A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams(1947)
Extract
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
A woman in a white suit arrives at a cramped apartment in the French Quarter carrying a trunk of costume jewelry and a past she cannot outrun. Tennessee Williams premiered this play in 1947, and in the collision between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski he staged the war between two Americas: the fading plantation South, all manners and moonlight, and the brutal new world of sweat and neon and appetite. Blanche's need to be seen as refined is not vanity but survival, and the play watches that survival fail with the pity and terror of genuine tragedy. Williams writes dialogue that sings and wounds in the same breath, giving American theatre its most haunting portrait of a mind undone by the kindness it keeps expecting from strangers.
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