Word: streetcar
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...this most Broadwayesque of musicals leads the way. It has been a season of powerhouse new plays by August Wilson, Herb Gardner, Neil Simon, Brian Friel and Richard Nelson. It has been a season of movie- and TV-star glitter -- Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin and Amy Madigan in A Streetcar Named Desire; Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel Dorfman's politically inflamed Death and the Maiden; fast-rising Larry Fishburne, direct from the angry film Boyz N the Hood to Wilson's wistful Two Trains Running; Judd Hirsch; Alan Alda; Jane Alexander; Raul Julia; Gregory Hines...
...Streetcar Named Desire goes off the rails...
...TITLE: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE...
WHEN A CRITIC AND FELLOW tippler suggested to Tennessee Williams that he | might be a better playwright if he stayed off the sauce, Williams patted his companion's forearm and with a satisfied smile challenged, "Improve A Streetcar Named Desire." The discussion stopped right there. The years since its debut in 1947 have only intensified the relevance of Streetcar's vision of sexual passion as a force so powerful that the principal characters must all lie to themselves about it. But if Streetcar emphatically belongs back on Broadway, it deserves far better than this starry but mostly wan and torpid...
Theater is particularly effective in communicating the ambiguities involved in the question of sexual consent versus sexual acquiescence. Rasminsky juxtaposes two versions of the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire in which Stanley carries Blanche off to bed, the first version as a seduction, the second as a rape: the dialogue in both versions is identical, suggesting that the question of literal consent remains problematic. Raz contends that popular culture pretends that consent is not problematic: "Stanley is a big bad hero, infamously protrayed by Marlon Brando. But a lot of our literary heroes depend on power and sexual control...