A Streetcar Named Desire

Symbol and Theatrical Expression of Character in Streetcar From: The Moth and the Lantern [According to Thomas Adler, playwright Arthur Miller has cited Streetcar as an inspiration for his own work on Death of a Salesman in part for] “the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, [that] moved me more than all its pathos.” . . . One of Williams’ chief contributions to the American theatre through Streetcar . . . was an almost entirely new conception of a lyrical drama; fully utilizing the stylistic possibilities of the stage allowed Williams to break away from the language-bound realistic drama of the 19th century that was still holding sway over [the drama of the Forties]. . . . This new type of play would not only admit but insist that the language of drama involve more than just words; it would acknowledge the stage symbols and the scenic images that speak to the audience as powerfully as what issues from the mouths of the characters. . . . Williams (and Miller after him) envisioned a use of theatrical space that would not demand that the spectators deny they are in an auditorium watching a play. Furthermore, the location of the action would not be restricted to any one room, as the dramatist, aided by the designer’s use of painted scrims that could be made transparent through lighting, conceived of a freer handling of space, allowing for simultaneous action in different settings, or for showing both the inside and outside of a room, or many rooms. . . .

[As Williams’ Glass Menagerie narrator Tom advised the audience, traditional realistic theatre “gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth,” whereas] Williams’ so-called “theatre of gauze,” which plays unabashedly with the convention of the stage, makes the audience more self-conscious of the playgoing experience, and thus gives “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” The aim is not to distract us from the essential truth of experience but to take us deeper into it through all of the sensuous means—not simply words, but lighting, music, color, sound—available as well to dramatists’ tools in the creation of the aesthetic object. As Williams writes in his afterword to Camino Real, “I felt, as the painter did, that the messages lie in those abstract beauties of form and color and line, to which I would add light and motion.” [Indeed, in his notes on Menagerie’s production Williams explains that] “when a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. . . .

Truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” It is more than lyric language, or even recurrent scenic images of great visual beauty, than justify terming Williams a “poetic dramatist”; it is a habit of seeing experience as a multilayered construct or network that tends toward the metaphoric, the symbolic, the archetypal. . . .

[This places Williams clearly in the arenas of two related art movements that arose at the turn of the 19th century, expressionism and symbolism.] Expressionism, as a movement, embraced . . . . not only drama but the other pictorial arts of painting, sculpture, and cinema as well, and has as its goal the objectification of the inner experience of reality. Through a heavy dependence upon symbols, it attempts to transform into something ascertainable by the sense the interior or psychic condition of— in the case of drama—the central character onstage. Williams finds this potentiality of expressionism . . . particularly fruitful in his characterization of Blanche DuBois. . . . It 44