[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The New York Post, December 4, 1947.]

[A Streetcar Named Desire] is a feverish, squalid, tumultuous, painful, steadily arresting and oddly touching study of feminine decay along the lower Mississippi…. Mr. Williams is an oncoming playwright of power, imagination and almost desperately morbid turn of mind and emotion. In his latest work to reach Broadway, the dramatist is telling the story of a doomed Southern girl who seems startlingly like what the foolish old mother of his previous drama, "The Glass Menagerie," might well have been at a similar age. Hers, to put it mildly, is not a pleasant life story. Essentially a romantic and dreamy young woman, it is her fate to represent in her frail spirit the decline and fall of a long line of decadent Southern aristocrats, and, for all her sentimental imagination, she ends as a simpering, witless prostitute.

Two characteristic traits of Mr. Williams' morbid imagination are distinguishable in his new play. I should say that one was admirable and the other less praiseworthy. Despite the blackness of fate which he depicts, there is a frequent quality of lyric originality in his pessimism that gives it an inescapable vitality. Things may look depressing to him, but there is always the rich tumult of life to make up for it. On the other hand, his doomed heroines are so helplessly enmeshed in their fate they cannot put up a properly dramatic battle against it.

There is something a little embarrassing about watching the torment of as helpless a victim of a playwright's brooding imagination as the heroine of "A Streetcar Named Desire," particularly when her downfall is studied with almost loving detail. The result is that the play has a painful, rather pitiful quality about it. Yet its characters are so knowingly and understandably presented, the vividness of its life is so compelling, and the theatrical skill of its portrait of spiritual and moral decay so impressive that it never ceases to be effective and powerful. (pp. 30-1)