A Streetcar Named Desire

It's the Cawthra spring play ... playing May 1, 2, and 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Cost: a ridiculously low $10 per ticket!

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[Reading through the script] [Cast List] [Rehearsals get intense] [Building the Set] [Props] [Rehearsals Continue] [Tech Rehearsal] [Wardrobe] [Dress]

Poster Design Contest for Streetcar

About the play ...

In 1947 the Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway for a two year run with Marlon Brando as star and Elia Kazan as director.   In 1951 the famous play was made into a movie starring: Vi vien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, Kim Hunter as Stella, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Karl Malden as Mitch.

The story opens with Blanche DuBois coming to New Orleans to visit her sister, the pregnant Stella, and the sister's husband Stanley Kowalski. To get to their seedy apartment, she has to take a streetcar named Desire.   Thus, the Desire streetcar became the most famous street railway in the world.

Marlon Brando didn't win the Academy Award in 1951 for his acting in "A Streetcar Named Desire" but you could make a good case that no performance had more influence on modern film acting styles than Brando's work as Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams' rough, smelly, sexually charged hero.

Before this role, there was usually a certain restraint in American movie performances. Actors would portray violent emotions, but you could always sense to some degree a certain modesty that prevented them from displaying their feelings in raw nakedness. Brando held nothing back, and within a few years his was the style that dominated Hollywood movie acting.

When "A Streetcar Named Desire" was first released, it created a firestorm of controversy. It was immoral, decadent, vulgar and sinful, its critics cried. And that was after substantial cuts had already been made in the picture, at the insistence of Warner Bros.  That was more than 50 years ago ... how will the play be received in 2003?  Buy a ticket and see for yourself!