A+Streetcar+Named+Desire+Director

Hanna Alfredsson THEA2000 Final Project 20 April 2017

Analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire A Streetcar Named Desire is a renowned play from 1947 written by Tennessee Williams. The play revolves around its main character Blanche Dubois, who appears in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana to find her sister, Stella Kowalski, after apparently losing her home in Belle Reve, Mississippi. With no money and just a trunk containing her possessions, she has nowhere to go, Stella and her husband Stanley allow Blanche to stay in their home. It is quickly shown just how extravagant and strange she is in character, which Stanley quickly sees through, establishing a clear divide between fantasy and reality. Throughout the entirety of the play the audience sees Blanche’s slow dissent to the bottom as more light is shed on her reality both literally and figuratively until the shattering of herself when Stanley forcibly and violently rapes her. Overall, this work by Williams overviews themes of sexuality and violence, male domination, and fantasy versus reality. Throughout the beginning of A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche hides details of how Belle Reve was lost and how she ended up without any money. Though she eventually gives up the papers she carries in her trunk to Stanley, it seems as if she is attempting to cultivate a certain image of herself the moment she arrives in New Orleans. She notably stays away from direct lighting, and even brings a paper lantern with her in order to soften the surrounding light. She also makes sure to present herself in a specific, and very flirtatious, manner when in front of the men. When interacting with her own sister, she tends to play to Stella’s sympathies for her so that she feels safe and understood, something Stanley frequently refuses to do. Blanche’s inability to accept her reality and Stanley’s refusal to let her bask in fantasy creates the plot point that will continue to move the entire play forward and serves as the primary conflict. An important motif to touch on in this is the aspect of light. Blanche makes a constant effort to avoid bright and direct light at all times as it reveals her entire and true self. She is notably anxious and self conscious of her age and appearance and side affect of her sense of youth being shattered after witnessing her husband commit suicide when she was very young. This last bit leads into the second main theme of the play, the numerous amounts of violence and its relation to sexuality. Blanche’s avoidance of harsh light and her constant effort to remain beautiful and flirtatious in front of the men reflects her fears of aging and loss of beauty. The beginning of the play even suggests and foreshadows that Blanche’s sexual nature and behavior would be her ultimate doom. She take the “Streetcar Named Desire” after which she transfers to the “Streetcar named cemeteries” which then brings her to the street Elysian Fields. There is also clear violence in all marriages presented in the play. Though we don’t find out until the end of the play, the entire reason for Blanche’s sexual nature and fear of getting older comes from the suicide of her husband when she was just a young girl. After her harsh words toward his gay tendencies, she witnesses him shoot himself in the head, and from that moment forward, she loses her sense of youth and is mentally impaired by this moment. Stanley’s brutal violence toward Stella is notable in the play. After the beginning of a romantic jazz song comes on the radio Stanley, in a drunken rage, loses his temper and smashes it to the side provoking Stella to yell back at him in shock and anger. He then advances on her figure and strikes his pregnant wife, leading her to leave with Blanche and go to her neighbor Eunice in the apartment above. Stella doesn’t stay away for long, as Stanley begins to call for her loudly over and over again as she sits upstairs. Finally, after he calls her over and over again, and she returns to him. They reunite, kiss and are assumed to make love once they return back to the house that night and Stanley carries her inside. This repeated attitude of the sex and violence is also clearly present in the marriage of Eunice and Steve, who seem to almost parallel Stanley and Stella’s marriage. In Scene Five, Stella and Blanche overhear a fight breakout between Steve and Eunice upstairs. Eunice accuses Steve of having an affair and being unfaithful. He responds to this with his fists as she cries out from him beating her. Though she calls out that she is going to report him to the police, Stanley points out that he has only just seen her at the bar around the corner having a drink, to which Stella replies that alcohol would help her more then the police. Even Mitch and Blanche experience this violence when Mitch drunkenly stumbles into the apartment after finding out the truth of Blanche’s behavior he experiences feelings of anger and betrayal. He shows clear disgust for her actions and calls her too unclean to marry, and even stalks at her as if to take her to bed forcefully before running out after she begins to scream “fire!”. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">However, the ultimate act of sex and violence within the show happens during scene eleven when Stanley comes in after Mitch has departed Blanche. He begins to taunt her, knowing he has fully exposed her for all of her flaws and mistakes. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">The scene is even broken up by a small moment of struggle between a prostitute, how Stanley and Mitch view Blanche’s promiscuous behavior, and a common drunkard, how Blanche constantly views Stanley. The scene ends with a brief struggle between Stanley and Blanche before she completely gives up and he carries her rag doll form to the bedroom. