Distinguished Speaker Series: The Greatest American Play! Why ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Still Moves Audiences Today

Distinguished Speaker Series: The Greatest American Play! Why A Streetcar Named Desire Still Moves Audiences Today with Professor Henry Schvey

Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), is more than seventy-five years old, yet it speaks to us today with a freshness and theatrical power that bely its age. Unlike its heroine Blanche Dubois, who cannot bear strong light, Streetcar stands up to the most exacting scrutiny, and this talk considers the sources of its greatness.

The lecture’s first part examines the play’s rather pedestrian origins and its relation to Williams’s own life; its second analyzes Streetcar’s innovative uses of color symbolism and examines the play’s combination of realism and expressionism. In the lecture’s third part, we consider how Elia Kazan’s iconic 1951 film transformed the play and opened it to a new and wider audience, while a concluding part of examines the play’s extraordinary impact on American Culture.

About the Presenter:

Henry Schvey is Emeritus Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis (the same university where Williams studied during the 1936-37 academic year). Henry taught in the university’s Performing Arts Department for 37 years until his retirement this past July. Prior to coming to St. Louis he was professor of English at Leiden University in the Netherlands where he also founded the Leiden English Speaking Theatre. He is a teacher, scholar, playwright, memoirist, and stage director.

Henry has published widely on modern American drama, and extensively on Tennessee Williams, including essays on the impact of New Orleans on the writer and on the artist’s paintings, many of which are housed in David Wolkowsky’s amazing collection here at the Key West Art & Historical Society. He is the author of Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams (2021), and his most recent publication is an essay, “Towards a Plastic Theatre: the Case of Summer in Smoke,” examining Williams’s interdisciplinary connections in that early play. That essay was published in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review; a book detailing Williams’s relationship with the visual arts is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Last year, he was named Artist-in-Residence at the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in Danville, California, and is completing a comparative study of Williams and O’Neill.

In 2007, Henry discovered an unpublished Williams poem, “Blue Song,” at the back of an examination blue book in a New Orleans bookstore. In retrospect, that chance discovery triggered the start of a powerful connection with the playwright which has lasted to this day and beyond. He feels truly honored to have been asked to speak about the playwright in his beloved Key West.