THEATER CHRONICLE
OH , SWEET MYS TER Y OF LIFE
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.
By
Tennessee Williams. Barrymore
Theater.
You are an ordinary guy and your wife's sister comes to stay
with you. Whenever you want to go to the toilet, there she is in the
bathroom, primping or having a bath or giving herself a shampoo and
taking her time about it. You go and hammer on the door ("For Christ's
sake, aren't you through yet?"), and your wife shushes you frowningly:
Blanche is very sensitive and you must be careful of her feelings. You
get sore at your wife; your kidneys are sensitive too. My God, you yell,
loud enough so that Blanche can hear you, can't a man pee in his own
house, when is she getting out of here? You are pretty sick too of
feeling her criticize your table-manners, and does she have to turn on
the radio when you have a poker game going, who does she think she
is? Finally you and your wife have a fight (you knew all along that
She was turning the little woman against you), you decide to put your
foot down, Blanche will have to go. Your wife reluctantly gives in–
anything for peace, don't think it's been a treat for
her
("But let me
handle it, Joe; after all, she's my own
sister!").
One way or another
(God knows what your wife told her) Blanche ge.ts the idea. You buy
her a ticket home. But then right at the end, when you're carrying her
bags downstairs for her, you feel sort of funny; maybe you were too
hard ; but that's the way the world is, and, Boy, isn't it great to be
alone?
This variation on the mother-in-law theme is the one solid piece
of theatrical furniture that
A Streetcar Named Desire
can show; the
rest is antimacassars. Acrimony and umbrage, tears, door-slamming,
broken dishes, jeers, cold silences, whispers, raised eyebrows, the deter–
mination fo take no notice, the whole classic paraphernalia of insult and
injury is T ennessee Williams' dowry. That this kind of genre-writing
is generally associated with the comic strip and the radio sketch
should not invalidate it for him as subject-matter; it has nobler ante–
cedents. The cook, one may recall, is leaving on the opening page of
Anna Karenina,
and Hamlet at the court of Denmark is really play-
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