200 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
ALFRED UHRY
I believe that A Streetcar Named Desire contains the finest dialogue
ever written for an American play. Two examples:
Scene Six
Mitch: I guess it must be pretty late- and you're tired.
Blanche: Even the hot tamale man has deserted the street, and he
hangs on to the end.
Scene Eleven
Eunice: What a pretty blue jacket.
Stella: It's lilac colored.
Blanche: You're both mistaken. It's Della Robbia blue.
The blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures.
Are these grapes washed?
The rest of us can only stand in awe.
JEAN-CLAUDE VAN ITALLIE
In my book Tennessee Williams is, to date, the premiere playwright
of the United States, by right of the quantity of fully satisfying plays
he has written-a full three or four (which is many for any
playwright's lifetime).
What comes immediately to mind as Williams's most
breathtaking effect is the thoroughly human and dramatic way that
deep emotions arise through his characters as if by osmosis from
deep underground pools and caverns, to be expressed in lush leaves
of language, and extravagant blossomings of personality. The water
element seems particularly powerful in Blanche, the most brilliant
and tropical of Williams's flowers.
Williams in Streetcar seems to be encouraging us to acknowledge
fully our own emotions, to experience the truth of them, no matter
what we or the world thinks of them, and despite the lying with
which we habitually surround ourselves. He seems to see mendacity,
a word he uses in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as the underlying source of
disease and insanity. He might be saying that as long as we lie to
ourselves about what we are feeling, we cannot heal or grow. And
that truth is essential to healing a diseased and insane planet today.
