Each new production of A Streetcar Named Desire seems to offer the excitement of witnessing a new interpretation. A great play has within it the potentiality for differing interpretations; indeed, this may be the test of greatness. The different interpretations of Streetcar by directors invariably stem from different attitudes toward the two main characters, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Some directors tip the audience toward Blanche, others toward Stanley—and this tipping controls the nature of the tragedy and its effect. The director chooses sides, and the audience, of necessity, must play the director's game.

My aim in this essay is to explore the possibility that Tennessee Williams wishes to keep the sides balanced, that, in fact, complementarity informs the play's art and meaning. (p. 97)

At the outset we must recognize that different interpretations can be caused by fuzziness of writing, blurring of effects, lack of coherence…. One of our finest critics, Eric Bentley, believes that in Streetcar "Williams does not write with complete coherence."… Bentley's view is an echo of and has been echoed by others. But another view is possible: that Tennessee Williams, after O'Neill America's finest playwright, knows exactly what he is doing in Streetcar, offering a play with balanced sides built in, dramatizing an attitude toward life based on duality and complementarity. This balancing is achieved in every aspect of the drama—in the treatment of theme and character, in the symbolism, in the movement, in the specific stage actions. Balances are always precarious, in art as in life. Williams maintains his, I wish to demonstrate, and the critics and directors have lost theirs at times. (pp. 97-8)

The genteel Blanche and the raw Stanley ride the same streetcar, but for different reasons. Blanche goes to her sexual affairs to relieve the broken quality of her life, looking for closeness, perhaps kindness, in that physical way. She cannot see herself as a whore because sexual activity was for her a temporary means for needed affection, the only refuge for her lonely soul. Stanley rides the streetcar because that is the necessary physical function of his life, natural, never compensating for emotional agony because his soul is never lost, what Blanche calls "brutal desire—just—Desire!" Desire is the common ground on which Stan and Blanche meet, a streetcar on which both are passengers, the scales on which both are measured. On one side of the scale a fading, fragile woman for whom sexual activity is a temporary release from loneliness; on the other side a crude, physical man for whom sexual activity is a normal function of life. The needs of both are clearly presented by Williams and should be clearly understood by the audience, which must neither wholly condemn Blanche for her whorishness nor Stanley for his brutishness. The scales are balanced so finely that when Stanley condemns Blanche for her sexual looseness and Blanche condemns Stanley for his apishness, each seems both right and wrong, right in the light of truth, wrong in the light of understanding.

Desire or sexual impulse, therefore, is common to both Blanche and Stanley and provides one measure of their similarity and difference. (pp. 98-9)

Complementarity provides the pressure of the play's movement, beginning with the audience's first encounter with Stanley and Blanche. When the curtain rises the audience witnesses Stanley's sure command of the stage—vigorous, shouting, deftly throwing a package of meat at Stella. Blanche's entrance reveals a delicate creature, frazzled, uncertain, burdened with a suitcase, lost. Within the play's first minute the audience is forced to absorb the dialectic that will give the play its dynamic tension. Within each scene the dialectic continues, becoming more persistent as the play progresses. A brief look at scene three will reveal Williams' method.

Scene three presents the poker night…. In each segment of the scene Williams plays with the audience's sympathies, forcing us to side with Stanley when Blanche is teasing and artificially genteel, forcing us to condemn Stanley when he breaks the radio and hits Stella, and forcing us to pity the repentant Stanley who wishes to have his baby back. Balances in our attitude toward character; changes in our emotional responses. And important changes in movement. Stella goes up the stairs to escape a raging Stanley, only to come down to the baying Stanley. Stanley falls down on his knees to show his repentance, only to rise and lift Stella to show his victory. Stanley's victory is Blanche's defeat. A confused Blanche ends the scene by talking about the confusion in the world and reasserting her need for kindness. She will give powerful voice to her confusion in the next scene, wondering how her sister could return to the brutal Stanley, calling him "common," "bestial," a "survivor of the Stone Age," and imploring her sister not to "hang back with the brutes!" Blanche's "superior attitude," as Stella calls it, will alienate the audience because of the speech's tone, but the content of her speech offers ideas about civilization and progress that the audience must consider true. And again we have complementarity and balance.

Williams does not even allow the rape, which could be considered the supreme brutalization of Blanche by Stanley, to upset the balance he presents throughout. For Williams betrays a respect for Stanley's "animal joy," for men at the peak of their manhood, for the natural desires of the Stanley Kowalskis, who were born to have women, and Williams invests the play with a sense of the inevitability of that violent encounter between executioner and victim, who had that date from the beginning.

What I am suggesting … is that the ambiguity and confusion often felt in specific productions and readings of Streetcar are prodded by Williams' delicate art but are not his intent. He aims for complementarity, duality, balance, a difficult challenge for a dramatist, but a necessary one for Williams in this play because it holds the key to the play's meaning and tragic effect. The tensions are present throughout and are basic to the tragedy. We end with pity and terror, themselves balance emotions, the natural result of all that came before. As Blanche DuBois leaves the stage, we, like Stella, are allowing her to go because we have sided at times with Stanley, we have been annoyed by her falsity and superiority, we have wondered at her cruelty to her now dead homosexual husband, we have considered her a disturbing interruption in her sister's seemingly idyllic life in Elysium. But we feel compassion for this fragile creature who has been living with death, who is trying to hold on to vanishing values, and who needs what we all need, kindness. We feel the terror of her departure to death within the walls of an asylum not only because we pity Blanche, but because we are forced to ask the frightening question: Is the world so possessed by the apes that there is no place for a Blanche DuBois? Both better and worse than those around her—the balance again—Blanche commands our attention as we witness her disintegration. She passes through, and the curtain comes down to block out the light over that poker game as we return to this one,… but all, I suspect, affected by Williams' superb dramatization of a basic human dialectic reflecting what our deepest experience tells us is the reality of things, presenting a complementary vision more complex than a one-sided interpretation allows. (pp. 100-03)