Word: streetcars
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...definition of hysteria''), still tells stories that get scarier and scarier-and tells them so hypnotically that the public pays him over $200,000 a year not to stop. He is the nightmare merchant of Broadway, writer of Orpheus Descending (murder by blow torch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania, homosexuality), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality), Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration, syphilis), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, underwear fetishism, coprophagy...
Williams has peopled the U.S. stage with characters whose vibrantly durable presences stalk the corridors of a playgoer's memory: Amanda Wingfield, the fussy, garrulous, gallant mother of Glass Menagerie; Streetcar's Blanche DuBois, Southern gentlewoman turned nymphomaniac, and its Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in a T shirt...
...dying of cancer. In an age that suppresses its tantrums as impolite, part of Williams' cathartic appeal for an audience is to allow it to act out its hostilities vicariously. Above all, Williams is a master of mood. Sometimes it is hot, oppressive, simmering with catastrophe (Streetcar, Cat); at other times it is sad, autumnal, elegiac (Menagerie, Iguana). To achieve it, he uses the full orchestra of theatrical instruments: setting, lighting, music, plus the one impalpable, indispensable gift, the genius for making an audience forget that any other world exists except the one onstage...
After Menagerie, Williams went on to his biggest hit, 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire. Powerfully directed by Elia Kazan, it marked the beginning of the dynamic Williams-Kazan entente that would dominate Broadway for more than a decade. Ups and downs of critical approval never dampened the excitement of a Williams opening: 1948's Summer and Smoke, 1951's The Rose Tattoo, 1953's Camino Real, 1955's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957's Orpheus Descending, 1958's Garden District, 1959's Sweet Bird of Youth...
...from Michael Gold, a man of small talent and great authority who functioned as a sort of U.S. cultural commissar for the party. Wrote Gold (later, of course): "Wilson ascended the 'proletarian bandwagon' with the arrogance of a myopic, high-bosomed Beacon Hill matron entering a common streetcar...