MAN OF THE HOUSE Marlon Brando played Stanley on Broadway in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and in the 1951 film.
“HAVE A SHOT?” Stanley Kowalski asks his sister-in-law, Blanche Du Bois, whom he has just met. He's come home to find her in his and his wife's two-room New Orleans apartment.
Blanche: “No, I rarely touch it.”
Stanley:”Some people rarely touch it, but it touches them often.” Blanche laughs politely. What sort of cretin has her sister, Stella, married? But at least Blanche has a place to stay for a while. And we see a bit of what Tennessee Williams had to say about drinkers and drinking in "A Streetcar Named Desire."
PART 4 IN A SERIES
NO ONE CAN ARGUE that "Streetcar," which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for drama, was not primarily about sex and illusion. Sweet, genteel Blanche (or is she?) arrives in New Orleans to find her little sister, Stella, married to a coarse Polish-American guy whose wardrobe staple is a white undershirt, sometimes torn and often sweaty. Stella is both visibly pregnant and visibly hot for her blue-collar husband, who was first played on Broadway by Marlon Brando when he was 23. Jessica Tandy (in photo) originated the role of Blanche when she was 38. The character is described in the script as over 30.
Seventy years later, the plot of "Streetcar" is well known. Blanche, who has run away from her and Stella's Mississippi hometown and what used to be their family plantation, Belle Reve (it's been taken by creditors), has nowhere to go. While she's staying with Stanley and Stella (Kim Hunter, center, in photo), she meets a nice mama's boy, Mitch (played by Karl Malden on Broadway and in the film), who seems charmed by her. But Stanley, who has grown suspicious of Blanche's tales, does some research and learns that Blanche has a shady recent past.
She married a young man who turned out to be gay and killed himself, but she apparently followed that up with proving just how desirable she was in shabby liaison after shabby liaison at the local Flamingo Hotel. She was essentially run out of town as a scarlet woman. When Stanley shares that information with Mitch, Blanche's hopes for marriage and a new life are dashed. (Vivien Leigh, in photo, starred in the London stage version and in the film. She was 38 in 1951.)
While Stella is at the hospital giving birth, Stanley rapes Blanche. "You and me have had this date from the beginning," he growls at her. Later, Stella doesn't believe her sister when she tells her what happened. And Blanche is soon being taken away to a mental institution by a doctor and a nurse, having clearly lost touch with reality and rattling on about "the kindness of strangers."
But, as Williams makes clear in scene after scene, the plot couldn't have moved ahead nearly as smoothly without the help of booze.
Blanche is an interesting combination of an escapist drunk, a flirtatious drunk and a drunk in denial. "A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand-new outlook on life," she tells Stella cheerfully at one point. But she's always insisting that it's her first of the evening. Or that she's never had so much to drink at one time before!
But we've seen Blanche when she was alone. After the landlady lets her into her sister's apartment, the first thing she does is help herself to a shot. As the script notes, she:
“notices something in a half-opened closet. She springs up and crosses to it and removes a whiskey bottle. She pours a half tumbler of whiskey and tosses it down. She carefully replaces the bottle and washes out the tumbler at the sink."
Her next line is "I've got to keep hold of myself."
When Stella makes her a drink later, she asks for it straight, with just water as a chaser. "Now don't get worried," Blanche says sweetly. "Your sister hasn't turned into a drunkard. She's just all shaken up and hot and tired and dirty." She also announces that one is her limit but decides to have "just one little tiny nip more."
Apparently, this is part of her game. In one scene, she girlishly tells Mitch: “The show let out at 11 and we couldn’t come home on account of the poker game, so we had to go somewhere and drink. I’m not accustomed to having more than one drink. Two is the limit — and three! [she laughs] Tonight I had three.”
Another of Blanche's memorable lines is "Well, honey, a shot never does a Coke any harm." She has to be classified as a louche drunk too. She does try to seduce the paper boy ("Young, young, young man") when he stops by the apartment to collect money.
Actually, if there's a scary drunk in "Streetcar," it's Mitch. (Always the quiet ones.) He's a gentle soul, and if he drinks a bit during the poker games with Stanley and the other guys, we don't see any ill effect. But he deliberately gets smashed before going over to confront Blanche with what he's learned about her sexual reputation. He tries to assault her, but she escapes.
And then there's Stanley. We have to classify him as a mean drunk, but his sober personality and his inebriated one aren't very far apart. Stella, who is pregnant and therefore (presumably) not drinking, makes excuses for him.
"In the first place, when men are drinking and playing poker, anything can happen," Stella says tolerantly. "It's always a powder keg. He didn't know what he was doing."
This is after Stanley has thrown Blanche's portable radio out the window because he doesn't like the music. "Drunk, drunk, animal thing, you!" Blanche wails at him.
"They went through two cases last night," Stella adds.
Stanley is drunk the night of the rape too. And he's drunk when he cries his wife's name, "Stella!," repeatedly, standing at the foot of his apartment building's outside stairs (scene in photo). Everything about the play tells us that Stanley will continue drinking, he will hit Stella again, and he will never reveal the truth to her about his night with her sister.
For Blanche, we can only hope that the hospital she's headed for will provide her daily meds.
"A Streetcar Named Desire," by Tennessee Williams, opened on Dec. 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and ran for two years. Broadway revivals were produced in 1950, 1956, 1973, 1988, 1992 (back at the Barrymore, with Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange), 2005 and 2012.