A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947)

She covers the bare bulb with a paper lantern the moment she arrives, because Blanche DuBois cannot survive being seen clearly, and the whole tragedy is the slow tearing away of that shade. She has come to her sister's two rooms in the New Orleans Quarter with a trunk of rhinestones and evening gowns, the last finery of a Southern world that has already foreclosed on her: Belle Reve sold, the men dead, the schoolteaching gone. Across the table sits Stanley Kowalski, her sister's husband, all sweat and appetite, refusing to let a single lie stand. Tennessee Williams set fragility and brute force in the same hot rooms and made you ache for both at once, because Stanley is right about her, and that is the horror. The play moves through poker nights and streetcar bells toward a violence you feel coming long before it lands, then out the far side into one of the theatre's most unbearable exits: a woman led away on a stranger's arm, still performing the gentility that is all she has left.