A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

By Tennessee Williams

Performed at The Nuffield Theatre on 14th to 18th June, 1983

Cast

for the Maskers

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His father was a traveling salesman for a shoe company, and his mother the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman. The family moved to St. Louis in 1918, and being sensitive and physically delicate, Williams found the transition from the small Southern town to a big "Northern" city difficult. His small size, his Deep South accent and manners, and his incapacity for, as well as disinterest in, athletics made him the butt of his schoolmates. Unable to participate in their games and mocked by his unsympathetic father, Tom drew closer to his sister and began to write. He called his St. Louis boyhood "lonely and miserable."

In 1929 he entered the University of Missouri$ where he won prizes for writing. Just before his senior year, in 1932, his father, disappointed in the boy and pressed by financial need, removed him from college and obtained for him a $65-a- month job in the warehouse of the International Shoe Company. Williams worked by day and wrote by night; two years later he suffered a nervous collapse and had to be hospitalized for a month. Soon after, in 1935, with the financial help of his grandparents, he attended Washington University in St. Louis. In 1938, Williams received his B.A. degree and, on learning that a lobotomy had been performed on his sister, went to New Orleans. Greatly disturbed by his sister's illness, he no longer wished to return to St. Louis. The Glass Menagerie (1944) marked his first major success and established him as an important American dramatist. A Streetcar Named Desire, produced in 1947, underscored the success of William’s previous play. It was followed by many critical and box-office triumphs including The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1961).