Three Plays of Tennessee Williams

by Tennessee Williams

  STELLA: Oh, my God, Eunice help me! Don't let them do that to her, don't let them hurt her! Oh, God, oh, please God, don't hurt her! What are they doing to her? What are they doing?

  [She tries to break from Eunice's arms.]

  EUNICE: No, honey, no, no, honey. Stay here. Don't go back in there. Stay with me and don't look.

  STELLA: What have I done to my sister? Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?

  EUNICE: You done the right thing, the only thing you could do. She couldn't stay here; there wasn't no other place for her to go.

  [While Stella and Eunice are speaking on the porch the voices of the men in the kitchen overlap them. Mitch has started toward the bedroom. Stanley crosses to block him. Stanley pushes him aside. Mitch lunges and strikes at Stanley. Stanley pushes Mitch back. Mitch collapses at the table, sobbing.

  During the preceding scenes, the Matron catches hold of Blanche's arm and prevents her flight. Blanche turns wildly and scratches at the Matron. The heavy woman pinions her arms. Blanche cries out hoarsely and slips to her knees.]

  MATRON: These fingernails have to be trimmed.

  [The Doctor comes into the room and she looks at him.]

  Jacket, Doctor?

  DOCTOR: Not unless necessary.

  [He takes off his hat and now he becomes personalized. The unhuman quality goes. His voice is gentle and reassuring as he crosses to Blanche and crouches in front of her. As he speaks her name, her terror subsides a little. The lurid reflections fade from the walls, the inhuman cries and noises die out and her own hoarse crying is calmed.]

  DOCTOR: Miss DuBois.

  [She turns her face to him and stares at him with desperate pleading. He smiles; then he speaks to the Matron.]

  It won't be necessary.

  BLANCHE [faintly]: Ask her to let go of me.

  DOCTOR [to the Matron]: Let go.

  [The Matron releases her. Blanche extends her hands toward the Doctor. He draws her up gently and supports her with his arm and leads her through the portieres.]

  BLANCHE [holding tight to his arm]: Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  [The poker players stand back as Blanche and the Doctor cross the kitchen to the front door. She allows him to lead her as if she were blind. As they go out on the porch, Stella cries out her sister's name from where she is crouched a few steps up on the stairs.]

  [Blanche walks on without turning, followed by the Doctor and the Matron. They go around the corner of the building.]

  [Eunice descends to Stella and places the child in her arms. It is wrapped in a pale blue blanket. Stella accepts the child, sobbingly. Eunice continues downstairs and enters the kitchen where the men, except for Stanley, are returning silently to their places about the table. Stanley has gone out on the porch and stands at the foot of the steps looking at Stella.]

  STANLEY [a bit uncertainly]: Stella?

  [She sobs with inhuman abandon. There is something luxurious in her complete surrender to crying now that her sister is gone.]

  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....

  [The luxurious sobbing, the sensual murmur fade away under the swelling music of the "blue piano" and the muted trumpet.]

  STEVE: This game is seven-card stud.

  The End

  An Introduction by the Author

  On A Streetcar Named Success

  by

  Tennessee Williams

  (Copyright, 1947, by The New York Times)

  (This essay appeared in The New York Times Drama Section, November 30, 1947—four days before the New York opening of A Streetcar Named Desire.)

  Sometime this month I will observe the third anniversary of the Chicago opening of "The Glass Menagerie," an event which terminated one part of my life and began another about as different in all external circumstances as could be well imagined. I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans.

  No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind—and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success—there may be some point in comparing the two estates.

  The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

  I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporarily that the green satin looks like slime on stagnant water. But in the morning the inoffensive little sofa looked more revolting than the night before and I was already getting too fat for the $125 suit which a fashionable acquaintance had selected for me. In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surfaces of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rainstorm flooded the suite. But the maid always put it straight and the patience of the management was inexhaustible. Late parties could not offend them seriously. Nothing short of a demolition bomb seemed to bother my neighbors. I lived on room-service. But in this, too, there was a disenchantment. Sometime between the moment when I ordered dinner over the 'phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirioin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.

  Of course all this was the more trivial aspect of a spiritual dislocation that began to manifest itself in far more disturbing ways. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well of cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded like they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends' voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery.

  I got so sick of hearing people say, "I loved your play!" that I could not say thank you any more. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another.

  I was walking around dead in my shoes, and I knew it but there was no one I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take him aside and tell him what was the matter. This curious condition persisted about three months, til late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation, mainly because of the excuse it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask. It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye. (The eye is still in my head. So much for that.) Well, the gauze mask served a pu
rpose. While I was resting in the hospital the friends whom I had neglected or affronted in one way or another began to call on me and now that I was in pain and darkness, their voices seemed to have changed, or rather that unpleasant mutation which I had suspected earlier in the season had now disappeared and they sounded now as they used to sound in the lamented days of my obscurity. Once more they were sincere and kindly voices with the ring of truth in them.

