A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire: We’ve Had This Date from the Beginning

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Stephen Byrd’s 2012 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with black and Hispanic actors, inspired the typical strong responses from critics, many of whom objected to the casting as historically improbable. Yet it is precisely the predictability of these responses that argues in favour of non-traditional casting. Such casting reveals something new about the play and also about audience assumptions. It forces a confrontation with ideology that is particularly revealing in the case of Streetcar. When director Emily Mann cast African-American and Hispanic actors in the lead roles, she denied theatregoers the opportunity to ride the tracks up one old narrow street and down another to a familiar destination – an interpretation that both scapegoats and romanticizes the South, exposing and concealing the nation’s racial history. Byrd and Mann proved, not only that Streetcar can be successfully produced with a multiethnic cast, but that it demands to be done so.