Sweet Bird of Youth, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Modern society is complicated. Let's admit it, and the play by Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named

Desire is all of it and more, because it remarks the power of men and internal weakness of women, put in confrontation and passing through sex and desire.

A woman can be abused in many different ways.

Of course there is also the thematic of how a woman interacts with a man and what a man thinks of that woman.

The first London production had as Blanche Du Bois

an intense Vivien Leigh, directed by Laurence Olivier. Leigh passed at the story also as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

When I discovered that a friend of mine, Sean Rose was on stage with this play  by Tennessee Williams at the Odyssey Theater in a production directed by Jack Heller I thought that I wanted to treat this play published by Penguin in the series Penguin Plays.

It's a hard story this one, where there is no redemption and where protagonists in a way or in another will lose their battle for a best life: why this? Because Stella at the end will remain with her abusive husband, no other words for describing that man while Blanche her sister will be internated for a profound psychological crisis after that the husband of Stella, Stanley, raped her, while the wife was in the hospital for having a baby and her supposed boyfriend Mitch, not in grade of saving her from the horror she saw close to her, and that she wanted to avoid. Everyone dream a best life, but these protagonists are like trapped in their existences.

Blanche is not a saint, let's remark it. Stanley will discover a lot of facts that Blanche would have preferred not to tell.

She escaped from the city where she lived in because, teacher, she made sex with a student, then, fired, she lived in a hotel the Flamingo one famous for being a place where prostitutes very well accepted.

Mitch, her new flame, asks her some explanations and if the stories  reported by Stanley are real. They are, at the end she will confess.

Blanche loves him and when Mitch at the end of the sixth act tells her: "You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be - you and me, Blanche?"

Blanche is hopeful. "Sometimes there's God - so quickly."

Blanche was pretty unlucky with her husband, because her husband hiding his homosexuality once discovered by her with another man preferred to kill himself than to live the experience of a coming out.

Blanche will try all her best at some point with vehement words, to convince her sister that Stanley is an abusive man and husband adding that, if the sister is realistically loving him she is trembling for her, because there are bestial aspects in that man. Someone from the Age of Stone adds, sure of it, Blanche.

The final line put on the mouth of Blanche by Williams is this one and tell all the solitude of this lady: "....I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" remarking the impossibility of finding in the family an answer for sorting out problems, but also the impossibility of escapism, researched in many possible ways and firstly thank to Mitch.

Blanche imagined a future with Mitch and the possibility of going away from the toxic place where she lived in with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley.

Unfortunately it was not possible and this time mediocrity, luridity won against the possibility of an existence more simple and less complicated.

Anna Maria Polidori