As was surely obvious in his earlier "Glass Menagerie," [Williams] again proves his dramatic imagination [in "A Streetcar Named Desire"]. I think it is safe to say that every telling gesture and effect was securely wrought into the script before ever rehearsals started. You must envision a scene whose transparent wall allows both the heat-laden street as well as this burning room to come into focus. And the sounds are important: from upstairs, outside, all over. As the protagonist topplingly progresses among horrors, one hears her private mockeries: bells, a gunshot, voices. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the stage being so precisely controlled. And further, the language is as sure. A kind of interior syntax is set up with complex, often lovely, period sentences (speeches) dealt to the heroine and opposed to the current, inarticulate slipshod of the others. Gertrude Stein was not wrong in tracking emotion as well as history through grammar.
In view of all this excellence, it will seem graceless to admit to some puzzles. The first of these has to do with theme. At first glance, it seems that Mr. Williams has conjured nothing more (nor less) than a melodrama, an especial Freudian case-history with all on stage only more or less diseased, the conflict being one of degree. And yet somehow the remembered lines do seem to indicate a further dimension as though the lying nobility projected by the heroine were not only dying, but rather mistaken, though nevertheless a strength. (p. 254)
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