Mary McCarthy's Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962 by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4117-0
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-09-11T20:01:00+00:00

MARCH 1948

A STREETCAR CALLED SUCCESS

YOU ARE AN ORDINARY guy and your wife’s sister comes to stay with you. Whenever you want to go to the toilet, there she is in the bathroom, primping or having a bath or giving herself a shampoo and taking her time about it. You go and hammer on the door (“For Christ’s sake, aren’t you through yet?”), and your wife shushes you frowningly: Blanche is very sensitive and you must be careful of her feelings. You get sore at your wife; your kidneys are sensitive too. My God, you yell, loud enough so that Blanche can hear you, can’t a man pee in his own house, when is she getting out of here? You are pretty sick too of feeling her criticize your table-manners, and does she have to turn on the radio when you have a poker game going, who does she think she is? Finally you and your wife have a fight (you knew all along that She was turning the little woman against you), you decide to put your foot down, Blanche will have to go. Your wife reluctantly gives in—anything for peace, don’t think it’s been a treat for her (“But let me handle it, Stanley; after all, she’s my own sister!”). One way or another (God knows what your wife told her) Blanche gets the idea. You buy her a ticket home. But then right at the end, when you’re carrying her bags downstairs for her, you feel sort of funny; maybe you were too hard; but that’s the way the world is, and, Boy, isn’t it great to be alone?

This variation on the mother-in-law theme is the one solid piece of theatrical furniture that A Streetcar Named Desire can show; the rest is antimacassars. Acrimony and umbrage, tears, door-slamming, broken dishes, jeers, cold silences, whispers, raised eyebrows, the determination to take no notice, the whole classic paraphernalia of insult and injury is Tennessee Williams’ hope-chest. That the domestic dirty linen it contains is generally associated with the comic strip and the radio sketch should not invalidate it for him as subject matter; it has nobler antecedents. The cook, one may recall, is leaving on the opening page of Anna Karenina, and Hamlet at the court of Denmark is really playing the part of the wife’s unwelcome relation. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Farrell rattle the skeleton of family life; there is no limit, apparently, to what people will do to each other in the family; nothing is too grotesque or shameful; all laws are suspended, including the law of probability. Mr. Williams, at his best, is an outrageous writer in this category; at his worst, he is outrageous in another.

Had he been content in A Streetcar Named Desire with the exasperating trivia of the in-law story, he might have produced a wonderful little comic epic, The Struggle for the Bathroom, an epic ribald and poignant, a comédie larmoyante which would not have been deficient either in those larger implications to which his

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