The battle between them will be fought on linguistic
grounds: Blanche’s poetic imagery versus Stanley’s vivid
colloquialisms.
44 Capricorn – the Goat!: Blanche realises that the sexually active goat
is an appropriate star sign for Stanley.
44 The Hotel Flamingo is not the sort of establishment I would dare to
be seen in: probably a brothel, the hotel adds to the colour imagery.
Blanche gives telling physical reactions when both Shaw’s name and
the hotel are mentioned.
45 Not in front of your sister: Stanley makes clear just how much of a
problem is Blanche’s presence; he cannot be himself with his wife.
45 I never was hard or self-sufficient enough: now that Blanche is alone
with Stella, she can hint at her recent past, a past that she fears has
become common gossip. This speech really sets out Blanche’s
philosophy, drawing on the play’s imagery of light and frailty. Soft
people, like her, have got to seek protection from the likes of
Stanley. They have to create the magic of illusion by glowing
attractively. In stating that she had to obtain whatever shelter she
could and that men only notice women when they are making love to
them, Blanche gives a strong hint that she has resorted to a form of
prostitution. Her comment that she does not know how much longer
she can ‘turn the trick’ confirms this: ‘trick’ can mean both illusion
and a prostitute’s client.
46 STELLA pours the coke into the glass. It foams over and spills.
BLANCHE gives a piercing cry: a crude image of ejaculation. The
staining of Blanche’s white skirt emphasises how sex has corrupted
her. Her cry is probably a mixture of pleasure and pain.
47 I want to deceive him enough to make him – want me: Blanche
considers Mitch crucial to her future, hence her continuing plan of
deception. She is pretending to be a Southern belle with very strong
morals. Her worry is that he will become frustrated, deterred by her
not ‘putting out’ – making herself sexually available.
47 Ah, me, ah, me, ah, me . . . : in the 1951 film, Blanche touches
 herself quite suggestively as she says these words. Her dreamy mood
is reinforced by the gathering dusk and the music from the Four
Deuces.
48 The YOUNG MAN shakes his head violently and edges hastily up the
steps: the young man immediately establishes his innocence by
rejecting the advances of the negro woman.
48 A dime: a 10-cent coin.
48 It’s temperamental?: in Blanche’s flirtatious mood, the lighter
becomes a phallic symbol.
48 Fifteen of seven: a quarter to seven.
48 Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when
an hour isn’t just an hour – but a little bit of Eternity dropped in
your hands – and who knows what to do with it?: Blanche dignifies
her lust with this image of unending time. The answer to the
question is clearly that they should make love.
49 Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young prince out of the
Arabian Nights?: carried away with the overriding impression of his
youth, Blanche transforms the young man into an exotic figure from
literature, when the vivid detail of his drinking cherry soda has made
him an archetypal American teenager.
49 It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good and keep my
hands off children: an allusion to the real reason why Blanche is no
longer teaching. To her (and the audience), he must seem like a child
who cannot comprehend her suggestiveness, who ‘stands like a
bashful kid’.
49 My Rosenkavalier!: Mitch’s sudden entrance reminds us of
Blanche’s real target. He is almost as bemused but is playing the role
that is expected of him: that of the romantic hero respectfully
bowing before his lady. Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera by
Richard Strauss. The title translates as ‘The Knight of the Rose’.
49 Merciiii: merci is French for ‘thank you’.
50 The utter exhaustion which only a neurasthenic personality can
know is evident in BLANCHE’s voice and manner: this seems to mark a
deterioration in Blanche’s state. Her nervous disposition, reflected in
 her constant drinking and quick-fire conversation, has taken over
and she is no longer able to conceal her gradual breakdown.
50 MITCH is stolid but depressed: it should be evident that Mitch is
making the best of what has been a disappointing evening.
50 They have probably been out to the amusement park on Lake
Pontchartrain, for MITCH is bearing, upside down, a plaster statuette
of Mae West, the sort of prize won at shooting-galleries and carnival
games of chance: Williams’s ‘probably’ suggests that precisely
where they have been is not as important as the mood of the evening.
Located in Louisiana, Lake Pontchartrain’s south shore forms the
northern boundary of New Orleans. Mae West (1893–1980) was a
famous American actress, a sex symbol known for her irreverent
double entendres. The 1951 film substituted a less tacky rag doll for
the statuette. The fact that the statuette is held upside down suggests
that something is wrong; and the ‘carnival games of chance’ are a
comment on the faltering relationship between Mitch and Blanche.
50 I’ll walk over to Bourbon and catch an owl-car: Bourbon Street, in
the French Quarter, is well known for its bars and entertainment.
The owl-car is a streetcar running through the night.
50 The one that says the lady must entertain the gentleman – or no
dice!: as a lady, Blanche expects to be taken out and for everything
to be paid for by the man. She realises that, in return, it is her duty to
entertain him in order to make the evening and their relationship a
success. The reference to dice continues the game of
chance/gambling theme.
50 No, honey, that’s the key to my trunk which I must soon be packing:
Blanche’s trunk contains the secrets of her past that Stanley has tried
to unpack and the costumes for her role playing. She realises that her
stay can only be a brief one, that she will not be able to defeat
Stanley.
51 Eureka!: Success. The cry supposedly uttered by Archimedes when
he discovered the principle of water displacement while in his bath.
51 I’m looking for the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, but these girls are
not out tonight: another reference to stars as guiding lights. Blanche
needs direction and it is interesting to note that she makes her source
of help female.
52 Joie de vivre: happiness, joy in living.
52 We are going to be very Bohemian. We are going to pretend that we
are sitting in a little artists’ café on the Left Bank in Paris!: another
example of Blanche’s ability and willingness to create a fantasy
world. Mitch is entirely unsuited to an unconventional or Bohemian
existence.
52 Je suis la Dame aux Camellias! Vous êtes – Armand! Understand
French?: ‘I am the Lady of the Camellias! You are – Armand!’ Even
if Mitch could understand French, he would be unlikely to recognise
this reference to the characters from a romantic novel by Alexandre
Dumas Fils (1824–95).
52 Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir? Vous ne comprenez pas? Ah,
quel dommage!: ‘Do you want to sleep with me? Don’t you
understand? Ah, what a shame!’ Blanche flirts with Mitch in the full
knowledge that he will not understand. She sends out conflicting
messages: they are alone in the apartment together and she wants
him to relax, but she is still setting boundaries over which he must
not step.
52 I am ashamed of the way I perspire. My shirt is sticking to me:
Williams parodies romantic dialogue throughout this scene. Mitch
unwisely draws attention to his physical inadequacies, and we are
reminded of his clumsiness when dancing with Blanche in Scene
Three.
52 It’s very light weight alpaca: Mitch chooses to wear a coat made of
light weight wool to avoid the embarrassment of perspiration stains
in summer. He does not realise that this is not something you
disclose to a lady.
52 A wash-coat: jacket of light, washable material.
53 I was given a membership to the New Orleans Athletic Club:
Williams used this club at 222 North Rampart Street. He was a
particularly keen swimmer.
52 Samson!: an Old Testament character whose strength lay in his hair
until Delilah cut it off. Again, Mitch is unaware of romantic
conventions when he asks Blanche about her weight.
54 She rolls her eyes, knowing that he cannot see her face: Blanche is
 all too aware of her hypocrisy in claiming she still has ‘old-
fashioned ideals’; she is giving another performance.
54 A midnight prevue at Loew’s State: Stanley and Stella have gone to a
preview showing of a film at the local cinema on Canal Street.
54 We was together in the Two-forty-first: Mitch refers back to the
Second World War and the fact that he served with Stanley in the
same regiment. This provides an important bond between the two
men, one that Blanche will find hard to sever.
55 Of course there is such a thing as the hostility of – perhaps in some
perverse kind of way he – No! To think of it makes me . . . : Blanche
cannot quite bring herself to say – or pretends not to be able to bring
herself to say – that Stanley’s antipathy for her masks a desire that
cannot be admitted. Mitch is not sharp enough to pick up on this.
55 Why did your mother want to know my age?: as we have seen,
Blanche is sensitive about her age. She appears to sidestep the
question before bringing Mitch back to it, although, tellingly, she
never answers him. Mitch’s closeness to his mother is both a
problem for Blanche and an opportunity for mutual sympathy: her
terminal illness will return Blanche to the subject of her dead
husband.
56 It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that
had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for
me: love was a process of illumination. In Blanche’s youth, intense
light was associated with passion, not unwanted truth.
56 There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a
softness and tenderness which wasn’t the least bit effeminate
looking – still – that thing was there. . . . He came to me for help:
Williams has to use a form of code here because he was living and
writing in homophobic times. Blanche’s husband was a homosexual,
something more noticeable in his gentle mannerisms than his
appearance. Like many homosexuals of the time, he chose to carry
on a secret life while outwardly having a conventional marriage.
Feeling rejected, Blanche betrayed him.
56 By coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty – which
wasn’t empty, but had two people in it . . . : these lines were regarded
 as too explicit for the first London production of the play by the
Lord Chamberlain; he ordered them to be cut.
56 A locomotive is heard approaching outside. She claps her hands to
her ears and crouches over.: another important sound effect that
contributes to the psychological realism of the play. We have already
been told about the proximity of the L and N tracks, so the train is
not unexpected. However, its approach and impact at this key
moment suggest a huge internal scar left by Blanche’s treatment of
her husband.
56 Yes, the three of us drove out to Moon Lake Casino: at this point,
Blanche did not want to contemplate the reason for the presence of
her husband’s companion. Moon Lake Casino, now a restaurant and
inn called Uncle Henry’s Place near Clarksdale, Mississippi,
continues the theme of gambling. Williams used Moon Lake often in
his plays, especially in a sad or violent context (e.g. the destruction
of Papa Romano’s wine garden in Orpheus Descending).
57 We danced the Varsouviana!: this happy, lively polka tune jars with
the sudden suicide of Allan Grey. It has become inseparable from the
memory.
57 And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was
turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any
light that’s stronger than this – kitchen – candle . . . : Blanche
experienced a sort of death too. She has not been able to put this
experience behind her and find love again, so racked with guilt as
she still is.
57 Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!: given the rest of the scene,
Mitch appears a highly ironic God, but, at this moment of emotional
vulnerability, Blanche is desperate for comfort from anyone.
58 It is late afternoon in mid-September: having started in early May,
we are now in the autumn of Blanche’s life. The play will end some
weeks later, possibly in November.
58 The portieres are open and a table is set for a birthday supper, with
cake and flowers: the attempts at celebration create further tension
and expectation. Will Stanley join in? Given Blanche’s sensitivity
about her age, will she want to celebrate?
58 Temperature 100 on the nose, and she soaks herself in a hot tub: in
 drawing attention to the temperature, Stanley indirectly reminds us
that Blanche is not just washing but attempting to purify her soul;
we also get a sense of the stifling atmosphere in the apartment.
59 BLANCHE is singing in the bathroom a saccharine popular ballad
which is used contrapuntally with STANLEY’S speech: Williams
cleverly uses the song to punctuate (contrapuntally means in
counterpoint) Stanley’s comments. It is sentimental but the words
are appropriate for Blanche and her situation.
59 Sister Blanche is no lily: Stanley’s tone is sarcastic. Blanche is
Stella’s sister but also, ironically, a nun. Stanley is attacking her
claims to a virtuous life, the white lily being a symbol of innocence.
59 ‘Say it’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard seal – But it
wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!’: the song is entitled
‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, the music was composed by Harold Arlen
and the lyrics were written by E. Y. Harburg and Billy Rose in 1933.
The song was performed by Ella Fitzgerald in 1938. The ‘make-
believe’ world is the one that Blanche has created as a defence
mechanism; it might not be necessary if someone truly loved and
believed in her.
59 In fact they were so impressed by Dame Blanche that they requested
her to turn in her room-key – for permanently!: ‘Dame’ is American
slang for a woman but is also a title in the United Kingdom; Stanley
is attacking Blanche’s superior airs, showing how she was even
banned from an establishment with such a poor reputation as the
Flamingo.
59 ‘It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be – But it
wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!’: P. T. Barnum and
James Anthony Bailey were famous circus proprietors in the
nineteenth century. Again, the world of performance and illusion is
alluded to.
60 It’s a honky-tonk parade!: in this context, ‘honky-tonk’ means
squalid or disreputable.
60 Regarded as not just different but downright loco – nuts: ‘loco’
means crazy. Stanley wants to prove that Blanche is not eccentric so
much as insane, and therefore needs to be locked up for everyone’s
good.
60 Which brings us to Lie Number Two: Stanley is also giving a
performance, presenting evidence systematically in the role of a
prosecuting lawyer. Blanche has already commented sarcastically on
his ‘impressive judicial air’ (21) when explaining the Napoleonic
code.
60 No, siree, Bob!: a colloquial American expression meaning ‘No,
definitely not’. Warming to his task, Stanley’s language becomes
increasingly more colloquial and colourful.
60 A seventeen-year-old boy – she’d gotten mixed up with!: Blanche’s
absence from work is explained, as is her comment about keeping
her ‘hands off children’ (49). The meaning of Stanley’s euphemism
is made all too clear by the exclamation mark.
60 In the bathroom the water goes on loud; little breathless cries and
peels of laughter are heard as if a child were frolicking in the tub:
can Blanche hear the argument outside the bathroom? Is she trying
to block it out by running more water? As Stella was with the
comics, she appears childlike and vulnerable, not, at this point, the
insane and promiscuous woman Stanley has tried to portray.
61 But they had her on the hook good and proper that time and she
knew that the jig was all up!: an unpleasant image, not just of
Blanche being trapped but skewered like a fish or a piece of meat.
Perhaps we think of Stanley’s bloody package when he first enters
the play. Interestingly, ‘jig’ can mean a lively dance (another
performance) or, in fishing, an artificial bait jerked up and down in
the water; the expression ‘jig is up’ means that her act of deception
is finally over.
61 Yep, it was practickly a town ordinance passed against her!:
exaggerating for effect, Stanley claims that Blanche’s behaviour was
so grave that legislation was very nearly passed to ensure that she
could not return.
61 Possess your soul in patience!: a commonly used line from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Blanche objects to the rude way in which
Stanley asks her how much longer she is going to be in the
bathroom.
61 She was always – flighty!: Stella is defending her sister but concedes
that some of Blanche’s behaviour has been reprehensible. Here she is
 searching around for the right word to describe her. ‘Flighty’ implies
fickle and irresponsible.
62 This beautiful and talented young man was a degenerate: she means
that he was a homosexual but the stating of this in anything other
than a euphemism would not be tolerated at the time. Williams often
used the word ‘degenerate’ with its negative connotations of
immorality and corruption; it is another example of encoding
homosexuality. Stanley is not very interested in Blanche’s marriage
to a gay man because, as he says, it is not ‘recent history’, and
because her behaviour with heterosexual men provides him with
more ammunition.
62 Mitch is a buddy of mine: ‘buddy’ implies more than simply friend.
The men have bonded through their service in the army, their work
and their leisure pursuits. They have a loyalty to each other which is
almost more sacrosanct than any relationship with a woman. Hence,
Stanley has warned Mitch off Blanche and he will not be coming to
the birthday party.
63 Maybe he was, but he’s not going to jump in a tank with a school of
sharks – now!: it seems that Mitch might have considered the
possibility of marrying Blanche before Stanley’s revelations. This
second reference to fish suggests that Blanche is very dangerous –
not just one shark but a whole school of them.
63 Her future is mapped out for her: it is ‘mapped out’ in the short-
term because Stanley has bought Blanche a ticket for the Greyhound
bus back to Laurel, a town from which she has already been ejected.
It is unclear whether he also means here that she will be committed
to a mental asylum in the future.
63 She tinkles her highball glass: in addition to the bath, Blanche has
used alcohol to calm her nerves (whisky and soda with ice).
63 The distant piano goes into a hectic breakdown: the piano music
suddenly becomes very discordant to emphasise Blanche’s increased
anxiety and confusion. Williams’s music again helps to create
psychological realism.
64 A torch of sunlight blazes on the side of a big water-tank or oil-drum
across the empty lot toward the business district which is now
pierced by pin-points of lighted windows reflecting the sunset: the
 sun is setting on Blanche as Stanley closes in for the kill. The
warmth suggested here contrasts with the emotional coldness of
Blanche’s birthday celebration, a dismal occasion. The empty lot
corresponds to the vacant fourth place at the table, itself a strong
visual image of Mitch’s rejection of Blanche. Williams permits us
another glimpse of the larger world outside the domestic environs of
the play.
64 I don’t know any refined enough for your taste: the play contains
several jokes or stories. Appropriately, those told by the men are
somewhat bawdy and Blanche tries to offset this with more innocent
material. Her parrot joke, which barely raises a smile, mocks their
situation: Stanley is the parrot who is excessively rude in the
daytime and better suited to darkness; Blanche is the easily offended
‘old maid’ who is trying to silence him.
65 What do you two think you are? A pair of queens? Remember what
Huey Long said – ‘Every Man is a King!’ And I am the king around
here, so don’t forget it!: Stanley’s somewhat uncouth behaviour at
the table has borne out Blanche’s criticisms of him. He spears the
chop with his fork and then eats it with his fingers, covering his face
in grease in the process. However, he rightly feels under attack and
is stung by the persistent slur on his ethnic origins (Polack) and the
suggestion that he has the manners of a pig. He believes that, as the
breadwinner, he should be respected, and he cites Huey Pierce Long
(1893–1935), a famous lawyer and politician (he was governor of
Louisiana), in his defence. Stanley resents any challenges to his
sovereignty, particularly when he sees Blanche successfully
influencing his wife.
65 My place is cleared! You want me to clear your places?: a
flamboyant gesture that, once again, highlights Stanley’s physical
threat. In the film, Marlon Brando cuts a slightly comic figure, with
a napkin tucked into his shirt, before making a sudden and
impressive outburst.
66 God, honey, it’s gonna be sweet when we can make noise in the night
the way that we used to and get the coloured lights going with
nobody’s sister behind the curtains to hear us!: Stanley is trying to
get Stella back on side and the only way he knows how to do this is
 with a promise of energetic sex. Interestingly, the coloured lights
symbolise this wild passion, but, on his wedding night, Stanley
smashed an artificial source of light. His sexual frustration is all too
clear.
66 Oh, I hope candles are going to glow in his life and I hope that his
eyes are going to be like candles, like two blue candles lighted in a
white cake!: Stella’s baby, here assumed to be a boy, is the future, the
promise of new life the play offers. Unsurprisingly, Blanche wants
him to be soft and tender like candle light and the delicate colours
she refers to. The contrast with Stanley’s brash coloured lights is
very marked.
67 But what I am is a one hundred per cent. American, born and raised
in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever
call me a Polack: Stanley’s staunchest defence of his American
identity. He is determined not to be labelled an outsider or an
immigrant of uncertain status.
68 The Varsouviana music steals in softly and continues playing:
previously associated with the death of Allan Grey and the guilt that
produced, the polka tune is more closely linked with rejection here.
As Allan Grey’s homosexuality was a rejection of Blanche the young
wife, so Stanley’s ‘birthday remembrance’ signifies the rejection the
desperate sister has long been expecting (even though she tells
Stanley she was not anticipating a present). The connection is
confirmed with a repeat of Blanche’s convulsions.
68 You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and
trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her
to change: Stella reinforces the sympathy she (and the audience)
feels for Blanche. Her sister is more sinned against than sinning, and
here she seems to be a bygone culture rather than just an individual.
The Old South, the epitome of civilisation and gentility, has been
lost, assaulted as it has been by a ruthless modern America.
68 I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with
the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved
it, having them coloured lights going!: Stanley is proud of his
working-class background and of his role as Stella’s liberator. He
sees the columns (significantly, he has only ever encountered them
 in a photograph) as a symbol of aristocratic privilege; they represent
not only the plantation but also the Old South. The only way he
could entice Stella away from this world was through sex,
metaphorically taking her down from columns that provide safety
and shelter.
68 I done nothing to no one. Let go of my shirt. You’ve torn it: Stanley
feels wronged and, as if to confirm the attack on his character, one
of the badges of his manhood, the ‘brilliant silk bowling shirt’, is
ripped.
69 Hoity-toity, describing me as an ape: Stanley blames their problems
on Blanche’s snobbery and belittling of him as part of a lower
evolutionary order. The use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘she’ before
this shows Stanley trying to establish some distance between them.
Again, he is seeking to divide and rule.
69 The ‘Varsouviana’ is heard, its music rising with sinister rapidity as
the bathroom door opens slightly: another rejection as Blanche is
left ‘twisting a washcloth’ while Stanley tenderly comes to his
wife’s aid.
69 El pain de mais, el pain de mais, / El pain de mais sin sal: literally
‘maize bread, maize bread, maize bread without salt’. There is a
strong Mexican influence throughout the play and this folk song
draws our attention to a staple of existence. There is also a Maya
creation myth in which man is said to have been formed from
‘masa’ or corn dough. Maize is, consequently, regarded as a gift
from the gods by the Maya people. Blanche may be thinking of her
own lonely life – plain and unseasoned, especially now that she is
being refused any further shelter; she may be commenting on the
imminent birth of Stella’s child and the nourishment it will need in a
difficult world.
69 BLANCHE is seated in a tense hunched position in a bedroom chair
that she has re-covered with diagonal green and white stripes. She
has on her scarlet satin robe: the contrast between Blanche’s
defensive foetal position and the bold colours she is now
surrounding herself with is very noticeable. It is almost as if she has
accepted that she is the scarlet woman or whore that Stanley has
accused her of being.
69 The music is in her mind; she is drinking to escape it and the sense
of disaster closing in on her, and she seems to whisper the words of
the song: for the first time, Williams makes it clear that this is an
interior soundtrack, that he is attempting to make the audience
experience what Blanche is thinking. Alcohol is no longer just a
relaxant but a means of banishing nightmares, of seeking oblivion.
69 Mitch comes around the corner in work clothes: blue denim shirt
and pants. He is unshaven: Mitch’s scruffy appearance is an
immediate indication that he does not have romantic intentions.
Blanche expects her men to be smart and well-groomed and we
suspect that Mitch has complied with this on their dates.
70 She looks fearfully after him as he stalks into the bedroom: Stanley’s
influence can even be detected in Mitch’s movements; there are
several references to Stanley stalking aggressively in the play like
an animal.
70 No, of course you haven’t, you dumb angel-puss, you’d never get
anything awful caught in your head!: Blanche mocks Mitch’s lack of
intelligence. She is speaking quickly and he appears not to register
what she is saying, partly because he has been drinking.
70 I won’t cross-examine the witness: Blanche desperately hopes that
Mitch’s presence will make the Varsouviana tune disappear.
Questioning Mitch is only likely to antagonise him and, anyway, she
does not want to adopt Stanley’s pseudo-legal methods.
71 A distant revolver shot is heard, BLANCHE seems relieved: more
evidence of Blanche being haunted by her treatment of her young
husband. The gunshot (Allan Grey’s suicide) temporarily halts the
painful memory.
71 Are you boxed out of your mind?: Are you so drunk you cannot think
or speak intelligibly? We might also think of Blanche being boxed in
by both her mental condition and her physical situation.
71 I’ve done so much with this place since I’ve been here: Blanche
prides herself on her home improvements in an attempt to show that
she is a good homemaker. We remember her appalled looks and
superior manner when she first arrived. Of course, Blanche’s legacy
will be so much more than the soft furnishings with which she seems
to have bedecked the apartment.
72 He tears the paper lantern off the light bulb. She utters a frightened
gasp: a shocking action for both Blanche and the audience. She is
suddenly stripped bare and left defenceless. This clearly anticipates
Scene Ten.
72 I don’t want realism; a comment on Williams’s dramatic technique,
which is not straightforwardly realistic but a combination of realism
and expressionism, and Blanche’s inability to live with the truth.
72 I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to
be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!: Blanche
talks again about the magic of invention, owning up to the deliberate
deception that is symbolised by the paper lantern covering the light
of truth. Here she introduces a note of judgement from a Christian
perspective.
72 That pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all the
malarkey that you’ve dished out all summer. Oh, I knew you weren’t
sixteen any more. But I was a fool enough to believe you was
straight: by using the word ‘pitch’, Mitch implies that Blanche has
been selling herself and that he was taken in by her patter. He may
have realised that she was not in the prime of her youth, but the
secrecy about her age has troubled him, if only because his mother
has asked about it. John M. Clum notes (Acting Gay: Male
Homosexuality in Modern Drama, 152) that ‘straight’ is part of the
language of homosexuality, a subtext, because it defines a
heterosexual as well as meaning honest or straightforward. Clum
implies that Blanche represents the homosexual (i.e. not straight)
sensibility. Though Clum does not go this far, there is a long critical
tradition of viewing Blanche as Tennessee Williams in drag.
73 The Tarantula Arms!: Blanche mocks Mitch’s comments,
exaggerating her ability to control men and bring about their
downfall. Mitch does not seem to understand what a tarantula is; he
certainly does not pick up on her sarcasm about the way in which
men try to stigmatise her.
73 I was played out: she was drained of her youthful energy. Perhaps
there is also a suggestion of being out of a game of cards here.
73 I thanked God for you . . . The poor man’s Paradise – is a little
peace . . . : Blanche’s language is increasingly taking on a Christian
 tone. These biblical echoes convey the modest hope of protection
she had after meeting Mitch.
74 Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart . . . : Blanche can seemingly
divorce her creation of magic from an inner integrity. The fact that
she presents herself as essentially truthful is likely to make her more
sympathetic.
74 She is a blind MEXICAN WOMAN in a dark shawl, carrying bunches
of those gaudy tin flowers that lower class Mexicans display at
funerals and other festive occasions: the appearance of this vendor
is timely. Blanche’s spiritual death is approaching and the woman is
the symbol of this, a harbinger of doom. The fact that she is blind
recalls Tiresias, the sightless prophet of Greek legend.
74 Flores para los muertos: flowers for the dead. The Mexican Spanish
chant is haunting because of the subject matter but also because of
its somewhat alien quality. It sets Blanche thinking about the deaths
at Belle Reve again.
74 Corones para los muertos: crowns for the dead. We might think of
the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head before the crucifixion.
74 And other things such as blood-stained pillow-slips: oblivious to
Mitch at this point, Blanche has been transported back to Belle Reve
and the painful deaths of her relatives. The blood represents the sin
of the ‘epic fornications’ (22), a dynasty collapsing in upon itself, as
well as death. Blanche’s fragmented conversations with the dead
indicate a schizophrenic state.
74 The opposite is desire: the relationship between death (Thanatos)
and desire (Eros) is one that has preoccupied Western writers. Desire
is the life-force staving off death, but the insatiability of desire can
only be ended with death. Blanche can no longer court desire – it
was what transported her to this point – and must accept death.
Williams suggests the connection between the two themes when he
has Blanche talk about the two streetcars (5).
74 Later the paddy-wagon would gather them up like daisies . . . : the
drunken soldiers looking for sexual favours from Blanche would
eventually collapse and be arrested for causing a public disturbance
by police in a van. Stanley’s information about Blanche creating a
scandal is accurate.
75 What I been missing all summer: namely, sex. Now that he knows the
stories about Blanche are true, Mitch can vent his sexual frustration.
75 You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother: Mitch
measures women by his mother and so exhibits Freud’s Oedipus
complex: he secretly desires his mother but this is taboo. Of course,
his mother is nearing death, another conflation of desire and death.
Mitch implies that he wants to enjoy Blanche as a prostitute, rather
than a girlfriend respectable enough to be presented to his family.
Given that he was previously in awe of Blanche, we can see that
Mitch uses a typical classification of woman as Madonna/whore.
75 Get out of here before I start screaming fire: to cry rape might be
too sensational. A cry of ‘Fire!’ could refer to the force of Mitch’s
lust, as well as being a sure way to create an alarm and so scare
Mitch off.
75 Blanche staggers back from the window and falls to her knees. The
distant piano is slow and blue: reeling from the attack, Blanche
almost falls into an attitude of prayer. The music appropriately
captures this sombre mood.
75 She has decked herself out in a somewhat soiled and crumpled white
satin evening gown and a pair of scuffed silver slippers with
brilliants set in their heels: her trunk or wardrobe out in front of her,
Blanche is trying to return to a world of faded glamour. The words
‘soiled’, ‘crumpled’ and ‘scuffed’ indicate how she has been abused,
how broken and imperfect her world has been rendered.
75 Now she is placing the rhinestone tiara on her head before the
mirror of the dressing-table and murmuring excitedly as if to a
group of spectral admirers: just costume jewellery, the tiara is a
symbol of the fraud Blanche has been perpetuating. She is
increasingly unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and is
haunted by the ghost of her past.
75– She catches her breath and slams the mirror face down with such
6 violence that the glass cracks: unhappy with her appearance,
probably the signs of ageing, Blanche smashes the mirror and,
according to superstition, ensures seven years’ bad luck.
76 He still has on the vivid green silk bowling shirt. As he rounds the
corner the honky-tonk music is heard. It continues softly throughout
 the scene: the last time we saw the shirt it had been ripped by Stella.
Now it again symbolises Stanley’s boldness, just as the silk pyjamas
will later in the scene. The music is coming from a tinny piano and
helps to create a sleazy atmosphere.
76 Does that mean we are to be alone in here?: Blanche spells out her
danger; this is ominous.
76 What’ve you got on those fine feathers for?: more bird imagery.
Feathers might be a means of escape were Blanche not already
trapped by Stanley.
76 A fireman’s ball?: appropriate after the way the previous scene
ended. Of course, Stanley is poking fun at Blanche’s invented social
invitations.
76 ATO: Auxiliary Territorial Officer.
76 Gosh. I thought it was Tiffany diamonds: Tiffany is an expensive
jeweller in New York. Stanley is being sarcastic but earlier, in Scene
Two, he had to be told that these were rhinestones and worth
nothing.
77 The bottle cap pops off and a geyser of foam shoots up. STANLEY
laughs happily, holding up the bottle over his head: the phallic bottle
was significant before when Blanche’s dress became stained. Here it
anticipates the sexual explosiveness at the end of this scene. As
Stanley pours the bottle over his head, we might also be reminded of
the shower being turned on over him in the aftermath of the poker
party (Scene Three).
77 Shall we bury the hatchet and make it a loving cup?: Shall we make
peace and have a celebratory drink? It is difficult to tell how sincere
Stanley is being here.
77 Well, it’s a red letter night for us both: we have both received good
news. Blanche was wearing a red satin robe when Mitch visited her
in Scene Nine. Of course, red is a sign of danger, a warning.
77 The silk pyjamas I wore on my wedding night!: we have already
heard of Stanley’s violence on his wedding night (the smashing of
light bulbs in the apartment). The silk pyjamas are a luxury, a
symbol of passion. Here their connection with marriage will extend
to infidelity and rape.
78 But I have been foolish – casting my pearls before swine!: a biblical
reference (Matthew 7:6): ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,
neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them
under their feet, and turn again and rend you.’ It is Blanche unwisely
drawing once more on the image of Stanley as a pig that causes him
to snap. Her ‘pearls’, Blanche’s misplaced superiority, as Stanley
sees it, and the fake jewels she wears, upset him to the point where
he has to bring her fantasy crashing down. The insult is compounded
by the reference to Stanley’s ‘buddy’, Mitch.
78 Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable: almost Tennessee Williams’s
mantra. However we judge Blanche’s behaviour, she does not
deserve what happens to her.
79 There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination!: Stanley has little
imagination and so all that he despises is contained within this one
word. Stanley’s lines in this section are like a boxer’s punches;
Blanche is reeling on the ropes and all she can respond with each
time is a shocked ‘Oh!’.
79 That worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some
rag-picker! . . . What queen do you think you are!: Blanche looks
like something out of a carnival, possibly a freak show. Mardi Gras
is on Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, a day of feasting before Lent
officially begins. A rag-picker is a person who collects and sells
rags, so Blanche’s costume is the cheapest and tackiest that could be
found. Stanley has referred to Blanche’s imitation of royalty before
(Scene Eight, 65), but ‘queen’ can also denote a homosexual and has
been construed as coded language (see note 72 on p. 158).
79 You are the Queen of the Nile!: Stanley characterises Blanche as the
Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
she is seen by the Romans as a decadent whore who has lured
Antony to his doom; her world is unashamedly hedonistic.
79 The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form: Blanche’s worst
fears and nightmares are projected onto the wall. Again, Williams is
exposing the workings of her vulnerable mind.
79 The night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in a jungle:
auditory fears are added to visual ones. Blanche is not lost in a wood
but a jungle and survival looks improbable.
79 A prostitute has rolled a drunkard: robbed a drunkard while he was
asleep. A brief glimpse is afforded of the outside world. The
prostitute takes advantage of the drunken man, just as Stanley is
going to take advantage of Blanche’s weakness.
80 Some moments later the NEGRO WOMAN appears around the corner
with a sequined bag which the prostitute had dropped on the walk.
She is rooting excitedly through it: a chain of theft is established.
Because the characters have little, they greedily take from others.
Stanley’s materialism was obvious when he talked of the Napoleonic
code in Scene Two.
80 He grins at her as he knots the tasselled sash about his waist: a
smile of power and the ability to exact revenge. It recalls Stanley’s
grin at the end of Scene Four after listening to Blanche’s speech
about his primitivism.
80 Then a clicking becomes audible from the telephone, steady and
rasping: a moment of high dramatic tension. The sound of the
clicking phone is very insistent. It represents broken
communication – both between Blanche and Stanley and Blanche
and the outside world.
80 The barely audible ‘blue piano’ begins to drum up louder. The sound
of it turns into the roar of an approaching locomotive. BLANCHE
crouches, pressing her fists to her ears until it has gone by:
Williams uses the lugubrious piano more intensely here to build into
the crashing train sound; it is ear-splitting for Blanche.
80 Come to think of it – maybe you wouldn’t be bad to – interfere
with . . . : as Stanley reaches for the right word, we are left to wonder
whether this is the first time he has thought about assaulting her,
whether he has always desired her but has channelled this into
hostility.
81 What are you putting on now?: What game of deception are you
trying to play now? The way this is phrased makes it sound like
another costume or performance.
81 She smashes a bottle on the table and faces him, clutching the
broken top: the loving cup has been turned into a weapon. Blanche
hopes to use it to penetrate Stanley’s face, but she will be
overpowered and he will penetrate her violently.
81 So you want some rough-house!: Stanley relishes the prospect of a
violent sexual encounter; he wants Blanche to offer some sort of
resistance in order to make conquering her that much more
satisfying.
81 Tiger – tiger! Drop the bottle-top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with
each other from the beginning!: Stanley makes Blanche out to be a
highly dangerous beast of the jungle, again so that he has an
opponent to subdue. Interestingly, Stella portrayed Stanley as a lamb
(depicting, in his remorse, the gentleness of Christ) in Scene Four
after the poker night: ‘He was as good as a lamb when I came back
and he’s really very, very ashamed of himself ’ (36). Stanley implies
an inevitability about what happens which might seem to contradict
his apparent spontaneity earlier. Like two inexorable forces, Blanche
and Stanley, old and new America, have been brought to this final
battle of wills.
81 He picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed. The hot
trumpet and drums from the Four Deuces sound loudly: all
resistance has been broken. The music builds to a climax, capturing
the carnality of the scene. Inevitably, the film’s director, Elia Kazan,
encountered difficulties with the censor over this. His solution was
to have Stanley’s act of picking up Blanche seen through a mirror
that then smashes before the shot dissolves into the next scene, so
diminishing the expected rape.
81 The atmosphere of the kitchen is now the same raw, lurid one of the
disastrous poker night: Williams revisits the world of male
camaraderie and competition. By repeating the poker party, he
encourages us to see both what has changed and what has remained
constant.
81 The building is framed by the sky of turquoise. STELLA has been
crying as she arranges the flowery dresses in the open trunk: the
colour of the sky invites another comparison, this time with the
opening scene of the play: How far has Blanche travelled
metaphorically? There is the first sign of a response from Stella,
though we cannot yet judge what she knows. The trunk, now being
packed, is a reminder of Stanley’s hostile questions and Blanche’s
shock at discovering him going through her belongings (‘It looks
 like my trunk has exploded’, 19). The flowery dresses suggest a
softer, more innocent Blanche than the fake furs.
82 Drew to an inside straight and made it, by God: Stanley combines
the idea of a race, possibly a horserace, with winning a hand of
cards. His mood is far happier than when he was losing in Scene
Three.
82 Maldita sea tu suerto!: literally ‘Curse your good luck!’
82 Put it in English, greaseball!: Stanley, victimised as a ‘Polack’, does
not worry about insulting his friend with this racist remark.
82 Luck is believing you’re lucky. Take at Salerno: Stanley believes in
making his own luck and, therefore, in controlling fate. Applying
this to Blanche, he knew he could defeat her; he had the ultimate
means of doing so. Salerno was the site of the Allied invasion of
mainland Italy in the Second World War. The American forces were
the Fifth Army.
82 You . . . you . . . you . . . Brag . . . brag . . . bull . . . bull: Mitch’s lack
of sophistication is all too clear in his conversations with Blanche.
Here his anger at Stanley’s insensitivity makes him particularly
inarticulate.
82 If it’s not too crushed I’ll wear it and on the lapel that silver and
turquoise pin in the shape of a seahorse: one of several references to
the sea. Crushed herself, Blanche has to find some way through this
difficult scene.
83 I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley: Stella’s
moral dilemma. What Stanley has done is too appalling to
contemplate; it is easier for Stella to accept that her sister is insane.
83 She has a tragic radiance in her red satin robe following the
sculptural lines of her body: the bold colour captures Blanche’s pain.
Strong sympathy surrounds her at this point and she has the beauty
of a work of art.
83 At the sound of BLANCHE’S voice MITCH’S arm supporting his cards has
sagged and his gaze is dissolved into space: the first sign of Mitch’s
feelings of guilt. Whereas in Scene Three he could not concentrate
because of Blanche’s presence, here he slumps at the table with the
regret that is triggered by her voice.
83 BLANCHE stands quite still for some moments – the silverbacked
mirror in her hand and a look of sorrowful perplexity as though all
human experience shows on her face: confused and shocked by the
sound of Mitch’s name, Blanche transcends her own situation and
becomes a figure of universal suffering. Williams is gradually
increasing her tragic significance. The mirror takes us back to the
one that shattered at the start of Scene Ten.
84 MITCH ducks his head lower but STANLEY shoves back his chair as if to
rise: the contrast between the two men is effectively illustrated here.
Mitch is ashamed and wants to avoid a scene; Stanley is pursuing
victory to the bitter end.
84 It’s Della Robbia blue. The blue of the robe in the old Madonna
pictures. Are these grapes washed?: Blanche is anxious to establish
her purity and continues the reference to her being a work of art. She
has been trying to wash her soul clean and now she wants assurances
that everything she touches is free from dirt and sin.
84 Those cathedral bells – they’re the only clean thing in the Quarter.
Well, I’m going now. I’m ready to go: heard for the first time, the
cathedral bells signify the start of Blanche’s spiritual journey.
85 ‘Poor lady’, they’ll say, ‘the quinine did her no good. That unwashed
grape has transported her soul to heaven’: typically, Blanche
dreams of dying in a young man’s arms. Having resisted the onset of
time so assiduously, she almost seems to welcome death here.
Quinine is a bitter crystalline compound found in cinchona bark and
used as a tonic and to reduce fever.
85 And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped
overboard – at noon – in the blaze of summer – and into an ocean as
blue as [chimes again] my first lover’s eyes!: Williams wanted to be
buried at sea like Hart Crane, but his body was taken to St Louis for
burial in the Mt Calvary Cemetery. This vignette suggests the
warmth and passion of first love, not the coldness of death.
85 The gravity of their profession is exaggerated – the unmistakable
aura of the state institution with its cynical detachment: Williams’s
experience of the institutions his sister Rose stayed in is evident in
the thumbnail sketches we get of the doctor and the matron. They
appear coldly professional until Blanche transforms the doctor into a
 gentleman caller. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, Rose was given a
frontal lobotomy in 1943 and spent the rest of her life in institutions.
Images of madness are common in Williams’s plays, and Catherine
Holly, a character in Suddenly Last Summer, is even threatened with
a lobotomy.
85 STELLA presses her fist to her lips: an obvious sign of tension.
86 Please don’t get up. I’m only passing through: Blanche’s life has
latterly involved journeys; she has not been able to find a permanent
shelter.
86 There is a moment of silence – no sound but that of STANLEY steadily
shuffling the cards: a moment of tension that, together with the
distant Varsouviana, suggests the threat to Blanche who still has to
negotiate Stanley and the other card players.
87 Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes. The
‘Varsouviana’ is filtered into weird distortion, accompanied by the
cries and noises of the jungle. BLANCHE seizes the back of a chair as
if to defend herself: the distorted Varsouviana represents Blanche’s
most recent nightmare: the rape. The scene is re-enacted in her mind
and she adopts a defensive position, this time with a chair rather
than a broken bottle.
87 The greeting is echoed and re-echoed by other mysterious voices
behind the walls, as if reverberated through a canyon of rock:
Williams continues to expose the workings of Blanche’s mind: she
hears only a jumble of confusing voices. The canyon also represents
the world falling away beneath her.
87 She cries out as if the lantern was herself: Stanley repeats Mitch’s
action of Scene Nine – essentially a figurative rape.
88 What have I done to my sister?: Stella understands her own
involvement in the betrayal of Blanche; she knows that she has
helped to destroy her.
88 Madre de Dios! Cosa mala, muy, muy mala!: Mother of God! This is
a bad thing, a very, very bad thing! Pablo is the first of the poker
players to voice his concern. By stating it here in Spanish, it seems
more heartfelt.
88 You done this, all o’ your God damn interfering with things you –:
 guilt-ridden as he has been throughout this scene, Mitch finally turns
on Stanley. He will need to be restrained as Stanley was in Scene
Three.
88 BLANCHE turns wildly and scratches at the MATRON: Blanche is like a
feral cat or the tiger that Stanley labelled her just before the rape in
Scene Ten; she does not want to be caged.
88 Jacket: straitjacket.
89 He takes off his hat and now becomes personalized: Blanche is now
able to see him as a gentleman caller, though not Shep Huntleigh.
89 Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of
strangers: Blanche is in the unfortunate position of having to accept
help from anyone, though she implies that she has never really
known people intimately. We are reminded of her comment to Mitch
at the end of Scene Three: ‘I need kindness now’ (34).
89 It is wrapped in a pale blue blanket: the colour links the child with
Blanche. In her delicate state, Blanche has needed to be handled like
a child in this last scene.
89 She sobs with inhuman abandon. There is something luxurious in her
complete surrender to crying now that her sister is gone: ‘inhuman’
echoes the jungle cries Blanche has been hearing. Only now that
Blanche has left can Stella give in to the fullness of her emotions.
These are self-indulgently ‘luxurious’, as if partly for her benefit, to
foreground her own remorse rather than just what has happened to
Blanche.
90 [He kneels beside her and his fingers find the opening of her
blouse.] Now, now, love. Now, love . . . : a crude sexual gesture on
Stanley’s part. The repetition of ‘now’ emphasises his conviction
that their life can return to normality. For Stanley, this means a
resumption of sexual relations, even though it is only ‘some weeks’
after the birth of the child. The stage direction before this is
‘voluptuously, soothingly’, combining Stanley’s sexual passion with
his genuine love for Stella. Kazan’s film version could not be seen to
endorse any kind of acceptance of rape, so the ending sees Stella
taking her baby and running off, promising never to return.
90 The luxurious sobbing, the sensual murmur fade away under the
swelling music of the ‘blue piano’ and the muted trumpet: the music
 and sound effects combine here in a heady mix which is both
‘swelling’ and ‘muted’. Williams effectively smothers the
emotional crescendo of the play with the music that has helped to
define both the Quarter and the specific events of the play.
90 This game is seven-card stud: this matter-of-fact statement indicates
three things: the poker players are starting a fresh game, one that
they played before in Scene Three; life will continue in much the
same way; Stanley, the ‘stud’, is triumphant, the luck that he
believes in fashioning for himself signified by the number seven. At
precisely what cost Stanley’s victory has been achieved is a point
that the audience is left to ponder.
 Questions for Further Study

