A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

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INTENTIONS, SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AND RESEARCH

Published in The Herald (Thu 21 Sept), here is our full repsonse to an article written by Brian Beacom where he questions our choices of cast for A Streetcar Named Desire. To read Mr Beacom's orginal article click here. 

We are writing in response to Brian Beacom’s opinion piece on Rapture Theatre’s current production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was published in The Herald, on 31^st August, in which several assumptions were made about our artistic decisions which are both inaccurate and unacceptable.

Most significantly, Mr Beacom takes issue with our company’s decision to cast black actors in key roles and accuses us of “playing” with the “playwright’s period intentions” by doing so. He should note the following points.

Far from “playing with” the playwright’s “intentions”, our aim was to observe the author’s intentions accurately and truthfully in our work, recreating the world of the play as he saw it, and making its central concerns relevant to modern audiences. 

Well before making any casting decisions, the company had already established that Williams supported the casting of black actors in his work.  Indeed, he sanctioned, personally, several multi-racial productions of Streetcar. 

Additionally, Williams once took legal action to prevent a production of his play, The Glass Menagerie, being performed in a Washington theatre which did not admit black people.  He wrote in the New York Times in 1947, the year that he published Streetcar:

 “Any future contract I make will contain a clause to keep the show out of Washington while this undemocratic practice (of audience segregation) continues.”

Clearly, the author’s “intention” was therefore to be inclusive and democratic.  These principles were upheld in the casting decisions.

The article states:

“Tennessee Williams’ play is…a world of stark segregation in which a black man would not be allowed to live in an apartment block with a white woman and certainly not in a house owned by a woman of colour.”

Yet, our research demonstrates that women in Louisiana were able to own property. In1855, Massachusetts passed the Married Women’s Property Act which allowed women to own and sell their own property, and by the end of the civil war, most states had a version of this law in place.  Moreover, because of the legacy of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, free people of colour possessed greater rights and freedoms there than those afforded to black people elsewhere, and were property owners. Inter-racial marriage was also legal in many states in America (in fact some states never had any legislation against it) by the time the play was written, beginning with Ohio, where the law against mixed race marriage was repealed in 1887. 

We are criticised for casting black performers as it is “anachronistic”. However, Williams’ describes New Orleans in the play’s stage directions as:

“… a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of the races”

By casting black actors, Rapture is presenting the city as Williams saw it, and heard it, with what he described as “brown hands” playing music in the bar off-stage.  We are not “playing with the author’s period intentions” our vision is clearly and directly in line with the playwright’s.

Most importantly, when we cast the play, our focus was on casting actors who would bring relevant qualities to the part, not on their ethnicity; we take it as a given that all human beings are capable of the full range of emotional experiences, whatever their heritage. The fact that Mr Beacom seems to require “explanations” for the presence of black actors on stage demonstrates an unfortunate narrowness of thought and a limiting lack of imagination. 

Furthermore, issue is also taken with the central male character of the play, Stanley, being black because he is also Polish. However, the experience of being black is not exclusive to nationality.  We have evidence of black soldiers in the Polish army in the 1920s and, in any case, given that Stanley was, as he states in the play, “born and raised”, in America, he may well have been of mixed race heritage, and Polish simply because one of his parents was a Polish immigrant.

Even more disturbingly, it is suggested that because Stanley is Polish, that fact alone is enough for us to be able to understand his entire character.  Mr Beacom states that Stanley’s “race and class informed his status” and then extrapolates that this defines “his attitudes to life and women”. 

However, it is impossible to accept that Tennessee Williams, champion of the outsider, the dispossessed, the unfortunate, could conceivably have resorted to such crude racial stereotyping as a shorthand method of characterising his male protagonist.  Stanley is a multi-layered, complex character:  an Officer in the Engineers Corps and a war hero who won medals for bravery, returning, no doubt psychologically damaged by his experiences, to a home life where he would have experienced a loss of status, and poverty, and where he would have been the victim of constant casual and overt racism.  He is certainly violent and aggressive towards others and such behavior is not excusable, but it is explicable within the internal logic of the play. However, it is not simply Stanley’s class and ethnicity which define him or drive his angry outbursts.