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">This sexual violence, or at least relation between the two subjects throughout the play is important to the characters. It also leads into another main theme, which is the woman’s dependence on man. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Stella’s abuse from Stanley is shocking and hard for an audience witnessing the play or a performance of it, and it is almost more shocking when Stella runs back to Stanley not even ten minutes after the whole ordeal takes place. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Eunice explains this back and forth and acceptance of violence against women throughout the play in scene twelve when discussing with Stella the moving of Blanche to the country to be watched, after Stanley’s rape of her. Stella and eunice have to disbelieve Blanche’s abuse because she has to stay with Stanley in order to survive. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">There is no other option for Stella and her baby in the same way that explains why Eunice does not leave her husband Steve. The women can not get by on their own or could not make enough money in order to survive in a world where they don’t have a husband. It also explains why Blanche is so desperate for a gentleman caller and is devastated when Mitch will not marry her. In this time period these women have no way of living well without a man beside them. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Tennessee Williams did not try to hide the gritty parts of life in this play. He makes sure to cover rough parts of life, while cultivating a wonderful and moving story for all audiences. Overall, Williams takes on themes of delusion with fantasy vs. reality, sexual violence and male domination in A Streetcar Named Desire.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Streetcars Group <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">THEA2000 Final Project <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">20 April 2017

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">A Concept Statement for A Streetcar Named Desire by  <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Tennessee Williams <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">While William Shakespeare is notable for his utter lack of stage direction and is therefore open to a variety of interpretation when it comes to setting, costumes, and design, Tennessee Williams lies on the far opposite of the spectrum. He took immense time carefully writing poetic paragraphs that set the initial scene, mood, look, and feel of the set, lighting, music, and characters within the show, and he never spares a detail. He knew what he envisioned for his plays and specifically writes exactly what he wants from each and every one of them and how he feels the audience’s experience should be. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">With all the time and effort he spent laying out specific instructions within each wonderful play, we felt that it was our duty to abide by those rules he spelled out for future productions and that going against it would be deeply disrespectful. We also felt that in order to truly formulate a production that would reach its full potential, there was no one else better to turn to then the genius that concocted the play itself. Why would he right so extensively of the shows details in costumes, set design, lighting, music, and stage directions if that was not how he truly wanted it to be seen? <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Williams’s very detailed stage directions and notes also contain specific notions of how the costumes for each character should look and feel.Our Costume Designer spent numerous hours studying Williams’ notes within the script in order to carefully craft each costume needed for each character. No detail was spared, including what type of garments needed, the color they required and the notable details upon each item of clothing, and she made sure that the costumes were right for Streetcar’s production. She also carried and light and careful hand in order to draw beautifully designed and clearly represented costumes for the characters to wear in the show. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Our Producer also made sure to study and carefully read the play so that she could really understand what exactly was needed for the show’s production. She fine tuned the details of the program and advertisements so that they would clearly and authentically represent the show in all the best ways possible. She also made sure to correctly budget the show so that we as a whole could produce the most wonderful show possible for the audience. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Our Director made sure to read over the script over and over again so that she knew she fully comprehended not only what the show was about, but also what, at it’s very heart, it intended to represent and mean for herself and the audience that would see it. She thoroughly and in depth, analyzed the play and also did what research on Tennessee Williams himself so that she could lead the show in the direction it was meant to go, and worked in collaboration with the producer on finding the best cast possible to fill the shoes of such iconic characters. She also collaborated with each and every designer to make sure that the authenticity of the play was fully kept and respected. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Our talented Scenic designer also spent her required time and more pouring over the contents of the script so that she had good idea of what Williams’ intentions were with how the set should be and look. William’s lays out a dual set that sheds light on both the outside street and the inside of the apartment belonging to Stanley and Stella Kowalski. She took initiative in designing a detailed drawing earlier on in the process so that she could work collaboratively with all the others in the group to make sure her design worked with all aspects of the show and to make sure that it did indeed follow the instructions that Tennessee Williams laid out in the design. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">A Streetcar Named Desire, like many of Tennessee Williams’s plays, have a great importance in terms of the music within the play. In this play, one of the most important musical pieces is the “blue piano” music that plays throughout in connection to Blanche’s descendance into madness. Our sound designers made sure to go through the script and mark each sound cue in the entire play, knowing how important it was to get each detail correct. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Our group worked hard and tirelessly to make sure that this production of A Streetcar Named Desire followed the wishes of Tennessee Williams for each and every detail throughout the show. We felt that we could not just toss what Williams’s spent so much time crafting and articulating for this special show away and replace it with something artificial and that could never live up to his well thought out play. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">We felt it was imperative that we keep the show to its truest form, after all, Tennessee Williams is quite unlike William Shakespeare. Shakespeare kept his poetic form reserved for the lines which the actors spoke on the stage, while Williams did not keep himself from lining the stage directions and show description with wonderful and detailed wording. There was no choice but to stick to the original thoughts of the play’s author.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Hanna Alfredsson <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">THEA2000 Final Project <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">20 April 2017 <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">A Biography of Tennessee Williams <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Tennessee Williams was born on March 9th, 1911 as Thomas Lanier Williams, III to Edwina and Cornelius C.C. Williams in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams had a brother, Walter Dakin Williams, and a sister named Rose Isabel Williams. As a child, Williams suffered from a bad case of diphtheria and was left weak and impotent as a child, causing his mother to focus much of her attention on him, and disappointed his father. Tennessee Williams describes his early life in Mississippi as pleasant and happy. However, his family lived a number of places throughout his life, including moving multiple times while living within the city of St. Louis, Missouri. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Williams attended the University of Missouri, originally for a major in journalism. However, Williams quickly became bored with his classes and began dabbling in his soon found passion of literature, poetry, and eventually playwriting. The first play Tennessee Williams ever wrote was Beauty Is the Word which was written in 1930, and for which he won an honorary award as a freshman in college. However, soon into his college career, his father pulled him out of school and forced him to work as a sales clerk for his own company. Soon afterward, Williams suffered a major mental breakdown, and spent time in Memphis Tennessee in order to recuperate, afterwhich returning to St. Louis and earning his Bachelors of the Arts in English. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Tennessee Williams got his professional name from the place in which his father hailed (He officially adopted the name in 1939). Tennessee’s relationship with his father was very complicated as his father was a demanding salesman with a violent attitude. His father’s relationship with his mother was not any better, as their marriage was a generally unhappy one. His majorly dysfunctional family often acted as major inspiration for many of his most famous plays (his mom inspired the well-intentioned, but overbearing mother in The Glass Menagerie, and his father inspired the demanding Bid Daddy in Cat on A Hot Tin Roof). <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">A notable influence on his first play of notoriety, The Glass Menagerie (1944), was Tennessee Williams sister, Rose. Tennessee and Rose were extremely close growing up as children, and found solace through each other in order to cope with their abusive father, depressed mother and volatile childhood. Rose suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a bilateral frontal lobotomy, and had a horrible reaction to it, after which, she fell deeply mad. Williams always felt immense guilt for what happened to her, and seemingly designed the fragile character of Laura after her, bits of her also reflecting himself. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Tennessee Williams also wrote a number of well-received plays such as Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1961), all of which were performed on Broadway. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;">However, after his fame and success through the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s sang a different and more melancholy tune for Williams. His alcohol and drug addiction began to spiral and caused him to produce subpar work that wasn’t well-received by his audiences, and he received constant and harsh backlash from the press for his works different style. Williams never made a full come back from this fall. His last show, A House Not Meant to Stand (1982), received largely positive feedback but only ran for forty shows. Williams would pass away in 1983 in his room at the Hotel Elysee.


 * Casting choices on Group powerpoint by mackenzie marr, and blocking is written on hard copy