1 To what extent is Blanche the controlling force in the play?

2 Compare and contrast the attitudes of Blanche and Stella to the story
of their past selves at Belle Reve.
3 How far do the audience agree with Blanche’s assessment of Stanley as
an ‘ape’?
4 Discuss the dramatic devices which Williams uses in the play to
suggest that Blanche is doomed.
5 Stanley ripping away the paper lantern represents his destruction of
lies, deceit and fantasy. Explore aspects of truth and fantasy in the play.
6 ‘A play must concentrate the events of a lifetime into the short span of
a three-act play. Of necessity these events must be more violent than in
life’ (Tennessee Williams). Examine the creation of tension as it is
developed through the eleven scenes of the play.
7 In his directorial notes on the play Elia Kazan suggests that through
watching the decline of Blanche ‘[the audience] begin to realise that
they are sitting in at the death of something extraordinary [. . .] and
then they feel the tragedy’. Discuss the fall of Blanche in the play.
8 Explore Williams’s use of colour as it impacts upon the changing
atmosphere of the play.
9 The ‘visual projection of Blanche’s inner life’ is a key aspect of
Williams’s dramatic technique. How is it used?
10 The ‘infusion’ of lyricism in the atmosphere of Elysian Fields is
created using a range of visual and aural devices. Examine Williams’s
creation of environment within the play.
11 ‘If Blanche belongs to the crumbling grandeur of the Southern
plantations, Stanley is a new American, an immigrant man of the city.’
How does the play express the conflict between traditional values and
the new world?
12 ‘The blind are leading the blind’ (Blanche, Scene Two). Examine the
twinned themes of sight and blindness as they are expressed through
 character and dramatic incidents.
13 ‘Don’t hang back with the brutes’ (Blanche, Scene Four). Discuss the
development of the character of Stanley as it is revealed, both through
his own words and actions, and the perceptions of others.
14 ‘The relationship between Stanley and Stella is based on his need for
domination and her need for protection.’ Discuss.
15 The relationship between Blanche and Mitch offers an interesting
perspective on the nature of gender relations in the play. Focusing on
clear examples of at least two of the relationships, explore the issues
which arise.
16 ‘He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits’ (Blanche, Scene Four).
Explore the conflicts between gentility and animal brutality in the play.
17 ‘I lived in a house where dying old women remembered their dead men
[. . .] Death . . . [. . .] the opposite is desire’ (Blanche, Scene Nine).
Examine Williams’s use of this theme to affect the audience.
18 The lurid reflections which fall across the walls in the final scene are a
potential manifestation of Blanche’s terrors and fears. Discuss the
dramatic devices used by Williams in the final scene.
19 ‘The language of the play is shaped by two needs: character-
identification and thematic development.’ Explore this statement.
20 Stella’s apparent betrayal of Blanche offers the audience a clear insight
into her character. Discuss the complexities of the relationship between
the sisters in the light of Stella’s final act.
21 A Streetcar Named Desire appears to be a hybrid drama: naturalistic,
symbolic and poetic. Do you agree?
22 Blanche’s response to the figure of the doctor in the final scene of the
play is characteristic of her deep-rooted perception of the role of men
in her life. Explore the range of Blanche’s attitudes towards the men in
the play.
23 ‘To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you are
lucky’ (Stanley, Scene Eleven). To what extent does Williams
emphasise the role of luck in dictating the course of the lives of his
characters?
24 Is A Streetcar Named Desire a moral play?

1 Tennessee Williams’s Letters to Donald Windham, London, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, vi.
2 Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, New York, Citadel Press, 1961, 62.
3 Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years, London, Dennis Dobson, 1946, 79.
4 The Revels History of Drama in English, London, Methuen, 1977, Vol. VIII, 62–3.
5 Author’s Preface to Miss Julie: Strindberg: Plays One, trans. Michael Meyer, London,
Methuen, 1976, 92–8.
6 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York, Penguin, 1994, p. 174.
7 Robert Brustein, “America’s New Culture Hero: Feelings Without Words”, Commentary. Vol.
25 (1958), 124.
8 Included in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, New Jersey,
Prentice-Hall, 1971, 26–7.
9 Oscar Wilde, Impressions, 1891.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

commentary and notes by

PHILIP C. KOLIN
 Plot

Act One

Cat opens with the physical symbols Williams uses to develop his
characters. Coming out of the bathroom, after freshening up from a
disgustingly messy dinner with Gooper’s ‘no-neck’ children, Maggie
stands in front of a mirror and a dressing table. Showering and powdering
are part of her repertoire to entice Brick back to bed and continue to be
alluring to Big Daddy. The mirror reflects her identity, and Brick’s too.
‘Who are you?’ she says in front of it (30). She is worried that Brick’s
older brother Gooper and his obnoxious wife Mae will cut Brick and her
out of Big Daddy’s inheritance. They never let Big Daddy and Big Mama
forget that Maggie is childless and that Brick is a drunkard. Branding
Mae’s repulsive children as ‘no-neck monsters’, she tries to thwart Gooper
and Mae’s plot to disinherit Brick and her.
Brick is symbolised throughout the play by his crutch, his liquor
cabinet, and his pyjamas. He needs the crutch because of a broken ankle he
suffered jumping hurdles on the athletic field at his old high school at 3
a.m. In every act, he hobbles and falls on stage. Dressed in silk pyjamas,
he is a patient in his own isolated world/ward. When Maggie informs him
that ‘Now we know that Big Daddy’s dyin’ of cancer’, all he can say is,
‘Do we?’ His terse replies to her – ‘Did you say something’, or ‘How
about that’ (9–10) – show that he is disconnected, emotionally and
physically, from his wife as well as from his father. Refusing to
communicate or sleep with Maggie, and drowning himself in liquor, Brick
wants to escape the pain and the obligation of self-disclosure. He drinks
until he hears the ‘click’, the silence that brings him peace. The empty bed
in the middle of the room, another key prop, is an accusing reminder of
Maggie and Brick’s childless, loveless marriage. Wanting no part of
family life, Brick refuses to even sign a card or play a part in giving Big
Daddy the birthday present Maggie has bought. The white silk pyjamas
Maggie asks Brick to wear parallel the soft cashmere robe she buys for
Big Daddy. In the midst of Maggie’s litany of hurts, Sister Woman, Mae,
barges in, berating Brick and Maggie. Attempting to convince her
meddling sister-in-law that Brick is a loyal husband, Maggie talks about a
hunting trip that she and Brick plan to make very soon to Moon Lake.
When Big Mama bursts in, overjoyed by the news that Big Daddy does not
have cancer, she also attacks Maggie for not having children and for
having a husband who drinks. Disgusted, Big Mama leaves the room.
Quick-witted and tenacious, Maggie quickly recovers from Big Mama’s
inquisitorial intrusion to return to her attempted conversation with Brick.
Hoping to coax him into bed, she informs him that other men find her
attractive, including Big Daddy whom she likes and admires, and reveals
that a man tried to pick her up recently. Even though the mirror in the
bedroom reflects a beautiful, desirable wife, Brick refuses to see Maggie
or himself clearly in it. Wanting her out of his life, he encourages Maggie
to ‘take a lover’, but she refuses because it would lead to a divorce. She
vows to take care of Brick, but he rejects everyone’s help, especially hers.
Maggie is determined that they will not lose Brick’s inheritance; after an
impoverished childhood she could not bear to be poor again. Standing in
front of the mirror, she sighs folornly, ‘I’m dressed, all dressed, nothing
else for me to do’ (35), while Brick whistles ‘vaguely’ at her, another sign
of his cool estrangement.
But Brick’s apathy turns to anger when she mentions his relationship
with his deceased friend Skipper. When Maggie declares that love-making
with Brick ‘didn’t just peter out in the usual ways, it was cut off short long
before the natural time for it to’ (30), she summarises what has happened
and forecasts confrontations to come. Nothing thus far has brought Brick’s
emotions to the surface as much as Maggie’s reference to ‘the truth about
that thing with Skipper’ (35). Cat gives us several accounts of ‘that thing’.
In Act Two, we will hear Brick’s and Big Daddy’s side, but, according to
Maggie in Act One, she made love to Skipper to be closer to Brick and to
put Skipper on notice that Brick was her husband. But Brick accuses her of
smearing that relationship as ‘dirty’, and blames her for destroying his
friendship with Skipper. Maggie protests that she saw their friendship as
‘pure’. Confessing that she tried to get Skipper to stop loving her husband,
she went to his room one night, but after he was unable to make love,
Skipper drank himself to death, for which Brick will never forgive
Maggie. At the end of Act One, Dixie, one of Gooper’s unmannerly brood,
barges into the bedroom, taunting Brick and Maggie once more. Linking
birth and death, Act One ends with the family gathering in Brick’s room to
celebrate Big Daddy’s sixty-fifth birthday.

Act Two

Act Two, with Big Daddy’s long-awaited entrance, might be divided into
three parts. In the first part, Big Daddy responds to the uninvited guests in
Brick’s bedroom. Like his son, he has little tolerance for his family and
only contempt for his wife Ida, who brings in ‘an enormous birthday cake
ablaze with candles’ (44). Given Big Daddy’s real medical condition,
ordering Ida to blow out the candles is painfully ironic. As in Act One,
Brick evades contact and conversation by leaving the room, going back
and forth to the bar, and refusing to answer direct questions with direct
answers. Big Daddy’s interrogations begin with wanting to know why
Brick is crippled, which triggers talk about his son’s sexual identity.
Brick’s character has been besmirched by Gooper and Mae because of
their disgusting eavesdropping, and an angry Big Daddy orders them out
of Brick’s bedroom, another in a series of evictions in Cat.
In the second part of Act Two, Big Daddy demands to know why Brick
does not sleep with Maggie. Big Daddy asserts that ‘the human animal is a
beast’ because he tries to win immortality through accumulating
possessions. He then describes his trips to Europe where Big Mama tried
to purchase everything in sight and to Africa where a woman made her
young daughter solicit him. Just as Brick repulses Maggie’s lovemaking,
Big Daddy rejects his wife’s. But for all of Big Daddy’s power he cannot
communicate with his son, who blames his father for talking in circles.
Brick finally confesses that he drinks because of ‘disgust’, a response
which sparks a father–son confrontation over lies and corruption. Brick
complains, though, that he never lied to his father, and Big Daddy likewise
responds, ‘Then there is at least two people that never lied to each other’
(75). Sadly, Brick is the only one to tell his father the truth. Yet Brick’s
disgust translates into mendacity, a subject Big Daddy knows well, having
lived in an abhorrent marriage and dealing with the rest of his contentious
family. But having received a good bill of health, he orders Brick to
straighten up.
In the third part of Act Two, pressuring Brick further, Big Daddy wants
to know how and why Skipper died. At the turning point of the play, Big
Daddy declares that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was ‘not exactly
normal’ (76). Vindictively, Brick intimates that his father was also in a
compromised (homosexual) relationship with Jack Straw and Peter
Ochello, the old ‘bachelors’ who many years ago hired Daddy as an
overseer on their plantation. But Big Daddy discusses the Straw–Ochello
relationship without ever directly answering Brick’s charge. Through a
fiery volley of words, Brick resents his father’s accusation that the
relationship with Skipper was ‘unnatural’, and assures him that he would
have spurned Skipper if he were gay. Inquiring, then, why Skipper cracked
up, Big Daddy learns that Brick blames Maggie for Skipper’s death. But
when Big Daddy insists that something has been left out of his son’s story,
Brick confesses that one night Skipper called to make ‘a drunken
confession’ (84) but that he hung up on him. Because of Brick’s cowardice
and self-deception, Big Daddy accuses him of mendacity, translated into
‘disgust’ with himself for not facing the truth. Amid fireworks celebrating
Big Daddy’s birthday, Brick inadvertently reveals what everyone but Big
Daddy knows – this is his last birthday. He quickly regrets the disclosure
and accuses himself of being ‘less alive’. The act ends with Big Daddy’s
harrowing cry condemning all liars.

Act Three

Serving as a bridge between acts, Big Daddy’s condemning voice cascades

into Act Three as he exits. Unlike the intimately charged conversations in
Acts One and Two, the exchanges in Act Three occur when the Pollitt
clan/ensemble gather to discuss Big Daddy’s medical condition and to
break the bad news to Big Mama. Reassured that Big Daddy is all right,
judging by the huge meal he has just eaten, Big Mama is nevertheless
concerned about this ‘mysterious family conference’ (138). When the time
comes to reveal the truth about this ‘black thing’ that has invaded the
Pollitt house, Dr Baugh vindicates himself by telling Big Mama that Big
Daddy’s condition has ‘gone past the knife’ (97). As he has done
throughout Cat, Brick leaves the room, and even sings a song, sealed in his
own pain-proof world. Unscrupulously, Gooper produces a briefcase (a
symbol of his mercenary world) containing trustee papers and medical
reports and asserts that as a corporation lawyer he can continue to run the
estate. Incensed, Big Mama demands that Gooper put the documents away
and implores Brick and Maggie to have an heir.
But, as Williams was keen to emphasise, Big Daddy is not dead yet, and
coming back briefly on stage, he vows to keep control of his land.
Symbolising the turmoil inside the Pollitt family, a storm blows in,
Williams’s use of what is known as ‘pathetic fallacy’: nature reflecting
human emotions. Big Daddy then tells his famous crude joke about an
elephant’s erection and how small it was in comparison to a husband’s
whose wife and children accompany him at the zoo. The joke reaffirms
Big Daddy’s manhood while his family paints him as dying. To everyone’s
shock, Maggie announces she is pregnant. Elated, Big Daddy declares she
has ‘life in her body’ (112), then retreats to where he can look at his
plantation, leaving Mae and Gooper in Brick’s bedroom where they angrily
accuse Maggie of lying before leaving outraged. Confronting Brick,
Maggie claims she is now the stronger one, hides his liquor, and insists
that he sleeps with her ‘to make the lie true’ if he wants it back. Echoing a
line from Big Daddy in Act Two (52), Brick’s words, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny
if that was true?’ provocatively refer to Maggie’s love for him and her
hoped-for conception.
 Commentary

Like many of Williams’s plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof takes place in a
highly symbolic setting, one that is steeped in the history and myths of the
South. In fact, Cat excavates two levels of history – the long tradition of
ante- and post-bellum (Southern) customs and their literary expression and
the more recent history of the 1950s in American political life, the time
when Cat was written and first performed.

Cat and the Plantation Mythos

Cat is inseparable from its Southern plantation setting. The South,

especially the Mississippi Delta, exerted a strong influence on Williams’s
life and work. Stretching from Memphis to Yazoo City, the Mississippi
Delta comprises an area of 6,250 square miles of flat land enriched by the
alluvial deposits of the Mississippi River which was frequently
impoverished by floods, insects, and drought. Growing up in Clarksdale in
the Mississippi Delta, just seventy miles south of Memphis, Williams was
familiar with the Delta towns and people because he visited them with his
maternal grandfather, the Reverend Mr Dakin, whose Episcopal church, St
George’s, was one of Clarksdale’s cultural centres. Cat is filled with
references to Williams’s boyhood South: Big Daddy’s sprawling plantation
of 28,000 acres is located near Clarksdale; Brick’s accident at the high
school running track is reported in the Clarksdale Register; and Big Daddy
eats huge quantities of Delta food, such as ‘hoppin’ John’, ‘candied yams’,
and all ingredients for ‘a real country dinner’ (90). His most important
cash crop is cotton, and to celebrate King Cotton, the Delta held festivals
with a cotton queen, also alluded to in Cat. Although Clarksdale was
known for the blues, there are, unfortunately, no references to this musical
form (as in Baby Doll or Orpheus Descending), but a saxophonist played a
Louis Armstrong score before each act in the production of Cat in 2008
with an all-black cast.
 With its large cotton plantations and the wealthy families that owned
them, the Delta was enshrined in the mythos of the nostalgic, antebellum
South, the land of valiant courtiers and fair ladies in the spirit of Gone
with the Wind. Plantation life was often idealised as idyllic and heroic, the
aristocratic world of the Wilkes and O’Haras who controlled huge estates
such as Twin Oaks and Tara. Planters were portrayed as cultured
gentlemen, educated, refined. Their columned houses – such as
Longwood – were modelled on classical architecture. The plantation
economy was rooted in cotton and harvested by field hands, chattel slaves,
whose labour sustained the fictions created about a genteel way of life.
Masters and their male heirs adhered to a strict code of chivalry where
women were idealised, and business deals were transacted with honour.
Plantation life also was noted for its hospitality and romance. Many
nineteenth- and twentieth-century plantation novels centred on love affairs
amid the magnolias and azaleas. It is this world that Cat’s setting evokes.
Yet, despite his Southern roots, Williams replaced the nostalgia of the
Old South and its sophisticated planters and elegant rituals with a crass,
menacing new South. Big Daddy, the master, is a ‘Mississippi redneck’
(33) who rode ‘a yellow dog freight car’ and lived in ‘hobo jungles’ (78).
His daughters-in-law, Maggie and Mae, also come from dirt-poor
backgrounds. As Maggie confesses: ‘Always had to suck up to people I
couldn’t stand because they had money and I was poor as Job’s turkey’
(34). But Mae still pretends she descends from the gentry. Debunking the
beauty queen ethos of the South, Maggie satirises the ritual of the cotton
queen who would ‘sit on a brass throne on a tacky float an’ ride down
Main Street, smilin’, bowin’, and blowin’ kisses to all the trash on the
street’ (13). She further recounts how one cotton queen, Susie McPheeter,
was riding in a parade when ‘some old drunk’ in front of the Gayoso Hotel
‘shot out a squirt of tobacco juice right in [her] face’ (13). Disdaining the
world of debutantes, Maggie wore a ‘hand-me-down from a snotty rich
cousin’ (34). Hardly attractive or ladylike, Big Mama looks like a
‘Japanese wrestler’ (25). And Brick is no dashing, romantic cavalier
protecting his lady’s honour; twice he tries to hit Maggie with his crutch,
once even hurling it at her (39).
Yet Big Daddy’s South contains all the comfortable conventions – the
setting, quaint, bizarre characters, black servants, and sensational events –
that Broadway audiences expected to see and could approve of. The Pollitt
plantation with its colourful and crude patriarch, his life-threatening
sickness and wealthy estate, the bitter family feud over the inheritance,
Brick’s alcoholism, secrets from the past, and a steamy, oppressive
climate – these were all part of the literary heritage of the South. But, as
Albert J. Devlin convincingly argues, Williams ‘cunningly’ exploited the
conventions of the plantation South to ‘obscure’ his own scepticism about
the Broadway commercial theatre (and its values) as he actually sought its
approval to secure his fame. Within the historical/economic context of the
plantation South, Williams could express the tensions and anxieties of his
own troubled sexual identity through Brick, ‘a mirror of [his] artistic
identity and his besetting career’ (Devlin, 105). Adhering to the nationally
acceptable conventions of ‘genre, race, class, [and] economy’ associated
with the South, Williams inserted Brick’s (and his own) ‘aberrant silence’
(Devlin, 104), the ‘speechless voice’ of a dissident homosexual/playwright
who could not openly reveal his ‘deepest secrets’, his ‘mystery’. Williams
had thus sown his own failures (the recent commercial disaster of Camino
Real on Broadway, 1953) into his character besieged with
disappointments. According to Devlin, Brick’s dilemma reflected, as it
disguised, Williams’s own ‘problematic . . . relations with the Broadway
theatre’ (107).
Williams also used this symbolic setting to raise questions about and
express anxieties over patriarchal control and the rites of inheritance.
Traditionally, the economy and hierarchies of plantation life were created
and sustained through the power of a patriarch whose legacies exerted
control over the land and those who lived on it. A history of the Old
South – with its famous plantations – is a history of big daddies, strong-
willed men who shaped the world around them. Plantations were passed
down from one generation to another through patrilinear succession,
fathers to sons, the heirs of heterosexual unions. But, as Michael Bibler
argues, Cat undermines, even as it sustains, conventional patriarchal
control and heterosexuality. For example, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello,
the homosexual couple who owned the plantation before Big Daddy, dispel
the plantation laws of inheritance through their love affair and their
relationship to Big Daddy. In a key speech, he declares:
I made this place! I was overseer . . . on the old Straw and Ochello
plantation. I quit school at ten! I quit school at ten years old and went
to work like a nigger in the fields. And I rose to be overseer of the
 Straw and Ochello plantation. And old Straw died and I was Ochello’s
partner. (51)
Sexually tolerant, Big Daddy had no qualms about being Ochello’s partner
and inheriting the plantation. But by admitting that he received the
plantation from this gay couple, Big Daddy subverts a heterosexual,
patrilinear line of inheritance. Interestingly, no one ever inquires why or
how Big Daddy inherited the plantation from Ochello.
Brick also destabilised the plantation mythos. While Blanche loses her
ancestral plantation Belle Reve (‘Beautiful Dream’) in A Streetcar Named
Desire because of her male ancestor’s ‘epic fornications’, ironically, it is
the son, Brick, who risks losing his inheritance by refusing to have an heir
with Maggie and because of his ambiguous friendship with Skipper. The
conflicts and tensions over Brick’s relationship with his wife and with
Skipper are more clearly understood in the light of the imperatives of a
plantation culture. Like Big Daddy, Brick and Maggie are under the
influence of Ochello and Straw. They stay in a ‘room that hasn’t changed
much since it was occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw
and Peter Ochello’. The entire plantation is thus shrunk to this sexually
symbolic room. As Bibler again asserts, the shared bedroom ‘establishes
homosexuality not only as the physical origin of the plantation but also as
its metaphysical origin in the loving relationship that “haunts” the room’
(384). To Big Daddy, ‘it doesn’t matter if Brick is homosexual’ since
‘homosexuality does not destabilize his social position or his masculinity
because homosexual desire operates well within plantation hierarchies and
codes’. After all, Big Daddy regarded Straw and Ochello as ‘double
patriarchs’ whose lifestyle was not inconsistent with a plantation ethos
(395).

Cat and America in the 1950s

America in the 1950s could be termed the age of repression, a time of

conformity, insisting that citizens adhere to intensely conservative values.
The country was ruled by a staunchly conservative Republican
President/General Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, America’s Big Daddy, and
his Vice-President, Richard Nixon, whose later presidency (1968–74)
scandalised the world by the mendacity of Watergate. In his Memoirs
(1975), Williams lampooned Nixon for his ‘total lack of honesty
and . . . moral sense’ (95). Big Daddy, too, decries the deceptive language
of elected officials: ‘Mendacity is one of them five dollar words that
cheap politicians throw back and forth’ (71). Ike’s America was patriotic,
heterosexual, and paranoid. America in the 1950s waged a Cold War
against Communism, which was demonised as a threat, both from within
and outside the country. It was popular, even mandatory, in America to be
anti-Communist. A ‘Red scare’ terrified the country. Fearing a nuclear
attack from Russia, America routinely held air-raid drills during which
millions of citizens fled to bomb shelters, usually built in their basements,
to survive an inevitable nuclear Armageddon.
America’s strategy for national defence also lay in vigilantly finding,
repelling, and punishing Communists at home. During the 1950s, as never
before, the US House and Senate justified taking extraordinary, and
sometimes illegal, measures to contain the Communist attack against
American family values and national security. To battle the ‘Reds’ and
their ‘Pinko’ sympathisers, the House on Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), founded in 1938, and chaired by Senator Joseph
McCarthy (Republican, Wisconsin) in the early 1950s, embarked on a
notorious witch hunt looking for Communists, especially in entertainment
and in the arts. Described as McCarthyism, the HUAC’s policy was to
search out witnesses to name names and, rather than insisting on hard
evidence, accepted and validated lies, innuendo, hearsay, guilt by
association, biased informers, and unregulated government eavesdropping.
Ten years before Cat premiered, Williams had warned America about the
dangers of McCarthyism:
Today we are living in a world which is threatened by totalitarianism.
The Fascist and the Communist states have thrown us into a panic of
reaction. Reactionary opinion descends like a ton of bricks on the
head of any artist who speaks out against the current of prescribed
ideas. We are all under wraps of one kind or another, trembling before
the spectre of investigation committees . . . (‘Something Wild’, 46).
Cat satirises and scourges McCarthyism through Gooper’s and Mae’s
despicable, covert actions to gather information about Brick and Maggie
to ruin their reputations. Sharing the room next to Brick and Maggie’s,
they listen through the walls to the couple’s conversations, all of which
infuriates Big Daddy:
I hate eavesdroppers, I don’t like any kind of sneakin an’
spyin’. . . . You listen at night like a couple of rutten peekhole spies
and go and give a report on what you hear to Big Mama an’ she
comes to me and says they say such and such and so and so about
what they heard goin’ on between Brick an’ Maggie. (55)
Their reports include information such as ‘You won’t sleep with her, that
you sleep on the sofa’ (50). Illustrating their spying, Big Mama and Mae
whisper in collusion behind Big Daddy’s back (49). Whisper campaigns,
eavesdropping, and spying were tactics associated with the HUAC. ‘The
walls have ears in this place’, warns Big Daddy. Earlier, Maggie asks,
‘Hush! Who is out there? Is somebody out there?’ (21). Just as Brick’s and
Maggie’s names were sullied in the Pollitt family (allegorised into
America, circa 1955), many actors, writers, directors, singers, artists, and
musicians were accused of Communist sympathies and affiliations and
blacklisted from working in Hollywood.
Gays in particular were targeted by policing agencies such as the
HUAC, the FBI, and the military for their supposed Communist leanings.
In 1950, the Republican National Chairman, Guy Gabrielson, informed his
constituents that ‘Sexual perverts . . . have infiltrated our Government in
recent years . . . [and they were] perhaps as dangerous as the actual
Communists’ (quoted in Paller, 54). It was an easy leap of (bad) faith to
make gays into Communists. According to John S. Bak, a ‘communist
suspicion . . . inextricably accompanied the effete male’ (232), branded for
being a non-conformist, a seditious foe of family values, and a threat to
national security. Gays were forced to go underground, stay in the closet,
thus masking their sexual identity. In homophobic America in the 1950s,
they were harassed by the police who arrested or institutionalised them for
deviant sexual behaviour. (The Stonewall Riots, igniting the gay liberation
movement in the summer of 1969, were more than a decade off.) If found
out, gays in the 1950s were fired from their jobs or discharged from the
military. The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, who history records was
himself a closeted gay, conducted intensive surveillance of gay bars, clubs,
and bathhouses to crack down on this suspicious population. Williams
himself was the subject of FBI and the Department of Navy surveillance
for his sexual contact with sailors during the Second World War (Mitgang,
122). Being labelled gay was a political crime in 1955.
In such a context, Brick’s fear of being branded a homosexual
symbolised a crisis in national identity politics. In the 1950s, America saw
itself as staunchly heteromasculine. Coming out gay ran the risk of being
persecuted as a Communist, a misfit, the Other, a threat to democracy and
decency. But, as John Bak, Michael Paller, David Savran, and others have
argued, America’s identity crisis in the 1950s was in part triggered by the
Kinsey report – Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) – which
documented two very troubling facts: many American men had at least
one homosexual experience and that the enforced dichotomy between gay
and straight was not always clear cut. The destabilisation of gay and
straight identities led to this national anxiety. Brick’s anguish over his
sexual identity thus brings this controversy to the surface by illustrating
the homophobia of the times. His refusal to sleep with Maggie became a
tell-tale sign of his homosexuality for Gooper and Mae. After all, Skipper,
who confessed his love for Brick, could not perform the sexual act with
Maggie. Moreover, Brick’s vitriolic homophobic denials do little to deter
the smear campaign against him.
Making sure that they represented an acceptable and conservative
national identity, movies were also policed in 1950s America. Hollywood
films were strictly censored by the PCA (the Production Code
Administration), ‘the industry’s moral guardian’ (Palmer and Bray, 62). To
ensure that films adhered to unsullied, conservative standards, the PCA
could insist that offensive material be omitted, a script be shortened, or
even that a scene be reshot from a different, less sexualising angle. The
PCA fought liberal politics, suggestive sexuality, indecent language, and
any scandal of homosexuality. As we shall see, the film version of Cat
(1958) differed significantly from Williams’s script. Williams’s ‘play
explores the discontent of desire – and its polymorphous perversity as
well. No previous production, however, had dealt at such length and in
such depth with sexual questions’ (Palmer and Bray, 8). The Cat film was,
however, heavily censored. Together with the PCA, the Legion of Decency,
the rating board of the Roman Catholic Church, censored films by
classifying them as ‘A’ (Acceptable), ‘B’ (objectionable in parts), or ‘C’
(objectionable). Receiving a rating of ‘C’ crippled a film’s chances of
making money because theatres would not dare to show it or, if they did,
audiences, guided by the Legion’s assessment, would be likely to stay
away.
Seen as a latent or repressed homosexual, Brick was far removed from
the strong male leads that dominated the popular films of the decade, such
as Charlton Heston’s Moses in The Ten Commandments (1955), the
quintessential Cold War film of the decade, or Gregory Peck’s Captain
Ahab in Moby Dick (1956). Strong, hypermasculine images – such as John
Wayne, the warrior cowboy – were the norm because they espoused family
values, the hallowed foundation of democracy. Because of its
homosexuality, alcoholism, adultery, Skipper’s impotence, and Maggie’s
sexual aggressiveness, Cat hardly fostered the wholesome virtues
espoused by the PCA and the Legion of Decency. The Pollitts were not the
models of the happy 1950s American family that the PCA and the Legion
wanted to see portrayed on screen. Thus, Williams’s play, but not Brooks’s
1958 screenplay, fomented a ‘rebellion against social order’ (Palmer and
Bray, 163), challenging the creed of the conservative 1950s. For instance,
by casting Brick as an ex-football player and a hunter, Williams shattered
the stereotype that all gay men were effeminate.

Versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Like many of Williams’s plays, the source for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one
of his short stories, ‘Three Players of a Summer Game’ (1952), including
the trio of Brick, Margaret, and Mary Louise Grey, the young widow of a
doctor. In the story Margaret vanishes early and does not appear until the
end; there is no Skipper or Big Daddy; and Brick’s problem is ambiguous.
The croquet game alluded to in Act One of Cat (7) is not fully developed
in the story. In 1953, Williams also worked on the draft of a play, A Place
of Stone, which became the intermediary script between ‘Three Players’
and Cat. In 1954, he showed a draft of Cat to the director Elia Kazan who
insisted on three major changes: (1) have Big Daddy return in Act Three
because he was ‘too vivid and important a character to disappear from the
play except as an offstage cry after the second act’; (2) make Maggie more
sympathetic to audiences; and (3) show Brick experiencing a
transformation as a result of his confrontation with Big Daddy and thereby
reconciling with Maggie to end his ‘moral paralysis’.
 To ensure that the highly influential Kazan would direct Cat and to
make his play commercially profitable, Williams agreed to the revisions
but feared he would become ‘a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy for ideas
which are not his own’ (‘Author and Director’, 118). But when Cat was
published in 1955, he included the two endings – his original one and the
revised, Broadway version. Endlessly revising his plays, even after they
were performed and printed, Williams created a new hybrid third act for
the American Shakespeare production in 1974, incorporating some of
Kazan’s changes (e.g. Big Daddy returns in the third act and Maggie is
more sympathetic) as well as others in his original draft, but the Brick–
Maggie relationship still remained problematic. Williams’s final version
of Cat (1975) is used in this volume.
There has been a continuing debate about which version of Cat a
director should choose to stage, although the Broadway version, which
bears Kazan’s heavy emendations, is usually not favoured. Even so,
Kazan’s decision to bring Big Daddy back on stage in Act Three has major
implications for how the play is structured and staged.

