Tennessee
WILLIAMS's most popular play, A Streetcar
Named Desire (1947; film, 1951), is both grimly naturalistic and
poetically symbolic. Typical of Williams in its characters and theme,
Streetcar pits Blanche DuBois, a neurasthenic, faded Southern belle
who represents the culture and beauty of the past as well as its
decadence, against her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, the
personification of modern practicality, crudeness, cynicism, and
brutality. Blanche's childlike helplessness, romantic yearnings, and
pretensions to gentility, sharply at odds with her age and the
squalor of her present surroundings--her sister's New Orleans
tenement--suggest an already tenuous hold on reality that completely
collapses when Stanley's ruthless exposure of her past brings about
Blanche's final disintegration. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize in
1948, A Streetcar Named Desire catapulted its male lead, Marlon
Brando, to stardom, and his "method" style of acting to national
prominence.