Mr. Williams has written a strong, wholly believable play that, starting in a low key, mounts slowly and inexorably to its shocking climax. I think [A Streetcar Named Desire] is an imperfect play,… but it is certainly the most impressive one that has turned up this season, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a sounder and more mature work than "The Glass Menagerie," the author's previous compliment to Southern womanhood. (p. 50)
The reservations I have may easily be captious. Principally, it seems to me that in the emotional surge of writing his play Mr. Williams has been guilty of establishing a too facile and romantic connection between Belle Rêve [the mansion where Stella and Blanche were brought up] and the Vieux Carré [the part of New Orleans where the play is set]. Not knowing much about the South, old or new, it was hard for me to visualize the girls' ancestral home, except as something vaguely resembling the House of Usher, but Stella is written and played as a pretty, reasonably cultivated girl, in no sense unbalanced, and her abrupt and cheerful descent into the lower depths of New Orleans seems rather incredible. Mr. Williams attempts, though the evidence on the stage is against him, to portray [Stanley] as a man of enormous sexual attraction, so that the very sight of him causes her to see colored pinwheels, but even that is scarcely enough. It is the same, to some extent, with Blanche; whatever the forces working against her may have been, her degradation is much too rapid and complete, her fall from whatever position she may have occupied in a top level of society to the bottom of the last level a good deal more picturesque than probable. As I say, it is conceivable that these transitions do occur in the South, but it is my suspicion that Mr. Williams has adjusted life fairly drastically to fit his special theme. The only other thing I might complain about (Blanche's arrival from Laurel, where apparently she had just been tossed out of a cheap hotel, with a trunkful of pretty expensive-looking jewelry and clothes perplexed me some, but I'm willing to let it go) is the somewhat strained and literary analogy that keeps turning up between the streetcars named for passion and death and the tragic conflict in the heroine's mind. Mr. Williams seems to me much too good a playwright now to bother his head with these ladies'-club mystifications. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is a brilliant, implacable play about the disintegration of a woman, or, if you like, of a society; it has no possible need for the kind of pseudo-poetic decoration that more vacant authors so often employ to disguise their fundamental lack of thought. (pp. 52, 54-5)
Wolcott Gibbs, "Lower Depths, Southern Style," in The New Yorker, Vol. XXIII, No. 43, December 13, 1947, pp. 50, 52, 54-5.
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