Before reading this play, I only knew there was a scene in which someone shouted “STELLA”. I’ll admit that my knowledge mostly came from a Simpsons episode. Mistakenly, I thought that the scene was at the climax of the play.

In reality, it’s in scene three or four (of eleven scenes, mind you). Still, the play is really amazing. I’ve noted in other reviews the knack Tennessee Williams has when portraying relationships between people, even if they are completely fucked up, as they are in this case.

Blanche, one of the protagonists of the play, is an aging woman (or so she sees herself, at age thirty) who is visiting her sister, Stella (yeah, that Stella). Stella is married to Stanley, a Polish descendant who is totally what her posh-ish sister will never approve. To Blanche, Stanley is a brute, barbaric arse, and she lets him know it at every chance she gets.

So, things are really strained at the Kowalskis’ household. And there is an awful lot of violence in the play, and most comes in non-physical forms. While Blanche wants to believe she’s a delicate southern belle, she comes across as being pretty bitchy, more than anything else. She constantly belittles Stanley and his way of living, and puts on airs. I’m even a little sorry for poor Stella, she doesn’t deserve such a horrible sister.

Blanche is kind of broken, too. She’s seen all of her family dying, she managed to lose the family state, and she’s deeply scared from her past. She married pretty young to a boy (she calls him that), but the boy turned out to be gay as the fourth of July (thanks, Starkid). One day, she discovered him and his lover, but kept silent until they were at a party. There, she said that she was disgusted by what she had seen. The boy was quite sensitive, and her rejection caused him to blow his brains out.

Blanche appears to feel guilty about the whole affair, but she covers it with smiles and her silly comments. It’s incredible how repressed her own guilt is, and almost all of her feelings. Freud would have a party with her.

Stanley is also pretty much a douchebag, and he by no means treats Stella (or Blanche, but she had it coming) decently. I can understand the type of stress he’s under, with Blanche in the house treating him like dirt, but still he was abusive toward his own wife. And pretty nasty, over all.

Blanche, in addition to being a stuck-up bitch, is also a major liar. When she’s asked about what happened to her in the high school she used to work at, she says she’s resigned. Well, she was fired because she had an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. And she was some sort of prostitute at a horrible hotel called The Flamingo, though that part is more implied than outright stated. Still, Blanche is a nasty element.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t deserve what happens to her in the end. No one, not even the bitchiest woman around, deserves to be raped. The final scene of the play is incredibly devastating because we can see how destroyed and traumatized she is. And it’s hard not to feel sorry for Stella, too. She says that she knows about Stanley raping Blanche, but decides not to take them into account. Just like her sister, she’s deluding herself to hide the stuff she cannot live with.

An amazing play, and a must read for everyone. And if you can get to see a stage version, it’s also a good one. The movie starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh (great actors) is also very good. Elia Kazan directed several of Williams’ plays both in the stage and on the screen, and he does a brilliant work with them.