The attack on the casting of black actors is not confined to our production, rather it permeates the piece, despite the observations being both unfounded and inaccurate.  For example, it is claimed that Albee’s estate rejected “colour blind casting…given that it was set in the early Sixties in New England in middle class academia”. But there have been productions of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, sanctioned by Albee, and other productions approved by his estate, which have included black actors.

The piece generously states that “rainbow” casting is acceptable in “panto” or “Shakespeare (which blends history and fantasy)”.  However, before consigning all of our wonderful black actors to the limitations of performing in these two specific genres, it is perhaps important to point out that all theatre, even when it is based on real events, is “fantasy”, that all theatre requires the “dramatic suspension of disbelief”, and therefore, by Mr Beacom’s own definition, it should be open to everyone. There is no reason why “historical” or other roles should be “closed off”, as he puts it, to black actors.  Black people have been living in Britain since at least the 12^th Century, and probably well before that (archeologists have found the remains of wealthy people of African descent in 4^th Century Roman York) and are just as entitled to be a part of, and to represent, British culture as anyone else. 

It is fascinating to note that Mr Beacom claims his “appreciation” of Noel Coward’s “Hayfever” was apparently “diluted” by the presence of a black actor in this comedy of “English middle class convention”. Yet, in the same production, the presence of two Scottish actors speaking in their own accents, adding to the richness of the text but sounding not at all as Noel Coward might have imagined, or intended, appears to have left him unfazed. He also comments that the chances of a member of the British upper class being black in the 1920s would have been “zero”.  However, there are many examples of upper class black people in British history.  One of Queen Victoria’s Goddaughters, Sara Forbes Bonetta, a well known socialite, was black. The first generally acknowledged black British aristocrat, Dido Belle, was born in 1761. Black people cannot simply be written out of history to fulfil reactionary cultural stereotypes.

Before we began working on “Streetcar”, we researched it extensively. We considered:  the role and ethnic mix of the Polish community in the USA; the history of Polish migration; the ethnic mix of the American military; the existence of ethnic segregation in the military; the role of the Engineer Corps (to which Stanley and Mitch both belonged) within the American military; the representation of ethnic minorities in popular culture in the USA from the 1940s onwards; the ethnic mix within the media from the 1940s onwards; the ethnic and cultural composition of New Orleans at the time the play was written; the history of Louisiana, including the French/Spanish influence on its laws and culture; the legal situation regarding, for example, property ownership and ethnicity; mixed race marriage laws (miscegenation laws) in the USA;  the patriarchal nature of society in the USA in the 1940s; the social control of female sexuality; women’s rights; the understanding about, and treatment of, mental health issues at that time; as well as countless other aspects of the play and its background.

Unfortunately, the ideas in the opinion piece appear ill-informed. 

Tennessee Williams was a bold and fearless champion of those who found themselves to be, through no fault of their own, “outsiders” in society.  He created characters and plots which gave a voice to those who were excluded: because they were born into the underclasses of society; because they were shunned or rejected as a result of their mental illness; because they were discriminated against due to their gender, their sexuality or their ethnicity.  He was heroic, fearless and consistent in his support of the underdog. He believed that there were no “good” or “bad” people, just people.

However, his work is also driven by an overarching promotion of acceptance:  a fostering of compassion, forgiveness, understanding and tolerance.  The pure notes of his lyrical language in the mouths of those who frequently have no voice empowers them, enabling their words to soar and to penetrate the hearts, minds and souls of audiences in clear, ringing tones which transcend the characters’ otherwise lowly status.

However, Williams’ strong social conscience also meant that he did not shy away from confronting the ugliness and brutality of bigotry, prejudice and hatred. 

Neither will we.  

The Cast, Crew and Creative Team of Rapture Theatre 

FABULOUS PRODUCTION IMAGES

Wow, here are some of the beautiful production images from Streetcar. 

Images: ©RichardCampbell

Toview more click here

See what our audience thought of the production in this Vox Pop video (click on image to play)

Touring to a venue near you 1st Sep to 7th Oct, 2017. For booking details click on the links in the Tour Schedule.

Tour Schedule

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