“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” After the loss of her family home to creditors, Blanche DuBois travels from the small town of Laurel, Mississippi, to the New Orleans French Quarter to live with her younger married sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche is in her thirties and, with no money, has nowhere else to go.
In the sultry streets of New Orleans, passion, tensions, and cultures collide in Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois, a fading relic of the Old South, searches for refuge at her sister Stella’s home, only to collide with reality and her past in the form of Stanley Kowalski, her brutish brother-in-law. Full of authentic characters and class tension, this play is still relevant to modern audiences and explores the question of what happens in a society where autonomy and passion are swept under the rug.
The Desire Line ran from 1920 to 1948, at the height of streetcar use in New Orleans. The route ran down Royal, through the Quarter, to Desire Street in the Bywater district, and back up to Canal. Blanche’s route in the play—”They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!”—is allegorical, taking advantage of New Orleans’s colorful street names: the Desire line itself crossed Elysian Fields Avenue on its way to Canal Street. There, one could transfer to the Cemeteries line, which ran along Canal, blocks away from Elysian Fields.
