The Day x Connell Guides - The Connell Short Guide to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

“Streetcar is a cry of pain,” said Arthur Miller, paying tribute to his fellow playwright, Tennessee Williams’s achievement. What does it mean to be kind? What does it mean to be a stranger? Are we all more or less strangers to one another – even to those we love, and who love us? In a sense, all Williams’s work addresses these fundamental questions, and never more powerfully than in Streetcar. An immediate and triumphant success when first performed on Broadway in 1947, it was described by the drama critic John Chapman as “full-scale throbbingly alive, compassionate, heart-wrenchingly human” with “the tragic overtones of grand opera”.