Abstract

Admired plays in twentieth century American dramaturgy. Although William’s reputation had already grown considerably with the production of a Glass Menagerie in 1944, with A Streetcar Named Desire, he immediately gained world fame. Williams’s milieu is the south, a tense and un-reconstructed locale typical only of an environment we all inhabit. His theme is the plight of an individual trapped by his environment, the loneliness and lack of communication between human beings unable to reconcile flesh with the spirit. Filling his play with copious American icons, Williams distinguishes Streetcar as a work of American literature by keeping his plays independent from past theatrical traditions. In essence, Streetcar is not a play driven by a Social agenda, a challenging of gender roles, or a well defined structure of tragedy; it is instead a story driven entirely by human nature and a distinctly American nature, no less.

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