THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Tennessee Williams brings us into the steamy, gothic heart of American life, especially life in the old South, and he does it with a poet’s touch and a truth-teller’s grit. His plays are lush with desire – sexual longing, yearning for love or escape – and at the same time they seethe with violence, both physical and emotional. He once described his work as depicting “a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility” . That sentence is a perfect encapsulation. In Williams’ universe, genteel manners and soft drawls overlay passions as hot and dangerous as summer lightning.

Consider A Streetcar Named Desire, perhaps his most famous play. On the surface, it’s the story of a fallen Southern belle (Blanche DuBois) visiting her sister in a rough New Orleans neighborhood. Blanche speaks with flowery refinement and clings to notions of femininity and romance. But she’s arrived at the Kowalski apartment, a cramped, loud space dominated by her brother-in-law Stanley – a man of blunt words, animal energy, and no patience for Blanche’s illusions. The play becomes a collision between illusion and reality, desire and brutality. Blanche’s longing for magic (“I don’t want realism, I want magic!” she pleads) leads her into a dangerous dance with Stanley, who ultimately shatters her—raping her in a scene that is never shown explicitly but whose violence reverberates through the final act . The “romantic gentility” Blanche represents is no match for Stanley’s “harsh realities” . The ending is one of the most haunting in theatre: a broken Blanche led away, muttering about kindness from strangers, as Stella (her sister) and the newborn baby remain with Stanley – the new order of things, unvarnished and cruel.