Play That Shocks Also Has

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Eloquence and Vividness

By William F. McDermott

ENNESSEE WILLIAMS' "A Streetcar Named Desire" stays on at the Hanna for a second week. I suppose its box-office success here and elsewhere is partly owing to the sensational nature of its material. For a playwright who was born in an Episcopal rectory, Williams expresses a surprising preoccupation with human violence and aberration. The material in "Streetcar Named Desire" includes harlotry, animal passion, drunken brawling, the beating of a pregnant woman, neuroticism, rape, lunacy and homosexuality. Williams piles on a heavy load of the brutal and the abnormal, and he throws in some cargo which, so far as I can see, is not necessary to the play.

How does it illuminate the character of Blanche du Bois, or help to explain the course her life took, to be told that the young boy she married years previously, and who killed himself, was addicted to homosexual practices? I think some of the shocks introduced into the play are superfluous and without validity in respect to the play as a work of theatrical craftsmanship, though I suspect they have not been unhelpful at the box office.

Nightmare Vividness

But "A Streetcar Named Desire" is very much more than a shock melodrama. Being a genuinely gifted dramatist, Williams has transmuted the ugly and sordid into a play of intense realism, poetic eloquence, and remarkable theatric power.

WILLIAM F. MCDERMOTT

These mostly brutish people are presented with so strong an illusion of a breathing, living, realness that they become a part of life and you not any more resent them than you can resent life. In the end, the feeling they arouse is pity, pity for them and pity for the world in which they live and which has made them what they are. The play is intensely vivid. It! has the nightmarish vividness of a bad dream in which the events are more disturbing and the outlines sharper than the real happenings of waking life.

There is a peculiar and individual contradiction in Williams' plays. They combine the intensely real with a dream-like diffuseness, they mingle everyday prose with poetic statement, they picture the vague past along with the urgent present, and the two are assimilated into one.

What has happened to Blanche du Bois before the play opens is almost as vivid as what you see happening to her on the stage. The past was an equally important element in "The Glass Menagerie,” which the current play very much resembles, though it is livelier in action and stronger of effect.

The heroines of both plays are dreamers who cannot face life as it is and must create an imaginative world of their own. If Amanda's! past, as suggested in "The Glass Menagerie," is wistful dream, Blanche du Bois' past as it emerges in "Streetcar" is a horrible nightmare, and these words might almost be used to describe the likeness and the difference in the inner quality of the two plays.

Rick in Detail

"A Streetcar Named Desire” is as rich in detail as it is sharp in effect. In addition to dramatizing almost continuous action, creating the clearest characters, suggesting the mean living and the animal pleasures of its people, and vitalizing the past of one of its characters, it also summons up the mood and movement and background of

the old quarter in New Orleans.

This was not an easy play to stage and it must have offered what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles.

Jo Mielziner's setting is remarkably ingenious. It is so arranged that action can be shown on the street, on the front steps of the house and in two rooms of the house itself without change of

scene.

Williams' technical craftsmanship is highly knowing and adroit, and that is the least explicable aspect of his talent. He has had no theatrical experience, except playwright. The kind of skill he shows is usually acquired through a longer and more direct association with the stage.

as a

I mean such things as skillful use of music to enhance the mood of a scene and his ability to handle a complicated pattern of entrances and exits. The theatricality his plays sometimes display is an actor's theatricality.

The character contrasts in "A Streetcar Named Desire" are strong, effective and psychologically wellgrounded. Behind the unlettered and ill-mannered Steve's instinctive hostility to his wife's sister is an unspoken resentment against her background of birth, breeding and; education which was superior to his, and that same feeling may help account for his vicious treatment of his wife when he is in his cups.

The serenity and common sense of She married sister obviously add to the dramatic impact of the heroine's neuroticism, and all their scenes together are heightened by their contrast in temperament and