Already loaded with controversial topics, including homosexuality, schizophrenia and taboo sex, the play focuses on the complicated relationship between hard-drinking sexual dynamo Stanley Kowalski, his pregnant wife, Stella, and her fading-beauty-of-a-sister Blanche Dubois, who has come to the couple's New Orleans home searching for refuge. A Southern belle, Blanche has a sordid history that Stanley uses to deflate his friend Mitch's interest in her. By the end of the play, Stanley violates Blanche, who is eventually packed off to a sanitorium.
``The object isn't necessarily to make `Streetcar' contemporary but to make sure that it reaches a contemporary audience,'' said Yale- trained director Leah Gardiner. ``There's a nakedness about the world that Williams was attempting to portray: a rawness, sexuality, homosexuality, lost gentility, class divide - these issues were discussed but not, say, every night at the dinner table.''

Stanley is the outsider in the piece,'' said Remington, the theater's founding artistic director, who announced this week that he's leaving the company. ``Blanche's monologue that he's a brute, an animal who disgusts her, conjures up the same stereotypes ascribed to black men.''

Blanche, said that her character' s neediness and alcoholism are entwined: ``She's not a sex maniac, but she's drunk with longing and desire because she's been exposed to so much loss in her life. The power of desire is stronger than reason - that's why one is drawn to what's taboo.''

Noting that ``Streetcar'' is often scored with a jazz soundtrack of sensual horn-playing, she said that ``Williams wrote in a strong, poetic sensibility - with sexuality, rhythm, music, humor.''

Streetcar'' presents another opportunity to trip up racial and other stereotypes.

``The themes in the play are consistent in our mission already: a black actor in the role of Stanley and the raw emotional life, the struggles that happen among the characters of the play, bumps that up a little,'' she said. ``We wanted to push and provoke - to show the swirl of taboos here - in a
 

...oversexed school teacher flees reality in New Orleans." But "A Streetcar Named Desire" was about much more than that... 

Schvey believes that this process of transcendence or purification, or what I am calling resurrection, is augmented by Blanche's changing in the final scene (significantly, after a bath) from a red satin robe (133)--in which she flirted with Stanley during scene 2 (37) and with Mitch during scene 3 (53)--into a blue outfit. "It's Della Robbia blue," declares Blanche, "the blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures" (135), and thus a blue that associates her with both the Virgin Mary in Renaissance art and the Kowalskis' baby boy, whom Eunice brings onstage "wrapped in a pale blue blanket" (142) and who had been "sleeping like a little angel" (132). (Even the sky cooperates: it is more or less the same color that Williams described at the start of the play as "a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise" 113, 131].) Blanche's anticipated transcendence or resurrection is further augmented by the cathedral bells that chime for the only time in Streetcar during scene 11 (136) and lend increased support to the idea that this scene occurs on Ali Souls' Day; by her fantasy that eating an unwashed or impure grape, let us say one that has not been transubstantiated into the wine/blood of Christ, has nonetheless transported her soul to heaven and her body into a deep blue ocean (136); and by the Doctor' s raising Blanche up from the floor of the Kowalski apartment, to winch she dropped after the Matron had pinioned her arms crucifixion- style (141), together with Blanche's spiritedly leading the way out of the hell of her sister's home (without looking back), followed by the Doctor and Matron instead of being escorted by them (142).
 
 

Blanche is being sent to a purgatory of sorts, a psychiatric hospital, a kind of halfway house between the heaven of lucidity and the bell of insanity, the renewed life of the mind and the final death of the spirit. And it is while Blanche is in "purgatory" that she will be cleansed of her sins, particularly the sin--which she herself admits and laments (95-96)--of denying her homosexual husband, Allan Grey, the compassion dim would have saved him from suicide. Perhaps this cleansing will come through the intercession of the Virgin Mary herself whose own sorrow and suffering made her compassionate. Blanche's religious origins are Protestant, not Roman Catholic--she tells Mitch that her first American ancestors were French Huguenots (55)--and many Protestant denominations object to the veneration of Mary, but that would not prevent so independent or willful a spirit as Blanche DuBois from either appealing to Mary for help or receiving the Blessed Virgin' s ministrations. Indeed, Blanche has long since strayed from her religious origins, and her errant ways together with her lapse into madness put her in special need of God's grace--a grace, the Catholic Church teaches, for which Mary is the chief mediatrix.
 
