In one of the most renowned plays of the American theater, Blanche DuBois, a schoolteacher from Mississippi, arrives in New Orleans and takes a streetcar named “Desire“ to the French Quarter, where her sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, live barely above squalor. Blanche’s affectations of refinement set her immediately at odds with blue-collar Stanley, who is further incensed when he learns his wife’s aristocratic inheritance—the family estate—has been forfeited to creditors. As Stanley disdains and demeans Blanche, she fights back in the only way she knows: with her genteel femininity. The Kowalskis’ Elysian Fields apartment becomes a pressure cooker of sensuality and class tensions, until ultimately erupting in some of the most iconic dramatic moments seen on the modern stage.

Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play.