This Day in Theater History (Brando Rides Williams’ ‘Streetcar’ to Fame)

December 3, 1947—When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, it did more than thrust Tennessee Williams to the front of a new generation of American playwrights, or confirm Elia Kazan as the most important theater director of his generation. 

In Marlon Brando, Broadway discovered the exemplar of the new, more naturalistic "Method" style of acting.

When the 23-year-old actor made his way up to Cape Cod, Mass., where Williams was staying, to audition for his career-making role as Stanley Kowalski, he had to his credit only three small, albeit scene-stealing, Broadway credits, in I Remember Mama, Truckline Café and Candida. 

But when Williams saw the actor (who fixed the plumbing and wiring at Williams’ house before he sat down to read for the role), he knew instantly that he had found the embodiment of the coarse but sexually charged brother-in-law of Blanche DuBois.

That latter quality—sexuality—is essential to the role. But amazingly, at least one production I saw forgot that. 

In 2005, the Roundabout Theatre Co. cast John C. Reilly as Stanley. (I wholeheartedly agree with Ben Brantley’s dismissal of this mistake: “Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in ‘The Honeymooners.’")

Let's be kind and grant, though, that greater minds than those at the Roundabout missed why Stanley's animal magnetism--which, of course, not only leads wife Stella to stay with him but, at the end, to distrust Blanche's account of his rape of her--is so important. After a tryout of the play in New Haven, playwright Thornton Wilder was asked for his opinion of the show. 

"It was like having a papal audience," Williams remembered in his memoir. "We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley."

     

The earthy Williams immediately thought that the older playwright had never known the kind of experience that Stanley provided Stella.

  

One fascinating instance of alternative casting at the time of the original production would have come closer to Williams’ intent, at least. 

Irene Mayer Selznick, in her Broadway debut as a producer, wanted some box-office insurance, and pushed for John Garfield as Stanley. She undoubtedly remembered his role opposite Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice when she thought of the erotic heat he might generate. 

Moreover, the actor, at 33, was closer than Brando to Stanley’s age as conceived by Williams, and as a fellow member of New York’s legendary Group Theater with Kazan, he would have shared a kind of shorthand with the director.

But the film star’s insistence on non-negotiable items (e.g., more lines and a short time commitment) led Selznick, Kazan and Williams to look elsewhere. That led to an opening for Brando, and an opportunity to showcase the "Method style" of acting then beginning to gain traction in New York at the newly formed Actors Studio. 

Originally formulated by Russia's Konstantin Stanislavski, then promulgated by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio, "The Method" called for actors to internalize the experience of the characters they portrayed.

What might that original Streetcar have looked like? The closest facsimile is, of course, Kazan’s translation of the play into his 1951 film, which not only had him at the helm but also three of the original quartet of principal roles—Brando, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. 

The one difference, though, was an essential one: Vivien Leigh rather than Jessica Tandy as Blanche.

Kazan would have had no problem eliciting tension between his two film co-stars to mirror that between Blanche and Stanley. 

As production began, Brando grew annoyed at Leigh’s fussiness, and felt frustrated, in a Stanley-like way, by her charms. He admitted to friends that he wanted to sleep with Leigh so badly that his teeth hurt, but couldn’t do so because of the on-set presence of her husband, Laurence Olivier.

In the case of the Tandy-Brando relationship, Kazan had to work harder. While guiding and prodding Brando, his student at the newly formed Actors Studio, at every turn, he offered Tandy virtually no tips on how to approach her role. Maybe he figured the 38-year-old English actress was an old pro and would figure it out.

(On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to artificially create an adversarial relationship between his stars. Five years later, on the set of Viva Zapata!, he approached Brando and Anthony Quinn separately, telling each how much the other actor loathed him. When it came time for their climatic fight, the realism was something to behold.)

Brando’s unconstrained sexuality (onstage, he drew constant attention to his lips by constantly chewing gum, swilling from a beer bottle, or smoking a cigar) allowed Williams to begin to develop one of the central motifs of his career: the stud as destroyer. “We’ve had this date from the beginning,” Stanley leers as he begins to rape Blanche. 

The character represented the last step in the downward spiral begun by her sexual adventurousness—a trait that lost her a job as a schoolteacher for seducing a student. 

The equation—Eros equals death, or at least psychic obliteration—would be repeated in the novella and film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (again starring Leigh) and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.

Streetcar marked the point when Williams was still in most control of his material and his life. With a 30-minute standing ovation at the conclusion of the show at the Barrymore, not to mention the first of his two Pulitzers, the play brought the playwright to an emotional high. 

For Brando, it marked the point when he rewrote the rules for stage acting. Then he decamped for Hollywood, where he could use his skills before millions more, and for millions of dollars more—all the time relying on his improvisational skills and cue cards to cloak his rebellious refusal to learn lines.

Broadway lost something when he left, but so, it turned out, did the star.

