A Streetcar Named Desire

Template:Broadway-show A Streetcar Named Desire is a famous American play written by Tennessee Williams. The play is considered in modern society as an icon of its era, as it deals with a culture clash between two symbolic characters, Blanche DuBois—a pretentious, fading relic of the Old South—and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, inner-city immigrant class.

Streetcar came shortly after Williams's first big success, The Glass Menagerie of 1945. While Williams kept writing plays and fiction into the 1980s, none of his later works lived up to the critical reputation of his first hits. Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948 for the play.

In 1951 a movie of the play, directed by Elia Kazan won several awards, including an Academy Award for Vivien Leigh as Best Actress in the role of Blanche.

In 1995 it was made into an opera with music by Andre Previn and presented by the San Francisco Opera.

Plot

The play presents Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism. Her chastity and poise are an illusion which she presents, to shield others - and herself - from her reality. Blanche arrives at the house of her sister Stella Kowalski in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where the seamy, multicultural ambience is a shock to Blanche's nerves. Explaining that her ancestral southern plantation Belle Reve (translated from French as "Beautiful Dream") has been "lost" due to the "epic fornications" of her ancestors, Blanche is welcomed to stay by a trepidatious Stella, who fears the reaction of her husband Stanley. Blanche explains to them how her supervisor told her she could take time off from her job as an English teacher because of her upset nerves.

In contrast to both the self-effacing Stella and the charming refinement of Blanche, Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski, is a force of nature; primal, rough-hewn, brutish and sensual. He dominates Stella in every way, and she tolerates his offensive crudeness and lack of gentility largely because of her self-deceptive love for him.

The interjection of Blanche upsets her sister and brother-in-law's system of mutual dependence. Stella is swept aside as the magnetic attraction between the oppositely-charged Stanley and Blanche overwhelms the household. Stanley's friend and Blanche's would-be suitor Mitch is similarly trampled along Blanche and Stanley's collision course. Their final, inevitable confrontation results in Blanche's nervous breakdown.

Blanche and Stanley, together with Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, are among the most recognizable characters in American drama.

The reference to the streetcar (tram) called Desire is symbolic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on a streetcar named "Desire" to reach Stella's home in Elysian Fields, presenting an abiding theme in the play that desire and death are mutual aspects of the same pathos. Blanche's sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short-lived and ultimately doomed, much like her streetcar journey.

Themes and Motifs

Illusion versus Reality

A recurring theme found in "A Streetcar Named Desire" is an ever-present conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. Blanche does not want, "...what's real, but what's magic." This recurring theme is read most strongly in William's characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized: the purple shade she employs to cover the harsh white light bulb in the living room, her chronically deceptive recounting of her last years in Belle Reve, the misleading letters she presumes to write to Shep Huntleigh, and a pronounced excess to alcohol consumption.

Notably, Blanche's deception of others and herself is not characterized by malicious intent, but rather a heart-broken and saddened retreat to a romantic time and happier moments before disaster struck her life when her loved one Allan Gray committed suicide during a Varsouvian Polka. In many ways, Blanche is understood to be a sympathetic and tragic figure in the play despite her deep character flaws.

There is also a strong presence of sexism within the play. Throughout the play, women are portrayed as the "weaker sex" while men are shown to be in control. The gender struggle is apparent when Stella submits to Stanley's authority rather than come to the aid of her sister. The tragedy of Blanche is representative of the struggle of women in the South.

Abandonment of Chivalric Codes

In most fairy tale stories, the ailing princess or the damsel in distress is often rescued by a heroic white knight. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is characterized by the conspicuous absence of the male protagonist imbued with heroic qualities. Indeed, the polar opposite of what a literary chivalric hero might be is represented in the leading male character of the play, Stanley Kowalski. Stanley is described by Blanche as a "survivor of the Stone Age" and is further depicted in this primitive light by numerous traits that he exhibits: uncivilized manners, demanding and forceful behavior, lack of empathy, crass selfishness, and a chauvinistic attitude towards women. The replacement of the heroic white knight by a character such as Stanley Kowalski further heightens Williams' theme of the demise of the romantic Old South in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Stanley, it should be noted, is not a villain in the literary sense of the word. His actions do not reflect a motivation to actively pursue the destruction of an individual as the primary goal, but rather the callousness and destructiveness of his actions bear a direct result from his incapacity to empathize and his instinctive, primitive desire to own or dominate. Stanley, as a result, is a symbol for the rising new values and attributes of industrial, capitalist America that has come to replace the chivalric codes of the dashing gentleman caller of the Old South.

