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For Kim Hunter, 'Streetcar' is a special trip
Thursday, January 11, 2001 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
If you're like most people of a certain age, you have two mental snapshots of Kim Hunter: as the pretty, young Stella opposite the equally beautiful and even younger Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (Broadway, 1947-48; movie 1951); and maybe as Dr. Zira, the chimpanzee in the "Planet of the Apes" movies (1967-71) -- although that's more voiceprint than snapshot.
As a Pittsburgh theater-goer, you should have a third: In 1992, Hunter, now 77, was at the Public Theater, playing the patrician mother in A.R. Gurney's "The Cocktail Party" -- very WASP, but with a sly sweetness that kept peeking out from the crisp matron of the play.
Saturday, you can add a fourth: She'll be part of a free demonstration/discussion of "Streetcar: The Desire to Adapt" at 8 p.m. at the Philip Chosky Theater, Carnegie Mellon. In pursuing the transformations of "Streetcar Named Desire" from play to film to opera, CMU's Peter Frisch has put together a variety of film clips, live scenes by CMU actors and a panel.
On that panel, Hunter will be joined by Andre Previn, composer of the opera; its director, David Kneiss, a CMU directing grad who is executive stage director for the Metropolitan Opera; and Milan Stitt, playwright and head of the CMU play writing program.
My own files have one more snapshot. Sometime in the mid-'80s, the woman beside me at the Festival Theater at Stratford, Ontario, looked somewhat familiar -- like one of my mother's younger friends. So I introduced myself and met a funny, pert, lively woman who turned out to be Kim Hunter. Given a chance to talk with her at intermission and after, I can't tell you what Shakespeare we saw.
She got something in return: I hurried to the Stratford bookshop and bought "Loose in the Kitchen" (1975), her quirky half autobiography and half cookbook. I heartily recommend it for the account of her life I don't have space for here.
So when we talked by phone the other day, I focused on "Streetcar," even though she once objected to the obsession with her first big success as "ancient history."
"No, it's not!," she objected. "Thank God. It's all because of Tennessee. I'm just bloody glad it's not been lost."
Although "Streetcar" has long been an American icon, you might wonder what it was like to meet it for the first time as just another hopeful play.
"It wasn't ever just another play," she says. Williams had already hit it big with "The Glass Menagerie," so "everybody was terribly curious about it -- I kept wishing they'd get off our backs." In her autobiography, she tells how director Elia Kazan took her out for a drink a few days into rehearsals to swear at her and get her to loosen up -- she had been too tentative, facing her Broadway debut at age 25.
She, Brando and Jessica Tandy left the play after a year and a half, when there was still no plan for a movie.
When that came, "I had to fight for Stella; even Marlon had to fight for Stanley." For Blanche, the producers had already settled on Vivien Leigh (who had played it on stage in London) in place of Tandy, who wasn't then a movie name.
"I think I made three screen tests -- one with my hair bleached blonde, because they said we didn't look enough like sisters! I think the producer had another candidate. . . . Making that film was the best film experience I've ever had." Having had time off from the play helped her come to it fresh. The two basic sets were built on different sound stages so they could film scenes more or less in order. And there was a separate rehearsal area: "We never sat down. That's the best way to work -- it's terrible when you have to wait."
Most recently, Hunter has made three films, all successes at film festivals but all waiting to be released in this country -- "Here's to Life" with James Whitmore, "The Hiding Place" with Timothy Bottoms and "Abilene" with Ernest Borgnine.
She once did a musical -- "Jokers," a version of "The Gin Game" -- but it never made it to New York. She can sing, but opera is something else. Tomorrow she'll be here to see the "Streetcar" opera for the first time.
If she had the time, she could visit the original 1923-built New Orleans streetcar (destination, "Desire") that once went by Tennessee Williams' apartment and is now enshrined at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, Pa. But maybe impresario Frisch has moved it up to the Chosky for the day.
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