Structure

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of Tennessee Williams’s most tightly crafted
plays, runs about three hours. Divided into three acts, it has no scenes but
includes two intermissions. Act Two, the turning point of the play, is
rightfully the longest part and is flanked by two shorter acts, each
approximately the same length. Cat is structurally a well-made play with a
rising opening, complete with exposition giving us background
information in Act One about Brick, Maggie, Big Daddy, and so on, a
turning point at the end of Act Two, and a climax in Act Three. Even
though it follows the model of a well-made and seemingly realistic drama,
Tennessee Williams still introduces non-realistic elements into the script,
such as his highly expressionistic stage directions at the start of the play,
those dealing with lighting, colour, and atmosphere.
Like a Greek tragedy, Cat follows the classical unities of action, time,
and place. All events happen on a ‘late and fair summer afternoon’ and
into that evening. The action revolves around Brick’s relationships – with
Maggie, Big Daddy, the Pollitt family, his friend Skipper, and himself. Big
Daddy’s health, fortune, and past sexual experiences also form a major
part of the dramatic action. In fact, the fates of Big Daddy and Brick
unfold like a classical tragedy adopted for modern times, with Southern
landscapes, allusions, and dialects. Reflecting the play’s continuous action,
‘There is no lapse of time’ between Acts Two and Three. All the action in
Cat also occurs in one place – in Brick and Maggie’s bedroom – with a
door to the adjoining bathroom and others leading to the gallery outside.
For Brick, the bedroom is his sanctuary; for Maggie, it’s her prison. For
the other characters, it becomes the place where Big Daddy’s sixty-fifth
birthday party is celebrated or lamented. Symbolising barriers to
communication, a constant flow of interruptions disrupt conversations in
Brick’s bedroom (Kolin, ‘Obstacles’). Even with these interruptions Cat
moves seamlessly, straightforwardly from one act to another.
Structurally, and poetically, Cat might also be compared to a musical
composition. In many ways, the play is operatic, a score written for many
different voices. Maggie’s ‘voice has range and music’ (9), and at times
she sounds like a ‘priest delivering a liturgical chant’ (40); offstage, Big
Daddy’s ‘long drawn cry of agony and rage fills the house’ at the end of
Act Three; birthday and children’s songs, black work songs, music from a
hi-fi, scat music, Wagner, and Beethoven also play during Cat. In his
‘Notes for the Designer’, Williams himself characterised the stage for Cat
in musical terms: he wanted it to be roomy enough for a ‘ballet’.
Commenting on the ‘musical structure’ of the play, Brian Palmer claimed
that Act One, where Maggie dominates, ‘is practically an aria. Act Two
focuses on a duet between Brick and Big Daddy; and Act Three is finally
an ensemble’ (‘Swinging a Cat’, 177).

Language

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is poetic, compelling, explosive. Reviewing the

1955 premiere, Richard Watts characterised Williams’s language as
‘insistently vulgar, neurotic and ugly [yet it] still maintains a quality of
exotic lyricism’. The blend of the lyrical and the ugly (cruel, lustful,
distorted) nicely defines Williams’s Southern grotesque. When Cat
debuted on Broadway in 1955 Williams had to use such quaint words as
‘rutten’ (Mae and Gooper act like ‘a couple of rutten peekhole spies’ [55]),
‘duckin’, and ‘frig’ (as in Brick’s imperative ‘frig all dirty lies and
liars!’ [81]) in place of the four-letter taboo word and its participial
variants. Soon after Cat opened, a New York City licence commissioner
demanded that Big Daddy’s elephant joke and other offensive language be
cut. As Donald Spoto observed, ‘the salty language, an off-color joke, and
the psycho-sexual turmoil sent shock waves through audiences’ (Kindness,
200). When Williams revised Cat in 1974–5, he updated and increased the
profanities. Even today, productions of Cat have been labelled ‘shocking’
because of explicit language, and thus are often rated ‘R’ or ‘restricted’
(individuals of seventeen and younger are not admitted unless
accompanied by an adult). In the 2008 Cat, James Earl Jones’s Big Daddy
shocked audiences ‘with [his] unrestrained ribaldry’ (Robertson).
Beyond doubt, Big Daddy’s speech is expletive driven. It is poetic and
filthy, sometimes simultaneously. In his Memoirs, Williams glowed: ‘Big
Daddy has a kind of crude eloquence of expression . . . that I have
managed to give to no other character of my creation’ (168). His speeches
are peppered with four-letter words ranging from the mild ‘damn’, ‘hell’,
and his favourite ‘crap’ to taboo words and blasphemies against the Deity.
Listening to his colourful assortment of curse words, Big Mama
admonishes him not to ‘talk that way’, but he bellows: ‘I’ll talk like I
want . . . and anybody here that don’t like it knows what they can do’ (50).
Big Daddy’s speeches pulsate with obsessive repetitions that ‘imitate the
very mood and rhythms of . . . sexual intercourse’, according to Dan Isaac
(273) – ‘All that stuff is bull, bull, bull!’ (62) or ‘I was Ochello’s partner
and the place got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger’ (51). Relishing
sexual metaphors, Daddy Pollitt asks if Brick’s injury in the middle of the
night was the result of ‘jumping or humping’ in search of ‘a piece o’ poon-
tang’ (49); speaking of his own sex life with Big Mama, he brags that he
‘laid her, regular as a piston’ (72). But now dreading sex with her, he vows
to find a ‘choice one’, ‘strip her’, and ‘hump her from hell to breakfast’.
Like his father, Brick digs into the lexicon of vulgarity. In denying
homoerotic feelings on his part, Brick damns all ‘fairies’ and ‘fuckin’
sissies . . . [and] Queers’ (79).
Given Cat’s intense sexuality, the human body is a frequent topic of
conversation as well as a powerful visual symbol. Though ‘crippled’,
Brick has lost none of his good looks. ‘I actually believe you’ve gotten
better looking since you’ve gone on the bottle’ (16), claims Maggie.
Muscular, tanned, and youthful, Paul Newman’s body in the 1958 film
was foregrounded with close-up shots of his chest. Less age-proof,
Maggie retains her looks but declares, ‘My face looks strained,
sometimes, but [. . .] men admire it [her figure] . . . and last
week . . . everywhere that I went men’s eyes burned holes in my
clothes’ (30). James Earl Jones’s Big Daddy was guilty of ‘ogling Maggie
from eyebrows to toenails’ (Teachout). Exuding sexuality, Lindsay
Duncan’s Maggie (London, 1988) had ‘carnivorous lips’ and a ‘debutante’s
sway’ (Ratcliffe, 140). But beneath these external references to Brick’s
and Maggie’s bodies lie sexual anxieties/confusions. Unable to discuss
homosexual desire, a taboo subject, directly on stage in 1955 America,
Williams projected the psychological torments and transformations gays
experienced by showing their bodies realigned, torn apart, reconfigured, or
deconstructed in a homophobic America.
According to David Savran, Williams used the language of
fragmentation and marginalisation to ‘characterise the inhabitants of the
[homosexual] closet’. From his gay perspective he ‘configure[ed] the
female body constantly in danger of disintegrating’ and in the process,
‘throughout Act One Williams’s stage directions teem with Maggie’s body
parts, arms, hands, throat’. By doing this, Savran contends, Williams was
able to dramatise the homoerotic. Disengaged from a heterosexual, binary
anatomy, ‘the absent phallus [Skipper] becomes reinscribed in Maggie’s
body and allows her to be produced as the object of [male] desire’. As a
result, Brick turns into ‘the castrated male and Maggie the phallic
woman’.
Animal imagery, another of Williams’s staples, further helps to explain
his characters. If the cat is Maggie’s totem animal, capturing her wily
tenacity, her nervous energy, and her fears, the elephant is Big Daddy’s
emblem of virility. More commonly, though, animal images evoke the
cruelty or foolishness that transform human beings into grotesque
creatures. Mae is cast as the ‘monster of fertility’ (10–11), and her five
children as ‘no-neck monsters’ (7), who bear names (Dixie, Trixie, Buster,
Sonny, Polly) that ‘sound like four dogs and a parrot’ (22). Big Daddy
castigates the lot as ‘little monkies’. Because of their beast-like behaviour,
Gooper’s brood descends down the great chain of being. His own name
suggests a deformed creature with bulging body parts. Like a snake, Mae
is heard ‘hissing’ at Maggie (114). Big Mama is comically likened to a
charging rhino, ‘an old bulldog’ (25), or a pig when she grunts. In her
patterned chiffon, she has ‘the markings of some massive animal’ (43).
When the Pollitt clan gathers, ‘the room sounds like a great aviary’ (42).
Big Daddy ‘grins . . . wolfishly’ about his future sex life.
Characteristic of Williams’s plays, sickness symbolises greed,
mendacity, and/or betrayals. Though the least mendacious character in
Cat, Big Daddy nonetheless has an unquenchable desire for power and
land. His inoperable intestinal cancer may possibly symbolise his
aggressiveness and his own past homosexual relationships. A sick
patriarch, a sick Big Daddy, suggests the entire family is ill. His sickness
is both literal and symbolic: ‘it’s spread all through him and it’s attacked
all his vital organs, including the kidneys and right now he is sinking into
uremia . . . poisoning of the whole system due to the failure of the body to
eliminate its poisons’, says Gooper (104). Brick is ‘crippled’ because of a
jumping accident, but his physical malady suggests a deeper psychological
and spiritual malaise – he is sick from guilt and cover-ups. (Maggie opens
‘the sore of his friendship with Skipper’.) But his broken ankle is only the
current manifestation of a lingering illness. As Big Mama recounts,
Skipper’s sickness affected Brick’s crippling:
That boy is just broken up over Skipper’s death. You know how poor
Skipper died. They gave him a big, big dose of that sodium amytal
stuff . . . give him another big, big dose of it at the hospital and that
and all of the alcohol in his system . . . just proved too much for his
heart . . . I’m scared of needles! I’m more scared of a needle than the
knife . . . I think more people have been needled out of this world
than – (93).
Considering Big Mama’s fear of injections (and Williams’s, as in
Memoirs, 232), it is frightening to think that ‘Mae took a course in nursing
during the war’ (99). Everyone in Cat is in danger of being injected – Big
Daddy will need a hypo and Maggie acts like a ‘child about to be stabbed
with a vaccination needle’ after dealing with Big Mama (29). Big Mama
herself is in danger of having a stroke because of her excitability. When
the family breaks the news to her about Big Daddy’s cancer, she thinks
they are looking at her ‘as if big drops of blood had broken out on m’face’
(95); her high blood pressure is ‘riskin’ a stroke’ (70). Later, Big Daddy
warns her ‘you better watch that, Big Mama. A stroke is a bad way to go’
(111). The fireworks display in honour of Big Daddy’s fatal birthday party
makes her ‘feel a little bit sick at my stomach’ (89), possibly her
sympathy pains for Big Daddy’s gastro-intestinal ravages. Given his
alcoholism, Brick might be heading for similar medical problems.
Countering all these dire medical reports, Maggie claims she is pregnant
after consulting ‘one of the best gynecologists in the South’ (113).
Fire imagery also spreads through Cat. Helping to visualise the dangers
that engulf the characters, Maggie describes Brick’s desire for Skipper and
its devastating effect on their marriage as a house fire: ‘When something
is festering in your memory or your imagination . . . it’s just like shutting a
door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house
is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out’ (18). Brick mockingly
copies his wife’s fire imagery: ‘Lately, your voice always sounds like
you’d been running upstairs to warn somebody that the house was on fire’
(23). Big Daddy similarly characterises Big Mama’s European passions as
‘just a big fire sale, the whole fuckin’ thing’ (57–8). Ironically, his own
house, crammed full of Big Mama’s European purchases, is ripe for a fire
sale. Bursts of fireworks, an omen of Big Daddy’s last birthday, suggest
that the Pollitts are being consumed by the flames of mendacity and hate.
Yet fire both punishes and cleans a house. The fireworks tolling Big
Daddy’s death might be interpreted as a birth announcement, thanks to
Maggie’s ‘lie’.
Through its imagery, Cat shows how characters are trapped
claustrophobically because of guilt, hate, and estrangement. Big Daddy
and Brick, for example, ‘talk, in circles’ (68) and behind ‘closed
doors’ (55). Without love, Brick and Maggie are ‘caught in the same cage’.
Ironically, Big Daddy’s infamous final joke is about elephants in ‘adjoinin’
cages’ (109). Maggie tells Brick that ‘death was the only icebox’ that
could hold his epic love for Skipper, and Big Daddy warns his son that
he’ll hear ‘a lot . . . of unbroken quiet . . . in the grave’ (60). Brick sees
himself as trapped, having to sit ‘in a glass box watching games’ he could
not play (76). Entrapment becomes cosmic alienation as well. Thinking he
is cancer-free, Big Daddy claims he has ‘come back’ from ‘the other side
of the moon, death’s country’ (80). That’s the place where light is shut out,
and darkness is sealed in. Unfortunately, Mae cannot escape this dark
prison either; she stands ‘on the wrong side of the moon’ (55), according
to Big Daddy.
Characters

Creating memorable characters was Williams’s trademark. ‘My characters

make my plays’ (‘Critic Says’, 77), he declared. In Cat he used
psychological realism to develop characters who act out of strong
emotions and deep conflicts. Williams wanted his characters to tell their
life stories; in fact, Cat is made up of the characters’ confessional
monologues. But Brick, Maggie, and Big Daddy also reveal various sides
of Williams’s own personality, his inner life. He seems torn between the
melancholy Brick and the sexually frustrated Maggie.

Brick
Charles May rightly identifies Brick as ‘the ambiguous center for all the
characters’ because he functions as ‘the catalyst for the dramatic action’.
We often see things from Brick’s perspective. He is a central player in the
confrontations with Maggie in Act One and with Big Daddy in Act Two.
Much of Cat explores Brick’s demons and how he battles with them. Cool,
depressed, and detached – adjectives that describe him and how he
communicates (or fails to do so). Leading a dissipated life, Brick is a
drunk who refuses to go to bed with his wife and denies complicity in
Skipper’s death. He fights being vulnerable, but his behaviour says
otherwise. ‘Give me my crutch’, he orders Maggie. The crutch is Brick’s
signifier. Frequently losing his balance and crawling along the floor, Brick
is a broken man – emotionally, physically, sexually, and spiritually. He
uses his crutch as an escape, a weapon, and an emblem of his
sexual/psychic wounds. It speaks for him when he strikes out at Maggie.
Like Blanche in Streetcar and Tom in The Glass Menagerie, Brick
mirrors Williams’s own sexual/psychic struggles. He suffers from the
same ‘blue devils’, fits of depression, that plagued Williams. Moreover, as
Margaret Bradham Thornton observes, ‘Williams was a part of a private
world of gay men who lived an existence secret from their families. In
[Cat] he creates men who have had unusually close relationships with
other men, who marry, and then have conflicts over the two relationships’
(9). Just like Williams’s friends, Brick is the estranged husband who
protects his sexual identity in a repressive society that would condemn
him if he dared to reveal his secret. Brick thus fulfilled a key role for
Williams as his creator. He allowed Williams to express his gay
subjectivity without ‘coming out’ as a gay playwright’, according to Dean
Shackelford (106–7). Following the 1974 revival, Clive Barnes thought
that Cat was Williams’s ‘most honest play’. Williams admitted it was his
favourite. In order to write any play, Williams claimed he had to fall in
love with one of the characters. In Cat, Brick is the object of masculine
beauty for Williams; ‘a gay playwright [thus] places himself and his own
gaze at the center’ of Cat, according to Shackleford. In the 1988 London
Cat, Ian Charleson’s Brick had ‘the sort of charismatic male divinity
Williams must have had in mind when writing the part’ (Edwards, 136).
Furthermore, as George Crandell maintains, Brick becomes the
spokesperson for Williams the artist, crying out for attention and
connection (438).
Brick plays other key roles. He is the prodigal son (eight years younger
than Gooper) who throws his father’s inheritance away. Once a conquering
hero, Brick is the fallen, failed athlete reduced to announcing games rather
than starring in them, and he forsakes even this job. (Ironically, he may be
named after Jack ‘Bud’ Pollitt, a football star and acquaintance of
Williams at the University of Missouri in 1931–2 [Hale].) An alcoholic, he
chases the click that will bring him into oblivion. The large console on
stage contains his liquor, television, radio, and a hi-fi, all the ‘comforts
and illusions’ (Williams, ‘Notes for the Designer’, 6) protecting him from
self and the truth. The 1958 film of Cat included so much drinking that it
is listed in the top 100 booziest movies ever made. Once a charming,
confident lover, Brick is now a used-up stud gone dry. As we saw, Mae and
Gooper label him a sexual deviate. Several classical myths further
illuminate Brick’s role. Achilles’ legendary friendship with Patroclus may
be a prototype for his affection for Skipper (Hurd); and Brick is certainly a
broken Apollo (Thompson, 70). Drinking ‘Echo Spring’ (Southern
Bourbon) associates him with another classical figure, Narcissus, the
beautiful young man who, seeing his reflection in a pool, jumped in and
drowned. As Crandell argues, Brick’s behaviour is ‘fairly typical of the
Narcissistic personality’ (434) – self-love, rage, lack of empathy for
others, need for constant attention. More favourably, Brick has been seen
as the Sartrean existential hero trying to determine his own identity (Bak).
But his sense of truthfulness is, at best, highly controversial.
Unquestionably, Brick is one of Williams’s most complex and
conflicted characters who raises key questions about mendacity – with
others and with himself, including: (1) Is he gay? (2) What was his
relationship with Skipper?
(1) Cat is problematic about Brick’s sexual identity. Williams’s own
views on the subject are ambiguous, even contradictory. In the most
famous stage direction in the play, Williams confessed, ‘The bird that I
hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s
psychological problem . . . [but the] interplay of live human beings in the
thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the
revelation of character in a play’ (77). Rebutting the New York Herald
Tribune critic Walter Kerr who attacked him for writing about a
homosexual, Williams declared: ‘Frankly, I don’t want people to leave the
Morosco Theatre knowing everything about all the characters they
witnessed that night in violent interplay’ (‘Critic Says’, 78). Three years
after Cat opened, Williams again waffled in an interview with Arthur
Walters: ‘Brick is definitely not a homosexual. Brick’s self pity and
recourse to the bottle are not the result of a guilty conscience in that
regard. . . . He feels that the collapse and premature death
of . . . Skipper . . . have been caused by unjust attacks against his moral
character made by outsiders, including Maggie. . . . It is his bitterness at
Skipper’s tragedy that has caused Brick to turn against his
wife . . . although I do suggest that . . . there might have been unrealized
abnormal tendencies’ (Walters, 73).
The ‘mystery’ of Brick’s sexual identity is at the heart of Cat. On the
one hand, he never admits physical desire for Skipper and demonises
homosexuals. Yet he describes intimate moments he shared with Skipper.
Brick might not know or understand what homosexuality really is,
dissociating his homosocial relationship with Skipper from a homosexual
one. Or perhaps, though, he might be lying to himself. In that case, Brick’s
homophobia might be the mendacious façade for his true feelings about
Skipper; he might be experiencing ‘homosexual panic’, the fear that he
does in fact desire Skipper. This panic unsettles his self-image as the
strong, heterosexual athlete hero (Arrell, 60–72). He is furious at Maggie
for even suggesting to Skipper that he was gay. Or, more damningly, he
might ‘fail ethically because, finally, he seems willing to deny his nature
and a lover before forfeiting his comfortable position in the world’ (Paller,
112).
 Each of these interpretations speaks to Williams’s precarious position of
couching Brick’s sexual problems as ‘mysteries’. In a ‘Note of
Explanation’ (1955), he declared, ‘I don’t believe that a conversation,
however revelatory, ever effects so immediate a change in heart or even
conduct of a person in Brick’s state of spiritual disrepair.’ As we saw,
Williams could not offend conservative Broadway audiences who
supported his work. But by presenting Brick as ‘conflicted’, Williams was
able to keep his character’s sexual identity a mystery, leaving audiences
wondering, asking probing questions. The problematic ending that has
disturbed so many critics, therefore, may be Williams’s way of drawing
audiences into Brick’s moral paralysis, the world of his mendacity and that
of others. Ultimately, though, directors and actors have great leeway in
how they represent Brick.
(2) There seems to be little doubt that Skipper was gay and that he
desired Brick’s love. But Brick, like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, rejects a
homosexual who then commits suicide. This surely is a sign of Brick’s
deliberate cruelty, the worst sin for Williams. Moreover, Brick does not
accept his responsibility for Skipper’s death. It leaves him depressed and
brings into question his maturity, his narcissism. By idealising Skipper’s
friendship, Brick lessens every other relationship, for example his
marriage to Maggie and his obligations to Big Daddy. He refuses to enter
the adult world with its responsibilities to father children and to run his
father’s estate. Instead, he prefers to ‘foster the illusion that [he and
Skipper] are still boys’ (Winchell, 704). In such a world, Brick can be as
close to Skipper as he wishes. Their friendship is ‘purged from any
allusion to homosexuality’ since they live in a world of ‘prolonged
adolescence’ where ‘homosocial discourse and activities are acceptable
and free from any stain of sexual transgression’ (Winchell, 705). In sum,
Brick does not want to grow up; he still wants to run the football field with
his best friend to the cheers of a fawning crowd – to be ‘teammates
forever’ (38).

Maggie
Williams named the play in her honour. ‘I am Maggie the Cat’, she
declares. In a letter to Lady Maria St Just, who inspired the role of Maggie
(Five O’Clock Angel, 167) and to whom the play is dedicated, Williams
insisted that Maggie was the central character. ‘The story [in Cat] must be
and remained the story of a strong determined creature (Life! Maggie!)
taking hold and gaining supremacy over and converting to her own
purposes a broken, irresolute man’ (Five O’Clock Angel, 110). Her final
lines sum up her determination – ‘Oh, you weak people, you weak,
beautiful people! who give up with such grace. What you want is someone
to – take hold of you. – Gently, gently with love hand your life back to
you, like somethin’ gold you let go of ’ (115). Dominating the stage in Act
One, essentially a monologue lasting about an hour, Maggie battles
fiercely throughout Cat, and is responsible for its startling revelation in
Act Three.
She seems far removed from Williams’s doomed Southern belles –
Amanda, Blanche, or Alma. Instead, Maggie prowls with his more feisty
heroines such as Serafina in The Rose Tattoo, the Princess in Sweet Bird of
Youth, or even Myrtle in Kingdom of Earth. Like her namesake, Maggie is
sleek, agile, tenacious, clever, and seductive; she can manoeuvre in tight
places and claw her way to the top. She is both a sex-starved kitten and an
alley fighter. She has the predatory instincts of an animal yet she is also
the spirit of life and love in Cat. Even so, like many of Williams’s women,
Maggie fears losing her dreams. In Cat they include: (1) regaining Brick’s
love; (2) satisfying her sexual needs; and (3) receiving Big Daddy’s
inheritance by having a child with Brick. As Maggie strives to achieve
these goals, we witness a woman who is lyrical, sexy, determined, and
inherently decent.
Like Brick and Big Daddy, Maggie takes on several roles. Above all, she
is a fighter/redeemer, resolved to overcome a husband’s rejection, a
family’s scorn, and a life of poverty. While Brick is comfortable with ‘the
charm of the defeated’, she is not. Nothing stands in her path. At one
point, she grabs Brick’s leg, allowing him to drag her across the stage,
demonstrating that she will never let go of him, never stop loving him. She
wants to save him from alcoholism; from his greedy sibling; and from
consuming guilt over Skipper’s death. She courageously tries to ‘restore
Brick’s self-respect and faith in his manhood’ (Adler, 19). Like Brick, she
is surrounded by myths. She wins a ‘Diana’ trophy for archery (21) – a
sign of her skill at identifying and attacking a target. In Greek legend,
Diana was the huntress and protector of the woods. Evoking the classical
goddess, Maggie sees herself as Brick’s hunting partner and the protector
of her husband’s share in the Pollitt plantation. Combining her feline and
mythic roles, Maggie is ‘endowed with the animal sinuosity and
instinctive tenacity of a cat [and] the athletic aggressiveness of the Roman
Diana’ (Thompson, 68), but, ironically, she is also linked to Artemis, the
Greek counterpart of Diana, famous for chastity. Nevertheless, Maggie is
determined to end the enforced chastity imposed on her by Brick.
As Williams emphasised, Maggie is the life-force in Cat. ‘I am alive’,
she declares. She is a sexual dynamo, crying out for satisfaction. The
empty bed, the centrepiece of the play, is her symbol of loneliness, sexual
unfulfilment. She wants to reclaim it, make it her territory. A Southern
Aphrodite, Maggie uses her beauty and charm to save her husband and
dissuade Big Daddy from leaving the estate to Gooper. Portraying a
woman in heat in 1955 was a daring move on Williams’s part. Maggie’s
‘slip of ivory satin and lace’ (7), her garter belt, her bracelets, her make-up
rituals before the mirror, and her smoking, are signifiers of her sexual
being. Her sexual identity points to how successful she could be as wife
and mother. Moreover, she claims to bring ‘life to this place that death has
come in to’ (115) by declaring she is going to produce a Pollitt heir.
Maggie is thereby associated with renewal and redemption. A birth was
associated with good fortune in the American South.
But only by dislodging Skipper’s ghost from a place of prominence in
Brick’s heart and psyche can she give her husband a new identity/life. Cat
is a play of triads, and the most significant is that of Brick, Maggie, and
Skipper. Yet Maggie is a one-man woman. Brick’s relationship with
Skipper ostracises her as wife and woman; he has usurped her role as
Brick’s partner, turning her into the Other. When she and Brick ‘double-
dated at college’ (37), she tells him ‘it was more like a date between you
and Skipper. Gladys and I were just sort of tagging along as if it was
necessary to chaperone you!’ (37). She uses her sex to counter Skipper’s
claims to Brick and so she can get her husband back to bed. Clearly,
Maggie wanted to prove that Skipper was a homosexual to protect her
marriage – ‘Leave my husband alone.’ But her breaking up Skipper’s
relationship with Brick has often elicited hostile responses.
Robert F. Gross, for instance, insists that Maggie ‘gives male bonding a
guilty conscience’ (21). Seeing her victory really as a defeat, Mark
Winchell claims Williams is ‘using a symbolic code to tell others in the
audience that Brick is vicariously making love to Skipper when he
“humps” Maggie in Straw and Ochello’s bed’ (712). Similarly, queer
readings of the play by David Savran and Dean Shackleford conclude that
Maggie’s body becomes the site where Brick and Skipper can finally meet,
thus restoring Skipper’s place as Brick’s partner. Ironically, in trying to
make love to Skipper, Maggie allowed herself and Brick’s best friend ‘to
dream it was you, both of us!’ (35).
Undeniably, the most problematic issue in Cat is whether Maggie will
be successful in getting Brick back to bed. Kazan pushed for such an
ending to demonstrate that Maggie ‘was sympathetic, but she was strong.
This revision resulted from exactly the kind of dialectic process that had
occurred in all of Williams’s work with Kazan’ (Murphy, 101). Like
Kazan, it was the way Hollywood wanted Williams’s play to end in the
1958 film version. Resisting Kazan, Williams did not believe that Brick
could undergo a complete transformation, which included an eager return
to the marriage bed. Though Williams wrote a problematic, ambiguous
conclusion, he nonetheless saw (and wanted) Maggie ‘gaining supremacy’.
Williams maintained that Brick ‘will go back to Maggie for the sheer
animal comfort of sexual release’ and become ‘her dependent’ (‘Critic
Says’, 78). And, to the very end of Cat, Williams portrays an invincible
Maggie. She tells Brick, ‘I am stronger than you . . . I can love you more
truly.’ Preparing for her long-postponed sexual conquest, she orders:
‘Don’t touch that pillow’, and declares ‘I know what to do.’ In one of the
most telling lines in the play, she insists, ‘We’re going to make the lie
true’ (115). ‘Lie’ is a loaded word in Cat, a play filled with dirty secrets,
mendacity, scandals, misrepresentations, and false accusations/reports. Big
Daddy himself attests to Maggie’s redemptive fertility: ‘Uh-huh, this girl
has life in her body, that’s no lie’ (112). Yet by making a ‘lie’ (a child) into
truth (reality), she hopes Brick will love her again, and that Skipper will
be laid to rest in Brick’s conscience. In the end, Maggie wants Brick to
find the intimacy with her that he never did with Skipper or Big Daddy.
Clearing this major hurdle, she will have ‘convert[ed] a broken, irresolute
man’.
But all Brick does is ‘smil[e] with charming sadness’ (115). Is this the
charm of the defeated that Maggie earlier attacked (i.e. that Brick has
resolutely refused to accept a new identity as husband and father)?
Williams’s final stage direction, however, might translate into Brick’s
surrender to his wife’s pleas. In response to Maggie’s ‘What do you say?’
Brick answers, ‘I don’t say anything. I guess there’s nothing to say.’ What
does Brick’s ‘nothing’ signal – his capitulation and Maggie’s triumph or
her defeat and his victory in their concession to mutuality? Significantly,
Cat ends with a question mark – ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?’ –
echoing Big Daddy’s words about Big Mama’s love (52), which do prove
unshakably true. But controversy has swirled around any resolution –
Brick’s, Maggie’s, Kazan’s, or Williams’s. For over five decades, critics
have complained that Williams leaves us in a muddle. Some have
assaulted him for being ‘cowardly’ and compromising his integrity as an
artist. Others have, as we saw, supplied their version of a satisfactory
closure, applauding Maggie’s confidence or recuperating Brick’s ideal lost
teammate through a rebirth of Skipper in sex with Maggie. Yet, as
productions of Cat over many decades and several continents have
established, if anyone can make lies on the Pollitt plantation come true, it
is Maggie, the agile cat.

Big Daddy
‘I’m the boss here now’, shouts Big Daddy thinking he has been spared
from cancer. Bigger than life, Big Daddy is an epic figure, an icon of
masculinity, vitality, and power. Williams claimed he bestowed ‘a kingly
magnitude’ on him (Memoirs, 234), an image reinforced by Big Daddy in
his belvedere like a god overseeing his empire in Act Three. The sheer
strength of his will, even when he is in pain, drives Cat. The award-
winning Broadway playwright Neil Simon exclaimed that ‘Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof is a beautiful play, but it’s got size to it, and there is no one
around who does that anymore’ (Bryer, 77). Big Daddy contributes
immensely to the breadth and depth of Williams’s play. Dressed in a white
linen suit, smoking a huge cigar, he looks like the boss, the patriarch, a
figure of authority and power. Physically large, robust actors such as Burl
Ives, Charles Durning, or James Earl Jones have captured Big Daddy’s
dominating presence. Summarising the image Big Daddy creates, Ellen
Donkin and Susan Clement point out:
He effortlessly commands attention no matter where he goes,
automatically positioning everyone around him as adjunct. His
judgments are so powerful that they will resonate in everyone’s head
long after he is offstage. His presence is synonymous with control
 and power in ways that are profoundly linked to the social structures
of marginalization and erasure. (3)
Everything about him is large. Big Daddy’s possessions are big; he owns
‘twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley
Nile’ (74); his net worth comes ‘close on ten million in cash an’ blue-chip
stocks’. (In the 2008 production, with a black cast, that sum had been
increased to 80 million.) He is a force of nature. ‘All of my life I been like
a doubled-up fist . . . Poundin’, smashin’, drivin’!’ (62). When he learns
that his condition is not fatal, he declares, ‘I want you to know that I
breathed a sigh of relief almost as powerful as the Vicksburg tornado’
(68). His commanding presence led Eric Bentley, in his review of the Cat
premiere, to proclaim that ‘Big Daddy is Williams’s best male character’
(29). Fortunately, director Elia Kazan prevailed over Williams to bring Big
Daddy back in Act Three. According to Brenda Murphy, ‘The most
striking pictorial and kinetic statement Kazan encoded with the
performance [of Cat] involved Big Daddy. He brought Big Daddy down
front to address the audience four times’ (116).
There were several Big Daddies in Williams’s life. He grew up with a
father, Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams, who matched Big Daddy in size
and intimidation. In fact, Williams admitted that Cat was about his
relationship with his own father. The victim of Cornelius’s frequent and
sharp criticism, Williams tried to escape his father’s harrowing questions
and rages. Only later in his life did Williams turn towards his father with a
kinder eye, evidenced in his late short story, ‘The Man in the Overstuffed
Chair’. Colby H. Kullman indentifies other big daddies in Williams’s
life – especially Kazan, who through his ‘strong influence and constant
expression of restraint and correction . . . cast and directed many of
Williams’s plays but also defined his characters, called for new lines, and
changed endings’ (668). The prototype for Big Daddy, though, was the
father of one of Williams’s close friends, Jordan Massee Senior, whom
Williams had met in 1941 on St Simon’s Island, off the coast of Georgia.
According to Williams’s biographer Lyle Leverich, Massee Senior was ‘an
imposing southern gentleman whose granddaughter had dubbed him “Big
Daddy”, [and] was a true raconteur and used expressions such as “nervous
as a cat on a hot tin roof ”. . . . He was also endowed with an inexhaustible
supply of stories about plantation life . . . Tom [Tennessee] was clearly in
awe of the huge elder Massee in his white linen suit’ (417).
 Big Daddy is deeply invested in the homo-/heterosexual politics of the
play. He confesses that in his earlier years ‘I bummed, I bummed this
country till I was – ’ and that he ‘Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y’s
and flophouses in all cities’ (77). Big Daddy’s ‘bummed’ carries overtones
of sodomy. YMCAs and flophouses were also often locations of
homosexual trysts. Because of his past sexual experience, Big Daddy for
David Savran is a ‘carrier of homosexuality’ from Straw/Ochello to his
son Brick. Yet Big Daddy’s sexual alliances come at a price for some
critics who see his intestinal cancer as a punishment for sodomy, linking
him to Emiel Kroger, the old homosexual who suffers from the same
malady in Williams’s short story ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’ (written
in 1941; published in 1954). Despite Big Daddy’s homoerotic past, he
brims over with heterosexual hedonism. A keen observer of women’s
bodies, he regrets wasting his seed on Big Mama. ‘They say you got just
so many and each one is numbered’ (65). Sounding like an older Stanley
Kowalski, whose ‘life has been pleasure with women, the giving and
taking of it’ (Streetcar, Scene One), Big Daddy exults, ‘I’m going to pick
me a choice one . . . I’ll strip her naked and smother her in minks and
choke her with diamonds! Ha ha!’ His joke about the elephant also
advertises Big Daddy’s libido; it is no coincidence that the creature has a
large proboscis (phallic signifier), and that the husband bests the
pachyderm in size and vigour.
As patriarch, Big Daddy presides over one of the most dysfunctional
families in American drama. Williams chose a symbolic time to stage Cat,
Big Daddy’s sixty-fifth birthday party. As in his other plays (Glass
Menagerie, Streetcar, Baby Doll, etc.), a celebratory event turns into a
ruined occasion. Rivalry, jealousy, greed, anger and backbiting eat up the
mendacious Pollitt family. Gooper and his social-climbing wife scheme to
gain control of the plantation even before Big Daddy dies. There is no
fraternal love between Brick and Gooper. Sisters-in-law Mae and Maggie
cat-fight throughout the play. Even though Big Daddy has not made a will,
he has made up his mind. ‘Who said I was “leaving the place” to Gooper
or anybody. This is my sixty-fifth birthday! I got fifteen years or twenty
years left in me! I’ll outlive you! I’ll bury you an’ have to pay for your
coffin’, he shouts at Brick. He bluntly tells him, ‘But why in
hell . . . should I subsidize a fool on the bottle?’ (74). Moreover, Big
Daddy finds his grandchildren, sired by Gooper and breeder-wife Mae,
obnoxious, intrusive, animal-like. He cannot even remember their names.
Without necks, the children are unnatural, unlovable, unconnected to their
patriarch. ‘Their heads are directly connected to their stomachs,
symbolizing their greed/appetite for food, attention, control’ (Dukore, 97).
Given Big Daddy’s strong personality, however, it is no wonder that the
Pollitts inherited his boisterous ways.
But they have not received his heart. That sensitive side of Big Daddy is
revealed only in conversations with his favoured son Brick. Their
confrontation is one of the most powerful father/son scenes in modern
American drama, alongside those in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
and All My Sons, and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Uncovering psychic wounds after years of ‘talking in circles’, Brick and
Big Daddy at last bare their souls. Determined to save his son from self-
destruction, Big Daddy declares, ‘I am going to straighten you out’ and
probes Brick’s façade with dagger-like accuracy. Trying to rouse Brick out
of guilt and spiritual lethargy, Big Daddy gives him no opportunity to
evade or downplay his questions. He refuses to allow Brick to use Maggie
as an excuse for the way his relationship ended with Skipper and accuses
Brick of the mendacity that will ruin his life. He wants Brick to grow up
and accept the responsibility for Skipper’s death. ‘This disgust with
mendacity is disgust with yourself ’ (84). His confrontation with Brick is
fast-paced, throbbing, and, at times, physical. He pushes him down and
takes his crutch. But when Brick ‘loses his balance [and] . . . grabs the bed
and drags himself up’, Big Daddy offers him his hand, which at first Brick
rejects, but then a domineering father becomes the tender loving parent,
declaring, ‘“Well I want yours. Git up!” He draws him up, keeps an arm
about him with concern and affection’ (80). Wanting to ease Brick’s pain,
physical and mental, Big Daddy welcomes the prodigal home to his arms.
Exploring how large issues such as love, life, and death are sewn into
Big Daddy’s character, Cat merits being seen as a tragedy of universal
importance. Like a tragic protagonist, Big Daddy is proud, valiant; he is
Williams’s King Lear. Like Lear, he rages against his fate and the
mortality it imposes on him. He battles death itself. His words to Brick,
‘Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto’ (56), segue into the
Dylan Thomas epigraph to Cat, ‘father . . . Rage, rage against the dying of
the light’. Ironically, the old man wants life, while his son Brick wants
death (Dukore, 96). Big Daddy’s imprecation, leaving his voice ‘hoarse’ at
the end of Act Two, can be likened to Lear’s rage against injustice on the
moor (Act Three, Scene One). In one of his most impassioned speeches,
Big Daddy tragically comments on man’s existential strength in the face of
death:
Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that
comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows
what it is. The others go without knowing which is the way that
anything living should go, go without knowing, without any
knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, but a man sometimes, he can
keep a tight mouth about it. Sometimes he – (61)
Like King Lear, Big Daddy is surrounded by a family who betray him and
by retainers (Reverend Tooker and Dr Baugh) who lie to him. Like Lear’s
eldest daughters, his rapacious children (Gooper, Mae, and their hoard)
seek to rob him of his kingdom. As in King Lear, too, Williams included a
raging storm in Act Three symbolising the larger cosmic forces that
threaten Big Daddy’s hold on the plantation, family, self, and life. But like
Lear or Agamemnon, Big Daddy has a tragic flaw – his overweening pride,
his defiant egotism. Believing he is cured, he struts across the stage
thinking he is still boss. Speaking of Maggie and Mae, he declares: ‘I got a
surprise for those women. I’m not gonna let go for a long time yet if that’s
what they’re waiting for’ (53). But learning the truth about his medical
condition, Big Daddy, like great tragic heroes, experiences the terror of a
peripetia, a reversal of fortune. He leaves Cat, though, not as a defeated
victim but as a force that death will have to reckon with.

