Tennessee Williams as an artist, playwright, and human being has always intrigued me. I know so little about him, and yet I think of the impact his genius has had on my theatre life continually. We had to read “A Streetcar Named Desire” when I was in high school and we watched the film with Marlon Brando afterwards, and it was such a memorable moment.
The depth of the characters, the intensity of the story and the artistic elements in the notes all created an incredible experience for a young interested artist. So with all of that going on in my thoughts I was a little nervous to pick up the play again.
Something I really enjoyed was the introduction by Tennessee Williams himself; he truly in an intriguing and interesting man. I swear I could have just had a study based solely on his introduction. The whole introduction was about what his life had become after the success of “The Glass Managerie” and his thoughts of life before and after that success. Here is what he had to say about his life before his successful first play: “The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of lie for which the human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed.” I find it so true that our best art and our best selves come out of opposition.
And in the final paragraphs of the introduction I think Williams says something that can help anyone involved in the art or the public: “You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you ‘have a name’ is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition- and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!”
Now I can talk about the play! But really what can I say that hasn’t already been said or discovered by someone more intelligent than myself. After finishing reading and looking back over at the highlighted lines that stuck with me, I am really happy I read “Our Town” before reading this one. In “Our Town” I felt as though each moment of life is important and we need to life our lives fully and happily. This message was reaffirmed to me after reading “A Streetcar Named Desire”.
I look at our female characters, Blanche and Stella, both women who hide from reality and live in their own sense of honesty and happiness. Blanche, our soft, tender, and broken women who is looking for some gentleness, tells her own form of honesty, or ‘magic’ as she put it. “I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it.” (Scene 9, p. 117. Blanche says to Mitch.) Blanche’s world is softer, because the real world beat her into submission. Or as Stella said in scene 8 to Stanley: “You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.” And that is just what Blanche did to survive.
Then I think on Stella, who ultimately put her sister away because she chose to stay with the man she married and had a child with. Do I think this is the life she envisioned for herself… probably not; but she is going to stick with it. Was it the right decision? Probably not. But she chooses to live with her choices… good or bad.
My final thought only really came to me while writing is that how much of the character of Blanche is based on Tennessee Williams life experience after success; the attack from the world, the need for chance, the lookout for some sort of refuge. My favorite quote in the play comes from Blanche in scene 9 when she is speaking to Mitch. She says: “You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed somebody, too. I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle- a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in!” Tennessee Williams had to find a version of himself that he could live with, and in a great sense Blanche did that as well; she stayed true to an image of herself that she could live with, and I think Williams had to do the same.
To get back to my comparison of “A Streetcar Named Desire” to “Our Town” I think Williams focused on a darker side of humanity while Wilder made an ‘ideal’ small town life. I think both plays have helped me focus on what is important in my life and my values. I have always made it a goal to be a woman of virtue, a woman of honesty and a woman of charity.
I love when art is deeper than surface reading, and I encourage any who haven’t read or watched a production of Streetcar… read it, watch it, see it; it can and should impact your life.
