A Streetcar Named Desire

I saw this play some time ago, and it truly struck. It was one of the most powerful and moving experiences of my life, and it was the perfect way to get introduced to Tennessee Williams.

However, I differ in my view of it. Most critics have traditionally painted in the very simplistic and shallow terms of "Old South" versus "New South". But I disagree, I think that the play is so much more wholly human than that, and not as gregariously far-reaching as that. To me it wasn't at all Old South versus New South, but was about the darker side of humanity.

Stanley Kowalski is perhaps the darkest and most inhumane character to ever grace a stage in modern American theater. His conflict with Blanche is more, in my opinion, the conflict between the petty and narrow-minded and the lofty-minded, with the insensitive and the sensitive, with the cruel and the loving, the needed and the unneeded.

His character is so profoundly dark and evil because it is so believable and natural, and for that reason he is even more hatable. His impatience and temper, his violence and callousness have few equals anywhere. He controls Stella through a mixture of sex appeal and his masculinity.

But, from the ways he verbally attacks Blanche on her birthday, a day where she is initially very happy for once, the way he attacks her, brings her to tears, and callously hands her the tickets home and watches her cry with smug satisfaction was one of the most shocking moments I've ever seen. Then the way he systematically destroys her life, her relationship with Mitch, and in the end her sanity, is all the more terrible. He rapes her the night his wife has given birth to their child, rapes out of seeming anger of Blanche's need to lie to herself. He finally destroys ever bit of her sanity, her sensitive grip on life, and then at the end of the movie conforts Stella, and is devoid of all guilt or sorrow or any emotion at all is she is taken away and speaks her famous last line "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."

But there rare other scenes I could discuss, scenes were my passions were flared against him. He throws the radio that Blanche and Stella were dancing and listening to music on, out the window because its annoying him while he drinks and plays poker. He cares nothing for anyone else's happiness or contentment but his own.

What can I say? Blanche is the real character I identify with. Stella and Mitch, though main characters, are more like dolls; they have no real life of their own and they are primarily pedaled around the two major characters, who form the axis of the story. She and Stanley are opposites. Where he is drab and unimaginative she is, where is uncaring she cares, where he is angry she is sad where he insensitive she is. She has suffered more than any other character, she is the most sympathetic of all the characters, if somewhat exhaustingly dramatic at times. I connect with her need to lie to herself, with the way she covers the world up with romantic ideals and lies, I connect to that, that need to cover up the horrible truth and dull, empty grayness of the world with something more.

I think that merely calling the play a play about the cataclysmic collision of the "Old South" and the "New South" does it great disservice and it dehumanizes the central characters and forces to fit them into this narrow stereotype, and I believe that viewing them through this window greatly takes away from how much you will get out of them and their performance, how emotionally torn you will be.

This is simply a great play. That's all that really needs to be said. It is one of the few things that have left me disgusted with mankind, and with that, deep down, with myself, it is a melodrama of our darker natures.