[A Streetcar Named Desire], which might well have been titled The Glans Menagerie, has been criticized in some quarters as an unpleasant [play]. The criticism is pointed. But the fact that a play is unpleasant, needless to say, is not necessarily a reflection on its quality…. There is a considerable difference between the unpleasant and the disgusting, which is the designation Mr. Williams' critics probably have in mind, and his play is not disgusting…. Williams has managed to keep his play wholly in hand. But there is, too, a much more positive borderline between the unpleasant and the enlightening, and he has tripped over it, badly, While he has succeeded in making realistically dramatic such elements as sexual abnormality, harlotry, perversion, venality, rape, and lunacy, he has scarcely contrived to distil from them any elevation and purge. His play as a consequence remains largely a theatrical shocker which, while it may shock the emotions of its audience, does not in the slightest shock them into any spiritual education. (pp. 163-64)
[Williams has an] apparent conviction that theatrical sensationalism and dramatic substantiality are much the same thing and that, as in the present case, one can handily pass the former off for the latter, and for something pretty artistic into the bargain, by gilding it with occasional literary flourishes accompanied by off-stage vibra-harps, flutes, and music boxes…. To fashion any such festering materials into important drama it is essential that they be lifted out of life into a pattern larger than life, as, among others, [August] Strindberg and his contemporary disciple, [Eugene] O'Neill, have appreciated. Williams in considerable part leaves them where he found them and deludes himself into a belief that he has made of the gutter a broad sea by now and then sailing in it little papier-mâché poesy boats, propelled by doughty exhalations.
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