Editor's Note

A live theatrical production is a thing beyond recovery, but productions do, especially when long running, leave behind a spume of material objects that offer insight: film or sound recordings, if one is lucky, but also programs, newspaper advertisements, promotional materials, posters, scripts, costumes, publicity stills, directors' and actors' notebooks, and more, including-most important of all-the testimony of those in the audience. The sale of film rights generally meant a substantial payday for a playwright, whose earnings from the stage production would be quite modest in comparison. The essence of this inaugural production was preserved in the 1951 Hollywood film version, which, borrowing the authority of the wildly popular Broadway production, became the most influential form ofWilliams's play. Because Kazan repeated as director, the film is in effect a reauthoring of his original reauthoring of the playscript for the stage. For decades, this production would constitute part of the company's repertoire, a version of the play shaped by its director, Andrey Goncharov, and by Cold War-era Soviet sensibilities, which produced some drastic text changes.