Big Mama
Compared with her husband, Big Mama is a secondary character who
seems easy to stereotype as clownish, a garrulous, hysterical woman, a
coarse harridan. Yet she manifests a much more noble self and serves an
important structural function in Cat. Like Maggie, she is married to a man
who has rejected her, leaving her sexually starved. It has been four long
years since Big Daddy has made love to her yet she remains loyal and
caring. According to Nancy Tischler, Big Mama is a ‘beautiful, strong
study in unfilled love’ (201). Even the thought of Big Daddy’s having
cancer evokes a painful gesture of love from her – ‘Big Mama’s chest
heaves and she presses a fat fist to her mouth’ (50). Yet critics have seen
her actions as a ‘distorted manifestation’ of Maggie’s plight (Mayberry,
361). Obviously, she does not have Maggie’s voice and spirit. In the hands
of such veteran actresses as Judith Anderson, Kim Stanley, or Kate Reid,
all of whom have tackled the role, Big Mama aspires to greater heights.
Though she lacks her husband’s overwhelming drive, she comes forward
as his staunch supporter when, at the end of the play, she adopts his voice
(including his swear words) to thwart Gooper and Mae’s coup. She is a
mix of laughter (often at her expense) and tears. Like so many women of
her generation, she has sublimated her desires for the welfare of the
family. Only a grandmother like Big Mama could think Gooper’s brood
was adorable. At the end of the play, when she asks if she can accompany
Big Daddy to the belvedere and he allows her to, she reaches the apex of
her life – to be valued as his caring wife.

Jack Straw, Peter Ochello and Skipper

The ghosts of these gay men haunt Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Though they
never appear on stage, these characters embody many of the sexual
anxieties in Cat and express Williams’s own problematic attitudes toward
homosexuality. Straw, Ochello, and Skipper join the company of other
absent, dead, gay characters in Williams whose claims on their respective
plays long survive the grave – Allan Grey in Streetcar, Sebastian Veneble
in Suddenly Last Summer, or Williams’s favourite poet, Hart Crane in
Steps Must be Gentle. To accommodate a homophobic Broadway theatre,
and perhaps to assuage his own psyche (Paller), Williams erased the
presence of gay characters, although through them he was able to voice the
cries of a gay man. In his early and late plays, Williams had no qualms
about including overtly gay characters on stage. His first gay character, a
transvestite, Queenie, was one of the prisoners in Not About Nightingales
(1938) and, towards the end of his career, Williams openly portrayed his
homosexuality through the writer and his own personification, August, in
Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981). But none of his plays feature
as many gay figures, absent or present, as does Cat.
The play was guardedly subversive for its times. Williams describes the
gay couple of Straw and Ochello as ‘a pair of old bachelors who shared
this room all their lives together’ and whose relationship ‘must have
involved a tenderness which was uncommon’ (‘Notes for the Designer’).
John Clum stresses that Williams did not stereotype the pair but presented
them as shrewd and sensitive, running a ‘successful enterprise’ and not
‘self hating’ like Skipper. Unlike his son’s relationship with Skipper, Big
Daddy was empowered through his partnership with Straw and Ochello.
Keep in mind, though, that Williams’s admiration for the couple’s
‘uncommon tenderness’ was expressed in an authorial stage direction, not
in lines spoken before an audience. According to Savran, Williams thus
‘reveals his homosexuality in extremely conflicted ways, as a focus of
desire and scandal’. For example, his ‘naming of these two
characters . . . provide[d] significant insight into [Williams’s] oblique way
of approaching the subject of homosexuality’ (Cañadas, 60). ‘Straw’
implies that as a homosexual ‘he is a man of straw, a man of no
substance’; and Ochello ‘suggests the Italian word, occhiello, meaning
“buttonhole” or “eyelet” ’. In using these names, Williams ‘introduced
metaphoric allusions to male homosexuality [with] specific reference to
sexual penetration’ (Cañadas, 58).
Skipper is Cat’s sexual barometer. Emerging like a dangerous, guilty
secret from Brick’s past, he is at the centre of Brick’s sexual, marital, and
filial conflicts. As Brick’s team/roommate at Ole Miss, Skipper evokes the
glory days of their championship football careers. Brick emphatically
denies that there was anything ‘dirty’ or ‘sissie’ about his friendship with
Skipper. ‘Skipper and me had a clean, true thing between us! – had a clean
friendship. . . . Oh, once in a while he put his hand on my shoulder or I’d
put mine on his, oh, maybe even, when we were touring the country in pro-
football an’ shared hotel-rooms we’d reach across the space between the
two beds and shake hands to say goodnight’ (81). By characterising his
relationship as ‘clean’, ‘the one’, and ‘pure’, Brick, according to Judith
Thompson, is equating it with ‘philosophical terms of Platonic absolutes
in Ideas of the Good, the Beautiful, the true’. Yet when Maggie agrees with
Brick that his relationship with Skipper was ideal, as in Greek mythology,
she ironically alludes to its homosexual undercurrents, since classical
myths of male friendship were often rooted in homoerotic desire.
Like the names Williams uses for the ‘old bachelors’, ‘Skipper’
onomastically underscores the sexual tensions in Cat and those harrowing
Williams himself. Paller argues that the name alludes to Kip Kiernan, the
young Canadian dancer with whom Williams fell in love in the summer of
1940 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but who broke his heart. Through
Skipper, Williams ‘was venting anger, exercising a psychological revenge
on Kip Kiernan who died of a brain tumor’. Skipper’s name also suggests
boyhood immaturity, a sign, in terms of a 1955 psychotherapy, of latent
homosexuality, according to Clum. Like Skipper, Brick refuses to grow up,
to become a man, but, instead, is locked into a world of college football.
The name ‘Skipper’ also links the nautical and the sexual, a crucial
connection for Williams. Sailors were among the primary agents through
whom he sought to fulfil his homoerotic desires and he often stereotypes
them as sexualised figures – for example, Glass Menagerie, Streetcar,
Rose Tattoo, Something Cloudy. Finally, the name ‘Skipper’ physicalises
Brick’s condition. Hobbling along with his crutch, Brick becomes a
skipper, a halting, wounded and defeated man (Kolin, 215).

Gooper and Mae

Grasping, vicious, and jealous, Gooper and Mae are foils to Brick and
Maggie in Williams’s dysfunctional family drama. Gooper is a fawning,
untrustworthy son who has the audacity to tell Big Mama: ‘I’ve always
loved Big Daddy in my own quiet way. I have never made a show of it, and
I know that Big Daddy has always been fond of me in a quiet way, too, and
he never made a show of it neither’ (102). Big Daddy has never been quiet
about a thing, least of all his contempt for his elder son. ‘I hate Gooper
and Mae an’ know that they hate me’ (74). Gooper likes power, and he
uses an assortment of stratagems to win Big Daddy’s plantation, including
making his children pawns, protecting Big Mama’s interests, and
denouncing Maggie’s ‘lie’. The noisy games that his ‘monsters’ play with
their cap pistols comically parallel their father’s assaults against Big
Daddy and Brick. Even the name of Gooper’s law partner – Tom Bullit –
suggests the combative tactics he employs to secure Big Daddy’s fortune
for himself and his ‘screamin’ tribe’ of monsters.
Gooper symbolises a character type Williams loathed – the American
corporate man of the 1950s, the arch-conservative hypocrite. Big Daddy is
the corporation Gooper wants to take over, but the old man is too shrewd
to fool. When he sees the trusteeship papers scattered about Brick’s room,
knowing they really spell ‘nothing’, Gooper and Mae hurriedly gather
them up, stage business that underscores their cover-ups and trickery.
Behind everyone’s back, Gooper has garnered a cache of damaging
papers – power of attorney to ‘cut off’ Brick and Maggie’s credit (10), a
trusteeship for the estate, reports on Big Daddy’s prognosis from
Oschner’s, and possibly a court order sentencing his younger brother to
Rainbow Hill. As Maggie warns Brick, when news breaks about Big
Daddy’s fatal condition, ‘Brother Man and his wife . . . hustl[ed] down
here. . . . And why so many allusions have been made to Rainbow Hill
lately. You know what Rainbow Hill is? Place that’s famous for treatin’
alcoholics an’ dope fiends in the movies!’ (10). If Gooper gains control of
Big Daddy’s fortune, Brick is destined to be locked up.
Biographically, Gooper evokes the fraternal tension and rivalry between
Williams and his younger brother Dakin. A football star, military hero,
and successful lawyer, Dakin was Cornelius Williams’s favourite, while
Tennessee was attacked as the Other. Just as Gooper intended to send Brick
to Rainbow Hill, Dakin was responsible for committing his brother to the
psychiatric ward of Barnes Hospital in St Louis in 1969 for alcohol and
drug abuse. Tennessee’s greatest fear was being committed, as his sister
Rose was in the 1930s for her schizophrenia. Dakin was also responsible
for having his brother buried in the place Tennessee despised – St Louis
(or ‘St Pollution’, as he called it). A further (but kindly) parallel between
Dakin and Gooper surfaces in Gooper’s shrewd handling of money, a talent
that Tennessee later benefited from when he sought his brother’s advice on
finding tax shelters. Dakin referred to himself as Tennessee’s ‘professional
brother’. What Tennessee Williams did, then, in Cat was to switch his
younger brother’s life with Brick’s older brother’s resulting in an overall
unflattering portrait of Dakin Williams (Spoto, Kindness).
Mae also embodies a character type frequently satirised by Williams –
the social-climbing club woman whose passion is backbiting. The
gossiping women in The Rose Tattoo, Spring Storm, or Orpheus
Descending are Mae’s compatriots, as are the sarcastic matrons in
Williams’s other plays. The snooty socialites who visit flophouses in
Fugitive Kind (1937) or nursing homes in This Is the Peaceable Kingdom
(1970) can also claim kinship with Mae. Unrelentingly repugnant, Mae is
a fitting consort for her crafty husband. She is condescending to Big
Mama, spiteful to Maggie and Brick, and stuffed with vanity. Yet Mae’s
looks belie her self-image. She is a ‘monster of fertility’. In recent
productions, she has been portrayed as a bottle-blonde loud-mouth.
Appropriately, she comes from a family of crooks. Her ‘ole Papa
Flynn . . . barely escaped doing time in the Federal pen for shady
manipulations on th’ stock market’ (13). Mae’s father sounds like the
swindlers arrested for their Ponzi schemes during the 2009 recession in
America. Like her cheating father, Mae hopes to manipulate Big Daddy
with her inflated stock of monsters. She is all those things that Maggie is
not and vice versa.

Production History

Broadway
Cat premiered on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on 24 March 1955 and
ran until 17 November 1956, for a total of 694 performances. In a long line
of Broadway premieres (Glass Menagerie, 1945; Streetcar, 1947; Summer
and Smoke, 1948; Rose Tattoo, 1951; Suddenly Last Summer, 1958; Sweet
Bird of Youth 1959; Night of the Iguana, 1961), Cat won Williams his
second Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
Directed by Elia Kazan, with stage designs by Jo Mielziner and costumes
by Lucinda Ballard, Cat boasted the same artistic team that helped
Williams receive his first Pulitzer for Streetcar in 1947. The actors in Cat
received undiminished praise. Barbara Bel Geddes was applauded for her
‘authoritative and appealing’ Maggie (McClain) and for her uncapped
energy. Ben Gazzara’s anguished Brick was ‘handsome, melancholy,
sensitive’ (Atkinson), and even though he had to ‘hop, fall and drag
himself ’ across the stage, he did so with ‘great grace’ (Hawkins). His
depressed Brick set the tone for later actors who took the role. Folk-singer
Burl Ives, then forty-six years old and whose appearance in Cat was his
first professional acting role, was hailed for his ‘Rabelaisian’ Big Daddy
(Kerr), an ‘unforgettable character’ who questions an ‘empty existence’
(Coleman). Despite Big Daddy’s charisma, many critics faulted his
gratuitous and disturbing vulgarity. Kudos went to Mildred Dunnock
(Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman) for her interpretation of Big Mama
who ‘has unexpected strength of character’ (Atkinson) and was both
‘fragile and touching’ (Chapman). Pat Hingle’s Gooper was suitably
‘shifty’ and shrewd, while Madeleine Sherwood as the venal and annoying
Mae, oversaw ‘the South’s most horrifying children’ (Hawkins).
Cat itself did not fare as well. While the critics handily recognised
Williams’s craftsmanship, his ability to offer shocking theatre, and his
powerful dialogue, they found his new play ‘tormented and tormenting’
(Watts), a work that left audiences torn between ‘frustration and revulsion’
(McClain). Reviewers sensed that Kazan’s changes were very much at
odds with Williams’s original script. Chapman complained that ‘this time
Williams has out-frustrated himself by failing to remain in control of his
own play’. The critics also took Williams to task for Cat’s confusing
characterisations, its unbelievable ending, and its revolting subject matter.
Zeroing in on Brick’s submerged homosexuality, Kerr complained that
‘truth dodges around corners’ and, consequently, judged Cat to be ‘a
flawed work’, telling his readers: ‘You will believe every word that is
unspoken; and you may still long for some that seem not to be spoken.’ He
further warned that Williams’s ‘new play’ lacks the ‘staggering clarity of
Streetcar’. Kerr’s point of view was echoed over the next half century.
Chapman, however, had no trouble speaking the unspeakable – Brick was a
‘drunkard and a queer’. Overall, the problems the critics identified in the
Cat premiere did not go away in the four major Broadway revivals the
play has had up to 2009.
Over twenty years passed between the Cat premiere and its first
Broadway revival. Initially performed at the American Shakespeare
Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1974, Cat opened at
the ANTA Theatre on 24 September and closed on 8 February 1975 for a
total of 160 performances. It was the first time Williams’s definitive third
act was staged in the United States, which incorporated Kazan’s suggestion
from the Broadway script to bring Big Daddy back in Act Three as well as
changes Williams made in his original draft. In the process, Williams
provided a ‘more sensitive handling of the Brick and Maggie relationship’
(Barnes), but the couple’s reconciliation was still problematic. Snyder
complained that in the new version of Cat ‘there are no winners in this
stark contest’. But the play had changed with the times. Homosexuality
and women’s sexual hunger were no longer as shocking as they were in
1955. Consequently, the emphasis fell on the family’s deceit and hate –
‘They all seem to have a cancer . . . eating away at their insides’ (Probst).
If Cat itself still worried critics, this production nevertheless justified
the high praise it earned. Deftly directed by Michael Kahn, it starred
Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie; Keir Dullea as Brick; Fred Gwyne as Big
Daddy; Kate Reid as Big Mama; Charles Siebert as Gooper and Joan Pape
as Mae. Hands down, Ashley’s Maggie was the star, a performance that
received Williams’s enthusiastic endorsement. Her Maggie was ‘sensuous,
wily, febrile, gallant, scorchingly Southern’ (Kalem); she was the
‘calculating bitch’ as well as the ‘ingenious’ wife pleading for love
(Wilson). Ashley’s Maggie had displaced Brick as ‘Williams’s
mouthpiece’ (Sharp). On the other hand, Keir Dullea’s Brick was
disappointing. Playing a brooding Brick in the tradition of Gazzara and
Newman, Dullea was no match for Ashley; he was underwhelmed.
Injecting humour into Brick’s role was a fresh interpretation, although
Dullea’s ‘boyish laughter undercut’ the play (Wilson). Gwyne’s (Herman
in the Munsters) Big Daddy was lanky, too young, and resembled Abraham
Lincoln. Looking more like ‘Tall Daddy’ than Big Daddy, he lacked Burl
Ives’s ‘roguish animal magnetism’ (Kalem).
Thirty-five years after Cat premiered, the second Broadway revival
made history, too. Howard Davies, who two years earlier had directed the
play in London, brought Cat to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in March 1990
using Williams’s original script (1955), unedited by Kazan, for the first
time on Broadway. The only changes Davies made were to keep the storm
that Kazan inserted and to create a naturalistic set. Edwin Wilson
glowingly wrote: ‘This present version suggests Williams’s first instincts
about the play have been right after all.’ William Henry agreed, claiming
that there was now ‘an altogether redemptive final scene’. Yet Jack Kroll
insisted that the third act remained the ‘weak limb’ of the play.
There was nothing weak about their production; in fact Kathleen Turner
and Charles Durning were credited for even mounting a second revival.
With her ‘throaty molasses voice’ (Barnes), Turner’s Maggie was the star
of this Cat, a position Williams’s original script intended. Flirtatious,
determined, funny, and in love with her own sexuality, she ‘prowls the
stage in a second-skin slip, brushing her electric blond mane, tugging her
nylons up her long legs, rigging her garter belt, applying mascara with spit
and polish’ (Kroll). Though Turner’s cat was red hot, critics begged her to
‘expose her emotions a shade more’ (Wilson), especially in expressing her
love for Brick. Durning’s Big Daddy in his rumpled white suit, and
vaudeville-sized cigar, was a ‘hybrid of red-neck cut-up and aristocratic
tragedian . . . a cracker barrel Lear and Falstaff in one’ (Rich). Though he
did not appear in Act Three, Durning’s overwhelming presence as Big
Daddy still dominated. Brick, played by Daniel Hugh Kelly, who paraded
on stage in his bath towel, could have been more forceful, his anger more
intense. Yet when he defended his relationship with Skipper, Kelly gave
‘an impassioned hint of the noble figure who inspired worship from all
who knew him’ (Rich). According to Barnes, though, he never captured
‘the complexity of a man who betrayed the thing he so loved and [also]
possibly his own sexuality’. WABC TV’s Joel Siegel bluntly announced:
‘We realize he [Brick] is a homosexual even if he doesn’t.’ However
brilliant the acting, this Cat also was dated for many critics: ‘The 50s
sexual tension now seems overripe; its hush-hush attitude toward cancer
and scandal over childlessness seems almost quaint’ (Winer, 358).
Like the second revival, the third revival of Cat came to Broadway, at
the Music Box Theatre, on 3 November 2003, via London where the play
had been directed by Anthony Page two years earlier, but with a different
cast. Despite Page’s superlative craft and an all-star cast, this revival was
possibly the least successful of the four thus far. Under Page’s direction,
Cat manifested a tragic-comic spirit, mixing the hilarious with the
mendacious, an apt combination for Williams’s Southern grotesque. Yet
Howard Kissel smarted from the ‘sardonic, angry humor’ in the play. Ned
Beatty’s Big Daddy was the driving force behind this Cat rather than
Ashley Judd’s Maggie. Despite having a smaller frame than Burt Ives or
Charles Durning, Beatty was ‘emotionally towering’ (Murray); ‘his
prickly spirit catches all the cunning and cruelty of Big Daddy’s vulgar
energy’ (Lahr). Ben Brantley exulted in Durning’s performance, calling
him a ‘jig dancing bantam, a Napoleonic figure who has lulled himself
into power’. Beatty’s Big Daddy was likeable and feared at the same time.
Though ravishingly beautiful, comic, and steely, Judd’s Maggie ‘showed
little spontaneity’ (Brantley); ‘we don’t see her suffocating under the
threat of mendacity’ (Murray). As Elyse Sommer put it, her Maggie ‘was
more fidgety and cool than fiercely hungry’. Maggie must show spite as
well as sensitivity. Jason Patric’s representation of Brick had a limited
‘emotional range’ – from amusement to annoyance (Murray). He
‘compacts Brick into cement’ for Lisa Schwarzbaum. In his confrontation
with Beatty, Patric could not muster up the tension, hurt, and rage inside
Brick. Even more disappointingly, he did not show ‘the sexual ambiguity’
that crippled Brick (Kissel). Assessing Judd and Patric’s chemistry,
Schwarzbaum bristled: ‘She’s unsure and he’s unreceptive’. Surprisingly,
Margo Martindale’s Big Mama, a ‘large woman whose charm bracelet
jiggles along with the wattles under her chin’, lifted the Pollitt matriarch
above the bovine stereotype that has stamped the role (Lahr).
 The fourth Broadway revival (6 March to 22 June 2008) was a landmark
production. It was the first time a professional all-black cast staged Cat on
Broadway and featured James Earl Jones (Great White Hope) as Big
Daddy, Phylicia Rashad (television’s Bill Cosby Show) as Big Mama,
Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow) as Brick, and Anika Noni Rose
(Dreamgirls) as Maggie. Though the director Debbie Allen ‘wisely pushes
past the issue of race’ (Brantley), her Cat should be seen in terms of
contemporary racial issues. During the spring and summer of 2008, Barack
Obama electrified the world in his bid to be the first African American
president. Change had come to the American theatre too, as Broadway
attracted more black audiences than ever before, eager to see their
favourite black stars on stage. In fact, seventy to eighty per cent of the
audiences for Allen’s black Cat were African Americans (Fisher). Critics
asked if indeed Broadway had gone black. There was no question that
Williams’s ‘tale of dirty politics among a filthy right, white family in the
Mississippi Delta in 1955 [was] universal enough to withstand color-blind
treatment’ (Portantiere). While she strove not to change Williams’s
language, Allen omitted the elephant joke and shifted the time-frame
closer to 1990 when Ole Miss was no longer segregated (as it was in
1955). But she was faulted for the changes she made in Williams’s
dramaturgy – that is, for having a saxophonist play a bluesy score before
each act and for placing the major characters in a confessional spotlight
which ‘carr[ies] us out of the naturalistic world of the play’ (Denton).
Even more seriously, though, she was accused of sentimentalising
Williams’s script, taking Cat down to the level of black sit-com and
lowering its ‘emotional intensity, bringing it down to a simmer’
(Dziemianowicz).
That charge could not be levelled at James Earl Jones’s Big Daddy. With
his resounding baritone voice and impressive stature, Jones’s Big Daddy
made history. As Clive Barnes proclaimed, his ‘portrayal [of Big Daddy]
with bluster and subtlety . . . will surely leave a permanent mark on a role
he both inhabits and embodies’. Terry Teachout declared, ‘Jones gets Big
Daddy – the pride, the contempt, the half-concealed terror.’ ‘I always
wanted to play that cracker’, Jones laughingly told ABC News (Fisher).
His intensity contrasted with Terrence Howard’s soft spoken and, even
more inebriated and detached, Brick. In sum, Howard’s performance
received mixed reviews. Portantiere hailed his Brick as one of the ‘most
complex, fully realized . . . human portrayals’ which escaped ‘the two note
trap of playing him as “taciturn and angry” throughout . . . he is often
smiling and even laughing over the absurdities’ on the Pollitt estate. But
Martin Denton complained that Howard ‘plays up the detachment to a
point where he’s almost not there sometimes’. For Brantley, Howard ‘is
wearing his character’s pain all too palpably, mopping his eyes and
tearfully bleating his lines . . . [turning] Brick into a wounded boy instead
of the willfully numbed creature he must be to challenge Big Daddy’.
Rose’s Maggie more than compensated for Howard’s anaesthetised
performance. Dressed in a slinky slip and falling backwards onto a
sumptuous bed to adjust her garter belt, Rose exuded a steamy sexuality,
yet she possessed an incredible shrewdness, anticipating how to act and
react to Brick’s and his family’s attacks. Brantley affirmed that Rose’s
Maggie ‘pretty much owns the show when she is on stage’. However, Rose
may have paid a price for Maggie’s intensity. Dziemianowicz found that
she ‘shows us Maggie’s sexual claims but not the vulnerability that would
snare us as allies’. Williams’s script asks a great deal from any actor
playing Maggie; she has to be sexual, shrewd and honest, yet also reveal a
hurting, vulnerable side. Rashad’s Big Mama undeniably showed her
character’s pain. For Clive Barnes, she was ‘broken and defiant’, but she
also provided ‘tragic-comic relief as the shrill, underappreciated Big
Mama’. Arrindell Anderson’s Mae was ‘too smart, too well put together’
and too good-looking (Denton).

British productions
Two and a half years after the US debut, Cat premiered in Britain on
30 January 1958. Produced and directed by Peter Hall, this Cat starred the
American actress Kim Stanley as Maggie, Paul Masse as Brick, and Leo
McKern, wearing shoulder pads, as Big Daddy. Williams’s play (with his
original third act intact) had to be staged as a club performance – at the
Comedy Theatre in London – because the Lord Chamberlain banned it
from public theatres for its objectionable subject matter. Brick’s latent
homosexuality, as well as the sexual excesses of the other characters,
stirred up a controversy in the United Kingdom. The reviewer for the News
Chronicle hailed Cat as ‘Williams’s most enthralling play’, while the
Daily Mail critic found it Williams’s ‘cruellest but at times most
dramatic’ work (quoted in ‘London Sees’). An unsigned reviewer for the
Times, however, attacked Cat not so much for its homosexuality as for the
‘animal ferocity’ of its characters – ‘they cease to resemble human
beings’. According to the reviewer, Williams wrongly ‘injected . . . into
his leading characters . . . a special serum of greed, sexual frustration,
sexual longing, and sexual uncertainty’ that was lethal. Unfortunately,
Stanley’s ‘touchingly shameless’ Maggie lacked the ‘wiry defiance’ the
character needed and McKern’s Big Daddy was ‘not ideally suited’ to the
part, ‘playing it a little outside of the character’. Masse’s Brick existed in
‘a kind of gentle haze’. Though Kenneth Tynan recognised that Cat was ‘a
magnificent play’, he faulted Hall for his ‘lethargic pace; he stresses
everything except what needs stressing’ (203), and thought Masse was
‘callow and absurdly unprepared for a searching test like Brick’, while
Stanley was a ‘gifted’ Maggie, though she lacked the tension the role
demanded.
When Howard Davies’s production of Cat opened in London on
17 February 1988 on the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage, it made British
theatre history for several reasons. It was the first production of
Williams’s play in the United Kingdom for thirty years and the first time
Cat was staged at a public theatre there. Ironically, as Davies’s Cat was
playing, the House of Lords was debating the so-called ‘notorious’ Clause
28, banning the funding of any art project that promoted homosexuality.
Davies used Williams’s restored original third act which presented a less
sympathetic Maggie. Nonetheless, Lindsay Duncan’s Maggie successfully
competed with Eric Porter’s Big Daddy. It would appear that Williams’s
Cat had improved with age. The critics lavished praise on him for his
‘masterpiece’, which ‘demonstrates that poetry in the theatre does not
necessarily consist of heightened language and blank verse’ (King). The
actors spoke Williams’s poetry with an accurate Southern accent, though
at times it was hard to understand for London audiences. For the most part,
the acting was judged superlative. Looking ‘even Burlier than Ives’,
Portman did not simply replicate his American counterpart but brought a
new perspective to the role of Big Daddy – subtlety and ‘an intelligence
and worldliness that begin to look wise’ (Ratcliffe). His grey locks and
beard, powerful voice, and compassion made Porter stand out. With her
golden hair and smooth white shoulders, Duncan represented a Maggie
that looked a little too Hollywood – ‘somewhere between Marilyn Monroe
and Elizabeth Taylor’ (Radin). Still, she was a ‘triumphant mixture of
sexual hunger, venomous wit, and smouldering defiance, not least in the
way she angles her head when she announces her pregnancy as if to defy
her husband or anyone else to say her nay’ (Billington). Succumbing to
Maggie’s power, Ian Charleson (star of Chariots of Fire) played a
brooding, even catatonic at times, Brick who, dressed in symbolic white
silk pyjamas (Edwards), was lost in the illusory world Skipper represented
but sprang to life at the very mention of his name (Kemp). The set with
bamboo furniture, marble pillars, and swaying chandelier suggested a
Delta awash in ‘sweaty carnality’ (Kemp). Davies’s tragi-comic Cat ranks
as possibly the most powerful production of Williams’s play in the United
Kingdom to date.
A well-received London revival of Cat was directed by Arthur Page at
the Lyric Theatre in Shaftsbury Avenue, London, on 19 September 2001,
and, as we saw, was taken to the United States in 2003. Unlike some earlier
American revivals where humour was not a part of Williams’s Delta
tragedy, Page’s stressed the ‘Gothic comedy’ and the ‘supple sinuous
nature of [Williams’s] prose’ (Billington). That ‘barbed comedy’ came out
in exchanges between Brendan Fraser’s Brick and Frances O’Connor’s
Maggie as well as in their caustic attacks on Mae, the children, and
Gooper. As Maggie, O’Connor was sexual, witty, but also exhibited the
‘frantic restlessness’ of a frustrated wife and poverty-fearing daughter-in-
law. Taylor found O’Connor ‘pent up and wiry . . . a terrific performance’.
Even though Fraser’s Brick was in his cups, he never lost sight of the
mendacity around him, even if at times he was ‘bland’ (Taylor). His wit,
however, was searing, especially in his confrontation with Big Daddy. The
‘paradox’ of Brick’s role for Taylor was that his anger at a ‘corrupt
society’ was ‘less a matter of principle than a frightened flight from his
own rigid values’. Compared with earlier Big Daddys, the American actor
Ned Beatty might not have been as ‘earth-laden’, but he nonetheless
delivered a resonating performance as both boss and caring father.

Australia
The first Australian production of Cat was at Union Theatre in Melbourne
on 21 October 1957. Union Theatre was run by the University of
Melbourne at the time and became the precursor of the current Melbourne
Theatre Company. Like premieres in New York and London, Cat stirred up
controversy in Australia over its strong sexual content and language.
 Productions of Cat on non-English-speaking stages
Along with Streetcar and Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof remains
one of Williams’s most popular plays worldwide. Within a few months of
its American premiere in March 1955, the Swedish director Ake Falck
mounted the first European production of Cat on 2 September at the City
Theatre in Gothenburg. Starring Gunnel Brostrom as Maggie, Herman
Ahlsell as Brick, Karen Kavli as Big Mama, and Kolbjorn Knudsen as Big
Daddy, the play erupted into explosive confrontations that made it a box-
office hit. Later that season, film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman
also staged Cat, with a blond, muscular Max von Sydow as Brick and a
portly Benkt-Ake Benkstsson as Big Daddy. Though he admitted it was a
‘huge success’ (Five O’Clock Angel, 127), Williams was still not pleased
with the production. Unfortunately, Bergman’s Cat did not equal his
Swedish premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire six years earlier in
Gothenburg (Kolin, Streetcar).
The German premiere of Cat at Düsseldorf ’s Schauspielhaus on 26
November 1955 was heavily cut and bowdlerised (the elephant joke was
omitted as well as numerous stage directions suggesting sexualised
behaviour). Even though the translation considerably toned down
Williams’s script, there was ‘enough sexual explicitness left to make the
play sensational’. Reviewers could still stress, though, that ‘voyeurs need
not go because they would not be gratified’. So heavy was Brick’s drinking
that Alfons Neukirchen told his readers that after going to Cat, they would
not touch a drink for three days’. Contextualising Cat, some critics
diminished the play as a ‘cheap dramatization of the Kinsey report’
(Wolter, 17) countering the German view of America as wholesome and
heroic. Even so, the play remained popular in Germany and Austria. As
Sonja Luther points out, Cat saw an unparalleled revival through eight
major productions in Vienna, Hanover, Wiesbaden, Dusseldorf, Salzburg,
and so on during the 2004–5 season. The increased German interest in Cat
reflected contemporary political concern, that is, discontent with America
over the Iraq war as well as dissatisfaction with German politics (Luther,
60). In Andrea Breth’s production in Vienna, for instance, an American
flag was burned on top of Big Daddy’s birthday cake. That is not to say
that the sexual elements in Cat were censored or omitted. Burkhard C.
Kosminski directed a risqué Cat on 24 September 2004 at the Düsseldorf
Schauspielhaus, where Maggie ‘walk[ed] around in her panties, bra, and
high heels’.
The French premiere of Cat on 16 December 1957 at the Théâtre
Antoine, directed by Peter Brook, elicited extremely angry reviews that
faulted Williams for his subject matter and especially the conclusion of
his play (Falb). As their American counterparts did, French critics found
Brick’s sexual identity troubling. Like the Swedish press, too, the French
reviewers found Cat far less satisfactory than Streetcar. Yet despite such
negative press, Cat had a run of 192 performances in Paris.
Not surprisingly, Cat did not come to Communist countries until many
years after its New York premiere. Cat was not staged in the USSR until
December 1981, twelve years after the Soviets had seen Streetcar and
Glass Menagerie. No doubt the Soviet censors, like their American
counterparts three decades earlier, were troubled by the play’s strong
sexual content, particularly its references to homosexuality. When Cat did
open at the Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow, the Soviet director in all
likelihood received permission to stage the play ‘to expose the degradation
and decadence of the bourgeoise world’ (Schmemann). Nonetheless,
Soviet audiences responded positively to Williams’s play and saw
numerous comparisons between his work and Chekhov’s – in tone,
characterisation, and plot (the fragmentation of the family and the
questions over inheritance). The Russian translator proclaimed that
Williams was ‘the biggest success since Chekhov’ (quoted in
Schmemann). This reaction is not surprising given Williams’s life-long
indebtedness to Chekhov, even adapting The Seagull (1896) in his The
Notebook of Trigorin in 1981.
In May 1987, the Shanghai University Drama Institute staged a stirring
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (rendered Cat on a Hot Iron Roof), which may have
been the earliest professional production of Williams’s play in Communist
China (Kolin and Shao, 19).

Adaptations of Cat for Film and television

The film adaptation (1958)

Three years after the Broadway premiere, MGM released the film
adaptation of Cat in 1958. A huge box-office hit grossing ten million
dollars in the United States alone, Cat was the most commercially
successful film of any Williams play. Using the Kazan-influenced
Broadway script, the director Richard Brooks (who in 1962 directed the
film version of Sweet Bird of Youth) and James Poe co-wrote the MGM
screenplay (108 minutes). The film featured two sky-rocketing stars – Paul
Newman as the arrogant, sullen, non-conformist Brick, a character type he
would develop more fully in Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler, and a
sensual, kittenish, yet aggressive twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as
Maggie who later played the seductive and wily queen in Cleopatra
(1964). Together they carried audiences into the steamy world of passion
that the trailers promised. Posters in the United Kingdom and America
showed Taylor lying, longingly, on a big brass bed or peering, like a
prisoner, between the bars of the headboard, begging for sexual
satisfaction. Reprising his Broadway role as Big Daddy, Burl Ives again
won raves for his boisterous interpretation, but he got much closer to his
estranged son Brick in the film than he did in Williams’s play. The film
was nominated for six Oscars but, unfortunately, did not win any.
The MGM Cat was a provocative film in 1958, and even today retains
sensational qualities. The reviewer for Harrison’s Report observed, ‘Some
slight and necessary changes have been made in the story to clean it up for
the film version, but the considerable talk about sex is as frank and
forthright as anything ever heard in a motion picture’ (quoted in Palmer
and Bray, 174–5). Brooks was faced with the thorny problem of sanitising
Williams’s script while still being faithful to his intentions. To
accommodate Hollywood censors, and pass the Production Code, Brooks
severely muted or veiled any references to homosexuality. Brick’s major
problem in the film was not his sexual identity but his estrangement from
Big Daddy (Spoto, ‘Commentary’). Family problems became the leading
theme in the film version of Cat.
While Skipper does not appear in Brooks’s film, he was nevertheless
transformed from the closet gay into the unrepentant stud. Audiences are
led to believe that Maggie tried to seduce or was nearly seduced by Brick’s
best friend. Going to Skipper’s hotel room, she reports to Brick: ‘He
kissed me. That was the first time he’d ever touched me. And then I knew
what I was gonna do. I’d get rid of Skipper. I’d show Brick that their deep
true friendship was a big lie. I’d provide it by showin’ that Skipper would
make love to the wife of his best friend. He didn’t need any coaxin’. He
was more than willin’. He even seemed to have the same idea.’ Maggie
then tells Brick that ‘Skipper was no good’ and that ‘Without you Skipper
was nothing’. Celebrating heterosexual marriage, the film supplied a
conventional Hollywood happy ending. Brick hobbles upstairs to the
bedroom, and insists that Maggie join him. To which Taylor’s Maggie
confidently, and loudly, sounds off, ‘Yes, sir.’ The film closes with Taylor
at the bedroom door as Brick declares, ‘Maggie, we are through with lies
and liars in this house. Lock the door.’ Brooks left no doubt that Maggie’s
‘lie’ will come true. While Brooks created a box-office sensation,
Williams claimed that the film was not faithful to his characterisation of
Brick and Maggie.
Although Brooks made substantial changes to Williams’s play, he
nevertheless built upon its formidable cinematic qualities. Consistent with
MGM’s action-packed films, he opened Cat up by including several new
sets where we hear Hollywood dialogue and witness additional action. A
pre-opening scene shows a drunken Brick jumping hurdles in the dark at
his high school athletic field to the sound of cheering crowds, but when he
stumbles and breaks his ankle, the camera pans to an empty, silent
stadium. From Brick’s midnight run, Cat moves to the airfield where Big
Daddy returns home from the Oschner clinic and is driven by Maggie to
his mansion via his horse farm. His birthday dinner is outside on the lawn,
complete with the caterwauling of Gooper’s no-neck offspring. After
telling Big Daddy the truth in Act Two, Brick tries to leave the estate, but
his car gets stuck in the mud on a stormy night; he sits in an open
convertible, rain pelting him until Maggie comes to the rescue. In Act
Three, Brooks moves to the basement of the mansion where, amid
cobwebs hanging over the Pollitt’s possessions, an emotional conversation
occurs between father and son. Retreating there to kill his pain with booze,
but refusing the injection that Brick wants to administer, Big Daddy bonds
with his son, asking, ‘Why didn’t you come to me . . . and not Skipper?’ To
which Newman’s Brick confesses, ‘All I wanted was a father, not a boss.’
Brooks makes a powerful statement about Brick’s destructive self-image
and his failed relationship with Big Daddy when Newman tears apart a
large poster of him in his college football uniform hanging on the
basement wall.

