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

bits and pieces of what ended up being Streetcar in 1944:
    Almost directly after Menagerie went into rehearsals I started upon a play whose first title was Blanche’s Chair in the Moon . But I did only a single scene for it that winter of 1944–45 in Chicago. In that scene Blanche was in some steaming hot Southern town, sitting alone in a chair with the moonlight coming through a window on her, waiting for a beau who didn’t show up. I stopped working on it because I became mysteriously depressed and debilitated and you know how hard it is to work in that condition.
    The close relationship between Menagerie and Streetcar explains a great deal about the later play, and in particular about the special quality of the role of Blanche. The two female leads in Menagerie (based loosely on Williams’s mother and sister) represent—very roughly speaking—two extremes of theatrical femininity: the manipulative monster and the pathetic victim. It seems quite clear, from the passage in Williams’s memoirs, that even at the earliest stages of her creation, the character of Blanche DuBois was meant to be an amalgam in one character of both female leads in the earlier play: the manic, yearning woman who trades in destructive illusions and the tragic, passive victim of those illusions. (“Waiting for a beau who didn’t show up” calls to mind both Amanda Wingfield, who as we know was deserted by her husband, and her shy daughter, Laura, whose lameness will, Amanda fears, doom her to spinsterhood.) Desire, Blanche asserts toward the end of Streetcar , in part as an obscure justification of her own promiscuous past, is the “opposite” of death; as a figure who represents both desire and death, who embodies that typical Williamsesque grasping at beauty and the equally typical failure to seize hold of it, Blanche fuses within herself the confused, frenetically “desiring” Amanda Wingfield with the almost marmoreally passive and funereal figure of the futile Laura. (Blanche’s trajectory from desire to death is famously symbolized by the fact that she’s taken streetcars named “Desire” and “Cemeteries” to arrive at the neighborhood called “Elysian Fields.”)
    This is why, for Streetcar to succeed—for the play to evoke the idiosyncratic quality that is so important to Williams’s sensibility, the tragic allure of broken beauty, the way in which our illusions can be lovely and destructive simultaneously—Blanche must be convincing as both a monster and a victim. Another way to put this is that she has to delude the audience as successfully as she has deluded herself; must force us, as she forces the other characters (at least for a time), to see her as she wants to be seen, as well as how she really is. It’s a fine and difficult line for an actress to walk. If she’s played as a delicate neurasthenic, her tragedy has no traction—she’s just a loon. She is, in fact, not at all an innocent victim: she’s cruel to Stella, irritatingly (and ultimately dangerously) flirtatious with Stanley, manipulative and deceitful with Mitch, her awkward suitor; and as we know, she herself is guilty of the kind of deliberate cruelty to another human being which Williams held to beparticularly reprehensible. (We learn that, years ago, her young homosexual husband killed himself after she humiliated him at a dance.) If, on the other hand, you strip away all the pathos, she’s just an alcoholic fabulist—the comic strip figure of McCarthy’s vision, the pesky in-law who hogs the bathroom.
    It is precisely between the pathological delusions and the unpleasant manipulativeness that the fascination of this character lies. Blanche is enormously appealing, both to the many actresses who yearn to play her and to the audiences who continue to yearn to see her again and again having her nervous collapse, because she has the same kind of