Sweating Tennessee Williams: Working Actors inA Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna

Abstract

This article reads Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna by paying closer attention to the playwright’s representations of labour, gender, and especially sweat – a typically overlooked by-product of performance that Williams consistently foregrounds. I argue that the way these plays represent sweat encapsulates their portrayals of theatrical labour in a historical moment in which both American theatre and American labour were undergoing profound transformations. Different responses to sweat reveal different valuations of labour that fall along gendered lines, and both plays ask why this difference poses specific risks for female performers, who must efface their exertions and are thus more at risk when new economic and social situations render them more visible.