 

A number of commentators have pointed out the irony of Blanche' s spending several months on a street in New Orleans named Elysian Fields--in Greek mythology the dwelling place of virtuous people after death--and the further irony of her having previously lived in Laurel, Mississippi (laurel wreaths, of course, were used by the ancient Greeks to crown the victors in athletic contests, military battles, and artistic competitions). These ironies are compounded in the play by the namesof the people who surround Blanche, with the important exception of Stanley: Mitch (derived from Michael, meaning "someone like God" in Hebrew), Stella (from the Latin for "star"), Eunice (from the Greek for "good victory"), and Steve (from the Greek for "crown" ). Critics regard these various names as ironic because in fact Blanche DuBois--"white woods"--finds herself, not in heaven, but in what amounts to bell ("Redhot!" the tamale Vendor cries out at the end of scene 2 [44]) in a conflict with stone-age Stanley the blacksmith (whose first name derives from the Old English "stone-lea" or stone meadow, while his last, Kowalski, is Polish for "smith"); and, these critics argue, this conflict will obviously not send her to an eternal life of bliss in any Elysian Fields, but rather to the misery of a living death without chance of redemption in the madhouse.
 
 

It seems possible, however, that these celestial or winning names are not ironic, but instead suggest what they appear to suggest: that Blanche, brutally defeated in her crucible with Stanley in New Orleans, will ultimately triumph on Judgment Day in the kingdom of God if not on treatment day in the realm of secular ministry--modern (psychiatric) medicine. Blanche's own name, which appears to be ironic in that it suggests a virginity which she no longer possesses in deed, attests to her virginity of spirit--her "beauty of the mind and ... tenderness of the heart" (126), as she puts it. Thus her name links her not only to the purity of the Virgin Mary, but also to the reclaimed innocence of Mary Magdalene, who was cured of her sexual waywardness by Jesus Oust as Blanche was suddenly cured of hers when she remarked to Mitch, "Sometimes--there's God--so quickly!" [96]) and later saw Christ after he had risen from the dead.
 
 

Scene 11 of Streetcar can be regarded, then, as a scene of celebration as well as mourning, of eternal life as well as transitory death-- like the Mexican Day of the Dead itself. Hence William not only introduces the Kowalskis' newborn child into the action precisely at the moment of Blanche's "passing," a child of whom Blanche said in scene 8, " I hope that his eyes are going to be like candies, like two blue candies lighted in a white cake!" (109). William also creates a combination festive--macabre atmosphere: Stanley, Steve, and the Mexican, Pablo, play cards, eat, and drink, while Mitch sulks, slumps, and sobs at the same table over the loss of Blanche (the same Mitch who contributed to the festive-macabre atmosphere of scene 9 by demanding sex from a drunken, distraught Blanche DuBois); and Williams weaves into the action the music of the "Varsouviana," the polka tune to which Blanche and Allan were dancing the night he committed suicide (137, 139), the simultaneously melancholic and inspiriting sounds of the "Blue Piano," (142), and the harsh cries as well as lurid shadows of the jungle (139, 141). Moreover, Williams concludes the final scene of Streetcar on a sexual note: after Blanche has departed, Stanley "voluptuously" kneels beside the weeping Stella and places his hand inside her blouse, as Steve opens a new round of cards with the words "This game is seven-card stud" (142). Clearly, life goes on for the Kowalskis and their friends ("Life has got to go on." Eunice admonishes Stella [1331), but life goes on for Blanche too--in "purgatory" and beyond.
 
  NOTES
 
  (1.) Williams himself was to be preoccupied with his own death for much of his life. Moreover, he had begun writing Streetcar in Chapala, Mexico (near Guadalajara), convinced that he was dying, that this would be his last play, and that therefore he should put his all into it. (Williams thought that the agonizing abdominal pains he had been experiencing were the result of lethal stomach cancer, but in fact they were caused by a ruptured appendix.) See Tischler 133.
 
  (2.) See Kolin 81-87, for a detailed discussion of the striking parallels between Blanche DuBois and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Kolin builds on the work of Henry I. Schvey, who was the first critic to link Blanche to Mary in Streetcar. Here I am linking Blanche to the Virgin through the Mexican Woman Vendor, who, I have argued elsewhere, is a kind of fateful double for Williams's tragic heroine.