Kindness of Strangers Dwells in the Suburbs

A Streetcar Named Desire

While miles away from New Orleans, JPAC has staged a very respectable production that brings the heat of Tennessee Williams’ 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama to Cicero. Ask any serious theatre goer for a list of the best American plays and this drama is sure to rank among his favorites. Indeed, next to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie,” “Streetcar…” is probably William’s best-known and most-produced play from a lengthy canon of scripts that continually proves popular with educational, regional and Broadway theatres.

Inspired by the playwright’s own family experiences and motivated by a trend away from melodrama and a rise of naturalism in the theatre, Williams paints a sad portrait of Blanche DuBois, a faded Southern Belle who falls from grace. Blanche travels from her lost family home in Laurel, Mississippi to spend time with her younger, married sister Stella in New Orleans. An addiction to alcohol and a strong preference for culture and civility mask Blanche’s deeply-rooted guilty secrets, as well as her steady descent into mental illness. She arrives at her sister’s shabby, steamy three-room apartment by way of a series of conveyances, most notably the titular streetcar named Desire. There she faces off against Stanley Kowalski, her sister Stella’s coarse, primal-driven husband who suspects that Blanche is hiding more than a few skeletons in that huge trunk she’s hauled with her. Witnessing this fierce battle waged between a woman trying desperately to survive through self-deception and literary-inspired romantic fantasies and a man motivated solely by his basic needs and animal instincts spells tragedy from the beginning.