Feed on
Posts
Comments

I first read A Streetcar Named Desire when I was a sophomore in high school. I was under the impression that reading classic plays would make me an interesting and cultured individual. This endeavor only made me more confused about the literary canon, but it did make my dad take me to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so that was a win in my book.

A Streetcar Named Desire particularly went over my head. This was for several reasons:

  1. Tennessee Williams’s script allows a lot of creative freedom for actors and directors. While stage directions tend to be rather specific (especially when Stanley and Stella make up after poker night on page 67. Not to romanticize a terrible man and how he treats his wife, but hubba hubba!), he gives a lot of room for specific productions to have different interpretations of certain lines or scenes. While I am a theatre lover and adore all of the delicious possibilities that stem from this practice, I am autistic and take all of the things they say at face value. This led to me missing jokes, missing characterization, and generally misunderstanding the characters.
  2. Plays are not meant to be read. There is a lot of value in reading scripts, but theatre is a performance based medium. Even if my brain was perfectly regular, reading a script to understand a play is like looking at sheet music to hear the song. It’s like the story of the expert on color who had lived their entire life in a black and white room. Yes, it’s all there, but there’s a fundamental piece missing.
  3. I was fifteen. At the age of fifteen, I assumed I was grown-up with all the knowledge in the world, with a whole year of high school under my belt. I knew stories weren’t always black and white, but thought they always a clear bad guy. I knew people in abusive relationships typically stayed, but I thought that descriptor couldn’t possibly be applied to Stanley because Stella really seemed to like him sometimes. I couldn’t understand to what extent Blanche was or wasn’t a liar, or why she was so deceitful about things like her age or the hotel she stayed in. I thought seventeen was a whole hell of a lot older than it really is.

I feel like I didn’t fully comprehend Stanley as a character until I saw Marlon Brando play him. He was able to portray the sort of brutal nature which attracted one sister and repelled the other, something that had been lacking in all of the productions I’ve managed to find, but also without giving him too much charming sympathy, the other issue online productions tend to run into. I also feel that what I thought was understanding of Blanche was crumpled into bits by Vivian Leigh’s performance. I feel like I’m finally appreciating for the first time that cinema was invented to give theatre back to the masses.

One Response to “Reflections on A Streetcar Named Desire”

Leave a Reply