Free How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn

another girl is not a malicious act but an acknowledgment of confusion, all too human: that’s why it’s so devastating. The Glass Menagerie can’t mean a great deal if Laura is a victim of Jim’s narcissism: the far more dreadful reality, which gives the play its characteristic twisted pathos, is that she—and, to some extent, Jim himself—are victims of her mother and brother, pawns of their selfish fantasies. That terrible truth is crushed if you play the scene as an encounter between a crippled girl and a manipulative suitor—a cliché that fails to arouse any feelings at all.
    But then, the night I saw this performance I wondered which emotions could be at stake in a Glass Menagerie stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility that give the play, give each character, a deep pathos; I wondered what genre the spectacle of a gorgeous, competent mother, her tough, streetwise son, and a smug young hunk ganging up on a feisty crippled girl belongs to. Reality TV, perhaps—those spectacles in which public humiliation has become a source of casual audience amusement. And indeed, the night I saw the play, I was startled to hear people chuckling throughout that most awkward and shame-filled encounter between Jim and Laura. When Jim admits so devastatingly that he is already engaged, when he acknowledges that he’s just being nice to Laura, the man next to me laughed out loud.
    As the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—the theater where Williams’s Streetcar had its New York première in 1948—leapt to its feet for the by now ritual standing ovation at the conclusion of this meaningless production of a play that is, more than almost any other in the Williams canon, about the destruction of beauty and the inevitability of failure, I wondered whether the delicate emotions of such a play are beyond current audiences: whether great drama’s demand that we identify with the helpless victims, and with the strident suffering made visible to us onstage, makes us so uncomfortable today that it can only be played for laughs. As I got up to leave, a teenaged girl sitting behind me turned to her parents and said, “But I thought this was supposed to be sad.” So did I. The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all.
    â€” The New York Review of Books , May 26, 2005

Victims on Broadway II
    T he heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire is famously alert to the significance of names; “Blanche DuBois,” as she flirtatiously points out early on in the play, means “white woods.” (“Like an orchard in spring!”) But the most meaningful name in the play may be the one that, unlike that of Blanche or her sister Stella—“Stella for star!”—is never parsed or etymologized by the characters themselves.
    Throughout the published text of A Streetcar Named Desire , the name of the plantation once inhabited by the DuBois family—the “great big place with white columns” that pointedly represents the elevated sensibility to which the white-clad Blanche so pathetically clings—appears as “Belle Reve” (pronounced “bell reeve”). At first glance, the name looks as if it should mean “beautiful dream”: belle after all means “beautiful” and rêve means “dream,” and Williams’s masterwork is, as we all know, about the tragic destruction of the dreams of beauty to which Blanche, like so many other of Williams’s heroines, so pathetically clings. But of course belle rêve means absolutely nothing in French. For the French noun rêve (the “e” is short) is masculine; if the French Huguenot ancestors of whom Blanche boasts (in the scene in which she translates her name) had wanted to call their estate “beautiful dream,” they wouldhave called it Beau Rêve. What they almost certainly did call it was Belle Rive,