Surely playwriting is the most difficult of the arts and its successful achievement is among the world's miracles. It does not matter how hard the tidy mind of man applies itself to the formulation of rules for the making of a 'good play', the kernel of truth eludes definition. What makes both Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire good theatre? Is it because they both convey a heightened sense of reality—a poet's projection of the core of experience in terms of the spoken word, the human presence? Tennessee Williams' lost souls in a sordid basement flat in New Orleans are as palpitatingly alive as Shakespeare's royal lovers whose downfall shook the world. In both cases—so widely divergent, so utterly unlike—the artists' profound understanding illuminates as by lightning flashes the dark regions of the human heart.
A Streetcar Named Desire, as its title suggests, is concerned, like Shakespeare's epic tragedy, with love—with its devastations, with its triumphs. In it we see once again, as in The Glass Menagerie, the break-up of a social order and its effect on the women, bearers of life, who survive. Stella and Blanche du Bois are the last of a lost civilization. Stella has found salvation in the arms of a man who is at the beginning, not the end, of a cycle. Her husband Stan is passionate, violent, primitive, a second-generation Pole who is battling his way up from the bottom. Her older sister Blanche is the victim of the collapse of the old order. It is she who stayed at home on the family estate, nursed the old people, lived with death and decay, suffered the anguish of seeing her world of refinement and elegance fall to pieces around her…. At the last her nerves give way, her mind cracks and she—like the world her forbears once lived in—is brutally cast aside by the upsurging, ruthless new life personified by Stan. (p. 10)
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