(The photo of Marlon Brando, taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1948, while the actor was still in Streetcar, is now part of the Van Vechten Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on ‘Museum Feet’)

“I, myself, in a burst of parental obligation last Fall, decided to take the boys through the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. I would have picked a bigger place if there had been one in the country, but the Smithsonian was the biggest I could get. As a result, I contracted a bad case of what is known in medical circles as ‘Smithsonian Feet,’ that is, a complete paralysis of the feet from the ankles down, due to standing on first one foot and then the other in front of exhibition cases and walking miles upon miles up and down the tessellated corridors of the museum. The boys suffered no ill effects from the trip at all.”—Robert Benchley, “Museum Feet,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

From what I’ve been able to determine, only four museums were under the Smithsonian umbrella at the time when humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945) wrote his deeply amusing essay. Today, there are 19—count ‘em, 19. If every American could be prevailed upon to visit each of these buildings at least once, the result would be enough to foot the bill for a decade’s worth of meetings of the American Podiatric Medical Association, I'd wager.

(The accompanying image of Benchley was taken by an unknown photographer around 1935.)

Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on St. Francis Xavier)

“He left his dust, by all the myriad tread

Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand,

Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head

Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land:

He left his work, what all his life had planned,

A waning flame to flicker and to fall,

Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,

And the light died in temple and in hall,

And the old twilight sank and settled over all.”—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “St. Francis Xavier” (1892)

Four hundred and sixty years ago tomorrow, the Jesuit Francis Xavier died of a fever in China, still awaiting passage to China, thousands of miles from his native Basque region of Spain and unable to fulfill his ambition to preach his faith to one more land in the Orient. That fate strikes me as terribly lonely.

That same sense informs the above passage from a larger poem about the missionary saint by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). The verses won a prize for the future essayist-novelist, then an 18-year-old at St. Paul’s School, an English academic institution that had earlier produced John Milton and Samuel Pepys.

In a sense, the turn in the poem, almost despite its author’s intention, reflects the later evolution of his own religious thinking. Certain anti-Catholic references (“Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim” and “monkish myths”) may very well have appealed to the authorities at his school.

Remarkably, however, even after proclaiming Xavier’s “Eastern Church a dream, his toil a vanity,” Chesterton couldn’t help but admire the indefatigable fortitude and zeal of the Jesuit, and even went so far as to suggest that the surface disappointment of the saint’s last days did not end his story: “God only knows, man failing in his choice,/ How far apparent failure may succeed.”  Even amid what was still apprentice poetry, Chesterton is already exhibiting his lively, lifelong interest in paradox.

In spite of himself, Chesterton had come to feel a certain admiration for the greatest Christian missionary since St. Paul, a man who, in only 15 years between his ordination and death, had traveled to India, Ceylon, Japan, Borneo, and the Moluccas. In time, Chesterton would embrace the Roman Catholicism he had scorned in his youth, proclaiming its value, in an increasingly secular world, with the same zeal as the prototypical Jesuit missionary.

(This painting of St. Francis Xavier is held in the Kobe City Museum.)

 

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on the Need to “Think Anew and Act Anew”)

“Is it doubted, then, that the plan I propose, if adopted, would shorten the war, and thus lessen its expenditure of money and of blood? Is it doubted that it would restore the national authority and national prosperity and perpetuate both indefinitely? Is it doubted that we here—Congress and Executive can secure its adoption? Will not the good people respond to a united and earnest appeal from us? Can we, can they, by any other means so certainly or so speedily assure these vital objects? We can succeed only by concert. It is not "Can any of us imagine better?" but "Can we all do better?" Object whatsoever is possible, still the question recurs, "Can we do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”—Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

A century and a half ago, seeking means of ending a civil war already costing the nation countless blood and treasure, Abraham Lincoln called for a constitutional amendment to the Constitution authorizing voluntary colonization of freedmen back to Africa and compensated emancipation for their slave masters. Despite eloquent passages such as the one included here that have been recalled by successive generations of his reunited countrymen, however, his proposal failed, leading him to rethink his options—setting the stage for the more extraordinary, revolutionary Thirteenth Amendment.

Steven Spielberg’s biopic, Lincoln, is bringing attention to an aspect of his Presidency eclipsed in attention by the better-known Emancipation Proclamation—the use of his office, in ways not always simon-pure, for the noblest of motives: the Thirteenth Amendment, which accomplished the most fervent dreams of abolitionists. But the President’s campaign would not have come to pass had a milder anti-slavery measure two years earlier worked better than he had hoped. For all its considerable excellence, the film does not allude to this earlier proposal.

The appearance of the Spielberg film, then, leads inevitably to the question: Why did the legislative magic of the winter of 1864-65 fail when tried two years before?