Television adaptations
A trendy made-for-television Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, produced by Laurence
Olivier, appeared on NBC television, 6 December 1976. Although Olivier
attempted to restore Williams’s original script, his Cat had to be trimmed
into six short scenes (100 minutes) to accommodate commercials,
lessening the emotional effect of the play. According to Hal Erickson,
Olivier’s production was ‘more sexually explicit than the censor-driven
1958 Hollywood version, but [it] wasn’t quite as strong dramatically
despite its powerhouse cast’. Olivier’s Big Daddy was very different from
Burl Ives’s interpretation of the role. Dressed in a tailored white linen suit
and with his coiffed white hair and moustache, Olivier looked more like a
stately elder Mark Twain or slimmer Colonel Sanders projecting an
aristocratic Big Daddy, not the self-made, coarse man Williams imagined.
According to John O’Connor, Olivier’s Big Daddy ‘has been artistically
castrated. His language has been toned down, his off-color jokes have been
eliminated, his incorrigible lustfulness has been diluted’ (D: 29). Big
Daddy’s plantation, too, underwent remodelling. In Olivier’s version, it
became an elegant mansion with exquisite furniture, crystal chandeliers,
and white-jacketed servants evoking the lavish homes in such television
epics as Dallas or Dynasty.
The husband-and-wife team of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner were
(mis)cast as Maggie and Brick. While critics praised Wood for her
sensuality and sincerity; O’Connor, however, faulted her for ‘wielding a
cigarette, [that] seems to be offering a campy imitation of Bette Davis’.
Wagner was not up to the role and was compared to a soap-opera actor. At
forty-six, he was older and less passionate than Newman’s thirtyish Brick.
Regrettably, there were few sparks in his conversations with Maggie.
Moreover, his confrontations with Olivier were tepid compared to
Newman’s with Ives’s Big Daddy. As if symbolising his indolence,
Wagner’s Brick languished in a Victorian-era bath tub, a drink in his hand
and his leg, in a partial cast, hanging over the side.
A second made-for-television Cat premiered on Showtime on
19 August 1984 and was re-broadcast on 24 June 1985 on PBS as part of
the American Playhouse series. Using the uncensored text of Cat (1975),
this televised version was classified as ‘Family Drama’, ‘Psychological
Drama’, and ‘Melodrama’. Directed by Jack Hofsiss (Elephant Man), the
1984 televised Cat was an improvement over Olivier’s but still
‘flounder[ed]’ because of miscasting and misguided acting. According to
O’Connor, Tommy Lee Jones (Brick) ‘feels as though he is acting with a
muzzle on’; his Brick was so forlorn, so removed from Maggie that there
could be ‘no ambiguity’ about any future with her. While Jessica Lange
portrayed Maggie’s beauty and sensuality, she was ‘curiously distant’,
behaving as if ‘she hasn’t been introduced to the rest of the cast’. A cool
Brick works; a cool Maggie ‘disables’ the play. Lange made a better
Blanche DuBois (2004) than she did a Maggie. Rip Torn’s Big Daddy,
however, received high marks for his intensity, and his interactions with
Jones marked the highlight of the televised version, as in so many stage
productions of Cat. But Torn’s thick Southern accent was sometimes hard
to understand. Kim Stanley, who played Maggie in the British premiere,
brought an unexpected shrewdness to the role of Big Mama. Yet even with
this star power, this televised Cat could not measure up to Williams’s
script.

Production History since 2013 (by Katherine Weiss)

Williams’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, has just had
its fifth Broadway revival, but despite its excellent cast and creative team,
the production was received by critics with little enthusiasm. The director
Rob Ashford is best known for his Tony Award winning choreography for
musicals. Hollywood star and Tony Award winning actor, Scarlett
Johansson was cast as a red-headed Margaret Pollitt, and Tony Award
winner Benjamin Walker was cast as the handsome but injured Brick.
Ben Brantley of the New York Times praised Johansson for being ‘truly
feline, and for a poor but well-brought-up debutante, her accent is
strangely common’. He asserts that Johansson, whose 2010 Broadway
debut in the role of Catherine in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge
was sensational, has proved herself as a stage actor. Although admitting
the production was flawed, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post also
enjoyed the show, noting that while Johansson’s ‘performance often lacks
nuance and starts off too shouty, the star eventually gain[ed] the
confidence’ she needed for the role.
Not all critics, however, agree with this assessment. Don Aucoin of the
Boston Globe called the production a patchy, tepid revival at best, noting
that there was not much ‘chemistry’ between Johansson and Walker. The
lack of chemistry, he suggested, lies with Johansson as she was unable to
create ‘sufficient electricity to transfix us during the Maggie-centric first
act’. Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News called the production
a ‘misguided new take’, arguing that Johansson seemed ‘overwhelmed’ by
the role. Even Brantley, who praised Johansson, admits that the acting in
the production often lacked inspiration. Aucoin and Thom Geier of
Entertainment Weekly found, too, that the set was too expansive, losing the
claustrophobia the play requires.
Perhaps because of the overall weakness of the production, the ending
of the play which reviewers of past productions have found so problematic
was not commented on, nor was the production’s interpretation dealt with.
The trend to cast Hollywood stars in Williams’s unforgettable female roles
may be a mistake because too much weight is placed on a central
character. Moreover, the depth required to play characters like Maggie,
Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois and Alexandra Del Lago is far
beyond what the actor for the camera is accustomed to.
 Notes

The notes below explain words and phrases from the play, with page
numbers referencing the Student Editions published by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.

page
10 Great Smokies: the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee were
relatively cool in summer and a popular place for a holiday.
10 Rainbow Hill: sanitorium for alcoholics; the name suggests the
popular 1940s song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.
10 AP/UP: news wire services – Associated Press/United Press.
11 lech: to be sexually aroused.
12 Books of Knowledge: lavishly illustrated encyclopedias published
by the Grolier Society in 1928 and intended for children.
13 Spanish News: inflated journalism associated with reporting events
from the Spanish-American War, 1898; Williams’s father,
Cornelius Williams (C.C.), was a veteran of this war.
13 Ward-Belmont: a prestigious women’s school in Nashville,
Tennessee.
13 Gayoso: a fashionable, historic Memphis hotel; Williams’s
grandfather once resided there.
21 Moon Lake: a notorious resort, scene of gambling, prostitution,
fights, and murders, twenty miles from Clarksdale. It is referred to
in several of Williams’s other plays: a cock-fighting event takes
place there in Summer and Smoke and in Streetcar it is where
Blanche’s husband Allan Grey commits suicide.
22 Shantung: a type of silk imported from the Shantung Province of
China and used in fine, lightweight men’s and women’s suits.
26 Ochsner Clinic: New Orleans hospital founded in 1942 and widely
 respected for its care of cancer and heart patients. (Williams was
treated there for a heart ailment in 1954.)
27 spastic colon: colitis.
28 Commercial Appeal: Memphis newspaper.
33 redneck: derisive name for poor Southern white farmers,
synonymous with bigot.
33 overseer: manager responsible for running a plantation.
33 poor as Job’s turkey: emaciated, not fed; refers to someone with no
money, after the impoverished patriarch in Scripture.
34 Vogue: popular women’s magazine on fashion.
37 Ole Miss: affectionate name for the University of Mississippi,
located in Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown, about sixty miles south of
Memphis.
38 Blackstone: elegant Chicago hotel facing Lake Michigan.
38 Dixie Stars: appropriate team name since the South was the ‘Land
of Dixie’.
40 sashays: to strut or to glide, often stepping sideways to emphasise
self-confidence and grace.
41 St Paul’s: an Episcopal church by that name in Columbus,
Mississippi, where Williams was born.
41 Tiffany: Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) was a famous
American designer, stained-glass artist and maker of highly
decorative glass objects.
42 Gus Hamma: a Delta resident, also mentioned in the one-act Last of
My Solid Gold Watches (1945), plays poker with C.C. (a reference
to Williams’s father).
44 Dubonnet: a sweet liqueur/cocktail made from wine and flavoured
with spices.
44 old fox teeth: treacherous.
44 horsin’: fooling, joking around.
45 Skinamarinka-do: children’s song with this ironic stanza, given Big
Daddy’s inevitable voyage to the dark side of the moon: ‘I love you
in the morning / And in the afternoon / I love you in the evening /
And underneath the moon.’
47 Loewenstein’s: Memphis department store.
47 Stork/Reaper: in folklore, the stork, a gawky bird, was said to
deliver babies; the Grim Reaper is a personification of death.
49 humping: sexual intercourse.
49 poon-tang: vulgar word for female genitalia; also refers to sexual
intercourse.
57 Cook’s Tour: tour of the principal places of interest. Thomas Cook
founded a travel agency in the nineteenth century which arranged
tours and excursions. The agency continues to this day.
58 blue-chip stocks: shares in solid, established companies (Standard
Oil, etc.) which often cost more but were thought the safest
investments.
67 Skid Row: poorest section of a city where transients live, often on
the streets.
68 Vicksburg tornado: a devastating natural disaster that hit the
Mississippi river town on 5 December 1953; also the basis of an
influential investigative report – The Child and His Family in
Disaster: A Study of the Vicksburg Tornado.
69 all balled up: to be confused, troubled, bungled or in a mess.
73 Elks! Masons! Rotary!: civic and quasi-religious organisations
which stress the brotherhood of the members and are involved in
charitable activities.
77 hobo jungles: large makeshift camps (tents, lean-tos) built by
shiftless itinerants (hobos) who illegally stole rides aboard railroad
trains during the Great Depression.
77 Y’s: YMCAs.
78 yellow dog freight car: short-lived (1897–1903) Mississippi Delta
Railroad, from Clarksdale to Yazoo City, known as the Yellow Dog;
William C. Handy, founder of the blues, wrote a popular turn-of-
the-twentieth-century song ‘The Yellow Dog Blues’.
80 pledge: usually a college freshman who must undergo initiations
before becoming a member of a fraternity. A fraternity is a social
organisation of college men bonded together by tradition and ritual.
Known as Greeks because their names came from Greek letters of
the alphabet, fraternities had strict rules about dress codes, social
 events, living accommodation, etc. At the University of Missouri,
Williams was a member of Alpha Tau Omega where he met fellow
fraternity brother Jack Bud Pollitt, known as ‘The Bull of the Ball’.
82 shako: bearskin cap popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
82 moleskin: heavy cotton fabric sheared to create a short pile on one
side, like moleskin.
83 bursitis: inflammation, especially of elbows and knees.
84 passing the buck: dodging one’s responsibility; US President Harry
S. Truman (1945–52) had this sign on his desk – ‘The Buck Stops
Here’.
89 abolition: the abolition of slavery in 1863 in the United States; the
Thirteenth Amendment to US Constitution.
89 War between the States: US Civil War, 1861–5.
90 hoppin’ John: a Southern dish of black-eye peas and rice,
sometimes with bacon grease and chopped onions; it is a Southern
custom to eat black-eye peas on New Year’s Day for good luck.
92 Friar’s Point: community near Clarksdale, also mentioned in
Summer and Smoke.
92 chasuble: garment like a poncho worn by Christian priests when
celebrating the Eucharist.
93 Keeley cure: named after an Illinois physician who used gold
injections, thought to cure alcoholism.
104 Sugar Bowl: post-season college football game played in New
Orleans to determine the best team in the Southern conference.
104 Rose Bowl: major US collegiate football game held in Pasadena,
California, on New Year’s Day.
105 Cadillac: one of America’s most luxurious automobiles, in 1955,
made by General Motors.
105 Plantahs Bank: Planters Bank in Memphis.
112 belvedere: cupola, a place to sit and look at the view.
113 scat song: singing nonsense syllables instead of words in jazz.
 Questions for Further Study

1 There are different types of mendacity in Cat. Identify three or four

and provide examples from the play.
2 Where do we see Maggie at her most vulnerable and at her most
powerful?
3 Does Brick change at the end of the play? Provide convincing reasons
why or why not.
4 Where do we see Big Daddy as kind towards Brick besides giving him
a helping hand in Act Two?
5 Sports play an important role in Brick’s and Skipper’s lives. How do
sports reflect the larger issues of the play?
6 Identify other image patterns in Cat besides those discussed in the
Introduction.
7 Where in Cat do we find references to the steamy, passionate South.
How does the landscape reflect/symbolise the characters and conflicts
in Cat?
8 Big Daddy comes back briefly in the third act. Should he? If yes, what
impact does he have on the ending of the play?
9 Compare and contrast Cat as a tragedy with another Shakespearean
tragedy besides King Lear, for example, Macbeth.
10 What roles do Reverend Tooker and Dr Baugh fill in the play? How
and what does Williams comment on concerning religion and medicine
through these characters?
11 There are several phone calls in Cat. How do they fit into the play – its
themes, characters, symbols?
12 Williams was accused of introducing melodrama into Cat – the storms,
the family feud, etc. How does the play still use these dramatic
techniques but transcend them at the same time?
13 Find examples of Williams’s use of the Southern Gothic in Cat.
Explain how this Williams trademark combines the lyrical with the
ugly.
14 Time as the enemy is one of Williams’s most persistent themes.
Discuss how this theme is foregrounded in Cat through the characters’
narratives, props, and costumes.
15 Compare and contrast Maggie with another of William’s heroines,
such as Blanche in Streetcar or the Princess in Sweet Bird of Youth.
16 Assume you have been asked to cast the roles of Brick, Maggie, and
Big Daddy for a revival of Cat. Identify and justify your choice of
actors you believe are best suited for these parts. Do not select actors
who have previously appeared in the play.
17 Dean Shackelford has claimed that Skipper is ‘the central figure’ in
Cat. Do you agree or disagree? Summon up evidence from the play to
defend your decision.
18 Discuss the importance of Williams’s stage directions for an
interpretation of Cat.
19 Directors have used productions of Cat to make political statements
(e.g. Watergate mendacity). How might the play be a reflection of
current political events in your country or in the world?
20 How might Cat be (re)designed today to reflect an internet culture?
For instance, characters using BlackBerries, Blue-rays, etc.
Sweet Bird of Youth

commentary and notes by

KATHERINE WEISS
 Plot

Act One

Scene One
Chance Wayne, a twenty-nine-year-old man whose good looks are fading,
has returned to his birthplace, St Cloud, Florida, with an ageing movie
star, Alexandra Del Lago, on Easter Sunday. While Del Lago sleeps, a
coloured waiter, Fly, delivers a bottle of vodka and Bromo-Seltzer. Fly
recognises Chance as the young man who used to take out Governor Boss
Finley’s daughter. Uncomfortable with being recognised, Chance offers
Fly a large tip if he forgets he ever saw him.
However, word has already got out that Chance has returned to this Gulf
Coast town. After Fly’s departure, George Scudder, St Cloud’s local
doctor, arrives, trying to persuade Chance to leave at once. In the process,
Scudder reveals two crucial events that have occurred while Chance has
been away. The first is that Chance’s mother has died. Although he
attempted to locate Chance, Chance never received the letters the doctor
sent. The church had to take up donations to have Mrs Wayne buried. The
second event involves Heavenly Finley, Chance’s young love. While
Scudder does not reveal what has happened to Heavenly, he impresses on
Chance that ever since he has become a ‘criminal degenerate’, he is not
welcome in St Cloud. In fact, the doctor tells Chance that Boss Finley has
vowed to have Chance castrated if he was ever to return to town. Before
leaving, Scudder throws one more bit of devastating news Chance’s way.
Scudder and Heavenly will be married in a month’s time.
Stunned, Chance calls Aunt Nonnie, his former ally and Heavenly’s
aunt; however, she is unable to speak to him openly on the phone. At this
moment, Del Lago awakens, bewildered and needing oxygen. From her
interaction with Chance, we learn that while fleeing from her failed
comeback on screen, travelling incognito as the Princess Kosmonopolis,
she picked up Chance at a beach resort in Palm Springs, Florida. He is
essentially her gigolo. Yet Chance has not offered to be her driver and
male companion merely for money. He has a plan to blackmail her. To
execute his plan, he attempts to trick Del Lago into confessing to a federal
offence on tape. Along with recalling her failed comeback, she,
unknowingly, confides that she smuggled Moroccan hashish into the
United States. However, Chance is unable to beat this ‘monster’. She calls
his bluff, forcing him to go to bed with her if he wants her to sign over her
travellers’ cheques and stand by a contract, which she drew up in Palm
Springs, to introduce Chance into the film industry.

Scene Two
Having obeyed Del Lago, Chance is seen dressing as Del Lago signs her
travellers’ cheques. As she does this, she persuades Chance to tell her his
life story as a screen test of sorts. The rest of the scene consists of Chance
recollecting, and perhaps fabricating, a narrative of his past. We learn that
Chance first left his birthplace at the age of nineteen. Initially, he appeared
to have some success in minor roles in musicals and even appeared on the
cover of Life magazine. However, as his luck waned, Chance began to
prostitute himself before going into the Navy during the Korean War.
While in the Navy, Chance suffered from nightmares and began to drink.
He tells Del Lago that he hated the routine and discipline required of him
in the Navy, and shortly after divulges that he ‘cracked up’ and was
discharged. He returned to St Cloud but noticed a difference in the
attitudes of the people who once admired him. For Chance, St Cloud was
still a haven because Heavenly, his teenage love, whose nude photo he
shows to Del Lago, lives there. Chance reveals, however, that even
Heavenly’s attitude towards him had changed; the last time he returned to
St Cloud, Heavenly urged him to go away, calling him a liar.
After telling his life story to Del Lago, Chance discloses the later part of
his plan. He needs the money and Del Lago’s Cadillac to impress the
people of St Cloud, and most of all Heavenly, convincing them that he is a
success. Moreover, he wants Del Lago to arrange a talent show celebrating
youth and declare Chance and Heavenly the winners so that they can leave
for the West Coast together.

Act Two
 Scene One
On the terrace of the Finley home, Boss Finley and George Scudder
discuss how to handle Chance’s return, particularly since Boss Finley will
be holding a rally for the Youth for Tom Finley clubs to state his position
on desegregation and the youth group’s violent tactics. This rally will be
televised at the same hotel where Chance and Del Lago are staying. During
this, we learn that Boss Finley’s grudge against Chance stems from the
nude photograph of his daughter which unbeknown to Chance was
circulated by the photographic shop clerk who made extra copies of it. As
if this scandal were not enough, news of Heavenly’s operation to cure her
of the venereal disease she contracted from Chance, which was performed
badly by Scudder and left Heavenly barren, has leaked out. As a result,
Boss Finley has been heckled at previous rallies.
Tom Junior, Finley’s violent son and president of the Youth for Tom
Finley clubs, sees Aunt Nonnie run up the drive. Chance has driven up to
the house in Del Lago’s Cadillac and is calling out to Aunt Nonnie.
Ignoring him, she runs to the house. Boss Finley and Tom Junior taunt the
old woman for being gullible and having favoured Chance over other
suitors. After Aunt Nonnie leaves, Tom Junior, when berated by his father
for his promiscuity, confronts his father with his own promiscuity. Tom
Junior informs Boss Finley that Miss Lucy, Boss’s lover, ridicules him by
claiming that he is ‘too old for a lover’ and has written this insult for all to
see on the mirror of the ladies’ room at the hotel. He, we learn, is not the
only person who knows about Boss Finley’s promiscuity. Heavenly, who
enters reluctantly, scorns her father for his affair. She scolds him for trying
to marry her to rich old men rather than allowing her to marry Chance, a
boy she loved. Furthermore, she blames her father for Chance’s moral
decay. In his attempt to compete with these wealthy, ageing men, Chance
tried his luck in Hollywood. Boss Finley now bares his plan to silence all
rumours of Heavenly’s impurity, which are damaging him politically, by
having her stand beside him, in white, at the rally.

Scene Two
In the hotel cocktail lounge, an antebellum Southern belle with her index
finger bandaged accuses Stuff, the bartender, of breaking her trust by
telling others what she had written on the mirror of the ladies’ room. Miss
Lucy explains that Boss Finley brought her a brooch in an Easter egg. As
she opened the velvet box in the egg and went to take out the diamond pin,
Boss Finley shut the lid on her finger. Noticing a stranger in the bar and
suspecting that he is the heckler, Miss Lucy seeks out revenge on her
former lover. She promises to aid the Heckler, giving him a jacket and tie
so that he will be able to enter the ballroom where the televised rally will
take place.
Chance enters, but shortly after getting his martini, is called out to the
royal grove and beach by Aunt Nonnie who wishes to speak to him. She
urges Chance to leave town and stop dreaming of a future that will not
come true. Taking a pill and washing it down with a drink, Chance
reminisces over his stage debut and the loss of his virginity. Aunt Nonnie
reminds Chance that rather than winning first or second place, as he says
he did, he only received an honourable mention. Although Aunt Nonnie
has tender memories of Chance, she is no longer charmed by him; she tells
him that his real flaw is that he cannot confront his failures.
Once alone, Chance takes another pill. A small group Chance once
socialised with spot him. The ladies in the group leave while their
husbands, Scotty and Bud, remain. Taking advantage of his weakness,
Scotty and Bud heckle Chance. Perhaps as a threat, Bud tells Chance of the
emasculation of a black man – a fate that Chance will face if he remains in
St Cloud. Insightfully, Chance condemns the racist act, calling castration a
crime of ‘sex-envy’. He also doubts that Heavenly will accompany her
father in such a despicable rally.
Miss Lucy, attempting to ease the tension between Chance, Bud and
Scotty, reveals that Dan Hatcher, the assistant manager of the hotel, saw
Chance working in Palm Beach as a beach boy. Perhaps Chance’s only
friend in St Cloud, Miss Lucy, afraid of what will happen to Chance if he
stays, offers to drive Chance to the airport. He turns her offer down.
Del Lago enters, dishevelled and high. She has had an epiphany.
Chance’s return to St Cloud has made her feel something tender for him
and she wants him to help her be good and kind. Although Chance has no
desire to leave with Del Lago, when he sees Tom Junior and Scotty, he is
affectionate and kind to the ageing star, but only to save himself from
imminent harm. Boss Finley enters, sees Chance, raises his cane and
nearly strikes him before letting it drop. Stunned, Chance watches
Heavenly go to the platform with her vicious father. All this, the Heckler
witnesses.
Still by Chance’s side, Del Lago is silenced by fear when Hatcher, Bud,
Scotty and Tom Junior approach. She senses danger as the men try to
convince Chance to step outside. He refuses, but in the course of this Tom
Junior reveals that Chance polluted his sister with a venereal disease
which he contracted from one of the many women who paid his way.
Again, Del Lago tries to convince Chance to flee – the only action to take,
she claims, after failure is flight. He does not, however, listen to her.
Instead, he calls for a wheelchair to have her taken away. Miss Lucy and
Stuff turn on the television to watch the rally. The back wall of the stage
projects the image of Boss Finley, speaking and being humiliated by the
Heckler who is dragged out and beaten. Heavenly is escorted out, weeping.

Act Three

Past midnight in the hotel room, Del Lago speaks to the operator trying to
find a driver so that she can flee St Cloud. The rally has degenerated into a
riot. Chance is seen briefly by the audience; as he hears others, he ducks
into the shadows. Looking for Chance, Hatcher, Tom Junior, Bud and
Scotty force their way into the hotel room and threaten Alexandra Del
Lago with violence if she does not leave.
After they have left, Chance, who is shaken, makes his way to the room.
There, he commits one more desperate act. He phones Sally Powers, a
journalist and friend of Del Lago’s, and attempts to have Del Lago praise
him and Heavenly as new talent. However, Chance fails again. Del Lago
learns that her comeback was not a failure and, caught up by the news,
keeps Chance away from the phone; she does not mention him. After the
phone call, they struggle, trying to get one another to look in the mirror.
Del Lago taunts Chance with his ageing, his lack of achievement in
contrast to hers and his crime towards Heavenly. He moves to strike her
but instead punches himself in the stomach.
Following this struggle, a change occurs in Del Lago. She is fearful,
lonely and tender, knowing that her comeback will not last and that time
will destroy her eventually. Out of pity for herself and Chance, she again
asks him to join her. He refuses in recognition of his doom and, once Del
Lago departs, Chance with a ‘sort of deathbed dignity’ (96) waits for Tom
Junior and the other thugs to castrate him.
 Commentary

Context

Sweet Bird of Youth comes from the middle period of Tennessee

Williams’s career. Williams met with great success in the 1940s to mid-
1950s with The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). After his first two successes, Williams
began writing ‘a varied assortment of one-act plays and sketches’, which,
according to Drewey Wayne Gunn, would eventually become Sweet Bird of
Youth. He points out that ‘about 450 pages of manuscripts . . . remain from
this incubatory stage’ (Gunn, 26–7). Moreover, with Sweet Bird of Youth,
Williams ‘began a new process of trying out a “work in progress” in a
regional or off-Broadway theatre, revising it heavily both during
rehearsals and after he had had the benefit of a full production’ (Murphy,
135).
In 1957, Williams’s success was met with the disappointing reception of
Orpheus Descending which opened in New York City in March. In May,
his father died. Although his father was a source of pain and sorrow for
Williams because he taunted his son for not being interested in sports and
did not understand his desire to write, the failure of Orpheus Descending
and of the death of Cornelius Coffin Williams led to feelings of
depression. Shortly after the death of his father, Williams began to see a
psychoanalyst.
The following two years proved to be much more productive. With the
opening of Garden District, comprising Suddenly Last Summer and
Something Unspoken, the London premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and
other theatre activity in 1958, Williams stopped going to psychoanalysis
and travelled to Europe in June. Once back in America, Williams and Elia
Kazan began preparing for the Broadway debut of Sweet Bird of Youth.
Elia Kazan, who had attended the try-outs in Coral Gables, Florida,
directed the play and aided Williams in his revisions.
 Williams’s work has been compared both to his contemporaries and to
playwrights of the past. Philip C. Kolin draws a link between Williams and
Eugene O’Neill, claiming that O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms ‘is
something of a palimpsest in the Williams canon’ (23). In Williams’s A
Streetcar Named Desire, Kingdom of the Earth and Sweet Bird of Youth,
O’Neill’s play can be found in similarities in plot, setting and in the
biblical allusions. Kolin goes on to show that the character of Boss Finley
may have stemmed from O’Neill’s play. Ephraim Cabot, O’Neill’s
tyrannical Puritan farmer, bears a striking resemblance to Williams’s Boss
Finley, as both struggle to maintain their power.
In addition to drawing on O’Neill’s theatrical genius, Williams learned
a great deal from William Faulkner, a novelist of the Southern Gothic
tradition (see 251–2). Faulkner’s novel of 1940, The Hamlet, which was
made into the award-winning film The Long, Hot Summer, bears striking
similarities to Sweet Bird of Youth. Boss Finley, for instance, may be based
in part on Will Varner, the domineering father and corrupt businessman,
who owns most of the small Mississippi town. Moreover, like Chance
Wayne whose presence threatens the political stability of St Cloud, Ben
Quick, an outsider trying to make a name for himself, threatens the
stability of Varner’s quiet Mississippi town and home because of his
dangerous reputation as a barn burner. Interestingly, Martin Ritt’s film of
1958 and Williams’s play both starred Paul Newman as the outsider
attempting to rise above his lower socio-economic background.
While in O’Neill and Faulkner Williams may have found his literary
fathers, in William Inge, author of Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) and
Picnic (1953), he found a kindred spirit. His close friendship and brief
love affair with the playwright Inge had an impact on Sweet Bird of Youth.
Ralph F. Voss shows that Williams’s and Inge’s careers in the world of
theatre were similar in many ways. Both authors had won Pulitzer prizes,
both worked with the director Elia Kazan and both wrote about sexuality
in daring new ways. Williams and Inge often spoke about their work and
read each other’s plays, and thus ultimately influenced each other.
Other playwrights sharing the stage with Williams were Arthur Miller
and Edward Albee, both of whom admired Williams. After seeing A
Streetcar Named Desire, Miller ‘was inspired to work even more precisely
with his language in a play he was struggling with at the time’ (Roudané,
2–3); this play would later turn into Miller’s masterpiece Death of a
Salesman (1949). As well as being drawn to the poetic language of
Williams’s plays, Miller shared with Williams a distrust of the so-called
American Dream – a dream that was thinly disguised consumer
capitalism. In addition to a critique of the American Dream, a theme that
Albee in The Zoo Story (1959) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
also took up, these playwrights ‘produced new and radical theater that
challenged and undermined the Cold War order’ (Savran, ix). All three
playwrights worked to upset the political climate of the 1950s and 1960s,
and Miller and Albee learned from Williams, who had been pushing the
limits of theatre since 1944. By challenging the nuclear family,
masculinity and sexuality, Williams, Miller and Albee attempted to
dismantle the patriarchal, anti-communist sentiments and politics of 1950s
and 1960s America.

Themes

‘The Catastrophe of Success’ and Sweet Bird of Youth

After the success of The Glass Menagerie and just days before he was to
see his second Broadway play open, Williams wrote a bitter critique of
success and the Hollywood Dream. This essay, ‘The Catastrophe of
Success’, first appeared in the New York Times on 30 November 1947.
Though he would go on to write Sweet Bird of Youth among several other
successful plays, the importance of this essay is felt throughout his body
of work and is crucial to understanding the themes of lost youth and
broken dreams in Sweet Bird of Youth. In the essay, Williams begins to
define his experience as ‘not unique. Success has often come that abruptly
into the lives of Americans. The Cinderella story is our favourite national
myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not of the Democracy itself ’
(Glass Menagerie, 99). By evoking the Cinderella story, Williams does
more than argue that in America it was possible to move suddenly from
rags to riches. He brings an awareness of class divisions when he claims
that ‘Hotel service is embarrassing [. . .] Nobody’, he writes, ‘should have
to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world’ (102). Williams’s characters
are plagued with the embarrassment that comes with belonging to the
lower socio-economic classes – the classes that clean up after the rich.
Sweet Bird of Youth’s protagonist Chance Wayne, we discover in Act Two,
was once a bartender at the Royal Palms Hotel where he has returned with
Alexandra Del Lago, an ageing movie star. Like so many of Williams’s
protagonists, Chance is in a desperate struggle to become ‘Cinderella’ and
tries to attain his ambition through the film industry. Yet while the
Cinderella story is a feasible dream (success does come abruptly to some
who seek their names to appear on the Silver Screen), it is not easy to
achieve as we see in his desperate struggle to be ‘somebody’.
In the ‘Catastrophe of Success’, Williams recognises, too, that the
‘happily ever after’ in the Cinderella story is nothing but a myth. For those
who achieve fame and wealth, the very problem of their success, a
problem that Alexandra Del Lago and Boss Finley face, is that of identity:
the public Somebody you are when you ‘have a name’ is a fiction
created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the
solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which
is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming
under your own volition – and knowing these things, you can even
survive the catastrophe of Success! (104)
The identities both Del Lago and Boss Finley create to hold on to their
public are familiar to most American audiences; they are clichés still
present in American media – whether it is in the political arena or the
Hollywood scene. Boss Finley has made a name for himself by evoking
the rags-to-riches myth – the political leader who rose from poverty to
lead the common man into better days. On the television screen
broadcasting his speech nationwide, the old stag boasts, ‘I got a mission
that I hold sacred to perform in the Southland. When I was fifteen I came
down barefooted out of the red clay hills. Why? Because the Voice of God
called me to execute this mission’ (84). Although Boss Finley may have
been a common hillbilly, he has turned into a ‘monster’, a corrupt political
figure who has filled his pockets with oil money and allowed innocent
black men to suffer racially motivated crimes. Likewise, Alexandra Del
Lago has invented herself. When Chance reveals his life story to Del Lago
in Act One, Scene Two, the Princess interrupts with ‘BEAUTY! Say it! Say
it! What you had was beauty! I had it! I say it, with pride, no matter how
sad, being gone, now’ (35). In this and in her sometimes coarse
expressions, she reveals that, unlike her pseudonym, she has risen from
rags as well. In other words, Del Lago, like Chance and Boss Finley, comes
from humble beginnings. In her flight, she has created yet another self, the
Princess Kosmonopolis – a name that reveals that this royal diva is in
exile. Chance, wanting badly to become famous and continually failing to
do so, also has a fictional identity, apparent in his drastic shifts from
fragile and lost to a false confidence.
Although Del Lago and Boss Finley have negotiated their fictional
identities with that of their private selves, the mirrors have begun to show
the downfall of their public selves. When telling Chance about her ‘tragic’
comeback in Act One, Scene One, Del Lago reveals:
The glorious comeback, when I turned fool and came back. . . . The
screen’s a very clear mirror. There’s a thing called a close-up. The
camera advances and you stand still and your head, your face, is
caught in the frame of the picture with a light blazing on it and all
your terrible history screams while you smile. (25)
Del Lago explains that after she heard the audience gasp at the close-up
she fled the auditorium and kept on running in a desperate flight from the
public. The camera has awoken her to the ticking of the clock that
whispers ‘Loss, loss, loss’ (Glass Menagerie, 105).
In Sweet Bird of Youth Williams again uses the mirror to create tension
between characters. Tom Junior confronts his father, Boss Finley, with the
fact that Miss Lucy, the Boss’s mistress, has used her lipstick to write
‘Boss Finley [. . .] is too old to cut the mustard’ (50) on the mirror of the
hotel’s ladies’ room. In other words, she exposes his lack of sexual virility
and by extension his lack of political potency – she shatters the fiction he
has been struggling to keep up.
In the final battle between Chance and the Princess, the mirror is used a
last time. After Del Lago’s phone conversation with Sally Powers, a
conversation that has informed Del Lago that her comeback was a success
after all, Chance, infuriated that Del Lago has not mentioned his own
talent, forcibly turns her to the mirror: ‘Look in that mirror. What do you
see in that mirror?’
Princess I see – Alexandra Del Lago, artist and star! Now it’s your
turn, you look and what do you see?
Chance I see – Chance Wayne . . .
 Princess The face of a Franz Albertzart, a face that tomorrow’s
sun will touch without mercy. Of course, you were crowned with
laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel,
but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful
monster. (95)
Chance’s inability to fill in who he is when looking in the mirror suggests
that he recognises his failure to become a star and artist like Del Lago. He
is not even able to convince himself that he will be one. After he falters to
define himself as anyone other than a man whose chances are all spent,
Del Lago parallels Chance to Franz Albertzart, a young man who, failing
to make it in the movies, is fated to be the male companion of an elderly
lady. Chance, like Albertzart, has two choices: to be Del Lago’s gigolo (a
form of castration) or to face Tom Finley and his gang of thugs.
Ultimately, like the abruptness of success the fall from that success can be
just as sudden.
Despite his critique of success, failure was even more bitter for
Williams. In 1957, Orpheus Descending met with disappointing reviews
and audience turn-out. The show closed only two months after it had
opened on Broadway. Sweet Bird of Youth, although written in 1952 and
receiving its try-outs in 1956, was first produced on Broadway two years
after the dismal reception of Orpheus Descending. Despite some of the
criticism the play received, particularly of its potentially confusing plot
development, Sweet Bird of Youth was well-received by audiences and is
now held in high regard among scholars and theatre buffs for its
experimentation with ‘plastic theatre’ and Williams’s even bolder
attempts to stage subject matter that was deemed too sensitive for modern
audiences.

