13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
"I don't want realism. I want magic."
Date of Review: Jan 10, 2003
The Bottom Line: The best play I've ever read, and you can read it within a couple of hours.
Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning play tells the story of fading Southern Belle Blanche Dubois and her last attempts for stability and happiness. She's kind of what I imagine Scarlett O'Hara would end up as, penniless and facing middle age. A woman of feigned delicacy and modesty, she clings to beauty and the past, unable to deal with loneliness and the cruelties life has dealt her. She was by far my favourite and the most sympathetic character in the play.
The story starts with Blanche's arrival at her sister Stella's slummy house, in a seedy section of New Orleans ironically named Elysian Fields after the mythical Greek idea of Heaven. Stella, pregnant and married to Stanley Kowalski, has long ago left the family plantation, Belle Reve, and is surprised but happy to see her sister again.
Unfortunately, from the beginning the fragile, gentle Blanche clashes with her brother-in-law Stanley, a man who sometimes means well but is hampered by his dumbness; as well, he is too rough and insensitive to really suit Blanche, who he suspects has cheated Stella out of Belle Reve. The play continues with the tension between them, which ultimately leads to the tragic final scenes.
The positives of this play far outweighed any negative aspects. True, it was very depressing, but that's a reflection on much of life. Even though Blanche is vain, insecure, needy and aristocratically snobbish, Williams wrote well enough to make me feel intense sympathy for her and to really hope things could have turned out happily for her. It was very simple to read, and I managed to finish it within a day. Some of the dialogue comes off a little stilted, but that could be due to the period it was written in and Blanche's personality.
