A Streetcar Named Despair

It was startling enough that the world premiere of a new Tennessee Williams play should take place in the relative ob scurity of a London experimental the ater. It was even more surprising that Michael Redgrave and Alec Guinness should both have rejected the proffered male lead. Unusual also was the fact that critics were barred from attending the first two weeks of a limited Siweek run. Most of the reviewers, moreover, were nonplused by a play that lacked the familiar shape and sound of a Williams drama. "Seldom, even in the half-light of the theater, have I seen an audience as patently perplexed as this one," wrote Herbert Kretzmer of the Daily Express. "It would need a psychoanalyst--and preferably Tennessee Williams' own--to offer a rational interpretation of the enigmas that litter the stage like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw."

This dramatic jigsaw is called The Two Character Play, and it has only two players--a brother and sister named Felice and Clare. He is the manager and leading man and she the leading lady of a dramatic troupe playing an engagement in a fortress-like theater in a grimly foreign, extremely cold town. The pair have just been deserted by the rest of the company with a farewell telegram charging that they are insane. Since the "audience" is already filing into the theater, Felice and Clare have no choice but to put on an item in their repertory called "The Two Character Play."

Native Country. The play-within-a-play takes place on a blazing August day in a U.S. Southern town. The two characters are a brother and sister who fear that they are mad. They also believe that all the neighbors think them mad and thus never leave their home.

Their torment is increased by the suggestion of incest, and by the fact that their father killed their mother and committed suicide. Outwardly, this seems like native dramatic country for Tennessee Williams. But the new note is a Pirandellian ambiguity as the characters continually shift between their two poles of reality. Are these actors 'playing a mad brother and sister, or are they a mad brother and sister playing actors? In any event, the psychic locale of the play is a kind of streetcar named despair; the loaded revolver that glints with menace in the closing scene of the play could go off with equal accuracy in either the scorching Southern town or the icy theater.

The dialogue marks a change of voice for Williams, in that he varies his rich, sustained melodic line with bursts of terse, economic verbal counterpoint between the two actors. In the London production, Mary Ure and Peter Wyn-garde were critically acclaimed for the sure-footed skill they displayed in handling the rapid-fire crisscross of dialogue. There are no present plans for an American production, but it would be peculiarly ironic if Broadway were to receive the work of the finest living U.S. playwright as still another British import.

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