The moment Marlon Brando strutted on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, it was clear that a new kind of erotic American male had been born. It wasn’t just that Brando’s tight, sweat-stained T-shirt showed off his ripped torso and bulging biceps to perfection, nor that his unearthly beauty gave him a certain androgynous quality. It wasn’t even that his character, Stanley Kowalski, was a blue-collar hunk rather than a matinee idol. Rather it was the pent-up rage of Kowalski – that first entrance has him flinging a packet of bloody meat at his sister-in-law Blanche – which announced a man not so much unhappy in his skin as desperate to claw his way out of it. Streetcar’s submerged energies of gay love, sexual violence and insanity put the male psyche under the spotlight and found it more fragile than anyone could possibly have imagined.
In Strange Relations, Ralf Webb sets out to queer mid-century American culture. Specifically, he takes four literary giants – along with Streetcar’s Tennessee Williams there are John Cheever, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin – and watches as they warp the newly rigid protocols of post-war society. At a time of anti-communist hysteria, fractious race relations and a flight from the inner city to the tightly corralled suburbs, Webb’s quartet unleashed unholy desires that threatened to destroy the American dream from within.