Preaching hate
Tennessee Williams’s concern with humanity’s violence and cruelty and
his ponderings about the causes of such savagery are evident in both Sweet
Bird of Youth and his contemplations on the play. In his ‘Foreword’ to the
play, he reveals that during the time he struggled to write Sweet Bird of
Youth he was full of anger and envy, much like his character Chance
Wayne. He wrote to a friend at this time that ‘We are all civilised people,
which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities
of civilised behavior’. Human existence, then, for Williams, was a thinly
veiled savagery, a condition that Williams had not risen above. According
to Williams, we are all susceptible to releasing our savagery. Williams
sets out to expose ‘a good many human weaknesses and brutalities’ in his
plays (Where I Live, 109), and openly admits that he, too, embodies such
weaknesses. These human failings, his scenario for the play further
reveals, are the ‘betrayal of people’s hearts by personal and social
corruption, identifying the sources of corruption as the individual will-to-
power and the fierce competition in capitalist society’ (Murphy, 136). The
individual will-to-power, that disease that Chance is infected with, the
disease Williams maps out in ‘The Catastrophe of Success’, is of course
the desire for fame and fortune. The identification of capitalism, which is
linked to the individual will-to-power, as being one of the other corrupting
forces is crucial to understanding Williams’s play. Like his
contemporaries, Arthur Miller and William Inge, Williams is highly
critical of 1940s and 1950s America – an America saturated with an
ideology of individualism and capitalism, but an ideology that does not
allow all Americans equal footing in the competition.
Written in 1952 but revised several times until its Broadway debut in
1959, Sweet Bird of Youth resonates with the troubled climate of the
Eisenhower era (1952–60), McCarthyism (1947–57) and racial tension in
the South – a time when communists, homosexuals and people of colour
were not tolerated within mainstream America. As a Southern, gay writer,
that is, an outsider in an America that was desperately trying to hold on to
a unified white, heterosexual identity, Williams was conscious of the
troubled times this play depicts. In his ‘Foreword’ to Sweet Bird of Youth,
Williams, keenly aware of the intolerance for those who challenged white
America by being left-wing, non-heterosexual, or non-white, stated
profoundly, ‘I think that hate is a thing, a feeling, that can only exist where
there is no understanding’. As an example, Boss Finley is one of the few of
Williams’s characters that neither he nor the audience has sympathy for.
Boss Finley and his son, Tom Junior, have no understanding of the
changing world. They do, however, understand how to use rhetoric to
perpetuate their race crimes.
The Eisenhower era is sometimes romanticised as a time of prosperity
and consumerism. Nearly everyone was said to have a television, a car and
a washing machine – luxuries which previously were not commonplace
items in the average middle-class household. However, this period was
also wrought with fear and hate. The Republican Senator Joe McCarthy,
who won the respect of both President Dwight Eisenhower and President
Harry Truman before him, succeeded in stirring up hate and fear in his
attempt to rid America of political dissidents. The House on Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed in 1938, but McCarthy did not
lead his anti-Red campaign until the early 1950s at which time the
hearings were also televised. Among those who were questioned and
silenced were playwrights, directors and actors. Elia Kazan, who directed
the debut of Sweet Bird of Youth, was one such individual. If the
committee found that the individual on trial was guilty, he/she was
blacklisted from the industry. As a consequence, many in theatre and
Hollywood found themselves out of work. Fear soon spread throughout the
American entertainment business. In fact, these hearings had such a
detrimental effect on theatre and film that one New York theatre critic,
Brook Atkinson, was moved to blame McCarthyism for the lousy
Broadway season in 1952.1
This play is deeply rooted in an era of racial segregation. The Civil
Rights Act of America was not passed by Congress until 1964, five years
after this play premiered on Broadway and twelve years after the play was
initially conceived. Williams’s childhood and much of his adult life (he
was forty-one years of age when he wrote Sweet Bird of Youth) was spent
witnessing legally sanctioned racist policies and racist acts. Along with
the legally sanctioned segregation, it was not uncommon between the
years of 1882 to 1968 (though occurrences became increasingly rare after
1964) for black men to be lynched by white mobs. Many of the lynchings,
which sometimes involved castration, were acts of retribution; white
populations took it on themselves to ‘punish’ black men for ‘raping’ white
women, a violation of the Jim Crow laws (1887–1965) which made it
illegal for black men to have any sexual relations with white women.
While the accusations of ‘rape’ were often made when such violence took
place, many black men were mutilated without evidence.2
Indeed, the fear of miscegenation is crucial to the play’s political
climate. While the cast is predominately white and Southern, Chance’s
fate is paralleled to a black man who is castrated by the Youth for Tom
Finley gang to send the message that they will not allow black men to taint
the purity of white women. Boss Finley makes clear his position on the
desegregation debate. Speaking to his daughter, Heavenly, he explains:
I’m relying a great deal on this campaign to bring in young voters for
the crusade I’m leading. I’m all that stands between the South and the
black days of Reconstruction. And you and Tom Junior are going to
stand there beside me in the grand crystal ballroom, as shining
examples of white Southern youth – in danger. (56)
Boss Finley repeats this racist rhetoric during his television appearance.
While Chance and Miss Lucy watch and comment on the speech, the
audience hears the ageing politician bark his racist propaganda:
As you all know I had no part in a certain operation on a young black
gentleman. I call that incident a deplorable thing. [. . .] However . . . I
understand the emotions that lay behind it. The passion to protect by
this violent emotion something that we hold sacred: our purity of our
own blood! (85)
In the early sketches for the play, Boss Finely was drawn from the real-life
political leader Huey Long, who served as Louisiana’s governor from 1928
to 1932 and US Senator from 1932 to 1935. This right-wing politician’s
views on miscegenation left much to be desired (Parker, par. 1). While
Elia Kazan is credited with softening the character perhaps because of
Kazan’s own guilt for naming names when questioned by the HUAC, Boss
Finley remains a problematic character. He is ‘neither Kazan’s “sincere”
statesman and caring father, nor the hateful political and domestic bully
that Williams had come to consider him’ (Parker, par. 18). Disliked by
readers and audience but not despised by them, Boss Finley’s wrath
against Chance is in part understandable; after all, Chance did infect the
lovely Heavenly with a sexually transmitted disease.
Part of the problem with the character of Boss Finley is that it is unclear
whether he believes that black men are a physical threat to white
womanhood or whether he uses the rhetoric of the fear of blood
contamination to further his political career and protect his oil money. He
does, after all, attempt to marry his daughter to oil tycoons. Heavenly
confronts her father with his greedy intentions: ‘you took me out of St
Cloud, and tried to force me to marry a fifty-year-old money bag that you
wanted something out of –’ (53). Perhaps afraid that Chance would corrupt
more than Heavenly’s body – that is, that he would ruin her social status
and thus his own status – Boss Finley employs this rhetoric in his hatred of
Chance. Williams complicates the matter in that Chance has polluted
Heavenly’s body. Repeatedly, the disease that Heavenly contracted from
Chance is referred to as ‘rot’ (95, 97) and something only ‘whores’
(45, 81) contract. Having infected Heavenly with a venereal disease which
results in a badly performed hysterectomy, he will face the knife at the end
of the play.
Although we understand the anger of Boss Finley and Tom Junior, their
retribution does not fit the crime. Williams is able to ridicule the Boss
Finleys who ‘preach hate’ (79–80) and see desegregation and ruptures in
the class system (Chance is of a lower economic social group) as a danger
to white women’s sexual purity in the South.

The Korean War

Having made love to Alexandra Del Lago in Act One, Scene Two, Chance
tells the Princess his life story. While much of his story appears to be
exaggerated boasting (beginning with his being a twelve-pound baby),
Chance’s account of his stint in the Navy appears to be genuine. He
recalls:
when I came home for those visits, man oh man how that town
buzzed with excitement. I’m telling you, it would blaze with it, and
then that thing in Korea came along. I was about to be sucked into the
Army so I went into the Navy, because a sailor’s uniform suited me
better, the uniform was all that suited me, though. (36)
At the first mention of the Korean War, Chance’s mood shifts from one of
remembering how the town ‘buzzed with excitement’ each time he
returned from his stage and film adventures to the reality of the danger
that awaited him. He, much like Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie
who has returned from the Merchant Marines to remember his regrets, is
afflicted by this experience. Chance perhaps imagined that the Navy would
be a glorious adventure as depicted in films, such as those starring Victor
Mature (one of Chance’s heroes as we discover in Act Two, Scene Two).
What he discovers, however, is that he could not cope with the pressures
of war. Although initially he blames his failure to complete his tour of
duty on ‘the goddam routine, discipline’, he reveals that his medical
discharge was the result of a much more serious problem:
I started to have bad dreams. Nightmares and cold sweats at night,
and I had palpitations, and on my leave I got drunk and woke up in
strange places with faces on the next pillow I had never seen before.
[. . .] I cracked up, my nerves did. I got a medical discharge out of the
service and I came home in civvies, then it was when I noticed how
different it was, the town and the people in it. (37)
Suffering from a debilitating fear that one day ‘a bit of hot steel’ would
end his life, Chance has a nervous breakdown. Coming home, he notices
that the people of St Cloud have changed in their reaction to him, in part,
because he has no medals or visual battle wounds. In the 1950s, military
discharges were published in newspapers; hence, the people of St Cloud
would have known the cause of Chance’s early release from the service.
And, being discharged for psychological breakdown and perhaps drug and
alcohol addiction, would have been viewed with disdain by the general
public. However, what the people of St Cloud do not see, except perhaps
for Aunt Nonnie, is that Chance’s failure to become the heroic soldier is
indeed one of his more endearing qualities. When he confronts Tom Junior
in Act Two, Scene Two, he draws a distinction between himself and Boss
Finley: ‘He was just called down from the hills to preach hate. I was born
here to make love’ (79–80). Although Chance’s love-making has resulted
in pain and destruction, unlike the Tom Juniors and Boss Finleys of the
world, Chance is not fit to fight even for self-preservation. In the play’s
conclusion, he cannot strike Del Lago after she verbally cuts him down nor
can he fight off Tom Junior’s thugs. His fate is sealed.
Chance’s naval experience is also possibly what sets his thinking apart
from that of the closed-minded folk of St Cloud. Two years before the
onset of the Korean War, the armed forces implemented a desegregation
policy. Starting in 1948, white Americans in the Navy and other branches
of the US military worked side by side with black Americans and other
soldiers of colour. When Scotty tells Chance that the Youth for Tom Finley
clan ‘picked out a nigger at random and castrated the bastard to show they
mean business about white women’s protection in this state’, Chance
responds, ‘You know what that is, don’t you? Sex-envy is what that is, and
the revenge for sex-envy which is a widespread disease that I have run into
personally too often for me to doubt its existence or any manifestation’
(70–1). Chance’s diagnosis may not be psychologically or socially correct
in the world outside this play, but for the audience who has witnessed Boss
Finley’s sexual and political potency waning Chance’s definition appears
right on the mark.

‘The enemy time’

‘Tennessee Williams’s writing reveals a striking preoccupation with the
problem of time’, as Mary Ann Carrigan rightly posits (221). Like
Carrigan, other scholars have written about the theme of the passing of
time in Williams’s plays. Sweet Bird of Youth is no exception. Alycia
Smith-Howard and Greta Heintzelman assert that the primary theme of
Sweet Bird of Youth is decay and claim that to attempt to flee the
inevitable process of ageing, Chance Wayne returns to St Cloud ‘to
retrieve his youth by rekindling an innocent relationship and time in his
life’ (293). In his attempt to rekindle his first love, Chance devises a plan
to blackmail the Princess into staging a contest which he and Heavenly
will win. This contest ‘to show [her] faith in YOUTH’ (40) never
materialises despite the empathy Del Lago feels for Chance.
Later, in Act Two, Chance’s tactics to show the town of St Cloud that he
is somebody change. After popping pills and drinking vodka, he brags to
Scotty and Bud that Del Lago has signed a contract, giving him the lead
role in a film called ‘Youth’ (73). Immediately, Scotty and Bud point out
the ridiculousness of the title, seeing through Chance’s lies. However,
Chance’s fantastical schemes reveal that he still buys into the Hollywood
dream of glamour and youth. The movie camera, unlike the snapshots
Chance took of Heavenly, capturing and immortalising her young body,
threatens to frame and forever reflect back one’s ageing body as Del Lago
reveals to Chance in Act One. Ultimately, his efforts to regain his youth
are met with devastating failure. His own fall from innocence has infected
Heavenly’s body. Despite Chance’s desperate attempt to retrieve his youth,
like that of Alexandra Del Lago’s comeback and Boss Finley’s rally, there
is no turning back the clock. Even the act of cutting out the rot decaying
Heavenly’s body does not leave her unscarred. No longer a symbol of
virtue, Heavenly speaks of herself as a corpse: ‘The embalmers must have
done a good job on me, Papa’ (52). Williams, in essence, reveals that there
is no way to turn back the clock, no way to wipe the slate clean, and thus
there is no redemption to be had. The passing of time, as he writes in ‘The
Catastrophe of Success’, is ‘Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart
to its opposite’ (Glass Menagerie, 105).
Chance’s struggle to stave off time is not unique. Alexandra Del Lago
and Boss Finley also fear the ‘tick-tick’ of time which threatens to expose
the ‘burnt-out pieces’ (97) each character has become, and although
Heavenly also is a victim of time, she, unlike the others, is resigned to its
devastating cruelty. Both Chance and Boss Finley, like Del Lago, a fugitive
of her last screen debut in which the camera’s close-up exposed her age,
are in a desperate battle against time. Boss Finley’s mistress reveals that
he can no longer ‘cut the mustard’ sexually (50), and his extreme and out-
of-date politics lead him to resort to violence in the struggle to maintain
his power. Chance, never having made it in Hollywood, relies on his good
looks to latch on to wealthy and powerful women to pay his bills, but does
so with the knowledge that his hair is thinning and that which makes him
attractive to these women is fading. Heavenly, he believes, is his only way
to recapture and maintain his youth. However, she, too, has become ‘an
old childless woman’ (56) after her hysterectomy.
At the play’s conclusion, the audience realises that Williams’s ‘sweet
bird of youth’ is yet another myth – a myth that according to Williams we
have become infected by. Nearing the tragic end of the play, Chance and
Del Lago hear ‘The sound of a clock ticking . . . louder and louder’. To
this, Chance responds:
It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heartbeat, but it’s slow
dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to
burnt-out pieces . . . Time – who could beat it, who could defeat it
ever? Maybe some saints and heroes, but not Chance Wayne. I lived
on something, that – time? (97)
And continues after a brief affirmation from the Princess:
Gnaws away, like a rat gnaws off its own foot caught in a trap, and
then, with its foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn’t run,
couldn’t go, bled and died. (98)
Chance’s description of ‘the enemy, time, in all of us’ is grotesque and
violent. Time as a gradual explosion turning all humankind into burnt-out
scraps conveys images of war. Time wages a slow war on the body and
mind; it turns us into nothing more than refuse eaten by flames. His
second metaphor, one equally violent, relates to the way in which the
characters feel trapped. Caught in this trap called life, Chance reveals that
the destruction of time is an act of self-mutilation. Yet the violence we
inflict on ourselves in an attempt to flee the ticking of the clock is futile.
While Chance’s return to St Cloud, his drug and alcohol abuse and his
sexual encounters may at times allow him to ignore the passing of time,
ultimately, as he reveals, his attempts to flee merely result in paralysis.
Moreover, the image of the rat gnawing off its foot suggests that he has
already castrated himself. Although the physical mutilation that will occur
offstage will be committed by Tom Junior and his gang, Chance admits
that as a result of the choices he has made he is already maimed.

Good Friday and Easter

Williams makes the setting of Sweet Bird of Youth, ‘an Easter Sunday,
from late morning to late night’, explicit throughout. From the opening of
the play when Fly, the room-service attendant, tells Chance that ‘it’s
Easter Sunday’ (8) to Boss Finley’s closing political speech, Williams
continually reminds the audiences of the religious holiday during which
the action takes place. Although the play takes place during Easter, the
significance is anything but obvious. The audience might reasonably await
a resurrection and renewal of sorts. However, Williams exploits the
audience’s expectations, simultaneously revealing the way in which
Christianity itself is exploited. Boss Finley, on numerous occasions, uses
religion, particularly Good Friday and Easter Sunday, to attempt to elevate
his status as well as to hurt Miss Lucy. The crucifixion and resurrection of
Jesus Christ becomes a tool, and, in certain circumstances, a weapon for
those attempting to maintain or seize power. Boss Finley first employs the
image of Christ’s crucifixion after he is attacked by Tom Junior about his
relations with Miss Lucy: ‘Mind your own goddam business. A man with a
mission, which he holds sacred, and on the strength of which he rises to
high public office – crucified in this way, publicly, by his own
offspring’ (51). Using the rhetoric of religious doctrine, Boss Finley sets
himself up as a Christ-like figure, crucified by his son.
Having been ‘crucified’ by his lover as well, Boss Finley seeks revenge
on Miss Lucy. When Miss Lucy first appears with her finger bandaged, she
relates to Stuff the extent of Boss Finley’s cruelty. Boss Finley, she
explains, brought her a candy Easter egg with a jewellery box inside it.
When she opened the Easter egg and the jewellery box, she found a lovely
diamond pin inside, but as she was about to remove the pin, ‘the old son of
a bitch slam[med] the lid of the box on [her] fingers’ (59). Disguising his
‘weapon’ in a candy Easter egg, Boss Finley masks his violent nature.
While at times seemingly sweet and generous to Miss Lucy, unlike Christ
he does not forgive and he is not afraid to punish those who threaten his
sexual and political image.
Boss Finley again draws a parallel between himself and Christ during
his television rally:
Last Friday . . . Last Friday, Good Friday. I said last Friday, Good
Friday . . . Quiet, may I have your attention please. . . . Last Friday,
Good Friday, I seen a horrible thing on the campus of our great State
University, which I built for the state. A hideous strawstuffed effigy
of myself, Tom Finley, was hung and set fire to in the main
quadrangle of the college. This outrage was inspired . . . inspired by
the Northern radical press. However, that was Good Friday. Today is
Easter. I say that was Good Friday. Today is Easter Sunday and I am
in St Cloud. (86)
In this passage, in which Boss Finley struggles to be heard by a crowd
already stirred up by the Heckler’s intrusion, the ageing politician grasps
at Christian doctrine to appeal to his audience. Revealing that the youth of
Florida have burned an effigy of him on Good Friday, Boss Finley
attempts to position himself as a saviour whom the youth of his state,
polluted by what is written in the Northern papers, cannot yet appreciate.
Ending his speech (which also concludes Act Two) with ‘Today is Easter
Sunday and I am in St Cloud’, Boss Finley evokes a resurrection, but this
is a resurrection that never takes place perhaps because, although Boss
Finley may attempt to fashion himself as a saviour, for Williams and his
audience, this demagogue is more clearly aligned with the thieves
crucified alongside Christ. Thomas Adler adds that ‘Sweet Bird of Youth
ends, significantly, not on Easter morning – which is the moment of
complete belief and hope – but on Easter evening, biblically a moment of
absolute doubt and challenge to faith that can be alloyed only by
dependence on experimental proof of a resurrection’ (148), but it is a
resurrection that Williams never allows for.
 Williams also cheats his audience into believing that Alexandra Del
Lago and Chance Wayne might possibly be resurrected – he cheats us into
believing that there might be a happy ending after all. Although Chance
has returned to regain his lost youth and his lost girl, his desperate
attempts are met with failure. He gains the Princess’s sympathy for a time,
and with it her financial and emotional support, but finds himself ‘lost in
beanstalk country, the ogre’s country at the top of the beanstalk, the
country of the flesh-hungry, blood-thirsty ogre’ (77), as Del Lago so
fittingly describes the world of St Cloud and beyond. St Cloud is, indeed, a
place where ‘monsters’ like Tom Junior and his father seek out and
commit violent acts against those perceived as trespassers. In the end,
Chance, ‘with a sort of deathbed dignity and honesty’, resigns himself to
his fate. He allows Tom Junior, Scotty and Bud to enter the room, and as
these brutal youths surround him, he rises up to approach the audience
with his last words: ‘I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your
understanding – not even that – no. Just for your recognition of me in you,
and the enemy, time, in us all’ (98). By having the last lines before the
curtain falls spoken to the audience, Williams positions Chance as the
audience’s messenger. Yet, rather than have this messenger rise up
triumphantly, as would be fitting for Easter, he has Chance face his doom,
his crucifixion of sorts. However, before his castration, Chance asks his
audience to recognise that a part of him resides within us. We desire
success, youth, happiness and love, but the ‘monsters’ in this play (the
Finley clan and time) keep us from succeeding.
Del Lago, one of the few characters who sympathises with Chance,
knows very well how hard it is to succeed in this monstrous world. In the
last act, it is tempting to associate the Easter resurrection with Del Lago’s
comeback, especially after she discovers that her last film has ‘broken
box-office records’ and been called ‘the greatest comeback in the history
of the industry’ (94). Yet, even Del Lago does not believe that her rebirth
as a film star will last. While nothing in Del Lago’s dialogue gives her
doubts away, Williams reveals that the Princess, even after her bitter
argument with Chance, again tries to convince him to leave with her
because she knows her fame will be short-lived:
The report from Sally Powers may be and probably is a factually
accurate report; but to indicate she is going on to further triumph
would be to falsify her future. She makes this instinctive admission to
 herself when she sits down by Chance on the bed, facing the
audience. Both are faced with castration, and in her heart she knows
it. (97)
This knowledge of the castration she too faces is difficult for an actress to
convey. Without dialogue that designates her doubt and lack of faith in her
future, Del Lago must express through her gestures that she is fated, as is
Chance. Her journey, Williams reveals, is one that will result in future
disappointment, flight from failure and ultimately crucifixion without
resurrection.

Cut: Film and television

When Chance recalls for Del Lago and later for Aunt Nonnie his past, the
audience learns that his first attempt to make a name for himself was on
stage. His plan, like the dreams of many actors of the 1950s, was to land
roles on Broadway (at which he is in part successful) before heading out to
Hollywood. This Hollywood dream, the dream of seeing one’s name on a
screen shown across the country, is for many a bitter nightmare. The film
industry, for Williams, has the ability to offer instant success as well as
instant failure. Del Lago testifies to this when she bitterly says:
Ha . . . Ha. . . . The glorious comeback, when I turned fool and came
back. . . . The screen’s a very clear mirror. There’s a thing called a
close-up. The camera advances and you stand still and your head,
your face, is caught in the frame of the picture with a light blazing on
it and all your terrible history screams while you smile . . . (25)
Once a star with her own fan club, Del Lago, having agreed to come back
to the movies, takes desperate flight after hearing the audience gasp at her
close-up at the film’s premiere. Oddly, her description of the close-up
resembles that of a torture sequence – a light blazing in her face as her
‘terrible history screams’ out. Her ‘history’, while in part a reference to
having aged, also reflects how she has passed the years. There is a sense in
her recollection of the premiere that Del Lago’s initial disappearance from
the Silver Screen was the result of some undesirable past behaviour; she
was, according to her own accounts of Franz Albertzart, a diva. What she
then sees and perceives others witnessing is her past, those years she hid
from the camera. This camera, like ‘a very clear mirror’, reflects not only
her physical flaws but also her ethical and moral blemishes.
When Del Lago asks Chance to tell his life story as an ‘audition, a sort
of screen test’ (35), she symbolically places a mirror in front of him. He
begins boasting about his popularity in St Cloud and his minor successes
on Broadway, but Chance’s ‘screen test’ begins to reflect a troubled youth.
Williams ‘proposed to use the screen as the metaphor for consciousness, a
consciousness both lyrical and philosophical – personal and public – in
nature’ (Jackson, 196). While no camera or screen is present in this scene,
Chance’s monologue is directed on the forestage; he is speaking out to the
audience while Del Lago, staring into a mirror, applies her make-up.
Speaking to an imaginary camera, Chance’s mood shifts as he recollects
his Navy service, his drinking, his sexual promiscuity and his other
failures, including Heavenly’s attempt to push him away, with a tragic
aura. It is when he becomes sincere that he captures the Princess’s
attention. ‘Chance’, Del Lago tenderly says moving away from the mirror,
‘you’re a lost little boy that I really would like to help find himself ’ (41).
At this point, Chance awakens from the trance of the imaginary mirror
reflecting his sad life, and states confidently, ‘I passed the screen test!’ For
Williams, acting is not pretending to be someone one is not; it is not just
play. He worked with method actors – actors working with techniques of
tapping into one’s own past experiences to convey the emotional depth of
the characters they are embodying. In acting and perhaps in writing for the
screen or stage, one inadvertently expresses one’s own tragedy. This is not
to be mistaken with biographical interpretations of plays, that is, Williams
is not staging his life over and over again in his plays. He understands,
however, that an actor and a writer brings his history with him, and
ultimately this is also what makes the industry so cruel. Those who cannot
face the mirror that will expose their ugliness as well as beauty fail.
Williams additionally takes his pen(knife) to the television industry.
Not only does the camera threaten Del Lago, exposing more than she
wishes others to see, but also television allows Boss Finley, and politicians
like Joe McCarthy, to stage, perform and ultimately to try to ‘cut’ his way
to the top. Williams’s technique to represent the television screen on stage
warrants some note. While Stuff, Miss Lucy and Chance initially look out
towards the fourth wall, where a beam of light flickers indicating the
television screen, a sudden shift takes place. When Chance walks
downstage, ‘the whole back wall of the stage’ becomes a giant television
screen. Boss Finley is seen, larger than life, with his ‘arm around
Heavenly’ (84). Despite Boss Finley’s attempt to use national television
coverage to boost his voting public, the screen, which has the potential to
manipulate time, place and circumstances (Jackson, 195–6), ultimately
reveals his personal ugliness when he has the Heckler removed from the
rally. Captured on screen is not just the apparently pure image of Heavenly
and her proud brother and father, but also Boss Finley’s inability to face
his ‘terrible history’ – the family tragedy and his failing political pull is
captured on the public screen/mirror. If, as Roland Barthes argues, what
politicians attempt to create when they appear in front of a camera is an
image that their public recognises within themselves,3 then here the public
sees its own racism and sexism. Williams asks his audience to see the
stage as a mirror of an America polluted by narrow-minded Boss Finleys.
However, Williams incites his audience with an urge to rid America of
such ugliness – the ugliness of the HUAC, of a segregated South and of a
homophobic nation.

Structure, Language and Style

Structure
While the structure of Sweet Bird of Youth often has been criticised as
clumsy and disjointed, it pulls together private and public anxieties
concerning age, the loss of power and the fear of the ‘other’ through
spacial arenas. The play is set in two main spaces – the hotel (the bedroom
and lounge) and the terrace of the Finely home. These spaces interestingly
blur the distinction between the private and public, as does Boss Finley
who uses his children to further his political means. Jo Mielziner’s
original set design in which the hotel bedroom was present in each act
realises this breakdown of the personal and political tragedies in Sweet
Bird of Youth. The structure and the set design ultimately bring together
the stories of Chance and Del Lago, Chance and Heavenly, and the
political turmoil of the South.
Sweet Bird of Youth takes a great deal from Greek tragedy. Despite the
various locations, the play, like those of the Greeks, takes place in one day
‘from late morning till late night’. As the play continues, the dramatic
urgency intensifies until the tragic end. The tragedy, in Sweet Bird of Youth
as in Greek drama, lies in the downfall of a larger-than-life character.
Williams interestingly depicts the downfall of three demigods – Alexandra
Del Lago who is in exile after her fall, Chance Wayne whose boasting
elevates his status to a monumental gigolo and Boss Finley whose
bellowing at rallies cannot stop his political power from coming to an end.
Both Boss Finley and Chance are sacrificed within the action of the play.
Chance’s castration (though never enacted on stage) is more than brutality;
it is a ritualistic cutting to send a warning to those who threaten the social
structure of St Cloud. Boss Finley’s rally is disrupted in the same manner
as it had been before; the repetition in method and of questions transforms
the event into a ritualistic roasting.

Language
Williams’s writing is often described as poetic. His use of metaphors,
symbols, repetition, dialect and slang help to construct the vivid worlds he
stages. Embodying his central characters, Chance and Del Lago, with a
language rich in images borrowed from children’s fairytales, images of
insects, rats and other animals gnawing at abstractions such as time, and
endowing them with lengthy personal histories, Williams elevates their
status. Chance and Del Lago are not only given the most lines but their use
of language also reveals that these two figures are dreamers, rich in
imaginative power and longing to create personas on the Silver Screen.
They, like Boss Finley, are hyper-aware of the audience, speaking always
as if they are performing. Along with the rich images that Chance conjures
up, he turns to the auditorium, speaking to the audience in Act One, Scene
Two, when he recalls the life he has led, and in Act Three when he is about
to face castration. Unlike Boss Finley whose speeches are disrupted,
Chance’s are observed in silence, much like those of a Shakespearean hero.
The use of slang and dialect in Sweet Bird of Youth is often associated
with the antagonists. Tom Junior and his father speak with strong southern
accents, often leaving off the endings to words. Although they know how
to use language to perpetuate their racist ideologies, ultimately for an
educated audience, their dialect and slang signal their barbarism. Tom
Junior, for example, uses profanity such as ‘ruttin’ and shows little respect
to his elders. Williams aligns the way in which a character speaks with his
temperament.
 Plastic theatre
In his production notes for The Glass Menagerie, Williams wrote of a
form of theatre that he hoped would take hold on the American stage.
Plastic theatre, as he called this form, was an attempt to create theatre in
which ‘truth, life, or reality is an organic thinking which poetic
imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through changing
into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance’.
Leaving behind realist conventions which had all too much dominated the
American stage, Williams created a dramatic form which merged a poetic,
lyric quality with popular appeal. His revolutionary concept of plastic
theatre merged non-verbal expressions to illuminate the dialogue and
textual version of the play. In Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams achieves this
new dramatic form through his use of symbols, as seen in the gulls, the
recurring musical composition called the ‘Lament’ and the use of a
cyclorama on which ‘nonrealistic projections’ ‘should give a poetic unity
of mood to the several specific settings’ (5).
Before any word is uttered on stage, the audience hears ‘the soft, urgent
cries of birds, [and] the sound of their wings’ (7). Immediately, Williams
signals to the audience that this play is about an urgency to soar above
one’s status and to flee one’s failures. After this, Fly, the black man who
provides room-service at the Royal Palms Hotel, appears with vodka,
another form of escape. This minor character, only seen briefly, reminds
the audience that, like Chance, he is stuck in a dead-end job in a racist
Southern town which will viciously cut him if he is caught on the street
after midnight.
The gulls appear again immediately after Chance learns of his mother’s
death: ‘Chance slowly turns his back on the man and crosses to the
window. Shadows of birds sweep the blind. He lowers it a little before he
turns back to Scudder’ (10). They reappear only a few pages later, after
Scudder has left and once Alexandra Del Lago has woken from her
drunken sleep. While Del Lago attempts to figure out where she is and
with whom she shares her bed, the audience sees ‘Gulls fly past window,
shadows sweeping the blind: they cry out with soft urgency’ (21). These
birds are not ‘birds of youth’, frolicking and singing in the sun without
cares. In both instances, the shadows of their wings signal a desire to flee,
yet an inability to escape. The gulls stay near the sea, as Chance does,
because the ocean is their home; however, it is a home that is bound up
with uncertainty and danger. What lies beneath the water is unknown. The
cries of these gulls, moreover, are not sweet, like the cooing of pigeons.
Del Lago remarks that they sound like ‘pigeons with laryngitis’ (21). Their
hoarse cries are filled with a panic-stricken urgency which is mirrored in
Chance and the Princess.
Although Williams’s positioning of the gulls is not as specific later in
the play, the terrifying cries of these birds are ever-present in Act Two,
Scene One. ‘The Gulf’, he writes, ‘is suggested by the brightness and the
gulls crying as in Act One’ (43). Here the gulls heighten the audience’s
awareness of Boss Finley’s desperate attempt to maintain his political
power and to re-establish the respect he once held in his family. When told
that his mistress, Miss Lucy, has exposed his ageing and no longer virile
body, Boss Finley is ‘wounded, baffled’ (51). Indeed, the description
‘baffled’ is used in conjunction with Boss Finley again when he watches
his daughter shortly after.
The ever-present cries of the gulls, moreover, reflect Heavenly’s
tragedy. Rendered barren by her hysterectomy, she has become a corpse.
When asked where Heavenly is, her brother, Tom Junior says, ‘She’s lyin’
out on the beach like a dead body washed up on it’ (46). Williams asks us
to imagine the beauty, washed up on the shore, as gulls frantically swoop
down and devour her much like Boss Finley who insists that she escort
him in his television appearance in a ‘stainless white’ dress ‘to scotch
these rumors about your corruption’ (56). But by putting Heavenly in the
public eye, Boss Finley exposes her to the Heckler’s and by extension the
viewing public’s vicious pecking.
Apart from the ‘Mozartian music, suggesting a court dance’ (52), which
was cut from the production of the play and the popular tunes sung in the
bar during Act Two, Scene Two, the only music in Sweet Bird of Youth is
the ‘Lament’, or ‘Lamentation’ as it is sometimes called. Although this
piece of music was composed specifically for the play by Williams’s old
friend Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, the ‘Lament’ has a long
tradition in the arts. It is one of the oldest poetic expressions of grief,
regret and sorrow in Western music. In Baroque opera, the Lament is often
an aria sung by the leading lady. Williams’s ‘Lament’, heard seven times
during the play, serves a similar purpose. When this composition is heard,
Chance is hopeless. Towards the end of Act One, Scene One, as Chance’s
situation becomes increasingly desperate, the Lament makes its first
appearance. From this moment, we understand Chance’s attempt to
blackmail the Princess Kosmonopolis is an act of desperation – not an act
of greed but a struggle to regain his lost youth by winning over the girl he
loved. The Lament, however, also signals that his plan will backfire.
Despite his attempt to make the ageing actress submit to him, he will have
to submit to Alexandra Del Lago before the end of Act One. After the
Lament begins again, Del Lago softly tells Chance that she needs
that distraction. It’s time for me to find out if you’re able to give it to
me. You mustn’t hang onto your silly little idea that you can increase
your value by turning away and looking out a window when
somebody wants you . . . I want you . . . I say now and I mean now,
then and not until then will I call downstairs and tell the hotel cashier
that I’m sending a young man down with some travelers’ checks to
cash for me . . . (33)
Attempting to shame the Princess into signing her cheques, he in turn is
shamed as he becomes her gigolo. The Lament arises early on in Scene
Two of the First Act. Full of regret and sorrow for his shameful sexual act,
Chance now reveals more than his current desperation. He reveals his
entire lamentable history.
The Lament is not heard again until Act Two, Scene Two, after Tom
Junior confronts Chance with Heavenly’s tragedy. In response to Tom
Junior’s charge that Chance passed on a venereal disease which he
contracted after sleeping with ‘Minnie, that slept with any goddam gigolo
bastard she could pick up on Bourbon Street or the docks’, Chance says, ‘I
left town before I found out I –’ (81). Here, the Lament signals Chance’s
sorrow at discovering he has infected Heavenly, and that, as a result,
Heavenly was operated on. The Lament may also signal his regret for not
contacting her once he knew of his own diseased body. If Heavenly had
known and if the disease had been diagnosed early on, she would have
been spared being ‘spayed like a dawg by Dr George Scudder’s knife’. The
Lament, here, works to draw out sympathy for Chance. While his actions
are not commendable, he does feel sorrow and regret.
As Chance returns to the Princess, who has since ventured downstairs in
a dishevelled and drugged state, ‘“The Lament” is in the air. It blends with
the wind-blown sound of the palms.’ It is at this moment that the Lament is
clearly defined. Del Lago describes it as a feeling of loss:
All day I’ve kept hearing a sort of lament that drifts through the air of
this place. It says, ‘Lost, lost, never to be found again.’ Palm gardens
by the sea and olive groves on Mediterranean islands all have that
lament drifting through them. ‘Lost, lost’. . . . The isle of Cyprus,
Monte Carlo, San Remo, Torremolenas, Tangiers. They’re all places
of exile from whatever we loved. Dark glasses, wide-brimmed hats
and whispers, ‘Is that her?’ Shocked whispers. . . . Oh, Chance,
believe me, after failure comes flight. Nothing ever comes after
failure but flight. Face it. Call the car, have them bring down the
luggage and let’s go on along the Old Spanish Trail. (She tries to hold
him.) (82)
While St Cloud is initially a place of exile for the Princess, the whispers
begin to haunt her, revealing that she must flee again. But more
importantly, she recognises before Chance does that his comeback has
been a failure. His only chance of escaping bodily harm, she knows, is
flight. For Chance, St Cloud was once an exile from his failure to become
a film star but now it is his doom.
During the play’s last moments in Act Three, the Lament returns
signalling Chance’s doom. After the frightening visit Tom Junior and his
clan pay to Del Lago, she reminds Chance that he was the one who ‘put
such rot in [Heavenly’s] body she had to be gutted and hung on a butcher’s
hook, like a chicken dressed for Sunday’. Hearing this, initially aiming at
the Princess, he ‘strikes down at his own belly and he bends double with a
sick cry. Palm Garden wind: whisper of “The Lament” ’ (95). And only a
few moments later when Chance is resolved to face his castration, the
Lament fades in and continues for the remainder of the play (97). The echo
of ‘lost, lost, lost’ is crucial here. Not only is Chance about to lose his
virility, but also recognises that he has lost his youthfulness, his hope and
his will to go on. His acceptance of his fate is almost honourable.
The sets, Williams urges, ‘should be treated as freely and sparingly as
the sets for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Summer and Smoke’ (3). Murphy
confirms that the Broadway premiere of Sweet Bird of Youth did indeed
resemble Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with a bed occupying a large part of the
playing field. Furthermore, no walls or doors were constructed on stage;
all the doors and windows were mimed. The spaces were non-realistic as
they ran into one another. Even during the bar-room scene, for example,
the bedroom was partly visible. To suggest this non-realistic, fluid space,
the cyclorama at the rear of the stage was essential as it conveyed ‘shutters
in the first scene and palms, sea, and sky when the “shutters” were
“opened” ’ (Murphy, 145). In his ‘Setting and Special Effects’, Williams
stressed that ‘During the daytime scenes the cyclorama projection is a
poetic abstraction of semitropical sea and sky in fair spring weather. At
night it is the Palm Garden with its branches among the stars’ (3). The
focus on the non-realistic, the abstract, moves this play away from realist
conventions in which the setting or projections would reflect the current
turmoil of the characters. Instead, Williams uses the cyclorama to create a
contrast between the lives of Chance and the Princess, and the seemingly
peaceful outside world. The beauty of the palm garden and the sea remind
the viewers just how artificial such hotel settings are. In other words, the
world Chance and Del Lago live in is brutal; it only appears to be calm and
beautiful. Moreover, the image of the palm branches among the stars is
symbolic. While never reaching the stars, the night shadows give the
illusion of reaching for the unobtainable. Chance’s attempt to reach for
Heaven(ly) – is an impossibility.

Southern Gothic
Sweet Bird of Youth is an example of Southern Gothic, which draws on the
Gothic tradition of nineteenth-century England that, among other traits,
questions whether monstrous outcasts are truly monstrous – as seen in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1839). A key feature of Southern Gothic is
the plight of ostracised and oppressed individuals, such as blacks,
homosexuals, women and Northerners, who were deemed dangerous to the
fragile antebellum South. In Sweet Bird of Youth, while all the characters
are damaged and delusional (another feature of Southern Gothic),
Williams succeeds in stirring up panic and sympathy for Chance whose
fate parallels the story of a black man castrated by Tom Junior and his
Youth for Tom Finley clan. Chance is the ostracised Other who threatens
the stability of St Cloud because his presence is a constant reminder of the
corruption and pollution eating away at the community.
Characters

Despite his previous successes with creating vivid characters such as Tom
and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche and Stanley in A
Streetcar Named Desire, Maggie and Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
among other notable characters, Tennessee Williams was never quite
satisfied with the characters of Sweet Bird of Youth. Although he ‘was
deeply interested in the two main characters [Chance and Del Lago]’, he
told Manchester Guardian Weekly’s W. J. Weatherby in 1959, ‘the other
characters did not have the same interest for me’ (quoted in Devlin, 60).
He felt particularly dissatisfied with Boss Finley. The power of Sweet Bird
of Youth rests in the two main characters’ struggle against a world of
hateful and cruel monsters.

