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On this day in 1947, first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire thrilled the audience during it’s opening on the Broadway stage of Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
Produced by Irene Mayer Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, the play shocked mid-century audiences with its frank depiction of sexuality and brutality onstage. When the curtain went down on opening night, there was a moment of stunned silence before the crowd erupted into a round of applause that lasted 30 minutes. On December 17, the cast left New York to go on the road. The show would run for more than 800 performances, winning numerous prizes and in 1951 was made into a movie.
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In relevance to the event Berghahn is delighted to offer an array of titles on Performance Studies:
PERFORMING PLACE, PRACTISING MEMORIESAboriginal Australians, Hippies and the State
Rosita HenryDuring the 1970s a wave of ‘counter-culture’ people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.
