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Acting - The Dramatic Action and Characters
The play is an unfurling of the personal history of Blanche, and charts the miserable few months before her descent into madness. She arrives on the Kowalski's doorstep in May of some year in the late 1940s, 1947 perhaps: World War II is not long over. They live in a small ground floor apartment of a two-storey frame house in the exotic poor quarter of New Orleans, where blacks and whites rub along together, so there's always music from the bar on the corner, called 'blue piano'. In the stage directions, music and sound are used throughout the play to heighten the atmosphere; the house is near the railway tracks, and trains roar past with blazing headlamps, like terrible monsters. The 'Varsouviana' a polka tune which Blanche associates with the long-ago suicide of her young husband is heard playing, in varying moods; we can hear it, but it's playing only in Blanche's head.
The central dramatic action is the fierce conflict and growing hatred between Blanche and Stanley. Stanley is an unwelcoming host and Blanche a jittery, tippling, sharp-tongued guest. They are both figures of powerful sexuality, so desire is never far from the surface. Stanley suspects Blanche of having dissipated the Dubois family fortune; in a horrid scene which foreshadows the eventual rape, he tears open her trunk and scatters her clothes, furs and jewels, thinking that they are her ill-gotten gains from the great house, Belle Reve, now lost to Blanche and Stella. So in his mind, Blanche stands condemned of having defrauded his wife of her inheritance. He sets out to discover all that has happened in Blanche's recent past, and Blanche lies, fabricates and fantasizes to support the fictitious picture she has painted of herself. She also tries to undermine her sister's marriage to 'an animal'. These scenes are interspersed with ominous scenes of violence - a drunken Stanley beats up Stella, but she's deep in sexual thrall to him, pregnant, and despite the coarseness, the brutality, she's happy with him. More and more floats to the surface about Blanche's past: a long string of casual lovers and protectors, a shameful end to her teaching career (she had seduced a seventeen year old pupil). Blanche has now set her cap at Mitch, Stanley's workmate and ex-army buddy. Mitch seems different: a dutiful son to his ailing mother, a good-mannered gentle giant, a gauche and innocent man. These two lonely people draw closer to each other. At intervals Blanche becomes more honest. She confesses to Stella:
That's why I've been - not so aw'fly good lately. I've run for protection, Stella, from under one leaky roof to another leaky roof - because it was storm - all storms, and I was caught in the centre... People don't see you - men don't - don't even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you've got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you're going to have someone's protection...
She tells Mitch the painful story of her teenage marriage to an artistic boy, how she discovered him in a room with a man, having sex. Her young husband then shot himself. Blanche is slipping. She makes a pass at a young man who calls at the house. Blanche and Mitch have a date; she resolves to play the lady who doesn't 'put it about', so that Mitch will desire her the more. Before that relationship can go any further, Stanley tells Mitch all the sad details of Blanche's past, and Mitch cruelly rejects her. She is now sliding further and further into drunken fantasy and lies. Stanley takes Stella to the hospital to have her baby. On his return, drunk and celebrating, he finds a drunken Blanche, dressed in tatty finery, packing her clothes; she pretends that she has been invited by an old beau to go on a cruise. Stanley persecutes her unrelentingly. He provokes her to fury and terror, and then rapes her.
Some weeks later, the medics come to take Blanche to the asylum. Stella says to her neighbor Eunice Hubbel, 'I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley'. Stanley and his buddies are playing poker and drinking. The doctor gently leads Blanche away, leaving Stella sobbing and wracked with grief for the sister she has seen destroyed. As she weeps, Stanley comforts her by putting his hand into her blouse and caressing her breasts.