From Page to Stage to Celluloid: A Streetcar Named Desire

Introduction

Isn't it rather strange that most degree level study of drama (on literature degrees, at least) is conducted using lecture theatres, seminar rooms, books and computers rather than real theatres, rehearsal studios and costume shops?  Very often the focus is on topics such as language, history, and the sense of place, rather than specifically issues of performance. However, clearly it won't do to overlook dramatic texts' qualities as drama - they are, emphatically, not novels.

How then can one approach an understanding of the dramatic qualities of a play? If you have a chance to see any play from the period you are studying live in the theatre, you'd be mad not to take it. You might also want to explore a second option - watching a film of the play.

Instructions

First of all, make sure you have read and thought about the play, otherwise you will never be able to disentangle play from film.  Obtain and watch a video of the 1956 film, A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando.  Follow the text in the printed edition as you're watching it, and keep running notes - perhaps in the margin of your own copy - of any thing of interest.  The sorts of things that might come up include:
•	alterations of individual lines of dialogue (don't attempt to note all these, of course - but you might want to note the flavour of a few, or to concentrate on changes that seem to you significant)
•	cuts - and are these for reasons of pace, or sensitivities?  (some issues of the video announce that they are 'the director's cut', containing three extra minutes in all of footage deleted at a late stage from the version issued in 1956.  Is this discarded footage part of the 'real' film, or not true to the director's intention at all?)
•	additions to the dialogue - most obviously, of course, the start and end of the film - and transpositions of sections of dialogue
•	use of location - the play, after all, is stuck, pointedly and claustrophobically, in a single place.  Where does the film take us, and to what effect?
•	Use of filmic effects - close-ups, tracking shots, camera angles (Blanche filmed often from above, Stanley from below) and intercuttings are perhaps the most obvious.  
•	use of music and sound effects - both play and film use these a lot, but not in the same ways or at the same places.  Why?

There are various ways to use the film, mentally.  A list of these might include the following:
•	It's a powerful aide-memoire - having seen it, it's much harder to forget who does and says what in Streetcar the play (although bear in mind, as your work above shows, not all of the details are the same, especially the end!)
•	It's a useful reminder of period detail - the trains and telephones and so on.
•	It's a convenient approximation to a performance of Streetcar the play.  Were there any scenes that came out differently, in performance, to how you expected from having read the text?  For instance, relatively invisible on the page, but rather gripping in the film, is the wordless sequence where Stella walks down the staircase towards Stanley.  This moment is clearly a hugely important one in defining their relationship, but its full impact is not really registered in reading, since it has no dialogue attached.  And what about Stanley?  Many people report thinking of him as an inexplicable, unpleasant monster, until they see his part actually performed by Brando.  Would you agree?  What about your reactions to the other characters?
•	It is, in interesting ways, not a performance of Streetcar the play.  This, in turn, sets up a series of mental opportunities:
•	We've noted the cuts of bits of dialogue, some of which were perhaps felt to be too suggestive (for instance, Blanche's sentence about sister Margaret's death in Scene One).  What do these bits of dialogue suggest?
•	If there were moments when you noticed filmic devices being used extensively, think about how the scene might play without them.  For instance, close-ups focus on the emotional register of a single character - but what other characters are on stage whose reactions they are failing to log?
•	What about the extensive colour symbolism in the play - what does the film lose by being unable to repeat that?
•	And, perhaps most importantly, how would Streetcar play in front of a live audience?   So much of it is devoted to imagery of role-playing and costume-changing: to the courtroom-like struggle between Blanche and Stanley over which of them deserves Stella's sympathy (and the audience's): to Blanche's virtual monologues that appear to address the audience more than any of the characters on stage.   Can we use the film as a basis for an imaginative reconstruction of what it might be like in a theatre?

A sane way of keeping track of all this is to write up a short film review.

Further Work

There is critical material specifically on the relationship between the play and the film, which you might enjoy, for instance:

•	Matthew C. Roudané ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
•	A not bad online essay by Steffen Blaschke, "A Streetcar Named Desire - Play In Comparison With Movie" 
http://johnwatsonsite.com/MyClassNotes/Texts/Streetcar/SNDplay_film.pdf

You could watch another film based on a Williams play. For instance:

•	Suddenly Last Summer (1959) 
•	Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) 

You should be able to find videoed performances, of one sort or another, based on plays by by many major playwrights of the period, such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Miller, Beckett, and Pinter.  We have seen that film is a very different medium to live theatre, with its own possibilities and limitations - however, where videos of relevant plays are available, they might well be a useful addition to your critical arsenal.

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