the one with the streetcar

"They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries, ride six blocks and get off at the Elysian Fields !"

Written by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire is a play in eleven acts. Engrossing in its madness, it takes place in the two-room apartment of Stanley and Stella Kowalksi. Blanche Dubois, Stella's sister, comes to visit them and it is soon obvious that she is not all together.

With delusions of grandeur, she puts on airs and looks down upon Stanley who dominates over his wife with a passion that Blanche doesnt understand. Widowed at a young age by a husband who killed himself, she sifts in and out of reality. She tells her sister that she was allowed to take a leave of absence but in fact she had been fired from her post as Teacher for having had an affair with a 17-year old student. She talks  constantly of Belle Reve, their ancestral property and of how it was 'lost'.

Stanley gets into a collision course with Blanche as she holds court in his house, drawing his friend and her would-be-suitor Mitch like a moth to a flame.

Stella, defensive of her sister, seeks to keep Stanley from harming her but even she cannot turn a blind eye to the holes in her sisters' story or not see how much she needs help. When Stanley finds out all her secrets(the reason she left her job) and all the flaws that she's seeking to mask with her airs(her alcoholism is no secret through all the acts), he exposes it in a brutish way that pushes her over the edge. Mitch leaves her and Blanche subsides into a alcoholic misery where she keeps hoping for a former beau to call and take her away from all the madness and the unkindness. In the penultimate act, after coming from the hospital where his wife, Stella gives birth to their child, he rapes Blanche, tearing apart her reality.

In the last act, she is taken away by a doctor and his nurse; away to a mental institution. 

The original cast had Marlon Brando as Stanley; an unknown then, he was given cab fare to Tennessee William's house where he gave a brilliant reading and made some house repairs as well ! 

The play is a testament to cruelty and the fragility of the human mind. Blanche totters on the edge of sanity, clinging to memories long gone by. She is unable to face the present but chooses to dwell in the past but then don't we all ? Scarlett O'Hara dreams of Tara and Ellen's soft hands whenever she's faced with hardship. The human spirit is sometimes surprisingly strong. But at other times, it snaps like a thin wafer, leaving just crumbles behind.