How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
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Laura, I’d argue, is also the only character who deals with the realities of life by resorting to a beauty that is real: art. She not only collects her lovely figurines, which give her great pleasure, but (as we learn) spends her idle time at the art museum, the zoo, the “Jewel-box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers.” (Her mother and brother, by contrast, withdraw into drink and delusional fantasies about themselves.) It is precisely because Laura is the sanest of the Wingfields, the one whose interest in beauty is neither morbid nor nostalgic, that the spectacle of her allowing herself to become hopeful about Jim O’Connor is so unbearable.
Still, there’s no question that Laura is a victim, and here something is lacking in Paulson’s performance. You never feel genuine pathos—you never feel that this Laura is, as she is surely meant to be, ultimately as fragile as her glass animals. The lack of vulnerability in this Laura makes nonsense of the play’s principal preoccupation, what Williams always said he thought was the one inexcusable thing: deliberate cruelty by one person to another. (His own guilt about his treatment of his sister, at one point or another, haunts many of his plays.)
Much of the poignancy of the play, its great emotional subtlety, is that the cruelty of which Laura is the victim comes not from the stranger, Jim, but from those who profess to be protecting her—Amanda and Tom. This point is utterly lost because of the misguided performance of Josh Lucas as Jim O’Connor. Lucas, a young actor with toothpaste-commercial good looks, plays O’Connor as a slightly oily slickster who, it’s obvious from the moment he swaggers onto the stage, will have no trouble penetrating poor Laura’s defenses. This obtuse interpretation misses the point of Jim: he’s a heartbreaker not because he’s seamy, but because he’s simply normal—“an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from,” as Tom tellingly puts it in his prologue speech. The sudden, mystifying flare-up of feelings that Jim didn’t even suspect he could have for someone like Laura, which culminates in an unexpected kiss that is, so typically of Williams, a moment of utter happiness that is also a moment of destruction, is moving precisely because it’s genuine, not put on. That Jim then pulls back and declares that he is, in fact, engaged to 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.
—The New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005
Victims on Broadway II
The 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 would have called it Beau Rêve. What they almost certainly did call it was Belle Rive, “Beautiful Riverbank,” which is, in fact, pronounced “bell reeve,” and which is a perfectly sensible name for a house in the Mississippi Delta.
The elision of the sensible if rather ordinary “riverbank” in favor of the far more poetic if grammatically illogical “dream” is—whether Williams intended it or not—a deeply symbolic one. On the one hand, it may be said to represent the heroine’s approach to life. From the moment she shows up on the seedy doorstep of Stella and her crude husband, Stanley Kowalski, it becomes increasingly clear that Blanche’s aim is to replace the mundane, even the sordid—poverty, disgrace, loneliness, encroaching middle age, all the unflattering realities that she associates, in a telling little outburst early in the play, with the naked lightbulb that hangs over Stella’s matrimonial bed—with romantic illusions, using whatever means she has at hand: liquor, deceit, costumes, colored paper lanterns. “I don’t want realism,” she cries during her climactic encounter with her shy, sweet suitor, Mitch, after he’s learned that Blanche’s affected refinements conceal a dirty past. “I’ll tell you what I want. Magic!” The action of the play consists of the process by which Blanche’s magic is eroded and ultimately pulverized by contact with hard reality, embodied by her brother-in-law, Stanley. It is no accident that Stanley is a sexual brute who smirkingly boasts of having pulled his plantation-born wife “down off them columns” into, presumably, the mire of sexual pleasure—of having, in a way, retransformed “Belle Reve” into the muddy “Belle Rive.”
But the original metamorphosis, the enhancement of common delta clay into the stuff of illusory dreams, of “Belle Rive” into the impossible “Belle Reve,” may be said to reflect another sleight of hand that takes place in the text of Streetcar. Here I refer to the character of Blanche herself. In a notoriously vitriolic denunciation of the play composed immediately after its March 1948 New York première, Mary McCarthy derided the “thin, sleazy stuff of this character,” the kind of stock figure—the annoying in-law who comes for overlong visits—who, to McCarthy, belongs more properly to the genre of comedy:
…thin, vapid, neurasthenic, romancing, genteel, pathetic, a collector of cheap finery and of the words of old popular songs, fearful and fluttery and awkward, fond of admiration and overeager to obtain it, a refined pushover an
d perennial and frigid spinster…the woman who inevitably comes to stay and who evokes pity because of her very emptiness, because nothing can ever happen to her since her life is a shoddy magazine story she tells herself in a daydream.
