I'm really excited to bring A Streetcar Named Desire to the stage. For a long time I was hoping to do a part in the play as an actor, but over the years, I've wanted to have more of a hand in the overall production - casting, the set, the overall atmosphere, lighting, sound, etc. That's why this reading - happening at the Firehall on Oct 16th - is so cool. In a way, it almost mirrors the original 1947 "tryout" production that happened in New Haven Connecticut for 3 nights only before it moved eventually to Broadway and then to the West End in London.

Back then, pretty much every show headed for Broadway opened out of town first, far enough away from the New York critics that the director and the playwright could find out what was working (and what wasn't) in front of a real audience. Streetcar opened at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven on Thursday, October 30, 1947, and closed after the Saturday show. Three nights, that's it.

Here’s something really cool. Elia Kazan's director's notes from New Haven still exist, and they aren't big speeches about what the play MEANS. They're tiny things, like "Blanche pat Stanley tummy to pacify him," or telling Stella to smooth out the bed more. He even left a note for Tennessee Williams asking if one of Blanche's speeches was too long. The script barely changed on the way to New York, it was the performances that got worked on, gesture by gesture.

Arthur Miller was in the audience in New Haven, stuck on a play about a salesman. He wrote later that it wasn't the story that got him, it was the words, and that Williams had given playwrights "a license to speak at full throat." (Thornton Wilder was there too, and told Williams afterwards the whole premise was wrong, because no lady like Stella would EVER marry a guy like Stanley... so not everybody got it right away.)

Miller came back to it almost sixty years later, in the introduction he wrote for the 2004 New Directions edition, not long before he died. And he's STILL talking about the language. “The impression was not that of one-liners or ‘poetry‘ but of language flowing from the soul”

From New Haven it went to Boston, then Philadelphia, then Broadway on December 3, 1947, where it ran for 855 performances and won the Pulitzer.

My favourite thing in the back of my copy is a short piece called "The World I Live In," where Williams interviews himself (which is a very Tennessee Williams thing to do).
“Q: You think the word’s going mad?
A: Going? I‘d say nearly gone! As the Gypsy said in a Camino Real, the world is a funny paper read backwards. And that it isn’t so funny.”

Especially in a tryout, or a reading like this one, the LANGUAGE is what we're digging into. Even the stage directions are all about the language. In a fully staged production they'd be omitted, but here we get to hear exactly what the playwright intended for each scene, so an audience can almost hear his thoughts. In our production we will have a few different folks read the stage directions.

The Firehall is a LOT smaller than the Shubert (which seats about 1,600 today). It's home to Northumberland Players, and Val Russell, who is producing this reading, directed Silent Sky there back in 2019.

Silent Sky at the Firehall Theatre, 2019, directed by Val Russell. Photo: Northumberland Players

What I hope happens on the 16th is that a) folks come out to see it, b) there is a palpable excitement around the quality of the script and our actors’ capabilities with it, and c) an urgency to see the production fully staged. Time will tell!

Friday, October 16 at 7:30pm, Firehall Theatre, 213 Second St. in Cobourg. Tickets are $15 (and there are refreshments), get them here.