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POETRY IN THE PLUMBING Stylistic Clash and Reconciliation in Recent American Stagings of A Streetcar Named Desire

Perhaps nothing suggests gritty naturalism quite so graphically as plumbing problems. Broken pipes and overflowing toilets are unpleasant realities that never had a place on stage before Emile Zola and Andre Antoine began reconfiguring audiences’ perceptions and expanding the bounds of what could be tolerated in art—that is, exposing bourgeois playgoers to the lowerclass or seamy side of life. While today’s Broadway has embraced a musical titled Urinetown, we must remember that early twentieth-century American theatre audiences were slow to accept naturalism. Rarely was a sordid milieu depicted on the Broadway stage, nor was profane language heard there before the 1920s when Eugene O’Neill gave his sailors realistically salty dialogue and when What Price Glory portrayed soldiers swearing like soldiers. It was not until 1947, when Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened, that Broadway saw a play in which the bathroom figured so prominently in the setting, in the plot, and in the dialogue (including vocabulary like Stanley’s crude reference to his “kidneys”). While the plumbing that undergirds A Streetcar Named Desire may well be viewed as naturalistic, the play at the same time epitomizes Jacques Copeau’s concept of a poesie de theâtre; that is, it deploys a visual poetry of scenic metaphor, alongside the verbal poesie au theâtre. For example, the clouds of steam that emanate from the bathroom whenever Blanche takes a refreshing bath are realistic, but the haze on stage also creates an atmospheric softening effect. In symbolist terms, the added humidity in the small apartment reifies the discomfort caused by Blanche’s presence there. Williams’s dramaturgical genius is evident in his making the Kowalski apartment’s bathroom a source of signifiers for bodily functions that are the domain of naturalism while also exploiting it for all its potential symbolism and poetic overtones. A third theatrical style, expressionism, manifests itself in the episodic structure of A Streetcar Named Desire as well as in the distortions of reality that scenically and sonically reflect Blanche’s mental state. Some of those elements also have a basis in realism—the cat screeching in the alley, the clackety-clack of a passing train, the Mexican street vendors—but their juxtaposition with a precise emotional spike in Blanche’s sensibility makes for a powerfully theatrical (virtually expressionistic) heightening of the moment. Most importantly, the polka music of the Varsouviana must be considered a clear departure from realism in that it is heard only by Blanche and by the audience. In productions that follow the stage directions in