See The Original, Annotated Script Of "A Streetcar Named Desire" Stage Production

One of the most acclaimed theatrical works of the 20th century, playwright Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, opened on Broadway on December 3rd, 1947, with actors Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden bringing the searing family drama to life under Elia Kazan’s sensitive direction, and with Irene Selznick as the savvy producer. Earlier that fall, the full cast and crew gathered at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, to prepare for an out-of-town tryout. Standard practice for Broadway-bound productions in those days, regional tryouts were an opportunity for revisions and refinements and to assure investors that the production was putting its best foot forward for the New York critics.

This script, revised on October 6th, 1947 and used by Kazan in New Haven, bears many annotations and is the only known surviving script of his from the production. On this page, we see an indelible moment from the play, when Brando’s character Stanley Kowalski yells the lines “Stella! Stella!,” seeking desperately to reunite with his wife after earlier striking her in an abusive quarrel. The tension between Stanley, Stella, and Stella’s fragile sister Blanche builds throughout the acts to a terrifying climax. Kazan and Williams wanted the audience to see this drama as a fundamental conflict between sensitivity and brutality, a commentary on a more delicate world being crushed under a merciless modern society.

A gift to The New York Public Library from Kazan’s production assistant Mary Boehlert, the script—one of the over 250 items that will be on display as part of the Library’s permanent Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures—is part of a collection that also includes almost 100 pages of meticulously detailed typewritten notes to the actors. These acting notes give us an extraordinary view into the day-to-day creative process. Kazan (and Williams in a few instances) directed the actors to work out the smallest gestures, pacings, and movements, speak lines with particular emotional emphasis, and construct the complicated and often harrowing relationships that emerge in the course of the play.

All of Kazan’s painstaking work with the cast in New Haven paid off. As we now know, the Broadway production of Streetcar was a landmark moment of American theatre, earning Williams a Pulitzer Prize and Tandy a Tony Award, and making a virtually unknown Marlon Brando a break-out star. After seeing the Broadway premiere, New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting... It reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human.” Critical acclaim was widespread and Kazan directed the 1951 film adaptation, which garnered multiple Academy Award nominations and wins.

The Billy Rose Theatre Division also holds many other rare documents related to this production, including Kim Hunter’s personal annotated script and all the designs from renowned scenic designer Jo Mielziner (whose set design for the Broadway production of Guys and Dolls is also on display in Treasures). More broadly, the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library for the Performing Arts holds tens of thousands of theatre, film, television and radio scripts, most with annotations by the actors, directors, stage managers and designers who used them.

This story is part of our partnership with the NYPL around the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures, which showcases items spanning 4,000 years from the Library's research collections—we'll be publishing one NYC-related object a day throughout September, and you can see everything at gothamist.com/treasures. The Treasures exhibition opens Friday, September 24th, 2021 at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Free timed tickets are now available here.