Who, me? I’m waitin’ for a streetcar.
—Bugs Bunny, 14 Carrot Rabbit (1951)
The Yale Rep’s production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire began previews last Friday and has its opening night tonight (Thursday the 26th). Expect my review real soon.
There’s been much written—including by me, in the current issue of New Haven Living magazine—about the show’s local legacy.
A Streetcar Named Desire had its pre-Broadway try-out at the Shubert in New Haven. The premiere production was directed by a Yale School of Drama grad, Elia Kazan, and starred Marlon Brando, whose first major Broadway role (in I Remember Mama) also benefited from a Shubert try-out. Streetcar’s Shubert opening is recollected by Williams in his memoirs because he was berated that night by a fellow playwright—no less a personage than longtime New Haven resident Thornton Wilder—for Streetcar’s alleged “fatally mistaken premise.”
The play endured despite Wilder’s rebuke, winning a Pulitzer prize and returning to the Shubert on its national tour in 1950. But its Connecticut connections hardly end there.
Long Wharf Theatre did Streetcar back in 1971 with that theater’s diva Joyce Ebert as Blanche, the great Laurie Kennedy as Stella and John Cazale as Mitch.
When Michael Wilson became artistic director of Hartford Stage in 1998, he opened his first full season with A Streetcar Named Desire, the beginning of a decade-long exploration of Williams’ works at that theater. Wilson’s Streetcar was so operatic it was sick, and ended with a big jumbled-noises sound design representing what was going through Blanche DuBois’ head.
I can’t find a Westport Country Playhouse production of Streetcar, which is odd since the theater did many, much more obscure Williams works from the late 1950s in the ‘70s., like 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1956 (with—get this—Maureen Stapleton, Jules Munshin and John Cassavetes) and Summer & Smoke in 1973 (with Eva Marie Saint and Ronny Cox!).
That’s sort of like the Yale Rep, which has done Summer & Smoke and Glass Menagerie and other Williams works without ever getting around to Streetcar. Until now. Mark Rucker, who’s directing this production, directed the Williams rarity Kingdom of Earth for the Rep in 2001. That was the Rep show which inaugurated the Chapel Street black box space now known as the Iseman Theater.
“I did Kingdom of Earth as at Yale as a student” in the early ’90s, Rucker told me in a phone interview back in August. Memories of that show is what led the Rep to ask him to do it for the Rep a decade later. Kingdom of Earth, which Williams wrote in the 1960s and rewrote throughout the 1970s, had a troubled production history in the playwright’s lifetime, including changing its title (to The Seven Descents of Myrtle onstage and The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots for its film version). Rucker likens it heavily to Streetcar, in how its characters relate and the transformations they undergo at the plays’ respective climaxes.
The Yale Rep may not have produced Streetcar before, but Streetcar has been done on the Rep stage. In 2002, Trip Cullman chose the play for his thesis project in the directing program at the Yale School of Drama. His rendition, with a fiery hot stage design that featured raw cow bodies hanging above the stage, had a three-and-a-half-hour running time and really plumbed the anger and madness of the characters.
The longest-running. most realistic Streetcar Named Desire with connections to this area, however, has never graced a professional stage. It is rendered in a style which predates Tennessee Williams’ play by 25 years. It’s an actual streetcar, with “Desire” properly listed as its final stop, and it once carried passengers around New Orleans. In the mid-1960s the vehicle, known as Desire #850, was added to the collection of the Shoreline Trolley Museum in East Haven. In the 1990s, it underwent five years of restoration by museum volunteers, who retrofitted the interior so that it looked as it had in the mid-1940s, when the Williams play is set.
You can visit that streetcar at The Shoreline Trolley Museum between 10:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. weekdays at 17 River Street, East Haven, Connecticut. (203) 467-6927.
As for the Yale Rep: www.yalerep.org