A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams
directed by Ian Malcolm
Wed., April 11, 8:00 p.m.
Ottawa Little Theatre

Hannah Smith and Annette Huton

Blanche Dubois, relic of a fading southern plantation family, loses her job as a schoolteacher and takes refuge with her sister Stella and Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski, in a poor apartment in New Orleans. She arrives on a streetcar whose sign reads "Desire" (a real New Orleans streetcar line, named for Desire Street, that ran until 1948).

Blanche tries to hide her growing helplessness and her tenuous grip on reality under a veneer of gentility — a stark contrast with Stanley, who is brutish, sensual and abusive. The play can be seen as a culture clash between the Old South and the rising urban working class.

Annette Huton and Bryan McDonald.

Blanche's presence upsets the delicate balance in the Kowalski household, creating tension between Stella and Stanley, who eventually discovers some facts about Blanche's past that she has been trying to put behind her.

Liam Radford, Lorna Jodoin and Jennifer Verardi. Lorna Jodoin, Amanda Edwards-Brown and Annette Huton.

This classic play contains one of the most famous lines in American literature — "I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers," as well as the memorable theatrical moment of Stanley's anguished cry "Stella!" made famous by Marlon Brando.

A Streetcar Named Desire had its Broadway debut at the Ethel Barrymore Theater from December 1947 to December 1949, and won Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. In 1951 it was made into a film, which won four Academy Awards. The play has also been made into an opera and a ballet.

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. He decided to become a playwright after seeing a production of Ibsen's Ghosts at the University of Missouri, but his plan had to wait when his father forced him to drop out of university and work for a shoe company (where, incidentally, he met a young man named Stanley Kowalski who became the basis for the character in A Streetcar Named Desire).

Eventually returning to school, Williams had his first plays (Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind) produced in St. Louis.

His greatest success came in the 1940s and 1950s. The Glass Menagerie had a successful premiere in Chicago in 1944 and moved to New York where it was a hit and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play of the Season. In 1947 he had another great success with A Streetcar Named Desire.

Between 1948 and 1959 seven more of his plays were performed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Garden District, and Sweet Bird of Youth. By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

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