Script for the pre-Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the most acclaimed theatrical works of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway in December 1947, with Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden bringing the searing family drama to life under the sensitive direction of Elia Kazan. The previous fall, they held out-of-town rehearsals and a trial run in New Haven, Connecticut. This annotated script and Kazan’s accompanying notes document their meticulous rehearsal process. The New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review of the Broadway premiere that “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.”