Gothamist
A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.
Gothamist
Listen Live
Arts & Entertainment
See The Original, Annotated Script Of "A Streetcar Named Desire" Stage Production
By
Annemarie van Roessel, NYPL
Published Sep 22, 2021
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Never miss a story
Email address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .
© Elia Kazan, Courtesy of the NYPL
By
Annemarie van Roessel, NYPL
Published Sep 22, 2021
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
We rely on your support to make local news available to all
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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.
Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Kim Hunter in the stage production A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947.
Courtesy of the NYPL
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.
Tagged
flashback
history
Tennessee Williams
broadway
nypl
NYC Treasures
Annemarie van Roessel, NYPL
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
MORE arts-entertainment
Ever wish you could get paid to walk through a stranger’s house? ‘The Scout’ is for you.
A new film focuses on the strange career of a location scout in New York City.
By
Sonia Rao
Published Sep 26, 2026
There are 100s of places to visit during Open House New York. Here's 5 of our favorites.
See the entire lineup for the weekend when the city opens its doors.
By
Hannah Frishberg
Arts & Entertainment
There are 100s of places to visit during Open House New York. Here's 5 of our favorites.
See the entire lineup for the weekend when the city opens its doors.
By
Hannah Frishberg
A massive MTA archive ended up in a Virginia warehouse. A Brooklyn man brought it home.
By
Hannah Frishberg
How a Harry Styles pop-up in the East Village led to a nearby bookstore owner's arrest
By
Sonia Rao
NYC’s creative workers are increasingly self-employed, report says
By
Hannah Frishberg
Never miss a story
Catch up on the most important headlines with a roundup of essential NYC stories, delivered to your inbox daily.
Sign upEmail address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .