Tennessee Williams: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

The discussion of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE drew a gratifyingly large gathering for August: Caroline, Emma-Jane, Helen, Kathleen (!), Maren, Phoebe, and Robin (!!!). Sadly, Kathleen's suggested Southern Comfort wasn't on the menu.

The general reaction to the play (and for once we were fairly unanimous): intrigued and full of questions. Many of us had read it in school and found that coming back to it later in life and in a non-academic environment revealed new aspects; some want to explore more Tennessee Williams. A few points:

• Indefinable protagonists – Williams allows so many possible interpretations and provides a few cunning blurred areas, like the offstage moment of Stanley's violence against Stella or the final encounter between Blanche and Stanley, that we (and directors and actors) can never come to a final decision

• Steamy, louche atmosphere – thumbs up!

• Actors! Many points tied in with this: the iconic young Marlon Brando; what contemporary actor do we see playing Stanley today?; usefulness of imagining the play through the eyes of an actor playing one of the characters and thus obliged to find a logical throughline; in a related point, what did Brando think happened between Stanley and Blanche?

• Madness: how mad is Blanche? Robin brought up some interesting historical points on the treatment of (and cultural association between) women and madness.

• Money: coarsely, Phoebe suggested that all Blanche's problems could be resolved with a little money. While this is reductive, think of how many situations or apparent decisions in the play are conditioned by money: Blanche's living intimately and grossly with death, then coming to stay (and stay, and stay …) in her brother-in-law's house, Blanche's pursuit of Mitch – even Stella's choice of Stanley as a husband and apparent decision to stay with him at the end of the play.

• "Belle Rêve": a critic once remarked that, since "rêve" is masculine, Blanche seems to have taken a more prosaic name for a plantation, Belle Rive, and applied her brand of magic to it. Maren pointed out that Belle Rêve could also be interpreted as "The Beauty Dreams" – brilliant!

Esprit d'escalier: I meant to bring this to the table, but I forgot and I'm seizing the opportunity now:

During the rehearsal of the original production of STREETCAR, producer Irene Selznick suggested a change in the rape scene:

"I felt she [Blanche] would be destroyed more completely if, after resisting, she began to respond and then he changed course and repulsed her. It would be her fatal humiliation. I would have him fling her across the stage and just stand there, laughing savagely. I thought it would make the last act more valid."

Williams thought that the concept might be "dramatically sound," but Kazan vetoed the idea.

Phoebe