Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams's Greatest Creation by Nancy Schoenberger
What's It About?
A penetrating consideration of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring character — Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".In the Introduction to her latest work of nonfiction Blanche, subtitled The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation (Harper), author Nancy Schoenberger asks “Does Blanche DuBois Still Matter?” The answer, of course, is a thundering and resounding YES!
The role of Blanche is an aspirational, brutally challenging, career-defining tour-de-force that has brought some actresses to the point of insanity as well as exhaustion; the equivalent of performing Hamlet for eight grueling performances per week.
The character Blanche commands one’s attention and has been described by some of the actresses profiled here who’ve inhabited the role as profoundly disturbing and life-altering. Thousands of professional and amateur actresses have played the powerful role of Blanche DuBois. The author has selected seven who created quintessential personifications of this character with a chapter devoted to each. Several have performed the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire on both stage and screen or on stage and television. They are: Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Ann-Margret, Jessica Lange, Patricia Clarkson, Cate Blanchett and Jemier Jenkins.
It’s captivating to learn how each molded the character to suit their talents and strengths and how, in turn, playing Blanche profoundly affected them. Note: the author stated she used the term actress instead of the now preferred gender-indeterminate actor in deference to the character’s exaggerated femininity.
Biographical Insight into Tennessee Williams
Nancy Schoenberger focuses the spotlight on Tennessee Williams including significant biographical detail in addition to his most enduringly successful play. She examines his complicated life, prodigious output and his devotion to his sister Rose Williams. Rose, his muse and inspiration for three major characters in his body of work, was tragically lobotomized at an early age and spent the remainder of her long life in mental institutions. Blanche provides insight into the playwright’s torments along with an in-depth look at the play’s lasting impact.
“We have accepted as normal the persistent oppression of women. This is chronic abuse in the guise of culture,” is one of two quotes by the playwright selected for the foreword.
This fascinating book is destined to be essential reading for theater and film buffs, Tennessee Williams aficionados, and savvy actresses contemplating taking on this formidable role. A Streetcar Named Desire was first staged on Broadway in 1947 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois winning her the Best Actress Tony Award. She was succeeded by Uta Hagen during the play’s long run.
Williams had championed and envisioned Lillian Gish in the part but director Elia Kazan sensed she would have been both sorely miscast as well as a little too old. The petite, fragile looking Miss Gish was a realist and pragmatist who had begun acting as a young child; unforgettable for her role in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East that saw her float down a river on an ice floe in a blizzard. (Clad in a thin dress, she withstood numerous takes lying on the ice with a hand dangling in the frigid water.) Although frail in appearance, she was tiny, tough and suffered for her art but confessed she did not “get” the flirtatious, wounded-soul that was Blanche.
A World-Famous, Star-Studded Play
A Streetcar Named Desire is among the most frequently revived plays, the author stating that prior to the pandemic it was staged “every hour” somewhere around the world. In Athens, Greece it debuted in 1948 with Melina Mercouri as Blanche. The London production, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, featuring Vivien Leigh began its long run in 1949. It’s enormously popular in Japan. The first all-Black production was performed in 1953. It has been made into a ballet, an opera and been adapted for television on several occasions including a satirical version on The Simpsons.
Three of the actors from the original 1947 Broadway cast, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, reprised their roles in the 1951 film. Brando had been relatively unknown when cast in the play and immediately caught a blazing star. He lost the Best Actor Oscar to Humphrey Bogart who won for The African Queen but the other members of the quartet including Vivien Leigh triumphed. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Tennessee Williams. The original production and subsequent revivals and films have won countless awards.
Well Researched and Familiar Subjects
Blanche’s author Nancy Schoenberger has roots in New Orleans, the birthplace of both of her parents, visited there frequently as a child and resided there for a time as an adult. Her undergraduate degree is from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She knows and understands the city, Tennessee Williams and Blanche making her eminently qualified to write this important, must read book.
She is a Professor Emerita and former Director of Creative Writing at the College of William and Mary and the author of three books of poetry and several works of nonfiction. She frequently choses difficult, conflicted and complex individuals as subjects for her works including the brilliant but mentally unstable pianist Oscar Levant, the Bouvier Sisters, John Ford and John Wayne in a work about their films and friendship among others.
A Streetcar Named Desire ends with these oft quoted words, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” uttered by a shattered Blanche DuBois as she is led off on the arm of the attending physician to a mental institution. One can hope she will, in time and with care, recover from the abuse, disappointments and trauma that life has heaped upon her.
Nancy Schoenberger thinks so and includes an obituary for this vibrant fictional character in the coda. She concludes Blanche with extensive bibliography and source notes. I hope the reader savors this book as much as I did.
About Nancy Schoenberger:
Nancy Schoenberger is a professor of English and director of creative writing at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, and coauthor with Sam Kashner of books on Oscar Levant; George Reeves; and the love affair, marriages and working relationship of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Also the author of three award-winning books of poetry, Schoenberger divides her time between Williamsburg, Virginia, and New York City.
(Photo Credit: Tom Moore)
