About the work
Tennessee Williams's drama „A Streetcar Named Desire" was premiered on Broadway in 1947 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. It is one of the most important American plays of the twentieth century and made Williams world famous.
Plot
New Orleans, late 1940s. Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern aristocrat with a tragic past, arrives at her sister Stella's modest apartment in the French Quarter. Stella lives there with her brutal, working-class husband Stanley Kowalski. Blanche has lost the family estate Belle Reve, was dismissed from her teaching post for an affair with a student, and lives in alcoholic illusions of grandeur. Stanley resents Blanche's airs and digs into her past. Blanche meets Stanley's friend Mitch and hopes for marriage; Stanley reveals her past, and Mitch withdraws. While Stella is in hospital giving birth, Stanley rapes Blanche. She breaks down completely. In the closing scene Stella has Blanche committed; Blanche leaves on the doctor's arm with the famous line: „I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Cultural significance
Streetcar is the prototype of American psychological theatre. Marlon Brando's Broadway Stanley (1947) and Vivien Leigh's film Blanche (1951) defined the roles for generations. Elia Kazan directed both stage and film. Blanche DuBois is one of the great female roles of American theatre, played by Jessica Tandy, Tallulah Bankhead, Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson. The play was once banned for its frank treatment of sexuality and rape.