SMC Street Car Criticism a Streetcar Called Desire Play Analysis Discussion

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• Opinion/Assertion

Post

• Read the criticism in this module [below], entitled, “Streetcar: A Selection of Reviews” and share your ideas about the criticism in a discussion post (you MUST quote the passage). The post is meant to be a response specifically to THIS SET OF REVIEWS. So write at least three full paragraphs [or more if you wish] on this criticism [in relation to the play] for the full 20 points.

Grading

• Click on the rubric to see how the discussion will be graded.

‘STREETCAR’ WILLIAMS’S FINEST PLAY
Excellent Cast Stages Brilliant Tragedy at New Haven Theater

A mixture of seduction, sordid revelations and incidental perversion

Thorton Wilder said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley. (Memoirs 170)

Behind the somewhat dismaying title, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Tennessee Williams has written his finest play. Out of a woman’s hysterical flight from desperation into madness, he has composed a bizarrely brilliant tragedy. Under the knowing direction of Elia Kazan, an excellent cast is kindling it into a hugely effective performance.

This is the story of a southern girl whom fate destroyed with sure, persistent hewing from the time of her child-marriage to a poetical youth who turned out to be a homosexual. Under the extravagant sins of numerous relatives, the family estate crumbled and vanished, and as the girl supported them on the thin earnings of a schoolmarm, the relatives too died slow, leprous deaths about her. Seeking some glimmer of happiness, comfort, love, the girl went from one desperately foolish affair to another, ending up in the role of prostitute, harried but still somehow hopeful of escaping from the slough, and finding cover and rest. Just when marriage is within saving grasp, it is kicked away by someone seeking to protect his friend from marrying such a woman. But not before he himself has despoiled her.

It is on the tawdry loom of these mischances that Mr. Williams has set about weaving the real substance of his play. As in “The Glass Menagerie,” poetry and pity are the stuff with which he weaves. But the result is richer and more variegated than anything he achieved in the thin monochrome mood of “Menagerie.”

Vivid Play

Because here, in the first place, he has constructed a vivid play, simply as a play. In rowdy quarter of New Orleans, he has assembled coarse and noisy clowns who live gustily around the center and creature of tragedy. He has written this background with finely imaginative realism, and salt humors, creating a play that is quick with life as well as with death. And against this background, the tragedy of the woman’s last desperate stand for decency is only more ironic and poignant.

What in this rehearsing must seem like a combination of melodrama and brisk comedy, is saved from these merenesses by the infinite tenderness, the deep understanding and the ever-present glow of poetry with which Mr. Williams has probed his characters and set out their lives. The qualities which Mr. Williams has already evinced before are here at their most vibrant. “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a deeply touching, deeply moving, superior perception and exhilarating playmaking.

Jessica Tandy is playing the sad role of Blanche with just this same perception, as well as the skill, which Mr. Williams needs if his play is to be real rather than fantastic. She has brought it the exact balance between the tawdry and the beautiful. Marlon Brando, who has done such roles before, does superbly as the coarse brother-in-law, part animal, part tenderness. Kim Hunter, as Blanche’s goodhearted but practical young sister, gives a fine realistic performance. Karl Maiden plays with a curiously charming blundering naivete ideal to his part.

Wilbur ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ By Elinor Hughes

Tennessee Williams, winner of all manner of prizes for his play of two years ago, The Glass Menagerie,” is with us again, presenting the most haunting new drama, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” To compare him with any current playwright is impossible, for he has a quality completely and uniquely his own-the ability to tell a pitiful, always believable and nakedly honest story in terms of moods, snatches of speech, emotions suggested. Plot in the usual sense there is not too much of, for it is men and women in their moods of hope, despair, pretense, terror and uncertainty with whom he is concerned. Yet the play is purposeful and it held last night’s audience tense and silent to the final curtain. Elia Kazan’s direction seemed to me evocative and brilliant, and Irene M. Selznick, the producer, is to be congratulated upon bringing to the theater so striking and unusual a script.

Taking his title from the streetcar that runs through the Vieux Carre in New Orleans, a streetcar that bears the name of Desire and connects with another streetcar named Cemetery, the playwright tells the story of Blanche Du Bois, frail, pretty, rather too fine drawn and over-elegant, who arrives suddenly on the doorstep of her young sister, Stella, and Stella’s forthright unimpressionable husband, Steve [sic] Kowalski. Her arrival brings nothing but clashes and confusion; her talk—about her nerves, her teaching and the old plantations, now lost, where she and Stella had grown up—has a baffling quality about it, as though there were ultimate truths that she could not speak. Soon she has put Stella and Steve [sic] outwardly at odds with one another. She talks of her conquests, she is afraid of bright lights and responds rather desperately to the clumsy, polite advances of Steve’s [sic] friend, Mitch, who thinks he would like to marry her.

The hot summer days idle by, but the tension grows: Stella’s baby is coming and Steve [sic], frantic to be rid of Blanche, finally unearths the truth about her that, once published abroad, is to destroy hier. A tragic early marriage, ending in disaster, had driven her to more and more men, to drink, and to taking refuge in a dream world where what mattered was not truth but what she wanted to be true.