Let’s start with the second year-end message to Congress, from which I’ve quoted above. Lincoln concluded with the peroration above, which has become among his best-remembered words. (Among other things, it’s among the passages recited in that evergreen of Americana, Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait.) Each generation of Americans since then, facing another crisis, has found urgent meaning in his searing admonition to “think anew and to act anew.”

The passage is all the more striking because it contrasts with a far more prosaic earlier part of the message. The President began by reviewing events abroad as well as home (even the doings of the Post Office and the Agriculture Department).

But the message—to this reader, anyway—takes a decisive turn with a sentence that, in essence, stands as a rebuke to those who continue to believe that slavery did not cause the Civil War: “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”

Lincoln’s message to Congress reads in tone so differently at various points because he was calling on three different aspects of his background to bring the war to a speedier conclusion and to rid the continent of slavery and its traces: logician, lawyer and legislator.

*Logician: Lincoln had become enamored of the principles of logic demonstrated by Euclid, and sought to apply these principles in public affairs. In an unusual section of this message to Congress, he even applied what might be considered an early instance of demographics, tracing the population growth of the American public to date and projecting out to 1920.  The great expanse of the West could accommodate such growth in the form of one nation, he told Congress, but not two, which would inevitably lead to “embarrassing and onerous trade regulations.” There was no true geographic cause for the rift, only differences over slavery that could be harmonized.

*Lawyer: Lincoln doubted that a simple act of Congress would be enough to rid the nation of slavery, and he feared that the Supreme Court, under Roger B. Taney, who had handed down the hated Dred Scott decision, would rule the Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional, even though he had undertaken it as part of the Presidential warmaking powers. He needed something more comprehensive—an amendment to the Constitution.

*Legislator: Through eight years in the Illinois state legislator, and another two in the U.S. Congress, Lincoln sought ways to defuse opposition to his ideas, even becoming friends in Congress with Alexander H. Stephens, a fellow Whig who later became Vice-President of the Confederacy. In the second message to Congress, he stroked the massive egos of many on Capitol Hill by noting: “Many of you have more experience than I, in the conduct of public affairs.” The modern role of the President as legislator-in-chief, put in practice on a grand scale first by Woodrow Wilson, had not yet come to pass, but already Lincoln was thinking of how he could get his ambitious policies enacted on Capitol Hill.

Lincoln’s proposal for compensation for slaveowners for manumission of their slaves, designed to end after 37 years, would have left the United States free of “the peculiar institution” by the turn of the century. An attempt to try this in Delaware, the most pro-Union of the border states (and, hence, the most likely border store to manumit slaves) had failed the year before, so the call for an amendment was a last-ditch try at this idea.

The proposal for colonization differed in certain ways from the compensation idea. The idea had long been

advocated by Lincoln’s political hero, Henry Clay, and the President had pushed the idea several times over the past year. But the strenuous opposition of Frederick Douglass and several other freedmen who met with him at the White House had made him increasingly less hopeful that he could secure the support of blacks for a movement that, he stressed, was completely voluntary. (The charge of racism in connection to Lincoln, a standard topic of revisionists, can be countered even here. To the delegation meeting with him at the White House three months before the message to Congress, Lincoln stressed, "Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people." His assessment of their situation--"On this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours"--proved, sadly, all too accurate for the next century.)

The message to Congress stressed that the likelihood of freedmen overwhelming the North in a great migration was minimal. Nevertheless, feelings on this point were so strong that colonization was pushed “as an answer to racist fears about what would happen after slavery,” wrote historian William Lee Miller in Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002).


Lincoln eventually yielded on the issue of colonization, but in terms of the larger issue of eradicating slavery from the continent, the intransigence of the Confederacy and even loyal border states only emboldened him. The election of 1864 gave him a better hand. The 1862 message to Congress had arrived on Capitol Hill after the Democrats had taken the House of Representatives in midterm elections, but before two more years of fighting even harder than what had come before--and the eventual decisive turn in the war with Sherman's taking of Atlanta. By the end of 1864, then, not only had Lincoln been re-elected, but he had a working majority in Congress--one not only comprised of Republicans, but increasingly of those who, after so much fighting, felt that the war had to amount to something more than the status quo ante.  

Spielberg's Lincoln stresses the compromises needed to bring the Thirteenth Amendment to fruition. In truth, however, the Second Annual Message to Congress partook far more of this spirit. The message spoke of "mutual concessions," "compromise, " and the need to "harmonize" and "act together," and the proposals represented the President's attempt at a golden mean between extremes. 

The refusal of the border states to consider his proposal, however, taught him the same kind of lesson that months of grinding battle was only beginning to teach the North: At some point, if attempts to placate and find common ground failed, more complete measures needed to be taken. Now that his olive branch to opponents had been rejected, the President made common cause with the Radical Republicans. With his re-election assured, he now had the wind at his back--and, with his push for the Thirteenth Amendment, he could steer the United States to a second republic--quicker, more complete emancipation--that few could have envisioned in December 1862.