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Stand-in Stanley: “Streetcar’s” Polish African American
Gloria McMillan
African American theatre critics and others, as well, wonder how Tennessee Williams could write
about the South and have no major characters who are African American. There is one darkly
hulking stranger: Stanley Kowalski, who is ambiguous and not-quite white.
On the Fall 2020 occasion of a new-ish opera being produced in Tucson, Arizona, based upon the
Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar named Desire, I was stuck by certain myths that underlie this opera
and play. Many of the myths of the south revolve around the threat of miscegenation, race mixing, if you
will. But Tennessee Williams was ill-equipped to deal with all that mundane unpleasantness as this, since
he wrote from an inner Plato’s cave, projecting his own internal moods onto the world as a canvas,
seldom letting the external world inside. He seemed to have missed much of the Civil Rights era, for
instance. One critic, Rachel Van Duyvenbode, suggests in “Darkness Made Visible: Miscegenation,
Masquerade and the Signified Racial Other,” that there is real miscegenation going on in A Streetcar
named Desire, only it is between Stella and Stanley Kowalski. The threat of violent masculinity and rape
is a constant in the American imagination, nowhere more potent than in the southern states, and the main
offender is usually an African American . . . but not always.
Italians have been historically chased down and lynched as far north as Cairo, Illinois, in the early
20th Century when somebody “swarthy” was said to have attacked a local girl. A friend of mine explained
that is how Italians entered the yard of her family of Irish immigrants. My late friend Luan Thornton’s
Grandmother Dargan, a powerful and large Cairo, Illinois, woman, stood at her door and dared the self-
appointed locals to cross her doorstep looking for “any Eye-talians.” But how can a true sense of threat be
placed into a play when the very thought of dealing with African Americans as individual characters is
off-putting, as it appears to have been with Tennessee Williams?
Allegory is the best approach, then. In a gritty, yet poetic, fugue state, Williams envisioned a
darkly hulking figure menacing a pale blonde flower of the south, Blanche Dubois. With no African
American males on hand to cast as “the monster,” another lesser ethnicity will do. Beauty and the Beast is
a prominent allegory and has been made into plays and films over many decades. In her essay in The
Journal of Popular Culture, Danusha Goska theorizes that "the image of the uncultured Bohunk had been
depicted in popular literature before [Streetcar], but it entered the canon" with Williams's play which
"dramatizes the racists' fear of miscegenation, and its twin conviction that America, overwhelmed by an
influx of inferior others, was committing 'race suicide'"(414).
The best way to answer a troubling vision is with another work of art, so one young director in
the UK has taken one of Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie and added an African presence to it by
making the cast represent a single-parent Nigerian-British family in Birmingham, England. Nigerian-
descended British director Femi Elufowoju, Jr. discusses the question of “Why did Tennessee Williams
marginalize African Americans?” in a Guardian Theatre interview. Granting Williams’s talent and place
in the history of drama, Elufowoju continues to be perplexed and suggests that
“If you look at all of Williams’ plays, he sets most of his stories in the south, [but] the
African American presence within his plays is marginal. They’re not in any lead
roles whatsoever. But his plays are amazing stories, completely and utterly accessible.
They’re psychological thrillers, historical pieces, cultural masterpieces, and you
just question: was he doing it deliberately?” (Elufowoju “Marginalize”)
Was the omission of African Americans from a classic miscegenation drama any more intentional
than playing upon the fears of the East Bloc “other” during the Cold War? Using a Polish American to
stand in for one kind of southern gothic sexual threat, Williams parlays his “chill factor” with another “the
hulking Polack.” Polish immigrants or their descendants are hardly prominent features of the
carnivalesque streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Why bring a Pole into the bouillabaisse?
People feared that Russians were coming and all their furry hulking cousins from Eastern and Central
Europe. Why being white—almost—they might even be among us, runs this form of xenophobia. Who
can tell? Tennessee Williams seems to be following a stereotypical playbook that ordains “Why, their lack
of refinement will tell. That is how we shall sniff out these interlopers and purge them from our culture.”
No Polish Americans would protest the way Stanley Kowalski was portrayed. How could they?
Williams knew he could tap the fear and loathing directed at all Slavic-named people in that era
by making this menace Eastern European, even though his character Stanley is an American and only by
Polish by descent. Williams wrote in a telegram to Marlon Brando on his opening night, December 3,
1947 to
RIDE IT OUT, BOY! FROM THE GREASY POLACK YOU WILL
YOU WILL SOMEDAY ARRIVE AT THE GLOOMY DANE . . . (Williams telegram )
Ethnics would not complain any more than the frightened gays in the recent opera Fellow Travelers
would complain how gays were being represented in the media during the “Lavender Scare.” Polish
Americans were busy changing their names and trying to fit in like Bernard Dubowsky or his changed
name “Kip” Kiernan, Tennessee Williams’s Polish or Russian Jewish ex-lover who doubtless inspired
Stanley,Leading up to the 1947 play Streetcar named Desire, Williams made Bernard Dubowsky (a.k.a.
“Kip” Kiernan) the major character in several plays following his breakup with Kiernan, who had
decided to marry a young woman. Williams went through classic stages or grief, anger, remorse, over
“that stupid girl” and “Kip’s” betrayal until he reached closure, or as he put it, “fairness” to “Kip.” The
1941 one-act play “Parade” is based upon “Kip” when Williams’s was still furious with him. Then also in
1941 came Something Cloudy, Something Clear when Williams had mellowed a bit and this play followed
the affair in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the year before almost to the letter. Something Cloudy,
Something Clear went unproduced until 2006 when it was presented in Provincetown.
The toxic mix of both Cold War phobia of Eastern Europeans plus southern gothic perennial fear
of hulking dark (if not African American) rapists made A Streetcar named Desire the popular hit that
Williams always knew it would be. The fragility embodied by the character of dainty Blanche Dubois
with her eye-batting announcement that she has always lived on “the kindness of strangers” certainly fit
the mood of the country. All sectors of society were in search of a little kindness, a bit less of the Cold
War hysteria. Minorities all wished for the kindness of less discrimination and racial tension. Maybe not
for these others so much, but things were looking up for Tennessee Williams, at least. Marlon Brando did,
indeed, ride on the hem of that Polack Stanley’s greasy sweatshirt to stardom. Williams never had to
wonder where the rent was coming from again. All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare would say.
Works Cited
Goska, Danusha. "The Bohunk in American Cinema," Journal of Popular Culture vol. 39 no. 3, 2006: p.
414.
Kaplan, David Tennessee Williams in Provincetown. Hansen Publ., 2007.
Minamore, Bridget. “Why did Tennessee Williams marginalize African Americans?” Interview. The
Guardian. 27 May 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/may/27/femi-elufowoju-jr-
hoard-the-glass-menagerie-arcola-london Accessed 3 Feb. 2020.
Van Duyvenbode, Rachel. “Darkness Made Visible: Miscegenation, Masquerade and the
Signified Racial Other in Tennessee Williams' ‘Baby Doll’ and ‘A Streetcar Named
Desire.’” Journal of American Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 203–215. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/27556964. Accessed 4 Feb. 2020.
Williams, Tennessee. Telegram to Marlon Brando (3 Dec. 1947). Qtd in “The Writer’s Almanac.”
Minnesota Public Radio. 2 Dec. 2014.