Theatre 110
April 22, 2015
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play written by Tennessee Williams. The
protagonist, a young blonde named Blanche DuBois, arrives from Laurel, Mississippi to
the French Quarter of New Orleans to visit her sister, Stella Kowalski. It is really obvious
that sisters have fallen out of close contact, but Blanche seems like she intends to stay for
a longer time in her sister’s apartment. The apartment is located in a noisy and working-
class neighborhood. The play contains eleven acts of almost three hours in total with the
fifteen-minute intermission after the fourth act.
As the play begins, the exposition becomes clear. The exposition refers to the
Blanche’s arrival to the New Orleans. Blanche introduces herself to one neighbor, Eunice,
asking where she can find her sister Stella. Since Eunice lives just above her sister, she
lets Blanche into her sister’s apartment. It is easy to notice that Blanche is dressed very
different than people over there. Her clothes looks kind of fancy and rest of the people
there are working class, so they are poorly dressed and their apartments look very poor
and old. The life around their apartment is really chaotic which is presented in the
beginning of the play. As Blanche gets in the apartment, she looks everything with
disgust because she is used to live in a huge house, instead of small and dirty apartment.
It is very noticeable that she has problems with alcohol because she starts searching for
some as soon as she got there. After a few minutes her sister Stella comes. They were
mostly talking about their physical look and about the loss of their loved ones. Blanche
also mentioned the loss of their property, Belle Reve. The main point of the exposition is
getting to know about Blanche’s life and her past.
This brings us to the inciting incident. The inciting incident is the event (or
events) in the plot that introduces to the central conflict of the story. The major conflict of
this story is between Blanche and Stanley, husband of her sister Stella. After Blanche tells
to her sister that she lost their home Belle Reve, Stanley gets upset because he does not
believe that Blanche lost it, but he believes that she is trying to hide something. Stanley
even looks over her papers and things that she has because he thinks that Blanche sold the
property and wants to keep money that she got from selling it. Stanley does not like
Blanche at all and he decides that he will do everything to get rid of her. Conflicts
between Blanche and Stanley are affecting Stella throughout the play because she is in
