Getting stuck

Posted in A Streetcar Named Desire, News by Mim

When ever I start a new play, either acting or directing, I try to get at the nut of the character.  There is an essential core that makes each one who she or he is.  With A Streetcar Named Desire, the central theme around which everything else revolves is Blanche’s fragmented spirit and her inability to resolve the traumatic moment of her young husband’s death.

According to Darryl E. Haley, Assistant Professor of English, East Tennessee State University, “Tennessee Williams claimed that all of his major plays fit into the “memory play” format he described in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie. The memory play is a three-part structure:

1. a character experiences something profound;
2. that experience causes what Williams terms an “arrest of time,” a situation in which time literally loops upon itself; and
3. the character must re-live that profound experience (caught in a sort of mobius loop of time) until she or he makes sense of it.

Blanche is doomed to repeat her trauma until she can grieve it properly and move on.  And as long as she keeps on hiding from her own truth, she is hiding in her own shadow.  She is not crazy.  She is stuck.

That’s the way I see it.