  When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world. I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on the pavements and human voices, especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birds'. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.

  Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called "The Poker Night," which later became "A Streetcar Named Desire." It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable. This is an over-simplification. One does not escape that easily from the seductions of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will now continue my life as it was before this thing. Success happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

  You know, then, that 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!

  It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that's what you are or were or intended to be. Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about—What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth-serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

  Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive—that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life—live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

  A Streetcar Named Desire was presented at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, produced by Irene Seiznick. Scenery and lighting by Jo Mielziner, costumes by Lucinda Ballard. Assistant to the Producer was Irving Schneider, Musical Advisor was Lehman Engel.

  It was directed by Elia Kazan, with the following cast:

  STANLEY KOWALSKI - Marlon Brando

  STELLA KOWALSKI - Kim Hunter

  STEVE HUBBELL - Rudy Bond

  EUNICE HUBBELL - Peg Hillias

  HAROLD MITCHELL (MITCH) - Karl Malden

  BLANCHE DUBOIS - Jessica Tandy

  NEGRO WOMAN - Gee Gee James

  MEXICAN WOMAN - Edna Thomas

  PABLO GONZALES - Nick Dennis

  A YOUNG COLLECTOR - Vito Christi

  NURSE - Ann Dere (STRANGE WOMAN per www)

  DOCTOR - Richard Garrick (STRANGE MAN per www)

  The action of the play takes place in the spring, summer, and early fall in New Orleans. It was performed with intermissions after Scene Four and Scene Six.

  Another Introduction

  Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26th, 1911. He assumed the name "Tennessee" in 1938 because, he said, "The Williamses fought the Indians for Tennessee, and I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defence of the stockade against a band of savages"—a description reminiscent of Blanche's battles with Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. Indeed, it has been repeatedly pointed out by critics, biographers and Williams himself, that his plays were very much an exploration and a working out of his own life.

  His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, a hard drinking, bad tempered, coarse man who called his son "Miss Nancy", was often absent from the household—he had "fallen in love with long distances" like the father in The Glass Menagerie—in his work for the telephone company, and later, for a shoe company. Tennessee's mother was Edwina Dakin, the daughter of an Episcopal minister. She despised her husbands drinking and womanising; she felt she had an aristocratic pedigree which was ill-suited to the life her husband, and his frequent changes of address, forced her to lead. "CC" Williams and Edwina Dakin had three children: Rose, born in 1907, Tom, born in 1911 and Dakin, born in 1919—shortly after the family's traumatic move to St Louis. In St Louis the family were separated from Edwina's genteel background—she was thirty-four and had to cook for the first time—an experience which Tom later described as losing "belief in everything but loss". As a result, Tom withdrew into his writing, Edwina into dreams of lost Southern gentility, and Tom's sister, Rose, into madness—she was lobotomized in 1937. Edwina Dakin Williams, similarly, ended her life in a mental home.

  Tennessee Williams's first major success was The Glass Menagerie (1944), his second was A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). In an article in the New York Times (30.11.47) Williams describes the disadvantages of sudden fame—"the catastrophe of success," which he had experienced following his first successful play. He felt that the material security he found following The Glass Menagerie had limited his creativity. He felt that Streetcar rediscovered this creativity—and in many ways this battle between humanity and the corrupting effect of security is an important theme in the play.

  When Streetcar was first performed in England in 1949 it attracted a good deal of the "wrong" sort of attention: it was serialised in one of the more excitable Sunday newspapers and was popularly thought to be sexually permissive in the extreme. The play's early reputation, however, was short lived; critics and audiences quickly came to see Williams' play for what it really is — a work of great humanity and technical brilliance. Indeed, it is not too grand a claim to suggest that A Streetcar Named Desire is a classic tragedy. The poet Keats identified a tragic hero as an individual unable to see that life has its impossibilities. Tennessee Williams' contemporary, Arthur Miller, maintained that the struggle of a tragic hero, "is that of the individual attempting to gain his rightful place in society... ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity." Keats and Miller would, I think, have recognized in Blanche the individual they h
ad in mind—unable to renounce the image of herself as a rare being, unable to accept, as her sister does, the "blisses of the commonplace".

  Between his success with Streetcar and 1962 Tennessee Williams produced a large number of highly acclaimed plays: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo(1951), Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), Night of the Iguana (1961) and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1962). Night of the Iguana is considered by many to be his last great play, and although his reputation declined in subsequent years, he continued writing until his death (by accidentally choking on a bottle top) in 1983.

  In 1976 Williams published his Memoirs. He wrote to his agent shortly before their publication: "I have a new title for my memoirs—'Flee, Flee This Sad Hotel'—it's a quote from a poem by Anne Sexton. Of course hotel is a metaphor for my life—and flight from it—if not an impulse—at least is an imminence." He never used the title.