Chance Wayne
Although Williams was interested in the development of Chance Wayne,
more than a decade after the play opened on Broadway he was still
unsatisfied with this ‘hustler hero of Sweet Bird of Youth’ (Clum, 128). In
a 1971 interview with Jeanne Fayard, Williams expressed that he never
felt that Chance was an effective character. He went on to explain that
Chance
is used in a symbolic manner. It [his castration] is a ritualistic death,
a metaphor. He had to be real to be important. You cannot use a
character as a dramatic symbol if he is important. You cannot use a
character as a dramatic symbol if he is not first real to you. I didn’t
discover his real value until the end. (Quoted in Devlin, 211)
For his audiences, however, Chance is much more than a symbol. The
play’s intrigue is partly a result of the empathy that characters like Chance
evoke in viewers. We see ourselves, or at least our dreams, in his struggle
to be famous and his failure to achieve that success. This particular myth,
rooted in the American consciousness, commonly referred to as ‘the
American Dream’, recalls a tradition depicted in American Realist novels
such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). Like Clyde, the
protagonist of Dreiser’s novel, Chance strives to rise above his poverty
and in doing so compromises ethical and moral codes. In Sweet Bird of
Youth, however, the gigolo’s failure does not leave the audience with a
moral lesson. For Williams, those who succeed and those who do not are
no more or less virtuous than the other characters struggling to make a
name for themselves.
Furthermore, Williams reveals that the American dream, or the
Cinderella story, turns individuals into monsters. This is clearly seen when
Chance, struggling to capture the attention and trust of the bar-room crowd
in Act Two, is suddenly faced with Del Lago. High on drugs and alcohol,
the Princess, having felt something for Chance when he confessed his
failures to her in Act One, Scene Two, ventures to find him so that they
can escape the doom she feels approaching in St Cloud. Alone and seeking
comfort from him in the flight she wishes for them both, she pleads,
‘Don’t leave me. If you do I’ll turn into the monster again. I’ll be the first
lady of the Beanstalk Country’ (82). Chance, however, does not soften to
her desperate appeal. Instead, ‘in [his own] desperation’, he calls out,
‘Wheel chair! . . . Wheel chair! Stuff, get the lady a wheel chair! She’s
having another attack!’ While Chance’s inability to care for Del Lago in
her moment of despair is undoubtedly cruel, it is important to note that at
this very moment he is desperate to regain his reputation and his youth. He
is consumed with a dream which has infected him like the disease he has
put into Heavenly’s body, rotting away his moral and ethical responses and
transforming him into a monster – cruel and selfish, ready to destroy those
in his way.
Chance is much more complicated than Williams realised. While he
displays cruelty when desperate, he is quite tender and lovable when he
remembers his failures. When reminiscing with Aunt Nonnie about his
first stage appearance at ‘a lousy national contest’, he finally lets his guard
down after trying to convince himself that they won a prize:
We would have won it, but I blew my lines. Yes, I that put on and
produced the damn thing, couldn’t even hear the damn lines being
hissed at me by that fat girl with the book in the wings. (He buries his
face in his hands.) (63)
Aunt Nonnie here speaks for the audience: ‘I loved you for that, son, and
so did Heavenly, too.’ These moments of weakness, vulnerability and
honesty set Chance apart from the cruel inhabitants of St Cloud.
Williams’s genius as a playwright lies in his ability to stir sympathy for
Chance, to transform this tainted man who lacks moral fibre into a hero of
sorts. Despite his bad choices, selfishness and bravado, among other vices,
Chance is wronged; the audience does not want this faded golden boy to be
castrated.

Alexandra Del Lago

Alexandra Del Lago is notably one of Williams’s complex and memorable
female characters. This ageing, washed-up movie star is at times a self-
proclaimed ‘monster’. In her heyday, she was a diva, breaking the careers
of young men like Franz Albertzart: ‘I had to fire him. He held me too
tight in the waltz scene, his anxious fingers left bruises once so violent,
they, they dislocated a disc in my spine’ (90). Even after her return to the
screen, a return she believes has been a failure, she asserts her power over
young men. In her flight, she uses beach boys like Chance to distract her
from the harsh reality that ‘she is equally doomed. She can’t turn back the
clock any more than can Chance, and the clock is equally relentless to
them both’ (96–7). Her ability to devour and destroy men is, according to
Chance, an act of emasculation. When Del Lago tries to convince Chance
to leave with her in the final act, reminding him that if he stays he will be
castrated, Chance says, ‘You did that to me this morning, here on this bed,
where I had the honor, where I had the great honor . . .’ (95). However, her
acts of emasculating men are not out of ‘sex-envy’, bigotry or hate.
Rather, her acts are tied to her vanity – her longing for youth. Like
Chance, she seeks to blind herself to the ticking of the clock through
sexual unions with the young.
Del Lago is not simply a frustrated monster, seeking the admiring gaze
of her fans and the ‘hairless, silky-smooth gold’ (18) bodies of young men.
She is, as Williams’s agent asserted about all Williams’s female
characters, an ordinary woman. Recalling an encounter with a group of
angry women after the premiere of Summer and Smoke, Williams writes
that they asked, ‘Why do you always write about frustrated women?’
(Where I Live, 26). His agent, Margo Jones, rescued him from the
confrontation. Williams recalls that Jones told these women, ‘Tennessee
does not write about abnormal characters!’ He writes about ‘People!’
Alexandra Del Lago is very real, complete with grand neuroses and the
means temporarily to forget them. At times monstrous, the Princess is also
a vulnerable, frightened animal. She does not stick around to fight her
battles, but runs until all is clear. While we often see the Princess bossing
Chance around, calling his bluff and ridiculing his pathetic attempt to
blackmail her, Del Lago also displays moments of vulnerability. In Act
One, Scene Two, she is touched by Chance’s life story (perhaps because it
is similar to her own). In the following act, she stumbles into the bar,
drunk and high, but ready to admit that Chance has made her feel
something for someone other than herself. And in Act Three, after her
encouraging phone call with Sally Powers, Del Lago, revealing her own
vulnerability, again identifies with Chance:
In both Chance and the Princess, we should return to the huddling
together of the lost, but not with sentiment, which is false, but with
whatever is truthful in the moments when people share doom, face
firing squads together. (96)
Regardless of the positive reviews of her comeback, Del Lago knows her
success will not last.
Her alias, the Princess Kosmonopolis, likewise points to the complexity
of Del Lago’s character. Not merely a diva, struggling to survive in the
movie industry that turned her into a monster, her alias leads back to
Williams’s discussion of the ‘Cinderella story’ as well as suggesting that
before being consumed by this Hollywood dream, she was capable of
kindness, generosity and grace – traits that in fairytales lead the princess
to winning her prince. However, in the modern age, even when this
princess displays kindness and generosity, she is ultimately unable to
transform or for that matter save Chance. The pseudonym, furthermore,
reflects her past. Like Chance (and Cinderella who cleaned and toiled for
her step-sisters), Del Lago was not always rich and famous. She began,
like them, with only beauty to boast of. The power struggle between
Chance and Del Lago is, in part, fuelled by their recognition of their
similarities. Chance could easily have reaped the benefits of fame as Del
Lago does and she could easily have remained paralysed in her poverty.

Boss Finley
Tennessee Williams revealed that for him it was important to like his
characters, but to like Boss Finley was impossible (Gunn, 27). Never quite
satisfied, Williams allowed Elia Kazan to develop the Boss Finley sections
for the 1959 Broadway debut of Sweet Bird of Youth. Kazan softened the
tyrant considerably, transforming him into a sincere politician and loving
father (Parker, par. 18). However, when Williams revised the play for
publication in 1960–1, he omitted many of Kazan’s additions (Parker,
par. 1), leaving contemporary readers and viewers with a portrait of a
‘hateful political and domestic bully’ (Parker, par. 18).
Nevertheless, Boss Finley’s desperate struggle to survive the changes
occurring in the modern world, a struggle against time, makes him more
than just a political and domestic tyrant. Indeed, there is an unmistakable
resemblance between Boss Finley and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Big Daddy,
as Brenda Murphy and other scholars point out. However, unlike Big
Daddy who is an ‘epic figure, an icon of masculinity, vitality, and power’
(see 196), Boss Finley is not bestowed with ‘a kingly magnitude’, a
description given to Big Daddy by the playwright in his Memoirs. While
Big Daddy, like Boss Finley, is a domineering father who is desperately
trying to maintain his patriarchal position within the family, he, unlike
Boss Finley, is just and kind as is notable in his behaviour towards
Maggie. Although a hateful figure, Boss Finley is much more complex
than the bigoted and corrupt politician Williams thought him. A hillbilly,
according to himself and Miss Lucy, he is perhaps a victim of his own
environment and upbringing. He is not an educated man, although he has
helped to build the state’s university. Despite being one of the founders of
this institution, his attitude towards education is mixed. Although he is
humiliated by Tom Junior’s having ‘flunked out of college with grades that
only a moron would have an excuse for’, Boss Finley does not value the
process of learning. He aids his son in being readmitted ‘by fake
examinations, answers provided beforehand, stuck in your fancy pockets’
(50). Helping his son to cheat his way back into college, Boss Finley
reveals that his corruption goes beyond pocketing oil money; it has
infected every institution in Florida.
Boss Finley will go to great lengths to create the illusion of a happy and
successful family. Along with attempting to create the illusion of his son’s
intellectual integrity, he also attempts to mask the tragedy of his
daughter’s venereal disease. Initially he tries to cover up her operation.
Even after promoting Dr Scudder to chief surgeon and arranging a
marriage between the two (a marriage that has not yet taken place), Boss
Finley fails to keep Heavenly’s secret. Forcing his daughter to join him at
the Youth for Tom Finley televised rally to represent white purity, he
believes that ‘lookin’ at you [Heavenly], all in white like a virgin, nobody
would dare to speak or believe the ugly stories about you’ (56). However,
he is not really concerned about his daughter’s reputation or feelings nor is
he concerned about Tom Junior’s obscene behaviour. He ultimately uses
his children: his concern is his own reputation and the winning of the next
election. He is afraid that the scandals surrounding his children will
‘defeat the mission’ to eradicate ‘all of them that want to adulterate the
pure white blood of the South’ (57).
These extreme attempts to hide his family’s failures reflect Boss
Finley’s awareness of his loss of power, both in the home and in the
political arena. Angry and frustrated with Tom Junior, he says,
It’s a curious thing, a mighty peculiar thing, how often a man that
rises to high public office is drug back down by every soul he harbors
under his roof. He harbors them under his roof, and they pull the roof
down on him. Every last living one of them. (49)
During their family dispute, Boss Finley and his son are described as ‘two
stags’, prepared to buck each other. The description is one that leads back
to masculinity and power. Boss Finley, being the older ‘stag’, is bound to
lose. He can no longer maintain the alpha position, as seen when the
hillbilly heckler disrupts the rally. The Heckler unsettles Boss Finley, not
by attacking his politics in an objective debate, but by targeting Boss
Finley’s greatest wound – Heavenly’s impurity.

Heavenly Finley
At the opening of the play, Fly, the bellboy, speaks of Heavenly and
Chance’s young love. Having been a waiter in the Grand Ballroom years
ago, he tells Chance that he used to see him ‘with that real pretty girl you
used to dance so good with, Mr Boss Finley’s daughter’ (8). While this
reference to Heavenly seems insignificant at first, as Act One progresses
the audience discovers that Chance has returned for the young Heavenly
whose photograph he carries around with him. This photograph both
reveals what she once was to Chance and what she has become. A nude
image of a fifteen-year-old girl with the tide ‘beginning to lap over her
body like it desired her like [Chance] did and still [does] and will always,
always’ (38), the photograph signifies youth and Chance’s desire to
possess that youth. The water lapping over Heavenly’s body, furthermore,
preps the audience for another destructive image. In Act Two, Scene One,
she stops and contemplates a fern ravished by the wind. Like the delicate
fern ‘that the salty Gulf wind has stripped nearly bare’ (53), the salt water
of the Gulf of Mexico symbolises the process of decay. Heavenly, while
only fifteen in the photograph, has already been sexually involved with
Chance – an involvement which is the end of her purity and innocence.
Photographs are mere traces, shadowy figments, of the individual
photographed. As a reproduction of Heavenly, the photograph signifies the
hollowness of this idealised image which Chance carries around with him.
She, as Clum astutely describes, is ‘a mirage, the shell of the girl Chance
loved’ (140). Not only is the photograph a false image of the Heavenly
that we meet in the second act, but it is also only a trace of what she once
was. She is, indeed, washed up on the shore like a shell, or as Tom Junior
more crudely puts it, ‘She’s lyin’ out on the beach like a dead body washed
up on it’ (46). Several of the play’s characters, including Heavenly herself,
refer to her body as dead, gutted and old. Defeated, Heavenly apologises to
her father for the embarrassment her hysterectomy causes him but reveals
that her own pain exceeds his:
I felt worse than embarrassed when I found out that Dr George
Scudder’s knife had cut the youth out of my body, made me an old
childless woman. Dry, cold, empty, like an old woman. (55–6)
Acknowledging her own emptiness, she cannot be anything more to
Chance than an empty, hollow dream – a mirage in desolate Beanstalk
Country.

Tom Junior
While Boss Finley represents politically charged hatred and bigotry, his
son, Tom Junior, is perhaps more despicable. He has been the subject of
many scandals. Without the help of his father’s corrupt methods, Tom
Junior would not have been to college. Furthermore, he has received
newspaper coverage for ‘drunk drivin’’ and ‘once for a stag party’ that
cost Boss Finley a considerable amount of money to ‘hush it up’ (49).
Despite the supposed justice he seeks for his sister, Tom Junior is not
concerned with Heavenly’s well-being. His actions are motivated by his
own loss of pride; like his father he has been shamed by her sexual
relationship with Chance, an individual whose own conduct is
questionable. For Tom Junior, his sister contracted a whore’s disease, and
thus she has tainted the family’s reputation.
The leader of a small gang of thugs, Tom Junior employs his father’s
name to commit acts of violence that are motivated by racism, ‘sex-envy’
and pride. The Youth for Tom Finley clubs, endorsed by Boss Finley, are a
sadistic and immoral lot. Tom Junior and his gang are responsible for
randomly picking out a black man and castrating him ‘to show they mean
business about white women’s protection in this state’ (70). Regardless of
the rhetoric Tom Junior and his gang use to condone their actions, these
acts are not carried out to ‘protect’ white women. These acts, including
Tom Junior’s threat to castrate Chance if he does not leave town, are tied
to his own emasculation. As the Finley empire is challenged, Tom Junior
and his father resort to desperate and violent deeds. He and Boss Finley
are envious of those who are gaining power – both in the political arena
and in the private one. Having corrupted his sister, Chance represents the
encroaching threat to Tom Junior’s power. He no longer has control over
his little sister’s behaviour. With his masculinity in jeopardy, Tom Junior
resorts to lashing out at those whom he perceives as holding power over
women.

Miss Lucy
An opportunist, Miss Lucy, like Alexandra Del Lago, uses men. While Del
Lago uses Chance to distract her from what she believes has been a failed
comeback and from the destructive forces of time, Miss Lucy in essence
prostitutes herself for ‘a fifty-dollar-a-day hotel suite’ and other luxuries
Boss Finley showers on her. Before she ever appears on stage, both Tom
Junior and Heavenly tell their father that they and everyone else in St
Cloud know that Miss Lucy is his mistress and has been even before the
death of Mrs Finley. And, to make matters worse, Tom Junior reveals that
Miss Lucy ‘don’t even talk good of you’ (50). Exposing Boss Finley’s
impotency in lipstick on the ladies’ room mirror of the hotel bar, she
unintentionally causes him to confront his waning sexual power. Like Del
Lago and others of Williams’s heroines, she is ‘an agent of truth forcing
weak men to face reality’ (Clum, 140). In doing so, she exposes herself to
danger. Boss Finley retaliates with physical violence, clamping a jewellery
box on her finger.
 Despite his violence, Miss Lucy is a survivor. When she makes her
entrance in Act Two, Scene Two, she is described as ‘dressed in a ball
gown elaborately ruffled and very bouffant like an antebellum Southern
belle’s. A single blonde curl is arranged to switch girlishly at one side of
her sharp little terrier face’ (58). Like Scarlett O’Hara, to whom Chance
compares her, she holds on to her dignity and pride even under attack by
enemy forces and when scorned by her lover. But her gentility and girlish
behaviour is, Williams suggests, a façade. Like a terrier, a dog used for
hunting, she is quick and wily. Miss Lucy wastes no time in retaliating.
Seeing someone new enter the bar, she immediately approaches him,
asking questions until she discovers that he is a heckler ‘come to hear
Boss Finley talk’ (59). Providing the Heckler with a jacket and tie and
directing him to the ballroom where the rally will take place, she seeks a
revenge which will expose Boss Finley’s waning political potency.
Miss Lucy is one of the few characters who attempts to help both Del
Lago and Chance. Perhaps because she prostituted herself to obtain a type
of lifestyle similar to that of Del Lago’s – a lifestyle that Chance seeks and
Del Lago is potentially losing – Miss Lucy identifies with both of them.
When Miss Lucy, who has been trying to figure out what has changed
about Chance, ruffles his hair, he bristles. In response, she says, ‘Is your
hair thinning? Maybe that’s the difference I noticed in your appearance’.
Without intending harm, she forces Chance to confront his failure when
she tells him in front of the crowd in the bar that Dan Hatcher had seen
him in Palm Beach working ‘as a beach-boy at some big hotel’ (69). Even
though she exposes his failure to beat time and to be anything better than
beach-boy, she tries to save Chance from the monsters of St Cloud, urging
him to flee with her to New Orleans.
As the ‘president of [Del Lago’s] local fan club’ (61), Miss Lucy reveals
that like Chance she bought into the Hollywood dream, worshipping those
whose names appeared on the Silver Screen. When she sees Del Lago’s
miserable state in Act Two, Scene Two, unlike Chance who brushes her
aside, Miss Lucy shows compassion: ‘Honey, let me fix that zipper for
you. Hold still just a second. Honey, let me take you upstairs. You mustn’t
be seen down here in this condition’ (76). Aware of how cruel the
inhabitants of St Cloud can be, Miss Lucy attempts to preserve Del Lago’s
appearance, and by extension the Cinderella myth. While she may not be
able to assist her in much else, she tries to make sure that Del Lago is
presentable even in her desperation – a skill that Miss Lucy has perfected.
She shows no signs of distress though cut off financially from her former
benefactor, Boss Finley.

Stage, Film and Television Productions

Written in 1952 and first produced at the Studio M Playhouse in Coral

Gables, Florida, in 1956, Sweet Bird of Youth underwent several revisions.
The play did not make an impact on New York critics and audiences until
March of 1959. The Broadway premiere took place at the Martin Beck
Theatre and was directed by Elia Kazan who collaborated with Williams
on A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Jo
Mielziner, also no stranger to Williams, designed the set and lighting. Paul
Newman, who only a year before had starred in the film version of Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof, was cast in the role of Chance Wayne and Geraldine Page
was Alexandra Del Lago. Sweet Bird of Youth received mixed reviews
from New York critics, many of whom felt Williams had gone too far.
John J. O’Connor of Audience wrote,
The play, a hodgepodge of familiar Williams themes, sensationalism,
and pseudo-poetically stated truisms, might have been an interesting
one-acter. Certainly its content and scope do not justify the two-and-
a-half hour ordeal it now demands. (Quoted in Murphy, 160)
Moreover, the critic John Gassner reported that he ‘was disturbed by the
attempted focusing of sympathy on two self-confessed “monsters” ’ (123).
Along with criticising Williams’s sensationalism, Gassner, who overall
praised the play, saw problems in the structure of Sweet Bird of Youth. He
found the play weakened by ‘the split dramatic construction that divides
attention between the personal drama and an attack on racist demagoguery
in the South’ (123). Despite these reviews, the play is considered one of
Williams’s many successes. Audiences stood in long queues to see this
play which ran for almost a year and a total of 375 performances. In
addition to a positive audience reception, the play was nominated for four
Tony Awards.
The Broadway revival of Sweet Bird of Youth at the Harkness Theatre in
1975 also met with mixed reviews. Gina Mallet, a reviewer for Time
magazine, wrote, ‘Today [the play] seems fatally misconceived, a
sentimental melodrama instead of a savage, black comedy on southern
mores’. Despite the problematic production, Irene Worth’s portrayal of
Alexandra Del Lago was praised. Mallet and other critics noted that Worth
‘overwhelm[ed] the play, with a sexy vibrato not unlike Al Jolson’s, and
stalk[ed] the stage like a jaguar vacationing among field mice’. She won a
Tony for Best Actress.
Not until twenty-six years after its American debut did the play reach
London’s West End. Directed by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright
Harold Pinter, the play opened at the Haymarket Theatre on 8 July 1985.
Despite the praise Lauren Bacall received for her charming and cool
portrayal of Alexandra Del Lago, London critics and audiences were
disappointed. Mel Gussow, in his review of the London production for the
New York Times, argued that the play’s failure to captivate English
audiences stemmed in part from cultural expectations. He revealed that
since its world debut, English critics such as Kenneth Tynan have
dismissed Williams’s work as ‘operatic and hysterical’. Pinter’s attempt to
create a cooler version of the play, however, diffused the panic and anxiety
of Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago, which ultimately for Gussow
diminishes the angst of Sweet Bird of Youth.
Nine years after the London debut of Sweet Bird of Youth, the play was
revived at the National Theatre. Directed by Richard Eyre and starring
Robert Knepper as Chance Wayne and Clare Higgins as Alexandra Del
Lago, this 1994 production restored the heated tension and anxiety absent
in Pinter’s subdued production. According to critic Clara Hieronymus of
The Tennessean, while ‘Williams’s melodrama ends up a sad spoof ’,
London audiences ‘listened attentively, absorbed in its raffishly dramatic
performance and gave it a succession of curtain calls’. Indeed, most
critics, while acknowledging that the play is flawed and its themes are
perhaps no longer relevant, praised Eyre’s production and the acting of the
two leads. Michael Billington of the Guardian called Eyre’s production
‘superbly atmospheric’ with a ‘knock-down performance from Clare
Higgins as a fading movie queen’. Knepper’s performance, too, was
deemed exceptional. Neil Smith, in his article for What’s On, wrote, ‘The
role of Chance Wayne is an Everest for any actor, but Knepper tackles the
challenge head-on’. Michael Coveney of The Observer called the
production ‘a blazing restoration’ and Dale Maitland Cartwright of the
Southern Cross decreed it ‘A real stunner, make sure you see!’.
 In 1962, the first film version of the play hit the big screen, directed by
Richard Brooks. Newman and Page once again took on the roles of Chance
and the Princess. The film veers from the text in drastic ways and a
dismayed Williams complained that the happy ending to the film was ‘a
contradiction to the meaning of the play’ (quoted in Devlin, 275).
However, the performances of Newman and Page are unforgettable and
Page won an Oscar for her part. Despite the softening of the
racial/political tensions, the change from Heavenly Finley being infected
with a venereal disease to having an abortion and the film’s happy ending,
which allowed Chance and Heavenly to unite after Tom Junior breaks
Chance’s nose, the film’s aura is definitely Williams’s, leaving the
audience to wonder whether Heavenly and Chance can really make it.
Nearly thirty years after the play hit the stage, the American television
broadcasting system NBC aired a new version of Sweet Bird of Youth in
1989, directed by Nicholas Roeg, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Alexandra
Del Lago, Mark Harmon as Chance Wayne and Rip Torn as Boss Finley.
Although in the fifties and sixties Taylor starred with great success in film
adaptations of plays, including the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof and the 1959 film adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer, this
made-for-television version of the play is deeply disappointing. Despite
restoring the original ending (Chance’s castration), this film is no more
faithful to the playtext than the earlier film; production and acting also
leave much to be desired.

Production History since 2010 (by Katherine Weiss)

Out of the four works discussed here, Sweet Bird of Youth has been
Williams’s least successful play. The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named
Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have been revived several times in the
past two decades. The popularity with theatre professionals most likely
lies in their superior structure rather than the characters; Del Lago and
Chance Wayne are monumental. The frequent revivals and classroom
usage of Menagerie, Streetcar and Cat have made them familiar to
audiences and students of drama, if not to most Americans. Even those
who have not seen a staged production of any of these three plays have
undoubtedly heard much buzz about them. It is uncertain if this is the case
with Sweet Bird of Youth.
In the past three years, however, there has been considerable interest in
Williams’s play about time and corruption. The first of the major revivals
scheduled for Sweet Bird, regrettably, has been indefinitely postponed.
With Nicole Kidman lined up to play Alexandra Del Lago and James
Franco lined up to make his Broadway debut as the gigolo Chance Wayne,
the show was sure to attract crowds. In August 2011, the New York Times
reported that Franco dropped out of the project and the play, that was to
open in the fall of the same year, was on hold indefinitely. Since the
disappointing news, the producer, Scott Rudin, poured his attention and
money into other projects, most notably the revival of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman, directed by legendary Mike Nichols and starring
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman.
While Sweet Bird has not been performed on Broadway since 1975, the
director hoping to bring the play back to a major New York stage, David
Cromer, instead, took the play to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. With a
changed cast, the 2012 revival starred Diane Lane (known for her roles in
movies such as Perfect Storm and Under the Tuscan Sun) as Del Lago and
Finn Wittrock (who played Happy in Nichol’s revival of Death of a
Salesman) as Chance Wayne. The production was applauded by critics.
The New City Stage recommended the production to its readers. The
rotating stage and white and grey colour scheme of the production was
viewed by Kris Vire of Time Out Chicago as evoking the ‘eerie
atmospheric’ quality of Williams’s play. It is the performance of Diane
Lane, however, that received the most praise (with the performance of
Wittrock commented on positively but with little elaboration). Jonathan
Abarbanel of Theatre Mania wrote that Lane ‘smartly underplays Del
Lago without making her weak’. And, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune
gave the play three and a half stars, noting that although the play is a
‘meandering text filled with a plethora of furiously miserable souls’,
Lane’s ‘richly textured performance is a needed anchor for director David
Cromer’s passionate, arresting and unwieldy Goodman Theatre
production’.
Sex and the City star, Kim Cattrall tried her hand at Alexandra Del Lago
in the summer of 2013, starring alongside Seth Numrich, known for his
roles in Broadway musicals. The London revival of Sweet Bird at the Old
Vic received mixed reviews. No fan of the script (like most theatre critics),
Michael Billington of the Guardian nevertheless applauds the director,
Marianne Elliott, calling the revival ‘first-rate’, noting that the cast ‘is as
good as any you’ll find in a national company’. Sarah Hemming of the
Financial Times argues that James Graham’s edited text and Elliott’s
direction helped the production achieve ‘not just a wealth of
autobiographical pain, but a searing response to the viciousness afoot in
America’s Deep South in the 1950s’.
Known for directing successes such as War Horse, it is a shame that
Elliott’s Sweet Bird, as Tim Walker from the Telegraph bluntly states,
‘fails dismally’. Compared to Cromer’s direction, Elliott missed
opportunities by trying too hard to recreate Williams’s ‘plastic theatre’.
Twice a ghostly image of a woman lingered behind the semi-transparent
walls of the hotel room; the purpose of which, however, was not clear.
While most likely signifying the ghost of Heavenly haunting Chance, this
technique tried too hard to make the play about their young love. In his
review, Walker trashes the production, noting everything from Cattrall’s
awful red wig to the more damaging commentary that Cattrall ‘hasn’t any
of the fading grandeur that the part requires’. Kate Bassett of the
Independent shares Walker’s disappointment, even calling her review, ‘I
wouldn’t get out of bed for this, Kim’. Although not much is said in these
reviews about Numrich, his performance from what I witnessed on
opening night, was imprecise, and more devastatingly, his ‘audition’ in
which he tells Del Lago his life story, dragged. During his monologue, he
mostly stood behind the bed, missing opportunities to use his body to
express the twists and turns Chance Wayne has faced.
These recent productions reveal that the play has become a showcase for
an ageing actress. Bacall in 1985, Lane in 2012 and Cattrall in 2013, for
most critics, stole the show. Chance Wayne and the actors who have played
him in recent years have sadly been overlooked.
 Notes

The notes below explain words and phrases from the play, with page
numbers referencing the Student Editions published by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.

page
1 Hart Crane: (1899–1932) an American poet and novelist.
2 Cheryl Crawford: (1902–86) an American theatre producer and
director who produced Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in 1951 and later
Sweet Bird of Youth. Along with Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Anna
Sokolow, she is also known for founding The Actors’ Studio, an
organisation of theatre professionals who taught movement and
method acting. Among the famous actors to be trained at the studio
were Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Geraldine Page.
7 tabouret: a small cabinet.
7 domino: eyeshade.
7 Give me the Bromo first: possibly due to excessive drinking and drug
use, Chance asks for a Bromo-Seltzer, a popular effervescent
antacid.
9 ether: an organic compound that was once used as an anaesthetic.
10 wire: telegram.
12 state line: border into the next state, out of range.
14 A pink one: slang for diamorphine, diacetylmorphine,
acetomorphine.
20 Palm Beach: a tropical, beach city in Florida.
20 I’m the Princess Kosmonopolis: while there is no direct origin for
Alexandra Del Lago’s alias, kosmo/cosmo may refer to the universe
or world and monopolis/monopoly is the exclusive possession of the
trade in some commodity. Her alias, then, may refer to her sense of
 grandeur. She ruled the film universe. Moreover, calling herself
‘Princess’ resonates with other references and allusions to children’s
tales.
20 Tallahassee: the capital of Florida and home to Florida State
University. In Southern college towns in the 1950s, the purchase of
alcohol on Sundays was prohibited.
21 package store: an off-licence, so called because alcohol had to be
sold in a sealed container and wrapped up to take away.
21 Old Spanish Trail: a small highway that spans 3,000 miles of the
United States. This stretch of road, based on an historic trade route
from the nineteenth century, was completed in 1929.
23 neuritis: a serious nerve disorder, one which results in weakness,
loss of reflexes and a change in sensitivity.
31 You wouldn’t want ‘Confidential’ or ‘Whisper’ or ‘Hush-Hush’: all
three magazines were popular gossip rags during the time. The bi-
monthly Confidential ran from 1952 to 1978; the more blatantly and
violently sexual Whisper ran from 1946 to 1958; and Hush-Hush,
which often ran stories of interracial affairs and homosexuality, was
popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
35 twelve-pound baby: 5.45 kilos.
35 the boys belong to the Junior Chamber of Commerce: JCCs or
Jaycees are tax-exempt, non-profit organisations for youths
interested in financial or business networking, like the Youth for
Tom Finley clubs.
36 clubs in New Orleans such as Rex and Comus: while this is a
reference to social clubs in New Orleans, Rex and Comus are a part
of Louisiana folk tradition. Rex, the carnival king, and his wife
visited the court of Comus. This meeting of the courts evolved into
what today is Mardi Gras, the carnival celebrated before Lent.
36 freshmen at Tulane or LSU or Ole Miss: first-year students at Tulane
University in New Orleans, Louisiana, or at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge, or University of Mississippi in Oxford,
Mississippi.
36 Oklahoma!: a popular musical which opened in 1943; written and
composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
36 had pictures in ‘Life’ in a cowboy outfit: Life magazine featured
articles on political and cultural events. The cowboy outfit may refer
to his role in Oklahoma!.
36 then that thing in Korea came along: the Korean War, 25 June 1950
to 27 July 1953.
37 swabbies: enlisted men.
42 porch: veranda.
43 Georgia O’Keefe: (1887–1986) an American artist, famous for her
paintings of flowers and desert landscapes.
43 Pass Christian: Williams often uses real place-names. Pass
Christian is a costal town in Mississippi.
44 Discreetly, like you handled that operation you done on my
daughter: Dr Scudder performed a hysterectomy on Heavenly. In the
early- to mid-twentieth century, hysterectomies were often
performed on women with advanced stages of venereal diseases.
46 There’s a pretty fair doctor that lost his license for helping a girl out
of trouble, and he won’t be so goddam finicky about doing this
absolutely just thing: the doctor in question has lost his licence for
performing an abortion, a procedure that was illegal in America
until 1973. The ‘just thing’ that Tom Junior refers to is castration.
50 the Queen of Sheba: in ancient mythology, the Queen of Sheba tested
King Solomon’s wisdom by questioning him. She was also known
for her gold and gifts.
54 as if you were buyin’ a trousseau to marry the Prince of Monaco: the
Prince of Monaco married the American film star Grace Kelly,
known for roles that exuded innocence and sweetness.
54 backhouse: an outside toilet.
56 the black days of Reconstruction: after the Civil War and the
emancipation of slaves, the era of Reconstruction (1865–77) worked
to restructure the power and wealth distribution among whites and
blacks. Among the attempts to reform the South, blacks were given
land and sometimes money, and some black men were placed in
government offices. The placing of blacks in government offices
was, at times, destructive because most had had no prior training,
let alone a formal education. Before the Civil War and the
 Emancipation, black men and women were not even allowed to learn
how to read.
58 novachord: a polyphonic synthesiser, manufactured by Hammond
between 1939 and 1942. Only 1069 examples were made.
58 Grant’s twelve-year-old?: whisky.
58 Walgreen’s: a popular drugstore, much like Boots. In the fifties,
Walgreen’s would also have had a soda fountain, a counter at which
customers could order soft drinks and milkshakes.
59 He has the length and leanness and luminous pallor of a face that El
Greco gave to his saints: El Greco (1541–1614) was a late
Renaissance Spanish painter, sculptor and architect.
61 outfit Vic Mature wore in a Foreign Legion picture: although never
receiving the attention he deserved from film critics, Victor Mature
(1913–99) was one of the busiest and most popular actors after the
Second World War. A Southerner like Williams, he was born in
Louisville, Kentucky. Mature’s popularity waned in the sixties.
61 Quiereme Mucho: the song was published in 1931 and became very
popular in the thirties. Its English title is ‘Yours’.
62 The Valiant: a 1920s one-act play by Holworthy Hall and Robert
Middlemass, turned into a successful film in 1929. It was nominated
for two Oscars and its leading actor, Paul Muni, won an Oscar for
his performance. The play is about a convicted murderer who goes
to his execution without ever revealing his true identity.
62 ‘If you like-a me, like I like-a you, / And we like-a both the same’:
Chance is singing part of ‘Under the Bamboo Tree’, featured in Meet
Me in Saint Louis (1944) and sung by Judy Garland.
65 The Princess Kosmonopolis’s best friend is that sob sister, Sally
Powers: sob sister was a derogatory term used to describe female
journalists whose reporting style was to evoke sympathy from her
readers.
67 ‘It’s a Big Wonderful World’: probably the popular Dean Martin
song ‘It’s a Big, Wide Wonderful World’. Its refrain is ‘It’s swell
when you’re really in love’.
67 arpeggio: a musical term meaning ‘broken chord’. The technique
requires that instead of playing a chord the notes are played
 consecutively.
68 Scarlett O’Hara?: Chance refers to the infamous Southern belle in
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, an epic novel that was
turned into the famous MGM production, starring Vivien Leigh and
Clark Gable, in 1939. When working with MGM, Williams wrote a
screenplay about a modern day Scarlett O’Hara, a woman
representing ‘the natural elegance in the old South’ (Williams
quoted in Leverich, 509), taking her out of the Civil War period and
into the twentieth century. His script, The Gentleman Caller,
eventually became The Glass Menagerie.
70 There’s been a whole lot of Northern agitation all over the country:
Bud refers to movements that condemned segregation and
discrimination which continued in America until 1968.
72 pink pill . . . goof-ball: slang for diamorphine, diacetylmorphine,
acetomorphine.
74 That’s a fine setup, Scotty, if you’re satisfied with it but it’s starting
to give you a little pot and a can: sitting all day at his job, Scotty is
developing a large mid-section and large buttocks.
77 Lost in the beanstalk country, the ogre’s country at the top of the
beanstalk: a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, the popular
fairytale.
80 Keep your ruttin’ voice down: rutting holds the same vulgar meaning
as fucking.
82 ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’: a marching song, also known as ‘We are a Band
of Brothers’, composed in 1861 and associated with the Confederate
States of America. For an audience in tune to the racial unrest in
America, this march would bring home the extreme racist politics of
the Finley clan.
83 ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’: popular folk song composed by the German
accordionist Will Glahé.
89 ‘a criminal degenerate’: this phrase was ‘usually applied to
homosexuals’ (Clum, 142). To read Chance as a homosexual is
problematic, though. Hence, the phrase takes on the broader
meaning of referring to someone who has committed sexual crimes.
89 You couldn’t drive through the Palm Gardens: Del Lago reveals that
 Chance is still under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
90 Grand Corniche: a winding road along the south coast of France,
roughly 2,000 feet above sea-level.
91 Chasen’s: a luxurious restaurant located in Beverly Hills, California.
Chasen’s has been a favourite spot for Hollywood stars such as
Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra.
 Questions for Further Study

1 Critics insist that the plays of Tennessee Williams, unlike those of his
contemporaries such as Arthur Miller, are ‘poetic’ rather than
‘realistic’. What elements of Sweet Bird of Youth represent a ‘poetic’
aesthetic?
2 The protagonist, Tom Wingfield, in The Glass Menagerie, says: ‘I am
the opposite of a stage magician. . . . I give you truth in the pleasant
disguise of illusion’. How is this an equally accurate description of
Sweet Bird of Youth?
3 In his ‘Foreword’ to the play, Williams claimed his use of violence is
Aristotelian – that the audience reaches a catharsis (or emotional
cleansing) through the watching of violence on stage. To what extent
do you see the violence in Sweet Bird of Youth offering the audience
catharsis?
4 The scholar David Savran argues that while Tennessee Williams has on
many occasions spoken out against racism, calling it ‘the most horrible
thing’, he objectifies and exoticises those that are deemed as other
within the social setting of his plays, exemplifying ‘a contradiction
inherent within a certain liberal egalitarianism’ (126–7). Assuming
this contradiction is apparent in Sweet Bird of Youth, which characters
are objectified and exoticised, and how so?
5 How does Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth fit into the tradition of
Southern writing? What comparisons can be drawn between Williams
and other Southern writers such as Carson McCullers and William
Faulkner?
6 What significance can be drawn from the names of characters (Chance,
Heavenly, Stuff, Fly, Boss Finley, etc.)?
7 The action of the play is set ‘somewhere on the Gulf Coast’ in the
‘Royal Palms Hotel’, in which ‘a grove of palm trees’ is ever present
on the cyclorama. How does the tranquillity of the luxurious seaside
hotel inform the tragedy of the play?
 8 A four-lane highway, although never seen on stage, is said to run past
the Royal Palms Hotel. What does this image of encroaching
modernisation suggest about the time period, place and context of the
story, and the relationship between the characters?
9 Taking into account the play’s title as well as the ‘soft, urgent cries of
birds’ and ‘the sound of their wings’ that are heard throughout, what is
the symbolic significance of ‘birds’ in Sweet Bird of Youth?
10 Throughout Sweet Bird of Youth, there are many references to age,
ageing and a desire to recapture one’s youth. Alexandra Del Lago has
fled from the Silver Screen after her close-up reveals her age, and
Chance Wayne considers himself old at twenty-nine. What makes
youth so sweet and desirable to the characters in this play?
11 From Dr Scudder, the audience learns that Chance’s mother has died,
and, unable to reach Chance, a collection at her church was taken up in
order to bury her. What relevance does the death and burial of Chance’s
mother have on the play?
12 Del Lago refers to herself and to Chance as ‘monsters’. What makes
these two characters monstrous? What other characters in the play can
be described as ‘monsters’?
13 The children’s tale of Jack and the Beanstalk is mentioned in Act Two,
Scene Two. How does it help to define the characters in this play? How
does it inform the plot? What other references to children’s fairytales
are there and what significance can be attached to them?
14 What is the symbolic significance of Del Lago’s need for oxygen and
her desire to retire to the moon, a dead planet without oxygen?
15 What is Williams suggesting about Chance and Del Lago’s drug and
alcohol abuse? How does this form of abuse function in the play?
16 Many of Williams’s memorable female characters, such as Amanda
Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie and Blanche DuBois from A
Streetcar Named Desire, are described as ‘antebellum Southern
belles’, evoking Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. In what ways
is Miss Lucy part of this tradition?
17 Sweet Bird of Youth may be said to be a play about the tension between
needing illusions and being disillusioned. How are the characters of
Alexandra Del Lago, Chance Wayne, Heavenly and Boss Finley
defined by this tension and how do they cope with it?
18 In Act Two, Scene Two, Chance sings two songs. How does his singing
inform the play?
19 Twice we hear of the nude photograph Chance took of Heavenly when
she was only fifteen years of age. In the first instance, Chance shows
Del Lago the photograph (Act One, Scene Two). In Act Two, Scene
One, Boss Finley tells Dr Scudder that the first time he warned Chance
to leave town was after he had discovered the photograph of his
daughter had been taken. What significance can be drawn from the
photograph?
20 How does Boss Finley, a figure of authority and wealth, use his ability
to instil values of young masculine power and feminine purity to aid
his racist agenda? And why is that agenda crumbling as seen in Miss
Lucy’s lipstick graffiti and the Heckler’s ability to shake up Boss
Finley?
21 The movie and television industry are both under attack in Sweet Bird
of Youth. What is Williams’s critique of these media? How is his
critique of television similar and how is it different to that of his
critique of the film industry?
22 Sweet Bird of Youth is set in the 1950s and displays the attitudes and
politics of the time. Does it still have power and relevance today?
23 Imagine that you are going to direct a production of Sweet Bird of
Youth. How would you stage a production of the play? What would the
set look like? What would the Lamentation sound like? Who would
you cast as Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago?

