The Facts: The Basics

Title- A Streetcar Named Desire
Author- Tennessee Williams
Language/Translator- English/None
Year of original publication- 1947
Genre/Length/Structure- Full Length Drama-Three Acts
Agency Controlling License- Dramatists Play Service Inc.
Royalty Fees- $75 per performance
Cast Breakdown-
Blanche DuBois(female)
Stella Kowalski(female)
Stanley Kowalski(male)
Mitch(male)
Steve(male)
Pablo(male)
Eunice(male)
Allen Grey(male,never seen on-stage)
Young Man(male)
Negro Woman(female)
Mexican Woman-(female)
Shep Huntleigh-(male,never seen on-stage)
Doctor, Matron-(male and female)
Time and Setting- 1930's in a two room apartment owned by Stella & Stan Kowalski. New Orleans, Louisiana a noisy, working class neighborhood.
Bio of author- Tennessee Williams was born (1911-1983 Thomas Lanier Williams III) in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honor of his Southern accent and his father’s home state. Williams’s father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman’s daughter prone to hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi.After being bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness, Williams grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing. At sixteen, Williams won a prize in a national competition that asked for essays answering the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” His answer was published in Smart Set magazine. The following year, he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri to study journalism. Before Williams could receive his degree, however, his father forced him to withdraw from school. Outraged because Williams had failed a required ROTC program course, C.C. Williams made his son go to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.
After three years at the shoe factory, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown. He then returned to college, this time at Washington University in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced two of his plays, The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. Further personal problems led Williams to drop out of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, Rose, who had begun suffering from mental illness later in life, underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery). The event greatly upset Williams, and it left his sister institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite this trauma, Williams finally graduated. In the years following his graduation, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York. His literary influences were evolving to include the playwright Anton Chekhov and Williams’s lifelong hero, the poet Hart Crane. In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, catapulting Williams into the upper echelon of American playwrights. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theater in New York City. Much of the pathos found in Williams’s drama was mined from the playwright’s own life. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness, and insanity were all part of Williams’s world. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/streetcar/context.html
Some of his most famous works include:The Glass Menagerie (1944) · A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) · Summer and Smoke (1948) · The Rose Tattoo (1951) · Camino Real (1953) · Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) · Orpheus Descending (1957) · Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) · Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) · Period of Adjustment (1960) · The Night of the Iguana (1961)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Williams
Brief Plot Summary
The play reveals to the very depths the character of Blanche du Bois, a woman whose life has been undermined by her romantic illusions, which lead her to reject—so far as possible—the realities of life with which she is faced and which she consistently ignores. The pressure brought to bear upon her by her sister, with whom she goes to live in New Orleans, intensified by the earthy and extremely "normal" young husband of the latter, leads to a revelation of her tragic self-delusion and, in the end, to madness.
http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=1791