Overview

In an electrifying series of events, Tennessee Williams charts the uncertain and heart-breaking demise of one woman and those around her in an explosion of raw emotion. Southern belle Blanche DuBois is on the brink of a downward spiral made of her own trappings. Desperately seeking a brighter future, she flees her home in Mississippi and with it, her failed fantasies, delusions, and dreams. She finds herself in New Orleans and, in the hopes of rekindling a relationship with her sister, Stella, moves in with her. But Blanche’s airy pretensions come into conflict with the coarse reality of Stella’s husband, Stanley. And suddenly, their relationship seems set to hurtle towards an unforgivable climax. Williams’ sweetly perfumed lyrical style gives way to one of literature’s most complex and deeply unsettling plays. In it, Blanche, one of the most magnetic characters in literary history, is a tour de force battling against her fatal yet inevitable disintegration. She is at the same time a pitiable victim of circumstance and a silver-tongued manipulator, negotiating between façade and fragility. Tragically flawed and yet never wholly condemned, Blanche is Tennessee Williams’ finest character in his most painful masterpiece.