The Musical Collaboration of Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Alex North in a Street Car named Desire

UC South Ballroom

In his Notebook Tennessee Williams wrote:

The experimental dramatist must find a method of presenting his passion in an articulate manner… my form is poetic [therefore]…a nonrealistic form must be chosen…[what] I call sculptural drama.

Sculptural drama, Williams’s hypothesis of “plastic theater,” implied the use of all stage resources, to generate a theatrical experience greater than realism. Only by using “other” transformative shapes could poetic imagination define truth, life, or reality.

My work aims to demonstrate music as a universal source of poetic truth. Williams, from his earliest writings, recognized the poetic expressionistic purity of music. Similar expressions are found in the philosophic writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner. Through critical analysis of musical interludes in Williams’s plays and film adaptation, I demonstrate an ontological and aesthetic connection of Williams with these theoreticians.

For A Streetcar Named Desire and other Williams plays, scholar’s Nancy Tischler, Annette Davison, Brenda Murphy, C.W.E Bigsby and others have described the collaborative relationship between Williams, film director Elia Kazan, and music composer Alex North. A similar collaborative artistic philosophy of aesthetic artists remains undefined.

Alex North’s film score for Streetcar is considered a cinematic masterpiece. The collaborative team was familiar with New Orleans and the blues and jazz for which the city was famous. Williams had lived in the Vieux Carre frequenting many jazz clubs. Kazan filmed Panic in the Streets in New Orleans, North referred to jazz as “emotionally lowdown Basin Street blues—sad, glad, mad New Orleans jazz in terms of human beings.”

Kazan agreed with Williams choice of the blues as it relates to the protagonist Blanche’s “lonely abandoned soul.” In the film score, clarinet, drums, piano, and trumpet played arrangements of well-established standards. The blues/jazz music appeared to originate from the neighboring Four Duces bar, giving credence to scenic objectivity. The ghostly dance, the Varsouviana, played at the Blue Moon Casino the night Blanche’s husband died, was used for subjective effect, heard only by Blanche at moments of emotional crisis at mention of her late husband. Jazz elements emphasized a strong connection with Stanley, particularly in three scenes. Two scenes suggested the importance of sex in Stanley and Stella’s relationship. The rape scene underscored the potential for sexual violence when desire is unrestrained by morality.

Tennessee Williams's comprehension of the power of music is underscored by Alex North’s score which emphasizes Williams’s tragic and ambivalent characterizations of his protagonist anti-heroes. Williams’s anti-hero is embodied in Jungian psychology where the classic ideals of nobility, courage, and goodness are a priori within the individual collective unconscious. Schopenhauer sought to demonstrate the a priori nature of causality. Nietzsche termed music a primary expression of the essence of everything. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk sought to unite the arts; music and fiction, dance and gesture. Williams included music to create atmosphere and define character throughout his entire literary canon. Is music, defined as “the purest form of art that embodied the Will itself,” the aesthetic philosophic connection of great artists?