A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

I picked up this collection because I kept running into Blanche DuBois in other books about writing. People mention her the way they mention Hamlet, as if everyone already knows the whole story. I knew the broad strokes, a woman in New Orleans, a harsh brother in law, a bad ending, but I had never sat with the full play. The edition I used is the Penguin Books paperback from 2000, the one that runs 313 pages and puts three plays together, A Streetcar Named Desire with The Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth. Streetcar itself was first performed on Broadway in December 1947 and first published that same year by New Directions, and that 1947 date is the one that counts for the history. Reading all three in one volume turned out to be a good accident. You see Williams working the same worries from different sides, memory, illusion, time running out, people who cannot pay for the past and cannot stop reliving it.

The book opens with Streetcar, and it earns its place first. Everything else in the volume feels like a variation once you have lived on Elysian Fields for a while.

Blanche gets off at Elysian Fields

Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans with a trunk full of costume jewelry and evening clothes and almost no money. She has taken the streetcars called Desire and Cemeteries to reach Elysian Fields, which Williams names without winking too hard. Her sister Stella lives there in a small two room flat with her husband Stanley Kowalski. Blanche is older than Stella by a few years and she acts like it, fussing over the heat, the noise, the cramped rooms, the way Stella looks tired and a little too happy.

Stella married below what Blanche thinks of as their station. The DuBois family had Belle Reve, a big country house outside Laurel, Mississippi, and Blanche grew up thinking of herself as a lady from that kind of house. Stella married Stanley, a Polish American factory worker, a vet, loud at poker, physical in every sense. He comes home sweating, throws a package of meat at his wife, shouts for her from the street. Stella loves him in a bodily way that embarrasses Blanche and fascinates her at the same time.

Blanche tells a story that sounds almost reasonable at first. Belle Reve was lost to debts and deaths. She stayed behind to nurse dying relatives while Stella went off and lived. She taught school in Laurel. She took a leave because her nerves gave out. She needs rest. She wants quiet. She bathes constantly, avoids bright light, flirts with politeness the way some people drink, in big gulps.

Stanley does not buy it. He is not educated in the books sense but he is sharp about money and lies. He has heard that Blanche stayed at an expensive hotel in Laurel, the Flamingo, and that she was asked to leave. He hears the name of an officer, the way towns talk. He asks blunt questions about Belle Reve and whether Stella was cheated out of anything. Blanche answers with charm and scorn mixed together, calling him common, laughing too long at his jokes, trying to win over his poker friends. One of those friends, Harold Mitchell, called Mitch, becomes important. Mitch is big, clumsy, unmarried, caring for a sick mother. He likes Blanche because she seems refined and sad. Blanche likes Mitch because he seems safe.

What Blanche hides comes out slowly, and Williams lets you piece it together rather than handing you a confession. Years earlier, when she was very young, she married a boy named Allan Grey. She discovered him with another man and said something cruel about it at a dance. That night Allan shot himself. Blanche has carried that guilt through every bad choice since. In Laurel she drank too much, slept with too many people including, finally, a seventeen year old student. The school found out. The town pushed her out. By the time she reaches Stella she is drinking to steady herself, lying about her age, lying about gentlemen callers, pretending a rich admirer from Texas will rescue her.

I found these early scenes harder to watch than I expected. Not because they are graphic. They are not. It is the small stuff. Blanche turning on a paper lantern to soften a bare bulb. Blanche asking Stella if she can stand the noise of Stanley bowling. Stella going quiet when Stanley calls. You start to see that Stella has made a trade Blanche refuses to understand. Stella gets tenderness and sex and a baby on the way, and in exchange she accepts shouting and hitting and apologies that arrive as flowers and tears. Blanche thinks Stella settled. Stella thinks Blanche never learned how to live without servants and compliments.

Stanley wins, Blanche breaks, Stella stays

The middle of the play is a slow squeeze. Stanley and Blanche circle each other while Stella gets bigger with pregnancy and more caught in between. Stanley gives Blanche a birthday present that tells you everything about him when he is cruel. It is a one way bus ticket back to Laurel. He has done his homework. A traveling salesman friend told him the stories from Laurel, the hotel, the student, the drinking. He tells Stella. He tells Mitch. Mitch stops coming around as a suitor and shows up late at night in work clothes to accuse Blanche of playing him for a fool. Blanche begs him to stay, says she lied because she needed someone kind, but Mitch leaves. That scene hurt me more on the page than I thought it would. Mitch is not a villain. He is just ordinary and disappointed, and ordinary disappointment is enough to finish her.

