Much has been written about A Streetcar Named Desire -- and I won't attempt to rehash that here. But having just read the play for the first time, I will offer one point: this is a dark play, punctuated by acts of deliberate cruelty. I was surprised by this, actually: because while I had a general sense for the play and its position in the pantheon, I was not expecting such a dire view of, well, of the human condition. This is a play with very little remorse: characters come into repeated conflict, but rarely apologize for it. The nature of playwriting -- the very structure of a play -- magnifies this conflict as the scaffolding of a novel is peeled away. Without the narrative, and the description, and the literary enclosure, all that's left in Streetcar is pain and loss. This moment in time -- this vision of characters, in a specific place, with a specific set of concerns -- is one, in my reading, of unyielding despair.
