Was Stanley Kowalski Marlon Brando's only role on Broadway?

BRUTAL DESIRE In titling A Streetcar Named Desire after an actual New Orleans streetcar line, Williams connects mechanization to animal desires as well as the cultural decay that has diminished Blanche DuBois: STELLA: But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark-that sort of make everything else seem-unimportant. BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire- just-Desire!-the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.... STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car? BLANCHE: It brought me here.-Where I'm not wanted and Where I'm ashamed to be. (A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 70)

A play set in the French Quarter of New Orleans following World War II; produced and published in 1947.

by Tennessee Williams

Synopsis
Blanche DuBois, an upper-class Mississippi woman of dwindling fortune, moves in with her poor sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans. There she encounters brutality, and shows evidence of insanity that reflects a general cultural decline.

    The Play in Focus
    Events in History at the Time of the Play


Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. After spending most of his youth in St. Louis, Missouri, "Tennessee" (a name he chose because of his family's extensive roots in that state) moved to a New Orleans rooming house in the winter of 1938 and remained there through the spring of 1939. Proclaiming New Orleans "his favorite city in America, perhaps in the world" (Williams and Mead, p. 73), Williams returned there in 1945 to write A Streetcar Named Desire, a play that dramatizes the social and economic transition between traditional Southern life and the newly industrialized South.

For More Information
Arthur, Stanley Clisby. Old New Orleans. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1990.
Bukowczyk, John J. And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish-Americans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Cooper, William J. and Thomas E. Terrill. The American South: A History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.
Quirino, Leonard. "The Cards Indicate a Voyage on a Streetcar Named Desire." In Tennessee Williams: 13 Essays. Edited by Jac Tharpe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980.
Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.
Williams, Dakin and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1983.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1947.
Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.