Film and Opera adaptations

In 1951, Elia Kazan directed a movie based on the play; see A Streetcar Named Desire (film)

In 1995, the opera, A Streetcar Named Desire composed by André Previn with a libretto by Philip Littell, after the play by Tennessee Williams had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera during the 1998-99 season.

Performances

The first stage version was produced by Irene Mayer Selznick with Marlon Brando starring as Stanley, Jessica Tandy as Blanche, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. Brando portrayed Stanley with an overt sexuality that made him, the character of Stanley, and Tennessee Williams into cultural touchstones. The play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947. Brando's magnetic performance caused audiences to sympathize with Stanley in the opening scenes of the play, effectively implicating them in Stanley's eventual brutality towards Blanche. Tandy's performance won her a Tony Award. A 1988 revival by Circle in the Square Theatre starred Aidan Quinn as Stanley, Frances McDormand as Stella, and Blythe Danner as Blanche. A 1992 revival starred Alec Baldwin as Stanley and Jessica Lange as Blanche. A 2005 revival sharred John C. Reilly as Stanley and Natasha Richardson as Blanche (Reilly previously played Mitch opposite Gary Sinise's Stanley at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago).

Comparison with other works

As described above, Williams was writing in the familiar literary tradition of the Southern Gothic. Faulkner was soon to win the Nobel Prize for his many books set in a fantasy landscape of decadent (but chivalric) aristocrats shouldered aside by coarse (but vital) hustlers and ethnics like Stanley-- who, despite the torn T shirt, is a successful engineer, not a laborer. Faulkner's and Erskine Caldwell's successful work would have led theater-goers attending this new "Southern" play to expect events a bit beyond those in the normal world; poetry, despair, alcohol, and scantily draped bodies sweating in the heat. The cry, "You've lost Belle Reve?" was perilously close to cliche even by Williams's time. One could claim that the theatrical genre dates from the works of Chekov, who explored the parallel decay of the upper class in turn of the century Russia. A very dedicated Marxian may wish to argue that Stanley represents the proletariat (working class) which desires to overthrow the bourgeoisie-- but the student should know that this interpretation has not been popular among Williams's critics. Blanche, with her aristocratic pretensions, is no bourgeois. It is Stanley who is a coarse, but genuine petit bourgeois: his life revolves around marriage, sex, his home, the money he fears Blanche is cheating him out of, the son he hopes for, and his immediate personal pleasures.

Streetcar revival in New Orleans

Over 50 years after the play opened, the revival of the streetcar system in New Orleans is credited by many to the worldwide fame gained by the streetcars made by the Perley A. Thomas Car Works, Inc. which were operating on the Desire route in the play, and have been carefully restored and continue to operate there in 2004 (though not on the Desire route.) Streetcars along the Canal Street in downtown New Orleans are up and running. The one on St Charles Avenue is still out of service due to Hurricane Katrina.

Oh! Streetcar!

American animated series The Simpsons made specific reference to the play with a "musical version" of it in the episode entitled "A Streetcar Named Marge." The musical presented by the characters in the show was a deliberate and effective attempt on part of the show's creators to completely, perhaps direly, miss the point of the original play, a quality that is exemplified by the line: "You can always depend on the kindness of strangers....a stranger's just a friend you haven't met!"

See also

• A Streetcar Named Desire: Study Guide
• Streetcar
• Tennessee Williams
• A Streetcar Named Desire has an important role in the Spanish film All About My Mother.

External references

• "Spared history might be Big Easy's salvation" CNN.com, 5th September 2005. Update on post-Katrina situation