Stella goes into labor and has to go to the hospital. Blanche is left alone in the flat with Stanley, who has been drinking with the poker crowd and comes home loud and half undressed. Blanche has dressed up in a stained evening gown and a fake tiara. She pretends she has a phone call from an admirer, pretends a ship is waiting, pretends Mitch came back begging. Stanley sees through all of it. He tells her the stories from Laurel back to her face. She threatens him with a broken bottle. He overpowers her. What happens next is not shown in graphic detail on stage, and I will not dress it up here. He assaults her. Williams makes clear that this is the break. Whatever fragile grip Blanche had on a shared version of events snaps that night.

Weeks later, when the last scene opens, Stella and the neighbors are preparing Blanche to be taken to a mental hospital. Blanche has told Stella about the assault and Stella has decided not to believe her. This is the part people argue about, and I argued with myself while reading. Stella is not stupid. She knows Stanley can be violent. She has seen him hit her, throw things, break dishes. But she has a newborn, no money of her own, and a husband who weeps and promises after. Believing Blanche would mean leaving Stanley, and Stella will not do that. So she tells herself Blanche is confused, ill, making things up. The neighbors go along. A doctor and a nurse arrive. Blanche at first panics, then takes the arm of the doctor when he speaks gently, relieved that someone is treating her like a lady again.

Stanley keeps winning at poker in the background while this happens, which is a blunt touch but effective. The final image is Stella sobbing into his chest while he comforts her. It is not a happy ending or a clean tragedy. It is a household deciding to keep going by sacrificing one person. I closed the play angry at almost everyone, which I think is the point.

As theater it is easy to see why this won the Pulitzer for 1948 and why it changed American acting. The stage directions keep telling you about heat, music from a bar, a blue piano, light through shutters. The structure is tight. Eleven scenes, one set mostly, time passing from spring to fall. If I have a complaint, it is that some of the symbolism gets laid on thick. On stage with good actors I bet it washes over you. On the page I sometimes felt Williams nudging me to notice.

The Glass Menagerie, or the same wound from inside the house

The Glass Menagerie came earlier, first staged in 1944 and first published in 1945, and it reads like Streetcar told by someone who never left home. Tom Wingfield speaks straight to the audience and warns that the play is memory, so do not expect realism. He works in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis, writes poems, goes to movies to escape his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Amanda is a former Southern belle like Blanche but older, louder, more comic and more exhausting. Her husband left years ago. She clings to stories of gentleman callers in Mississippi and pushes her children to make up for her lost life.

Laura is the heart of it. She had a childhood illness that left one leg weak, and she wears a brace. She dropped out of business school because she got too anxious to walk up the stairs. She stays home polishing a collection of small glass animals. Tom loves her and resents being needed. Amanda decides the answer is to find Laura a husband, a gentleman caller, someone to take Laura out of the house and Tom off the hook so Tom can leave without guilt.

Tom brings home Jim OConnor from the warehouse, a nice ordinary fellow who was popular in high school and still believes hard work fixes everything. Dinner goes awkwardly well. Laura recognizes Jim as the boy she liked in school. They talk. He dances with her. He kisses her once out of kindness and then admits he is engaged to someone else. While dancing they bump a glass unicorn and break off its horn. Laura gives the broken unicorn to Jim and smiles in a way that is both generous and final. After Jim leaves, Amanda blames Tom for bringing a man who was already spoken for. Tom fights with her and walks out, and in the closing speech he says he left home but never really got away. Laura blows out candles. That is the play.

I liked this one more than I expected and also found it thinner than Streetcar. The writing about Laura is tender without turning her into a lesson. What drags is Amanda. She talks and talks. I know the play needs her pressure to force the plot, but some speeches run long and repeat the same point about the past. Still, as a companion to Streetcar it deepens the picture. Blanche and Amanda are cousins in spirit. Tom is the man who leaves, Stella is the woman who stays, Laura is what happens to someone with no Blanche style armor and no Stella style bargain.

Sweet Bird of Youth and the fear of getting old

Sweet Bird of Youth is the least famous of the three here and the roughest, first performed in 1959. Chance Wayne is a young man from St. Cloud on the Gulf Coast who left to become an actor and came back mostly a gigolo. He travels with Alexandra Del Lago, once billed as the Princess Kosmonopolis, a movie star hiding from a bad screening and a bad heart. Chance uses her for money and pills and a ride. She uses him for sex and company and flattery. They need each other and dislike themselves for it.

