Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 17

Tennessee Williams and Sports 13 A different set of sports, and rules, govern A Streetcar Named Desire. Sports are Stanley Kowalski’s passion and forte, and a means for Williams to interrogate Stanley’s brand of manliness. The stage direction in the reading edition of Streetcar announcing Stanley’s entrance ascribes to him the requisite qualities of both an esteemed player and an avid fan— ''The channels o f his life are. . . his heartiness with men, his appreciation o f rough humor, his love o f good drink and food and games'^ (265). “Strongly, compactly built,” Stanley is a sexualized, proletarian Adonis, the Alpha athlete. To this image of the muscular athlete Williams welds Stanley’s “luck” in war, the sport of combat, where he survived the brutal Italian campaign at Anzio, earning the rank of Master Sergeant, a masculinized hyperbole for the leader-victor. Another sports identity Stanley assumes is that of ihe primitive hunter. In the acting edition of Streetcar, he ‘‘tosses'" a package of blood-stained meat to Stella as he comes home, a fetish of his love of the sport of battle. Regardless of the sport he plays, Stanley loves “roughhouse,” and, not surprisingly, his favorite sports, after gambling, are fighting and bowling, both are loud and pummeling, whether it be noses or pins. He is the muscular brawler, the streetfighter. Fusing fiction and reality, role and self, Marlon Brando, ^^/ho has been synonymous with Stanley for ftieatre and film-goers worldwide, kept a punching bag in the boiler room of the Barrymore Theatre in New York, where Streetcar premiered in 1947, to practice his fighting techniques and, when he was not on stage, to spar with his understudy Jack Balance or Nick Dennis who played the role of Pablo Gonzales (Kolin, Williams: Streetcar 26). Always striving to be the winner, Stanley is a master bowler, the captain of his team. As Stella declares, he “loves it.” In Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of Streetcar, unlike in Williams’s script, Blanche gets her first horrifying look at Stanley as he quarrels with his cronies in a bowling alley, the sound of falling pins and rolling balls; his roughhouse symphony, a sign of her imminent destruction at his hands. As diving did for Chance Wayne, bowling unerringly characterizes Stanley—^the worker, the common man, the tribal player. As the proliferation of bowling alleys in the 1940s and 1950s attests, in addition to the coverage the sport received on national television during those years, bowling appealed to a large segment of the American population as a healthy, redblooded, democratic sport. One of the most popular Hanna-Barbera feline animations, shown in the U. S. and to troops overseas, was Bowling-Alley Cat, released in 1942. True to his blue collar roots and temperament, Stanley is inevitably attracted to the sound and fury of bowling alleys. The fact that he will not allow his team to play at Riley’s—“I don’t bowl at Riley’s. I had a little trouble with Riley last week” (375)—combines his brawling and bowling interests. Stanley orders, “We’re gonna bowl at the West Side or the Gala!”—^two highly symbolic sports names for the bowling alleys Stanley most likely would have patronized. “West Side” suggests the Wild West, the frontier, and, proleptically, the land of