“As the different scenes progress the play becomes darker and darker. Parts of the play did shock me and was glad when the curtain fell.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
The curtain opens and the audience finds themselves on a street in New Orleans, which is where the play takes place. Two of the main characters live in a flat…Stella and Stanley Kowalski, she’s somewhat of a Mississippi belle and he’s a burly ex military fellow and her husband… enter shortly Stella’s sister Blanche DuBois whose come to live with them as she has no where else to go having to let go the plantation.
Blanche and Stanley soon size each other up and it does not bode well. As they say “You can fool some of the people all of the time, others none of the time but not everyone all of the time”. Where Blanche can pull the wool over the eyes of a good many of the characters, not Stanley.
It doesn’t take much to debase Blanche, she’s a fragile being living in her own created reality and discourses become brutal, mostly not attended by Stella. The play is very dramatic and I found myself, not as much championing Blanche but feeling great empathy for her. Stella deals with the tension between her sister and husband, he does get physically violent with his wife and I cringed.
As the different scenes progress the play becomes darker and darker. Parts of the play did shock me and was glad when the curtain fell. As I read the play I could picture Marlon Brando (Vito Corleone-The Godfather) and Vivian Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara-Gone With the Wind) as Stanley and Blanche respectively…yes, indeed they stared in a 1951 movie. I would recommend reading the play and if possible watching the movie version.
Reviewed by:
Diana S. Long
Added 8th April 2018
