A Streetcar Named Desire is like Sugar in Beer

Before I proceed with this review, I’d like to thank Ms. Lentz for lending my a copy of this play. Best of luck with The Theory of Relativity this week!

At the end of my (Ms. Lentz’s) copy of A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tenesee Wiliams interviews himself. His questions are flattering and encourage the type of beautiful monologues about “the present plague of violence and horror” that he drizzles onto the script of the play. He even addresses his choice to write about the infected:

“Q: You sound as if you felt quite detached and superior to [the] process of corruption in society [you write about].”

A: I have never written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe in myself”

But for every question he excavates in the interview, there are a thousand he leaves buried in the text. For example: Mr. Williams, how do you know what it’s like to be a teenage girl?

Blanche Dubois and Stella Kowalski, the protagonists of A Streetcar Named Desire, are technically adults—in fact, Blanche is getting on in years. But due to a combination of factors (societal, sexual, etc) the sisters remain frozen in a self-illusion typically associated with the most painful periods of adolescence. Blanche is a fantastic deceiver: “I don’t tell the truth,” she declares. “I tell what ought to be the truth” (145) Stella, meanwhile, attaches herself to the abusive lout Stanley Kowalski.

The interactions of the fatal trio make up the bulk of the script. All three characters are excellent, but there is not much plot. Instead, Williams occupies himself with “artful hysteria.” Sex, violence, shameful secrets—all these swirl through the play like sugar in beer, consumed by a climax of pathetic force.

At times, Streetcar seems too stylish to stage. The division between masculine and feminine spaces is suffocating. Blanche speaks like (and is?) a deranged English teacher. And Williams is kind of racist against Polish people.

He definitely displays a paternalistic, disinterested attitude toward Black and Hispanic people, who live in “New Orleans…a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of the races” (2). The only characters of color are an offscreen pianist and two figures named “Negro Woman” and “Mexican Woman.” And given Williams’ treatment of Stanley, I doubt that Streetcar would benefit for more diversity.

Stanley Kowalski, who is Polish-American, plays into the accusations that Streetcar levels against him. Blanche despises her sister’s husband, calling him “sub-human” and urging Stella not to “hang back with the brutes” (83). This bias is part of Blanche’s character; she is a descendant of the planter aristocracy and tries to present herself as the last vestige of purity among the sins of the French Quarter. But Stanley, a working-class misogynist with primitive sex appeal, embodies every simian stereotype Blanche suggests!

Racism, however, is not Williams’ most prominent vice. It is authorial self-indulgence.

The reader’s tolerance for the narrative style of Tennessee Williams will determine whether or not they enjoy A Streetcar Named Desire. The play’s monologues bloom only in a hothouse atmosphere, and its staging can unravel very quickly if the language is not treated with appropriate delicacy. It may even be better as a text for study than as a living work, scrutinized under the harsh light of the stage. But I hold a kernel of affection for Williams’ work.

I can recognize a few of the playwright’s vices as my own.