There seem no words adequate to describe the remarkable performance by Jessica Tandy as the tragic Blanche, for this is really superb, imaginative and illuminating acting. With rare skill she suggests a lost, pitiful and confused woman, clinging to the illusion of beauty, clutching at the shadows of happiness, seeking to fly from the terrors of her lost love and family disaster.

The play is largely hers, but the other performances are most excellent: Marlon Brando fulfills his earlier promise with a mature and forceful performance of the angry, boisterous, resentful Steve [sic], seeking to salvage through brutality his resentment of Blanche’s condescension. Kim Hunter is appealing and lovable as young Stella, torn between love for her husband and pity for her sister. Karl Maiden brings strength and honesty to the role of Mitch.

The lesser roles, those of the quarrelsome but kind-hearted Hubbels, are well taken by Peg Hillias and Rudy Bond; Donald Oenslager’s transparent walled setting is imaginatively conceived and lighted and the background music is haunting and effective throughout.5

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Intense New Drama By Helen Eager

Tennessee Williams has written a deeply engrossing drama of intense dramatic power in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which Irene Selznick is presenting at the Wilbur. Elia Kazan has given it a fascinating production, staging it with brilliance. And the cast, headed by Jessica Tandy, is one of rare perfection.

Miss Tandy’s Blanche DuBois lives in a dream-world of the past, as did the heroine of Mr. Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.” But Blanche is a much more tragic and affecting figure. Like Iris March of “The Green Hat,” an unfortunate marriage in her ‘teens has led her to find solace in the arms of any stranger. From a gentle childhood on a Mississippi plantation, she has sunk to a prostitute ordered out of town. In desperation she joins her sister, who has married a Polish- American in New Orleans and who lives in two squalid rooms in a brawling section of the city. (To reach it one takes a streetcar named Desire.)

Her shock at finding her little sister Stella in such surroundings is matched by her distaste of Stella’s mad passion for her husky husband, Stanley. And at once a bitter antagonism springs up between Stanley and Blanche. It is Stanley who, distrustful of Blanche’s fine manners and professed delicacy, unearths her unsavory past.

Miss Tandy, who has been wasted in movies for the past five years, gives a haunting portrayal of loneliness—a woman who has watched her family die, one by one; who needs to be wanted since the suicide of her husband; who tries desperately to pretend she is a fragile virgin. Her gifted performance is one of the most impressive of the season.

Marlon Brando is splendid as the rough and physical Stanley. Stella is delightfully played by Kim Hunter, who refuses to believe anything bad about her sister. Karl Maiden is excellent as Stanley’s pal who courts Blanche with awed reverence until he learns the truth.

The play is vastly aided by Jo Mielziner’s striking and atmospheric setting, and his wizardry with lighting. Lucinda Ballard has costumed it perfectly. And the music, under the supervision of Lehman Engel, adds to the tragic, bitter mood. (These two reviews are reprinted with the permission of the Boston Herald.)

Williams Play Holds Interest at Shubert Theater

The unhappy fate of a faded Mississippi belle, who strays from her place in society to a psychopathic state and eventually loses her mind, is depicted in Tennessee Williams’ new play, “A Streetcar Called Desire”[sic], which premiered last night at the Shubert Theater. Presented by Irene Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, the vehicle is highly dramatic and accented with the Williams touch of tawdry realism. Set in the shoddy Quarters of New Orleans, the action is unfolded in two long acts with blackouts employed to note the passing of time.

As the beauty who slips into the status of moral outcast, Jessica Tandy, recently of Hollywood, has the intensive job of injecting a convincing note to her role. She is on the stage constantly and employs every feminine whim in her dealings with her younger sister, married to a Polish war veteran from way down on the social ladder, and the assortment of men whose paths cross hers. A confirmed liar, she gets more than casual stimulation from alcohol and amorous affairs. She is aided by a vivid imagination and a gift for putting into words her colorful and often sordid fancies and facts. There is no doubt of the exhausting quality of her part as the lady of culture, breeding and education whose early tragedy in love has sent her spinning on a downward path. Many of her lines are sheer poetry, while others are electrifying in their essence.

Kim Hunter is cast as the younger sister, who seems content with her lot as the wife of an illiterate but crafty factory worker endowed with a capacity for love. She possesses a natural and simple charm that offsets the intensive personality of her frustrated sister. As the shoddy heroine’s brother-in-law, Marlon Brando is a lusty young man shrewd enough to realize his rights under Louisiana’s “Napoleonic Code,” and properly resentful of the patronizing manner of his wife’s sister. Karl Maiden is introduced as the young man ensnared and almost won by the conniving Miss Tandy.

Mr. Williams does not mince words in his play, nor does he ignore basic human needs and behavior. He is an ultra-realist in every sense. His promising play in its present form suffers from too many long and frequently wearisome speeches. Several casual situations take more than average time to getting about to happening. With these corrected, “A Streetcar Called Desire” should head for Broadway with a confident air! (Reprinted by permission of The New Haven [Evening] Register)