The most famous
Tennessee Williams play, which witnessed the debut on the stage of a young actor named
Marlon Brando, is
a feracious representation of a small American reality and also the dramatic portrait of a decayed and crushed romantic spirit.
Blanche is a starved woman and a dreamer about love, who goes to visit her sister. Little sister has settled herself in a small suburb and taken an apartment with her husband, the rude worker Stanley Kowalsky. The crash between Blanche, who comes from a well-off and accustomed athmosphere to the luxury, and the man who despises all what Blanche represents, is immediate.
Then, it happens that something begins to emerge from the past of the woman, something that Blanche would have never let know to anybody. This woman now is in misery, and had also to sell the family assets in order to pay the debtors. The situation is so hard, that now she doesn’t even have a place to go to stay. Her young sister ignored all this story: in her memory, everything was remained fine and glad like it was at the time before she got married with Stanley and so before she left home.
The young sister is astonished by the Blanche’s revelation: now she declares her intention to support totally the older sister, and at this point the friction between the authoritarian husband and Blanche seems to calm down.
But the past doesn’t stop to show new embarrassing discoveries. Stanley comes to know some other detail about Blanche’s private life. From the woman’s place, there’s a current voice that traces a portrait of doubtful morality around the woman’s personality. It comes out that Blanche, in order to resolve the economic problems, and also in order to escape from daily melancholy and lonelyness, would have found a “romanticed” escape from reality, turning into prostitution with various people in a squalid hotel.
Stanley obliges Blanche to a face-to-face with her past. But the past offers no truth that the woman can accept: her hypersensitivity pulled her to some escape from the world, but at this point the world is too much oppressive to allow her to escape again.
The argue between Stanley, who despises this woman and doesn’t understand her souffrance – thinking that she’s only acting like a victim when she’s not a victim at all – leads to a last and dramatic event, which shatters Blanche’s fragile sensibility and personality. All her ingenuous dreams and romanticism are crashed, when Stanley abuses of her.
The menthal faculties of the woman look to be compromised. Her young sister can’t do anything anymore, and drama gets closed with nurses arrival, who take Blanche away from the Kowalskys apartment, in order to bring her in a clinic.
This
Tennessee Williams drama is permeated by a thin and sweet sensibility, which sinks the look in the inferior and less sensitive stages of life, in order to study the quarrel and the forms of crashing. The finer sensibility is destined unavoidably to succumb, againt such materialism forms and necessities. Often the interpreters have spotted three dominant leit-motifs in the Williams’s theatre: the sex as pathology; the degradation of the individuals which is reflexed by the society''s degradation; and the violence, which is considered as the easiest and normal resolution for the human vicissitudes.
But first of all these Williams’s aspects, it’s possible to characterize a more abstract character, which often escapes to a representation in the gestures and the actions of the theatre, but which dominates Williams’s vision of reality from a highest point compounds his dramas in the most pervasive way. It’s the topic about the time that passes, of the ineluctbility of its flux, and the crisis that thys tyran determines in the romantic spirits who don’t accepts it, and remain locked in the golden age dreams.
That age is considered by the author like the only one possible time for making passions and feelings making something real. The old age is always, in Williams’s theatre, nothing else than an age of corruption. Williams’s decadent heroes try to face it, but their end is already vain, and so they fall.