Chance wants two things that do not fit together. He wants Heavenly Finley, the girl he left behind, the daughter of Boss Finley, the local political boss who runs the town like a private business. And he wants Alexandra to get him a screen test and a new start. Boss Finley had Chance run out of town years earlier after Heavenly needed an operation that left her unable to have children. Now Boss Finley and his son are ready to punish Chance for good. The threat in the play is specific and ugly. They talk about cutting him in a way that would end his looks and his manhood. Williams does not soften these men. Boss Finley uses God and purity on the radio while paying thugs off the air.

Alexandra gets the best scenes. She is hungover, scared of aging, scared of being laughed at on screen, taking too many pills, ordering Chance around, then suddenly honest about how work and youth leave everyone. She decides to leave St. Cloud before the violence lands on her too. She offers Chance money and a clean break if he comes with her now. Chance refuses. He stays to wait for Heavenly and for the Finley men. The play ends without showing the punishment in full, but it is clear Chance will be hurt. He asks Alexandra to remember him as he was, young and full of promise, which is both vain and sad.

I am glad this was included because it stops the book from being only fragile women and brutal men in small flats. Here the brutal men run a town and the woman with power is an older actress who knows exactly how the machine chews people. But it is baggier than the other two. The politics speeches go on. Chance repeats himself about Heavenly and about time as an enemy.

What works, what drags, and who should read this

Reading three Williams plays together makes his strengths obvious. He writes wanting better than almost anyone. Blanche wants shelter and admiration. Laura wants one evening where a boy is kind. Chance wants to be young again on screen. Alexandra wants one more good performance. Even Stanley wants respect in his own house and Stella wants peace with the man she chose. Williams gives each of them a voice that sounds different. Blanche perfumes her sentences. Amanda repeats hers. Stanley cuts his short. Tom poets his. You can hear them without the character names after a while, which is more than I can say for a lot of modern plays I have read.

He is also very good at rooms. The Kowalski flat with the bathroom Blanche hides in, the Wingfield living room with the fire escape Tom climbs down, the hotel room where Alexandra hides from reviews. You always know where the door is and who is allowed through it. That is why these plays still get staged by schools and small theaters. Two rooms and strong actors can carry them.

The fair criticism is that Williams stacks the deck. His sensitive souls are sensitive in ways that flatter the audience for noticing, music, glass, poetry, old dresses. His brutes are brutish in ways that make judging them easy, shouting, hitting, talking about purity while arranging violence. Real people mix those traits more. Stanley can be charming with Mitch and tender with the baby in one scene and monstrous in the next, and the play knows that, but the shape still pushes you to pick a side. Sweet Bird pushes hardest. Boss Finley is almost all menace. Chance is almost all need. I wanted one scene where Chance shuts up and listens, or where Finley says something human by accident. Without that the moral stays clean in a way life does not.

There is also the question of who these plays are for now. A student picking this up for class will manage fine. The language is plain, the plots move, the scenes are short enough to read one at a time. The sexual violence and racism and homophobia in the backstories are not described in pornographic detail, but they are central, Allan suicide after being shamed, Blanche assaulted, Heavenly sterilized, Boss Finley using race and sex to keep power. Teachers should name that going in. Readers who want fast twists should know these are character plays. The shock is not who did it. The shock is watching people talk themselves into choices you can see will hurt them.

If you only have time for one, read Streetcar slowly and skim the stage directions out loud. Say the addresses and the names. Laurel, Elysian Fields, Belle Reve. Blanche, Stella, Stanley, Mitch. Then read Menagerie in one sitting at night. It is short and it plays better fast. Then take Sweet Bird in pieces. It rewards patience, especially Alexandra scenes, and you can forgive Chance for repeating himself once you see he has nothing else to say.

I finished the volume thinking Williams understood something I keep seeing in normal life. People build a story that lets them keep going, Blanche with her admirers and paper lanterns, Amanda with her gentleman callers, Chance with his comeback, Stanley with his home is mine talk, Stella with her he loves me talk. The stories work until someone stronger, or time itself, stops playing along. That is bleak, but the plays are not cold. They keep asking you to stay a little longer with people you might cross the street to avoid. I did, for 313 pages, and I was sorry when the lights came up.