Williams, Tennessee (Vol. 30) - Kappo Phelan

KAPPO PHELAN

As was surely obvious in his earlier "Glass Menagerie," [Williams] again proves his dramatic imagination [in "A Streetcar Named Desire"]. I think it is safe to say that every telling gesture and effect was securely wrought into the script before ever rehearsals started. You must envision a scene whose transparent wall allows both the heat-laden street as well as this burning room to come into focus. And the sounds are important: from upstairs, outside, all over. As the protagonist topplingly progresses among horrors, one hears her private mockeries: bells, a gunshot, voices. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the stage being so precisely controlled. And further, the language is as sure. A kind of interior syntax is set up with complex, often lovely, period sentences (speeches) dealt to the heroine and opposed to the current, inarticulate slipshod of the others. Gertrude Stein was not wrong in tracking emotion as well as history through...

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