NPR: Paging Vivian Leigh
Source: National Public Radio
NPR's "In Character" feature takes a look at Blanche DuBois:
I love that the streetcar never gets mentioned again. (Unless I'm forgetting something; y'all correct me if I'm wrong.)
It shows up in Blanche's opening lines: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields." And that's the last we hear of it.
But oh, how much distance that streetcar travels: Desire, that irrepressible impulse of the living, stops at Cemeteries, and our bruised but indomitable heroine ends up in Elysian Fields. New Orleans landmarks, all of them, but metaphors, too: the Elysian Fields is the resting place of dead heroes in Greek myth, and Blanche DuBois is nothing if not grand enough, mad enough to be a mythical character.
This play is the only reason that high school students everywhere know that street cars exits - or that New Orleans was ever something other than the place where "girls gone wild" videos are shot. Give a listen to the ties between literature and a city and a character that continues to beguile.