1 Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1996, 9.
2 David Pilgrim, ‘What Was Jim Crow?’, Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University,
2000 (www.ferris.edn/jimcrow).
3 Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill and Wang, 1972, 91.
 Further Questions on Williams’s Plays

1 Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is the best-known

American ‘memory play’, a genre in theatre in which a central
character remembers his past as it is acted out on stage. One could
argue that Williams’s other plays, which do not adhere to the structure
of the memory play, too, are concerned with the way the past
preoccupies a character and shapes his or her identity. Chart how
memory haunts and transforms the characters in The Glass Menagerie,
A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of
Youth.
2 In Sweet Bird of Youth, the protagonist Chance Wayne returns to his
hometown to reunite with his ‘girl’, Heavenly. What becomes apparent
is that he still clings onto an illusion of their young love, even carrying
a photograph of Heavenly with him. Chance is not the only Williams
character to romanticise young love. Identify moments in The Glass
Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and
Sweet Bird of Youth when characters romanticise or idealise young
love. Then discuss the effects of such illusions on the development of
the characters and the events in the plays.
3 Stephen Bottoms insightfully argues that Laura Wingfield in The Glass
Menagerie ‘has created an imaginary world for herself, into which she
retreats whenever she can, and especially when she is placed under
pressure’ (see 22). Which other characters in The Glass Menagerie, A
Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth
create imaginary worlds? For what reasons do they create these
worlds? When and to what effect do their make-believe worlds
crumble?
4 In addition to creating imaginary worlds, several of Williams’s
characters ‘manufacture illusions’, as Amanda Wingfield accuses her
son of doing in The Glass Menagerie (95). Is Tom alone in escaping
into illusions? Who else, on Williams’s stage, does this? What is
Williams’s attitude towards this type of escapism?
 5 Scholars have found many similarities between the events and persons
in Williams’s life and his plays. Where do you see biography enter into
The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth? How has Williams transformed these
biographical details to serve his fiction? Is Williams successful in
transforming the personal details of his life into depersonalised
fictions? Support your answers with examples from The Glass
Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and
Sweet Bird of Youth.
6 Williams strived to break from the conventions of realism. He, instead,
identified his theatre as ‘plastic’ by which he meant a theatre of poetry
and images to suggest reality and truth. Discuss the poetic and
imaginative elements present in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth.
7 Several scholars, including Philip Kolin, Michael Hooper and Patricia
Hern (whose commentaries are included here) have argued that
Williams’s plays are like classical tragedies. What similarities do The
Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Sweet Bird of Youth share with classical tragedies, especially those
from ancient Greece and/or by William Shakespeare? Be sure to
discuss what Williams takes from the tragic tradition and how he
modernises this tradition?
8 Explore Williams’s representation of the South and of Southerners in
The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth.
9 Williams provides his readers with detailed set descriptions and
specific location markers. How do the sets and locations inform the
plays? Draw your responses from The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth.
10 Williams often incorporated music in his plays. In what ways is music
implemented in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth? How does the incorporation
of music in these works shape the mood of the characters and, more
generally, the plays?
11 The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth all begin with an epigraph. These
epigraphs are rarely included in the programmes of productions. What
 do they express to the reader, director or actor? How would an
audience benefit from knowing the epigraphs?
12 Williams often uses animal imagery to describe his characters. Where
in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth do we find characters compared to or
referred to as animals? Explore the interpretative possibilities of such
comparisons and references.
13 What role does substance abuse play in The Glass Menagerie, A
Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of
Youth?
14 Williams recalled that the director Margo Jones told a group of women
once that ‘Tennessee does not write about abnormal characters’. He
writes about ‘People! . . . Life’ (Where I Live, 27). Using examples
from The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, argue Margo Jones’s position that
Williams’s characters are not abnormal.
15 Williams has created some of the most powerful patriarchs on the
American stage. Pulling your examples from The Glass Menagerie, A
Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of
Youth, explore the image of the father-figure on Williams’s stage.
16 So many of Williams’s characters are concerned with ‘time’. Explore
the ways in which Williams in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth depicts
time as a matter of concern.
17 Williams once said in an interview that ‘people who are shocked by
the truth are not deserving of the truth. The truth is something you
need to deserve.’1 Which of Williams’s characters are shocked by the
truth? Which have deserved the truth? Are there moments in Williams
in which the audience is shocked by the plays’ truthfulness? Draw your
discussion from The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth.
18 Explore the ways in which homosexuality, sexual promiscuity and rape
are depicted in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named
Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth.
19 Imagine that you are putting on a season of Tennessee Williams at
your university. As the artistic director of the project, you need to
decide in what order the plays, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
 Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, will
appear. While you could show them in chronological order, you have
been asked to consider other alternatives. What other options would
you consider? What rationale do you have for your decision?
20 Imagine you are putting on a season of Tennessee Williams plays at
your local theatre. To add some cohesion to the project, you, as the
director, want to highlight some recurring themes and styles that run
through The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. What themes and stylistic choices
would you highlight and why?
21 Early in his career as a writer, Williams worked for MGM, and,
perhaps because of this experience, Williams’s plays contain a
cinematic quality to them. Several of his stage works have been turned
into major motion pictures. Identify and discuss elements in The Glass
Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and
Sweet Bird of Youth that are cinematic.

1 This interview is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=FScWlr5qZUY

 Further Reading

Selected Works by Williams

American Blues: Five Short Plays. New York: Dramatist Play Service, 1948.
Baby Doll and Other Plays (Suddenly Last Summer, Something Unspoken). Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968.
Candles to the Sun. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays (The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Night of the
Iguana). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with commentary and notes by Philip C. Kolin. London: Methuen Drama,
2010.
The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, edited by David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis.
New York: New Directions, 2002.
Collected Stories. New York: New Directions, 1994.
Dragon Country: A Book of Plays. New York: New Directions, 1970.
Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St Just, edited by Alfred A. Knopf.
New York: Knopf, 1990.
Fugitive Kind. New York: New Directions, 2001.
The Glass Menagerie (with ‘The Catastrophe of Success’), with commentary and notes by
Stephen J. Bottoms. London: Methuen Drama, 2000.
The Magic Tower: An Unpublished One-Act Play by Tennessee Williams, edited by Nicholas
Moschovakis and David Roessel. New York: New Directions, 2011.
Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975.
Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel.
New York: New Directions, 2005.
Moise and the World of Reason. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.
Not about the Nightingales. London: Methuen Drama, 1998.
Notebooks, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2006.
One Arm and Other Stories (revised edn). New York: New Directions, 1957.
Period of Adjustment, Summer and Smoke and Small Craft Warnings. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1989.
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. London: Lehmann, 1952; republished by London: Vintage,
1999.
The Rose Tattoo and Camino Real. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I, 1920–1945, edited by Albert J. Devlin and
Nancy M. Tischler. London: Oberon Books, 2001.
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. II, 1945–1957, edited by Albert J. Devlin and
Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear. London: Methuen Drama, 1996.
Spring Storm. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Stairs to the Roof. New York: New Directions, 2000.
Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays. New York: New Directions, 1984.
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1962.
A Streetcar Named Desire, with commentary and notes by Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper.
London: Methuen Drama, 1984; republished in 2009.
Sweet Bird of Youth, with commentary and notes by Katherine Weiss. London: Methuen, 2010.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 1: Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar
Named Desire. New York: New Directions, 1971.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 2: The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and
Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real. New York: New Directions, 1976.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 3: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending,
Suddenly Last Summer. New York: New Directions, 1971.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 4: Sweet Bird of Youth, A Period of Adjustment, The Night
of the Iguana. New York: New Directions, 1972.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 5: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Kingdom
of Earth. New York: New Directions, 1990.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 6: Wagon Full of Cotton and Other Plays. New York:
New Directions, 1992.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 7: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and Other Plays.
New York: New Directions, 1994.
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 8: Vieux Carré, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel, The Red Devil Battery Sign. New York: New Directions, 2001.
The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, edited by Annette J. Saddik. New York: New
Directions, 2008.
Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays. New York: New Directions, 1945.
Where I Live: Selected Essays, edited by Christine Day and Bob Woods. New York: New
Directions, 1978.

Books and Other Full-Length Studies

Adler, Thomas P., Mirror and the Stage: The Pulitzer Prize Play as an Approach to American
Drama. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1987.
Bak, John, Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
Bigsby, C. W. E., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume Two:
Williams, Miller, Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
—, Modern American Drama, 1945–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Boxill, Roger, Tennessee Williams. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Bray, Robert, Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2007.
Clum, John, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in American Drama. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992.
Donahue, Francis, The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964.
Donkin, Ellen, and Susan Clement (eds), Upstaging Big Daddy: Direct Theatre as if Gender and
Race Matter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Falb, Lewis W., American Drama in Paris: 1945–1970. A Study of Its Critical Reception. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973.
Falk, Signi Lenea, Tennessee Williams. New York: Twayne, 1961.
Griffin, Alice, Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1995.
Hayman, Robert, Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993.
Holditch, W. Kenneth, and Richard F. Leavitt, Tennessee Williams and the South. Jackson:
University of Mississippi, 2002.
Hooper, Michael S. D., Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire over Protest.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Jackson, Esther Merle, The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Kolin, Philip C., The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights.
Jefferson: McFarland, 2008.
—, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport: Greenwood Press,
1988.
— (ed.), The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004.
—, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. Plays in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Leverich, Lyle, The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Norton, 1995.
Mitgang, Herbert, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest
Authors. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Murphy, Brenda, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Nelson, Benjamin, Tennessee Williams: His Life and Work. London: Peter Owen, 1961.
Paller, Michael, Gentleman Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-
Century Drama. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Palmer, R. Barton, and William Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and
Postwar America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Robinson, Marc, The Other American Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Saddik, Annette, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Perception of Tennessee Williams’ Later
Plays. London: Associated University Press, 1998.
St Just, Maria, Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St Just. New York:
Penguin, 1990.
Savran, David, Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Smith, William, and Suzanne Marrs, My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams.
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012.
Smith-Howard, Alycia, and Greta Heintzelman (eds), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Reference to
His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2005.
Spoto, Donald, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1997.
Thompson, Judith, Tennessee Williams’s Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter
Lang, 1989.
Tischler, Nancy, Student Companion to Tennessee Williams. Westport: Greenwood, 2000.
—, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan. New York: Citadel, 1961.
Vannatta, Denis, Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1988.
Williams, Dakin, and Shepherd Mead, Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York:
Arbor House, 1983.
Williams, Edwina Dakin, as told to Lucy Freeman, Remember Me to Tom. New York: Putnam,
1963.

Volumes and Collections

Arnott, Catherine M. (ed.), File on Tennessee Williams. London: Methuen, 1985.
Bloom, Harold (ed.), The Glass Menagerie: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea
House, 1988.
Devlin, Albert J. (ed.), Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2000.
Kolin, Philip C. (ed.), Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in
Critical Pluralism. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Kolin, Philip C., and Colby H. Kullman (eds), Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary
American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.
Kolin, Philip C., and Douglas B. Chambers (ed.), ‘Special Issue: The Legacy of Tennessee
Williams’, Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2011),
pp. 5–138.
Martin, Robert A. (ed.), Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997.
Roudané, Matthew (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Stanton, Stephen S. (ed.), Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood:
Prentice Hall, 1977.
Tharpe, Jac (ed.), Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977.
Voss, Ralph F. (ed.), Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2002.
Wilmeth, Don, and Christopher Bigsby (eds), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Vol.
III: Post-World War II to the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Windham, Donald (ed.), Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965. London:
Brown Thrasher, 1996.

Articles and Book Chapters

Adler, Thomas P., ‘Tennessee Williams’s “Personal Lyricism”: Toward an Androgynous Form’, in
William W. Demastes (ed.), Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1996, pp. 172–88.
Arrell, Douglas, ‘Homosexual Panic in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, Modern Drama, Vol. 51, No. 1
(2008), pp. 60–72.
Bak, John S., ‘“Sneakin’ and Spyin’” from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity,
Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 56 (2004), pp. 225–49.
—, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire: Tennessee Williams and the Semiotics of Rape’, Tennessee
Williams Annual Review, Vol. 10 (2009), pp. 41–72.
Balestrini, Nassim W., ‘Shattered Rainbows in Translucent Glass: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass
Menagerie (1945)’, in Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber (eds), Women in Literature: Reading
through the Lens of Gender, Westport: Greenwood, 2003, pp. 115–17.
Bibler, Michael P., ‘“A Tenderness Which Was Uncommon”: Homosexuality, Narrative, and the
Southern Plantation in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, Mississippi Quarterly,
Vol. 55, No. 3 (2002), pp. 381–400.
Bray, Robert, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire Interior Panic’, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Vol.
9 (2007), pp. 3–5.
Brooks, Daniel, ‘Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’, Explicator, Vol. 65, No. 3 (2007),
pp. 177–80.
Cañadas, Ivan, ‘The Naming of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof’, English Language Notes, Vol. 42, No. 4 (2005), pp. 57–62.
Cobbe, Elizabeth C., ‘Williams’s The Glass Menagerie’, Explicator, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2002),
pp. 49–51.
Crandell, George, ‘Echo Spring: Reflecting the Gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof’, Modern Drama, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1999), pp. 427–41.
—, ‘Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’, Modern Drama, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1997), pp. 337–46.
Debusscher, Gilbert, ‘And the Sailor Turned into a Princess: New Light on the Genesis of Sweet
Bird of Youth’, Studies in American Drama, 1945 to the Present, Vol. 1 (1986), pp. 25–31.
Di Giuseppe, Rita, ‘Monsters: Tennessee Williams, Darwin and Freud’, Quaderni di Lingue e
Letterature, Vol. 16 (1991), pp. 163–73.
Dukore, Bernard F., ‘American Abelard: A Footnote to Sweet Bird of Youth’, College English,
Vol. 26, No. 8 (1965), pp. 630–4.
—, ‘The Cat Has Nine Lives’, Tulane Drama Review (TDR), Vol. 8, No. 1 (1963), pp. 95–100.
Earthman, Elise Ann, ‘Riding Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)’, in Jerilyn
Fisher, Ellen S. Silber and David Sadker (eds), Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens
of Gender, Westport: Greenwood, 2003, pp. 274–6.
Everding, Anna Maria, ‘Complements of Home: Belle Reve and Elysian Fields in Tennessee
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’, in Klaus Stierstorfer (ed.), Constructions of Home:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture, Law, and Literature, New York: AMS, 2010, pp. 327–
37.
Fambrough, Preston, ‘Williams’s The Glass Menagerie’, Explicator, Vol. 63, No. 2 (2005),
pp. 100–2.
Freshwater, Lori, ‘Hearts That Refuse to Burn: American Existentialism in the Plays of Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams’, Arthur Miller Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010), pp. 29–45.
Gint, Dirk, ‘Torn between “Swedish Sin” and “Homosexual Freemasonry”: Tennessee Williams,
Sexual Morals and the Closet in 1950s Sweden’, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Vol. 11
(2010), n.p.
Gross, Robert F., ‘The Pleasures of Brick: Eros and the Gay Spectator in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’,
Journal of American Drama and Theater, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1997), pp. 11–25.
Gunn, Drewey Wayne, ‘The Troubled Flight of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird: From
Manuscript through Published Texts’, Modern Drama, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1981), pp. 26–35.
Hale, Allean, ‘How a Tiger Became the Cat’, Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1
(1990–1), pp. 33–6.
Hays, Peter, ‘Tennessee Williams’s Use of Myth in Sweet Bird of Youth’, Educational Theatre
Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1966), pp. 255–8.
Hovis, George, ‘“Fifty Percent Illusion”: The Mask of the Southern Belle in Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and “Portrait of a Madonna”’, Tennessee
Williams Literary Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2003), pp. 11–22.
Hurd, Myles Raymond, ‘Cats and Catamites: Patroclus and Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’,
Notes on Mississippi Writers, Vol. 23 (1991), pp. 63–5.
Isaac, Dan, ‘Big Daddy’s Dramatic Word Strings’, American Speech, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1965),
pp. 272–8.
Kolin, Philip C., ‘Obstacles to Communication in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, Western Speech
Communication, Vol. 39 (1975), pp. 74–80.
—, ‘Parallels Between Desire under the Elms and Sweet Bird of Youth’, Eugene O’Neill Review,
Vol. 13, No. 2 (1989), pp. 23–35.
—, ‘Popular Dance Music in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie’, Popular Culture
Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2012), pp. 67–74.
—, ‘“Red Hot” in A Streetcar Named Desire’, Notes on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 19, No. 4
(September 1989), pp. 6–8.
—, ‘“A River Flows through it”: Tennessee Williams and the Mighty Mississippi’, Big Muddy: A
Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2012), pp. 7–38.
—, ‘The Sobbing DuBois Sisters in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’, Notes on
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2003), pp. 6–8.
—, ‘Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’, Explicator, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2007), pp. 34–7.
—, ‘Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ’, Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Summer 2002), pp. 214–15.
Kullman, Colby H., ‘Rule by Power: “Big Daddyism” in the World of Tennessee Williams’s
Plays’, Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4 (1995), pp. 667–76.
McAdam, Ian, ‘Remembering Ibsen in Tennessee Williams’, Notes on Contemporary Literature,
Vol. 42, No. 4 (2012), pp. 6–8.
Mayberry, Susan Neal, ‘A Study of Illusion and the Grotesque in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof’, Southern Studies, Vol. 22 (1983), pp. 359–65.
Murphy, Brenda A., ‘Tennessee Williams’, in David Krasner and Molly Smith (eds), Blackwell
Companions to Literature and Culture, Malden: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 175–91.
Parker, Brian, ‘Problems with Boss Finley’, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Vol. 9 (2007),
pp. 53–65.
—, ‘Swinging a Cat’, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, New York: New Directions, 2004, pp. 175–86.
Pawley, Thomas D., ‘Where the Streetcar Doesn’t Run: The Black World of Tennessee Williams’,
Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2002), pp. 18–33.
Ribkoff, Fred, and Paul Tyndall, ‘On the Dialectics of Trauma in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar
Named Desire’, Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2011), pp. 325–37.
Roulet, William M., ‘Sweet Bird of Youth: Williams’s Redemptive Ethic’, Cithara, Vol. 2 (1964),
pp. 31–6.
Saddik, Annette J., ‘“You Just Forge Ahead”: Image, Authenticity, and Freedom in the Plays of
Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard’, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (2005), pp. 73–
93.
Schulte-Sassa, Linda, ‘Fixing a Nation’s Problems: When a Sweet Bird of Youth Crosses the Line’,
Cultural Critique, Vol. 43 (1999), pp. 13–37.
Schvey, Henry I., ‘The Tragic Poetics of Tennessee Williams’, Etudes Anglaises: Grande-
Bretagne, Etats-Unis, Vol. 64, No. 1 (2011), pp. 74–85.
Shackelford, Dean, ‘The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and Social
History in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Vol. 1 (1998), pp. 103–
8.
Single, Lori Leathers, ‘Flying the Jolly Roger: Images of Escape and Selfhood in Tennessee
Williams’s The Glass Menagerie’, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Vol. 2 (1999), pp. 69–
85.
Smith, William Jay, ‘My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams’, Hopkins Review,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 162–88.
Thornton, Margaret Bradham, ‘Between the Lines: Editing the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams’,
Theatre History Studies, Vol. 28 (2008), pp. 7–20.
Vlasopolos, Anca, ‘Authorizing History: Victimization in A Streetcar Named Desire’, Theatre
Journal, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1986), pp. 322–38.
Voss, Ralph F., ‘Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth and William Inge’s Bus Riley’s Back in
Town: Coincidences from a Friendship’, American Drama, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2006), pp. 62–73.
Waters, Arthur, ‘Tennessee Williams: Ten Years Later’, Theatre Arts, Vol. 39 (1955), pp. 72–3; 96.
Waters, John, ‘The Kindness of a Stranger: How a 12-Year-Old from Baltimore Searching for a
Bad Influence Discovered Tennessee Williams’, New York Times Book Review, 19 November
2006, pp. 20–1.
Winchell, Mark Royden, ‘Come Back to the Locker Room Ag’in, Brick Honey!’, Mississippi
Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4 (1995), pp. 701–12.

Theatre Reviews of The Glass Menagerie

Andrews, David Brooks, ‘Theater Review: Cambridge’s ART illuminates “The Glass
Menagerie”’, Metrowest Daily News, 20 February 2013.
Barnidge, Mary Shen, Windy City Times, 19 December 2012.
Billington, Michael, Guardian, 14 February 2007.
—, Guardian, 17 November 2010.
Brantley, Ben, ‘A “Menagerie” Full of Stars, Silhouettes and Weird Sounds’, New York Times, 23
March 2005.
—, ‘The Shape of Memory, Both Fragile and Fierce’, New York Times, 14 February 2013.
Cavendish, Dominic, Telegraph, 24 March 2010.
Crawford, Brett Ashley, Theatre Journal, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2005), pp. 308–11.
Delmar, Carol Jean, ‘An Innovative “Glass Menagerie” Leaves Questions Unanswered’, Opera
Theater Ink, 20 September 2010.
Fisher, Philip, British Theatre Guide, 2007, www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/leavesglass-rev
Gantz, Jeffrey, ‘Heart of “Glass”’, Boston Globe, 7 February 2013.
Gardner, Lyn, Guardian, 12 March 2010.
‘The Glass Menagerie to Play at the Booth Theatre’, New York Theatre Guide, 16 May 2013.
Gregory, Dolores W., Curtain Up, 2005, www.curtainup.com/glassmenageriedc.html
Hayford, Justin, ‘The Glass Menagerie, Inside Out’, Chicago Reader, 12 December 2012.
Hemming, Sarah, Financial Times, 18 November 2010.
Henerson, Evan, Examiner, 24 September 2010.
Hodgins, Paul, ‘Taper’s “Glass Menagerie” Reveals New Insights’, Orange County Register, 21
August 2010.
Isherwood, Charles, ‘Gritty Polish for a Tennessee Williams Jewel’, New York Times, 25 March
2010.
—, ‘In a World of Crystal, Flashes of Steel’, New York Times, 26 May 2009.
Jones, Chris, ‘“Menagerie” Is a Great Storefront Reinterpretation of a Classic’, Chicago Tribune,
2 June 2013.
Kubicki, Paul, Stage and Cinema, 18 June 2012.
McNulty, Charles, Los Angeles Times, 13 September 2010.
Marks, Peter, ‘“Glass Menagerie”: Fragile and Beautiful, in All Its Facets’, Washington Post, 23
July 2004.
Marzullo, Joseph, ‘Photo Call: Meet the Cast of Broadway’s The Glass Menagerie, with Cherry
Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Zachary Quinto’, Playbill, 20 August 2013.
Murray, Matthew, Talkin’ Broadway, 22 March 2005,
www.talkinbroadway.com/world/GlassM.html
Oleksinski, Johnny, New City Stage, 15 June 2012.
Reid, Kerry, ‘Brother and Sister at Center of an Intimate “Glass Menagerie”’, Chicago Tribune,
12 October 2011.
Rizzo, Frank, Variety, 10 February 2013.
Sava, Oliver, Time Out Chicago, 13 December 2012.
Sommer, Elyse, Curtain Up, 2005, www.curtainup.com/glassmenagerie10.html
Spencer, Charles, Telegraph, 18 November 2010.
Taylor, Paul, Independent, 19 November 2010.
Toscano, Michael, Theater Mania, 26 July 2004.
Vire, Kris, Time Out Chicago, 11 June 2012.
Weiss, Hedy, ‘Words of “The Glass Menagerie” Like You’ve Never Heard Them Before’,
Chicago Sun Times, 2 June 2013.

Theatre Reviews of A Streetcar Named Desire

Barry, Helen, Australian Stage, 7 September 2009.
Barth, Diana, Epoch Times, 11 December 2009.
Billington, Michael, Guardian, 28 July 2009.
—, Guardian, 29 July 2009.
Brantley, Ben, ‘Hey, Stella! You Want to Banter?, New York Times, 22 April 2012.
‘Cate Blanchett Upstaging Marlon Brando? A Streetcar Named Desire Review at BAM’, Faster
Times, 2009.
Coveney, Michael, ‘Weisz Struggles to Reveal the Magic in Williams Classic’, Independent, 29
July 2009.
Dziemianowicz, Joe, New York Daily News, 23 April 2012.
Haagensen, Erik, Backstage, 22 April 2012.
Hemming, Sarah, Financial Times, 30 July 2009.
Hitchings, Henry, ‘Rachel Weisz Mesmerizes in Magical Streetcar Named Desire’, London
Evening Standard, 29 July 2009.
Huntley, Dent, Berkshire Review, 4 August 2009.
Kellaway, Kate, Observer, 1 August 2009.
McNulty, Charles, Los Angeles Times, 2 December 2009.
MacTavish, Terry, ‘Gibson a Riveting Blanche in Faithful Production’, New Zealand Performing
Arts Review and Directory, 29 May 2008.
Rich, Frank, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire: Alec Baldwin Does Battle With Ghosts’, New York
Times, 13 April 1992.
Rooney, David, Hollywood Reporter, 22 April 2012.
Sommer, Elyse, Curtain Up, 5 December 2009.
Streetcar on Broadway.com. 2012. 27 September 2013.
Wittenberg, Polly, New York Theatre Guide, 26 April 2005.
Yarger, Lauren, Reflections in the Light, 25 April 2012.

Theatre Reviews of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Atkinson, Brooks, New York Times, 25 March 1955, p. 18; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), p. 344.
Aucoin, Don, ‘On Broadway, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” Is merely Tepid’, Boston Globe, 18
January 2013.
Barnes, Clive, New York Post, 22 March 1990; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol.
51 (1990), pp. 353–4.
—, New York Times, 25 September 1974, p. 26; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol.
35 (1974), p. 242.
—, “Roof ” Is the Cat’s Meow’, New York Post, 7 March 2008.
Bentley, Eric, New Republic, 11 April 1955, pp. 28–9.
Billington, Michael, Guardian, 4 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record (1988),
p. 135.
—, Guardian, 19 September 2001.
Brantley, Ben, ‘Big Daddy’s Ego Defies Death and His Family’, New York Times, 3 November
2003.
—, ‘A Storm from the South, Brewing in a Bedroom’, New York Times, 17 January 2013.
—, ‘Yet Another Life for Maggie’, New York Times, 7 March 2008.
‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, The Times (London), 31 January 1958, p. 3.
Chapman, John, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Beautifully Acted, but a Frustrating Drama’, New York
Daily News, 25 March 1955, p. 65; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16
(1955), p. 343.
Coleman, Robert, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Is Likely to Be a Hit’, New York Daily Mirror, 25
March 1955; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), p. 342.
Dziemianowicz, Joe, New York Daily News, 16 January 2013.
—, ‘Only James Earl Jones’, New York Daily News, 7 March 2008.
Edwards, Christopher, Spectator, 20 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record, Vol. 8
(1988), p. 136
Fisher, Luchina, ‘Is Broadway Going Black?’, ABC News, 1 May 2008.
Geier, Thom, Entertainment Weekly, 17 January 2013.
Hawkins, William, ‘Cat Yowls High on “Hot Tin Roof”’, New York World-Telegram, 25 March
1955; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), p. 342.
Henry, William A., Time, 2 April 1990, pp. 71–2; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews,
Vol. 51 (1990), p. 357.
Kalem, T. E., Time, 7 October 1974, p. 107.
Kemp, Peter B., Independent, 4 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record (1988), p. 134.
Kerr, Walter F., New York Herald Tribune, 25 March 1955, p. 12; reprinted New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), p. 342.
King, Francis, Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record (1988),
p. 138.
Kissel, Howard, ‘Cat – Down Home Southern Hostility’, New York Daily News, 3 November
2003.
Kolin, Philip, and Sherry Shao, ‘The First Streetcar in Mainland China’, Tennessee Williams
Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1990–1), pp. 19–32.
Kroll, Jack, Newsweek, 2 April 1990: 54; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 51
(1990), p. 355.
Lahr, John, ‘Bitches and Witches: Ulterior Motives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Wicked’,
New Yorker, 10 November 2003.
‘London Sees Cat, Opinion Is Divided’, New York Times, 31 January 1958, p. 21.
Loveridge, Lizzie, Curtain Up, 19 September 2001, www.curtainup.com/catonahottinroof.html
Lunden, Jeff, ‘A Cooler Roof for a New Cat’, National Public Radio (NPR), 17 January 2013.
Luther, Sonja, ‘German Translations and Performances of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar
Named Desire and Cat on Hot Tin Roof: 1955 until 2005’. MA thesis. University of Southern
Mississippi, August 2007.
McClain, John, ‘Drama Socks and Shocks’, New York Journal American, 25 March 1955, p. 20;
reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), p. 344.
Murray, Matthew, Talkin’ Broadway, 6 March 2008,
www.talkinbroadway.com/world/CatTinRoof2008.html
Portantiere, Michael, Theater Mania, 21 June 2004, www.theatermania.com/washington-dc-
theater/reviews/06–2004/cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof_4846.html
Probst, Leonard, NBC Radio, 25 September 1974; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews,
Vol. 35 (1974), p. 246.
Radin, Victoria, New Statesman, 19 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record (1988),
p. 137.
Ratcliffe, Michael, Observer, 7 February 1988; reprinted London Theatre Record (1988),
pp. 139–40.
Rich, Frank, New York Times, 22 March 1990, p. 81; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews,
Vol. 51 (1990), pp. 356–7.
Robertson, Campbell, ‘A Black Cat, Catching an Elusive Audience’, New York Times, 20 March
2008.
Schmemann, Serge, ‘The Russian Theatregoers Take Tennessee Williams to Their Hearts’,
New York Times, 31 December 1981.
Schwarzbaum, Lisa, ‘Meow Mix’, Variety, 2 November 2003.
Sharp, Christopher, Women’s Wear Daily, 25 September 1974; reprinted New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 35 (1974), p. 244.
Siegel, Joel J., WABC TV, 21 March 1990; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 51
(1990), p. 359.
Snyder, Louis, Christian Science Monitor, 27 September 1974; reprinted in New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 35 (1974), pp. 244–5.
Taylor, S., ‘The Claws Are Still Sharp’, Independent, 20 September 2001.
Teachout, Terry, ‘Cat Freshly Skinned’, Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2008, p. W9.
Tynan, Kenneth, Curtains. New York: Atheneum, 1961, pp. 202–4.
Vincentelli, Elisabeth, ‘ScarJo Is Red-Hot in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”’, New York Post, 17
January 2013.
Watts, Richard, Jr, ‘The Impact of Tennessee Williams’, New York Post, 25 March 1955, p. 57;
reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 16 (1955), pp. 343–4.
Wilson, Edwin, Wall Street Journal, 27 September 1974; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews, Vol. 35 (1974), pp. 243–4.
—, Wall Street Journal, 26 March 1990; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 51
(1990), p. 356.
Winer, Linda, ‘In Cat, It’s Kathleen’s Show’, New York Newsday, 22 March 1990; reprinted
New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, Vol. 51 (1990), p. 358.
Wolter, Jürgen, ‘Tennessee Williams in Germany’, Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, Vol. 3
(1995), pp. 9–13.

Theatre Reviews of Sweet Bird of Youth

Abarbanel, Jonathan, Theatre Mania, 27 September 2012, www.theatermania.com/chicago-

theater/reviews/09–2012/sweet-bird-of-youth_62953.html
Bassett, Kate, ‘I Wouldn’t Get out of Bed for This, Kim’, Independent, 15 June 2013.
Bemrose, John, MacLean’s, 2 May 1988.
Billington, Michael, Guardian, 12 June 2013.
Corry, John, New York Times, 18 June 1982.
Cropper, Martin, ‘Unexpected Delights of Character and Charm’, The Times (London), 10 July
1985.
Gassner, John, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1959), pp. 117–26.
Gussow, Mel, ‘Critic’s Notebook: The English Remain Cool to Tennessee Williams’, New York
Times, 1 August 1985.
Hattersley, Roy, ‘Endpiece Column’, Guardian, 31 August 1985.
Healy, Patrick, ‘Franco Looks Likely to Join Kidman in “Sweet Bird of Youth” on Broadway’,
New York Times, 2 February, 2011.
—, ‘“Sweet Bird” Won’t Fly on Broadway This Fall; Franco No Longer Involved in Revival’,
New York Times, 30 August 2011.
Hemming, Sarah, Financial Times, 14 June 2013.
Jones, Chris, ‘Turning the Tables on Tennessee Williams’ Story of Fading Beauty’, Chicago
Tribune, 24 September 2012.
Lahr, John, ‘Fugitive Mind’, New Yorker, 18 July 1994.
Lewin, David, ‘Bacall: The Need to Live Dangerously’, Courier Mail, 20 July 1985.
Lochte, Dick, Los Angeles Magazine, February 1987.
Mallet, Gina, ‘Petit Guignol’, Time, 15 December 1975.
‘New Plays on Broadway’ Time, 23 March 1959.
Nightingale, Benedict, New Statesman, 19 July 1985.
—, ‘Off Season Is High Season for Theater in London’, New York Times, 11 August 1985.
O’Toole, Fintan, Irish Times, 5 September 2003.
‘The Poet of Obsession’, Harper’s Bazaar, April 1985.
‘Review: Sweet Bird of Youth/Goodman Theatre’, New City Stage, 24 September 2012.
Selznick, Daniel, ‘London Digs Deeper into Familiar Plays’, Christian Science Monitor, 21
September 1994.
Vire, Kris, Time Out Chicago, 27 September 2012.
Walker, Tim, Telegraph, 16 June 2012.

Film and Television Reviews

Brennan, Patricia, ‘Sweet Bird of Youth: Rip Torn Putting His Accent on the Bigot Boss’ (NBC
production), Washington Post, 1 October 1989.
Carter, Alan, ‘Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth’ (NBC production), People Weekly, 2
October 1989.
Erikson, Hal, Cat. All Movie Guide, movies.msn.com
Leonard, John, ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ (NBC production), New York Times, 2 October 1989.
O’Connor, John J., ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Star Turn as Williams’s Aging Star’ (NBC production),
New York Times, 29 September 1989.
—, ‘From Cable to Air: Cat’, New York Times, 24 June 1985.
—, ‘The Tribute Smacks of Exploitation’, New York Times, 5 December 1976, D29 TV, 1984.
Park, Jeannie, ‘Playing Sweet Bird of Youth’s Abandoned Love, Cheryl Paris Draws on Her Own
Unhappy Past’ (NBC production), People Weekly, 2 October 1989.
‘Putting on the Cat’ (1962 film), Time, 30 March 1962.
Spoto, Donald, ‘Commentary’, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (DVD) Warner Home Video. Burbank, CA,
2004.
‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ (NBC production), Variety, 25 October 1989.
 Copyright

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

© Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014

Material from the present edition was previously published in the Methuen Drama Student
Edition series as follows: Plot, Commentary, Notes, Further Reading, Questions for Further Study
previously published in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and Sweet Bird of Youth.

Commentary and notes copyright The Glass Menagerie © 2010 by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama,
Commentary and notes copyright A Streetcar Named Desire © 2009 by Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, Commentary and notes copyright Cat on a Hot Tin Roof © 2010 by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama, Commentary and notes copyright Sweet Bird of Youth © 2010 by Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from
action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-4725-2872-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.