It is, to say the least, difficult to reconcile this rude vision of Blanche DuBois with the iconic status she has achieved in the half century since the play’s première: the vanquished but somehow ennobled female victim of male violence, gallantly exiting on the arm of her executioner, the heroically wounded prophetess of art and beauty in the face of crassly reductive visions of what life must be—an emblem, in short, of culture itself. “When, finally, she is removed to the mental home,” Kenneth Tynan wrote, “we should feel that a part of civilisation is going with her.”
For a production of Streetcar to work, McCarthy’s and Tynan’s wildly opposed characterizations of Blanche must both feel true. Precisely what makes the part so insinuating is the way in which it manages to hold Blanche’s awfulness and her nobility in a kind of logic-defying suspension. There can be little doubt that the decision to endow her with both monstrousness and pathetic allure was a deliberate one on Williams’s part. As he recalled in his memoirs, Williams began writing 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 be particularly 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 outsized, illogical, but nonetheless irresistible character that Medea and Clytemnestra do. None of the three is conventionally sympathetic, since they all do reprehensible things, and yet they are unmistakably heroines, too. Like her Greek tragic sisters, Blanche is caught in a hard world, ruled by aggressive men; however repellent the few tricks women have at their disposal—deception, seduction, “magic”—these characters must somehow evoke our sympathies more than our revulsion.
I’ve dwelt at some length on the character of Blanche DuBois because she is, in a way, a kind of template for the play itself, which like Blanche suffers from a certain degree of illogic, perhaps even self-delusion. I am not referring to certain aspects of the plot or narrative that other critics have found troublesome, in particular the way in which Williams, for neither the first nor the last time, overloads his characters and action with rather an excess of psychological and historical baggage. (Would our sense of the play, or even its meaning, be radically different if Blanche, in addition to being a drunk, having lost the family estate, and having been run out of town for being a tramp, hadn’t also had a gay first husband who’d shot himself at a cotillion? Probably not.)
But it’s interesting how this play, like others in the Williams repertoire, never seems to work through a coherent position with respect to the key terms with which it seeks to create its meanings, terms such as realism and beauty and lies and truth and art. Perhaps its greatest sleight of hand is to have convinced so many people that it’s about the losing battle between beauty, poetry, and fantasy, on the one hand, and crassness, vulgarity, and brute “realism” on the other—and convinced them to root for the former—without ever quite engaging the provocative question of why “reality” must always be ugly, and why “art,” in these plays, is always presented as a liar, always has such an aversion to the truth, to reality—which of course good art does not. In a way, the play, like Blanche, succeeds only if it doesn’t make you wonder about such internal inconsistencies—doesn’t, as it were, make you wonder about “Belle Reve.”
The special complexity and richness necessary for a performance of Streetcar to succeed on its creator’s terms are wholly lacking in the big new production of the play that has just opened on Broadway, starring Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly. As with the equally vacuous production of Glass Menagerie which is running concurrently, the problem lies essentially in a failure by the director and the lead actress to understand the central female part—a particularly costly error when performing Williams. And here again, a concomitant misapprehension about the lead male role makes nonsense of the play’s themes.
Precisely because so much of what Blanche actually does onstage is part of the monstrous aspect of her character—her baiting of her sister, her seductive teasing of Stanley, the toying with Mitch, and of course the ceaseless lying—Williams again and again in his script insists on a certain visual and verbal delicacy and flutter, which are expressions of the other Blanche, the vulnerable and wounded creature who must somehow capture our sympathy. Her “delicate beauty,” he instructs, “must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.” Indeed, as we know, from the very earliest stages of writing the play Williams conceived of Bl
anche as a nocturnal creature; we remember that first image of Blanche, before there was even a play for her to inhabit, “sitting alone in a chair with the moonlight coming through a window on her, waiting for a beau who didn’t show up.” The nervous fluttering of moth wings is audible in the speeches that Williams wrote for Blanche, too—in her stammering hesitations and anxious repetitions. (“But don’t you look at me, Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I’ve bathed and rested! And turn that over-light off! Turn that off!”)
These qualities are admirably conveyed in Vivien Leigh’s definitive performance in the 1951 film version of the play—a film that every Blanche, and perhaps even more every Stanley, must somehow contend with. It is true that a certain degree of nuance is possible in film, with its close-ups and immaculate sound, that the stage actor must forgo. But even accounting for this, you’re struck by the ingenuity and effectiveness of Leigh’s performance, from the slightly desperate way she clutches Stella’s arm when the two sisters embrace at their first meeting, to the slightly hysterical way her voice hits the word tired when she tells Stella, coming off the streetcar, that she’s “just all shaken up…and hot…and dirty…and tired.” And yet she also uses her slightly worn beauty with just the right degree of aggressiveness in her first scene with Stanley—a reminder that the fragility coexists with a certain hardness.