Street car named desire

A play, Tennessee Williams believed, was not necessarily complete when he delivered the text to a director and cast - nor did subsequent publication of it mean that he had finished the task. His works often continued to expand in his mind long after the premiere; years later, re-evaluations and revisions were often incorporated for new productions. This self-imposed sense of perpetual esthetic refinement became a habit as Williams typically refurbished many of his favorite plays. This is very much the case with Sweet Bird of Youth, a work very close to his heart.

The play began to take shape in William's mind in 1948, as rough scenes for something he called The Big Time Operators. But then, as so often with the major plays, he put it aside - in this case, until the fall of 1955, after the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He hoped to work on Operators full-time with Elia Kazan, but the director was hammering out the problems of fashioning the film script for Baby Doll, based on tw...