The original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York on 3 December 1947, cemented Tennessee Williams’ place in American literature overnight. The cast received a 30-minute standing ovation after the first performance, and the exhilarated playwright marvelled at how both he and the audience had been sent ‘zowing to mad heights’ before being left ‘wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained’ (Lahr 2014, p. 145). Although some were shaken by the play’s taboo themes of homosexuality, promiscuity, alcoholism and rape, the production played to packed houses for two full years and earned Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Set in a vibrant multicultural workingclass district of New Orleans, A Streetcar Named Desire is firmly embedded within its specific post-Second World War sociocultural context. Both intensely personal and highly political, its central characters — the highly-strung Southern belle Blanche and the brash second-generation immigrant Stanley — compellingly symbolise the violent culture clash and spiritual shift between the moribund Old South and newly confident post-war America.
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