[The essay "Boredom in New York" was originally published in 1948; "Better than Europe" was originally published in 1949.]

[In the dialogue of A Streetcar Named Desire there is] a liveliness that the American theater has heard from only two or three native playwrights. It is a dialogue caught from actual life and then submitted to only the gentlest treatment at the playwright's hands. In such a dialogue—as Odets showed us ten years ago—some approach to American life is possible. Life is no longer encased in wisecracks. Its subtle and changing contours are suggested by the melody and rhythm and passion of active speech.

A Streetcar Named Desire seems to me on the borderline of really good drama. If it is never safely across the border, it is because here too the sentimental patterns are at work which cramp most honest effort in the theater today. Perhaps we are not sure how limited, how small, Williams's play is until the last scene. But in realistic and psychological work the last scene is a test case. We look there to find the answer to the question: how deep does the play go? The episode of the black-coated couple from the madhouse compels the answer: not very.

Streetcar is a greater occasion in the theater than you would think from reading the script. Williams writes plays that our actors can perform and that our directors can direct. That's the advantage of being conventional. (pp. 33-4)

But there is a deeper incoherence in Streetcar, one that recalls Arthur Miller as well as Glass Menagerie. Williams can write very well when he writes realistically, when, for example, he writes dialogue based on observation of character; in fact, all his dramatic talent lies in that direction. But he seems to imagine that his talent is lyrical; read his poems (in Five Young American Poets 1944) and you will see that it is not. The love of lyricism seems to affect Williams's work in the same way that vagueness of purpose affects Miller's. The outlines are blurred. (p. 89)