A Streetcar Named Desire

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Drew Limsky

According to Brooks Atkinson, the major theater critic of the mid-century, Tennessee Williams' urban tragedy, A Streetcar Named Desire, was "a modern masterpiece" that "took Broadway by storm." Considered by many to be the finest drama of America's finest post-war playwright, A Streetcar Named Desire made an indelible impression on American culture. Under the muscular direction of Elia Kazan, the incendiary play, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics' Circle Award in 1947, was the follow-up to Williams' 1944 debut, The Glass Menagerie; but whereas the earlier play was primarily a meditative memory piece, Streetcar is rife with activity. Its melodramatic structure, however, is never allowed to eclipse the emotional and atmospheric authenticity of the play. It is particularly revered for its multi-faceted characterizations; its rich dialogue, which is masterful in its lyricism as well as its use of working-class vernacular; and the role it played in popularizing a new, naturalistic style of American acting, known colloquially as the "The Method."

Streetcar depicts domestic strife. At the start of the play, an unmarried, thirtyish, out-of-work schoolteacher, Blanche DuBois, arrives at the home of her younger sister, Stella. Since both young women were reared in the lap of luxury on a lush Mississippi home-place called Belle Reeve, the cultivated Blanche is somewhat shocked to find Stella living in rather squalid conditions in the French Quarter of New Orleans. More troubling to Blanche is her sister's marriage to a loutish, "common" ex-serviceman named Stanley Kowalski. For her part, Stella is dismayed to learn that Belle Reeve was forfeited to creditors under Blanche's watch. Clearly, both sisters have lost their social and economic footing, but while Stella is perfectly content in her rough-hewn but passionate marriage, Blanche is dispossessed, one step away from poverty.

The play recounts Blanche's efforts to adapt to her new circumstances with her dignity and sanity intact, and documents her poignant attempts to conceal her advancing age, her professional failure and her highly sexual nature from those who might judge her harshly. "A woman's charm is fifty-percent illusion," Blanche confides to Stella, and Stella indulges her fragile sister, encouraging Blanche's blossoming courtship with Stanley's gentle co-worker, Mitch. But Stanley ultimately becomes Blanche's destroyer, tearing away her tissue of lies and insulting her fine sensibilities. "I've been on to you from the start," he bellows to her at Streetcar's climax. His subsequent rape of Blanche causes what scholar Harold Bloom calls "a psychic rending" that is enough to nudge Blanche into madness. In the end, bound for a state asylum, Blanche leaves the home of her merciless brother-in-law and disbelieving sister, a lovely but broken spirit in an inhumane world. Her destruction is so complete that some critics, Kenneth Tynan for one, have read the play as a comment on the decline of civilization, the trampling of man's finer instincts by the implacable brutality of the modern world.

Several of the play's lines have found an affectionate place in the American vocabulary. Stanley's anguished, full-throated cry, "Stella, STELLAAAA!" has become something of a cultural touchstone, and Blanche's lilting final line, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," has endured as her rather ironic motto, as it utilizes a genteel euphemism for sexual promiscuity to reconcile Blanche's poetic frailty with her more desperate animal behavior.

Though Blanche is the role of greater complexity and sympathy, both major characters continue to live in the cultural imagination. Blanche's mix of cultivation, hysteria, and tragedy makes her an unforgettable creation, while Stanley, "the exuberantly macho American Pole," in Ronald Hayman's felicitous description, has been accorded iconic status. Much of this stature is no doubt due to the role's close identification with Marlon Brando, for rarely has an actor taken possession of a role so effectively and completely. Many actresses have triumphed as Blanche ("a relatively imperishable creature of the stage," according to Williams), not only Jessica Tandy in the original production, but Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film version, and in the 1990s, Jessica Lange on stage and television. But as for Stanley, Brando's remains the definitive interpretation. His Stanley is cunning, explosive, overtly sexual, and the ways in which the actor communicated character through his body language was startlingly modern to 1947 audiences, a living advertisement for the Method and the acting school that advanced it, Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. It is ironic that in early drafts of the play this emblem of machismo appeared as a considerably more androgynous figure. According to New Republic writer Geoffrey O'Brien, the final product in the form of Brando--grunting and sweating with exhibitionistic virility--"proposed a different way for men to be. Talking was small part of it."