A claustrophobic play set in a cramped, shabby two-room apartment in a crowded downtown section of New Orleans. The background of the play is formed by the decline of the aristocratic culture of the old southern states and the change in social conditions in modern America, characterized by industrialization, tough market laws and ethnic diversity. Well-bred and sensitive, but fading southern belle Blanche Dubois comes from a wealthy Southern family that has recently lost its money and prestige. To the outside world, but especially to herself, Blanche pretends that everything is still going great. She lives in her own fantasy world and never tells the truth, also not to people close to her. Blanche's inability to distinguish between illusion and reality will eventually be her undoing.
At the beginning of the play Blanche arrives to stay with her sister Stella, who is married to the vulgar and violent macho Stanley
Kowalski with Polish roots. Blanche is deeply shocked because her sister's lifestyle is not what she is used to. She tells Stella that the family's old plantation, Belle Reve, has been "lost" and that the principal of the school where she teaches English has given her leave to calm her nerves. That is why she has come to stay with Stella. From the start she is on a collision course with Stanley, who is the opposite of the refined Blanche. The battle for dominance over Stella of the two protagonists is symbolic of the general battle of the sexes, but also of other confrontations, for example between backward-looking nostalgia and progressive
optimism about the future, between the social subcultures of the old southern aristocracy and the new Eastern
European immigrants, and between the opposing value systems of art and culture in
contrast to crude materialism. In addition, the psychological profiles of Blanche and Stanley could not be further apart: on the one hand neurotic hypersensitivity, on the other hand insensitive
animal vitality. This is also expressed in two different body language behavioral patterns. Blanche's cultivated but slightly affected behavior and the emphasis on her noble origins are like a red rag to Stanley.
Little by little we find out that Blanche has fled to her sister to escape her past. Her husband committed suicide because he presumably could not live with his homosexual urges. There is also a persistent rumor that Blanche had a relationship with a 17-year old student and that she eventually had to go into prostitution in order to support herself, after the family estate had to be sold off to pay her family's debts. Tensions between Stanley and Blanche run high. Via colleagues at the company where he works, who regularly visit the hometown of Blanche and Stella, he is slowly digging out the truth about Blanche's life prior to coming to New Orleans. This motivates him to destroy a budding romance between Blanche and one of his buddies (the only sensitive one among his military veteran friends).
When Stella has to go to the hospital to give birth, it comes to a confrontation. Stanley rapes Blanche, who then collapses completely. Stella eventually has Blanche admitted to a clinic. The last words she speaks in the play are: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
By the way, the allegorical title is taken from the real-life Desire streetcar line in New
Orleans, which bore this name because its terminus was located in Desire
Street. Blanche boards this line when coming to stay with her sister. The
tram line, which had existed since 1920, was converted to a bus line in
1948, a year after the publication of Williams' play.
In 1948, Williams received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is considered one of the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. Another famous play by him is The Glass Menagerie (1944), in which he addressed the conflict between illusion and reality, as he did in Streetcar.
A Streetcar Named Desire has been several times adapted for such various media as film, TV, opera and ballet. The most famous film version was directed by Elia Kazan in 1951, and featured Karl Malden, Marlon Brando, and Kim Hunter from the Broadway play, plus Vivien Leigh from the London production in the part of Blanche. The movie won four Academy Awards. The ending was slightly altered in the film: Stella does not remain with Stanley, as she does in the play.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
A Streetcar Named Desire has been published in Penguin Classics.
Greatest Plays of All Time