A Streetcar Named Desire

There is no role more opposite to that of the restrained Scully of File x than that of the histrionic Blanche DuBois of A tram called desire. And here is Gillian Anderson to demonstrate her breadth of records playing this southern lady from Mississippi with delusions of grandeur who ends up fleeing to New Orleans to live with her sister Stella and her brother-in-law Stanley. The noisy, vain, intense, seductive and alcoholic Blanche hides many things from a past that she tries to cover up by inventing a parallel reality and fantasizing about being someone she is not.. Stella for her part, endure and justify Stanley's animal violence as best he can, a worker of Polish origin with a clear feeling of inferiority that Blanche's presence makes even more evident. This play by Tennessee Williams premiered on Broadway in 1947 with a young Marlon Brando in the lead role under the direction of Elia Kazan and would win the Pulitzer Prize a year later in the Drama category. We are in a time when women needed to find a man who offered protection and economic support., It was the property of the husband and had to maintain its “respectability” at all costs.. And in this well is where Blanche finds herself trapped.. She is alone (that is to say, without a man), has lost its respectability, He has an age at which he begins to become invisible, She feels empty and struggles desperately, She knows that she is burning her last cartridges to hook a man to rescue her from the sinking.. His most remembered phrase: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”. S.M.