Find some pictures of Streetcar sets (just type ‘A Streetcar Named Desire set design’ into the image search of a well known search engine; the set for the recent Young Vic production is especially interesting). Have these displayed.

Read out the opening stage direction and the first few lines of dialogue up to and including the Negro woman’s third line. Ask the learners to:

• identify the significance of the things Williams describes; what sort of play might this be?
• suggest some problems the stage direction might pose for designers and directors.

Learners might come up with some of the following:

• The name Elysian Fields is interesting; Elysian to do with heaven/paradise especially in classical culture, fields connoting pastoral. Irony therefore as the name is at odds with the down-at-heel, modern American urban setting.
• The neighbourhood is poor but not unappealing – ‘raffish charm’.
• The ‘white frame’ houses point back to a French colonial past.
• Several of the details might reflect the way Williams is to characterise Blanche: ‘quaintly ornamented’, ‘a kind of lyricism [which] gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay’.
• A sense of the in-between – it’s early May and we’re in ‘the first dark of an evening’.
• How does a designer render the ‘faint redolences of bananas and coffee’? Note the appeal to the senses: sights, sounds, smells, touch.
• The idea of life expressed through Afro-American culture, especially the music (the ‘blue piano’ becomes a key motif through the play) – is this at odds with the ‘atmosphere of decay’?
• The play begins in medias res (in the middle of things).
• The negro woman’s first line is probably a dirty joke which builds on the idea of sexuality as key theme, also developed by the sailor’s date. The open references to sex and alcohol (the ‘Blue Moon’ cocktail) add to both the ‘raffishness’ Williams specifies in the stage direction and ‘the spirit of life which goes on here’.
• Slight hint that the Four Deuces may be a brothel; certainly you might be expected to get ripped off there (‘that clip joint’).
• The vendor’s cry ‘Red hot!’ suggests ideas of desire and hell fire, so both a complement to and an opposite of the spirit of life.

When beginning to teach the play, give learners the following ten questions and allocate to each learner one of the four central characters – Blanche, Stanley, Stella and Mitch.

1) How is your character introduced into the play?

2) What clues do the stage directions give about costume and physical appearance?

3) What does your character do? How does she or he behave? Are his or her actions consistent?

4) What do other characters say about him/her?

5) What is your character’s position/state of mind at the start of the play?

6) In what ways does your character change during the drama?

7) How does your character end up?

8) How does your character use language?

9) What key themes and ideas are developed through your character?

10) What things are associated with your character? E.g. the blue piano and Stanley.

Get learners to answer these questions as you work through the play, updating answers where necessary. This could work well as an out-of-class activity and, if done electronically, results could be shared through the teacher’s VLE so everyone has a ‘map’ of the major characters.

A Streetcar Named Desire is structured around the interaction of the four key characters – Blanche, Stanley, Stella and Mitch; however, the minor characters have great significance too, and Williams’s use of two unseen characters from Blanche’s past (her dead husband and, assuming he actually exists, Shep Huntleigh) is also important to the play’s narrative and themes. 

Get learners into pairs or small groups and allocate them one of the following characters or groups of characters:

• Eunice
• Pablo and Steve
• Shep Huntleigh
• Allan Grey
• The Evening Star boy
• The doctor and matron
• The Negro woman, the Mexican woman and the tamale vendor

with the following prompts:

• In which parts of the play do your character or characters appear? If you’re dealing with unseen characters, when are they mentioned?
• What light do they shed on the central characters?
• In what ways do they further the plot?
• Which themes do they help to develop?

Give learners the list of 20 features of spoken language in Learner resource 1.

Working in pairs, learners should decide which are features of Stanley’s language and which of Blanche’s; several (unmitigated face threatening acts, irony, racist epithets, for example) are common to both. Then, get them to find examples of each feature, or select a section of an exchange between Stanley and Blanche which they consider an especially good illustration of the characters’ modes of speech, exploring how Williams uses these elements of dramatic dialogue to develop characterisation.

Choose some of Blanche’s longer speeches:

Scene One: (I, I, I took the blows … In bed with your – Polack!)

Scene Four (He acts like an animal … don’t hang back with the brutes.)

Scene Five (I never was hard or self-sufficient enough … And I – I’m fading now.)

Scene Six (He was a boy … stronger than this – kitchen – candle …)

Scene Ten (It won’t be the sort of thing … And let there be no hard feelings.)

Supply learners with the following list of rhetorical devices (if preferred, omitting the complicated Greek words) and ask learners to identify as many devices as they can, commenting on what each tells us about Blanche.

• Exhortation
• Hyperbole
• Antithesis
• Repetition
• Metaphor
• Parenthesis
• A sudden outcry (ecphonesis)
• Construction of a climax (a linked series A-B, B-C, C-D )
• Verbal scene-painting (pragmatographia).

This exercise might lead to a discussion of realism (Do people actually talk like this? Is the highly rhetorical nature of Blanche’s language an example of the tension in the play’s style between realism and expressionism?). It reminds us of Blanche’s pronounced tendency to self-dramatisation, her literary education, her artifice. Blanche may claim to disdain ‘evasions and ambiguities’ but they are fundamental to the construction of her persona and her highly artificial manner of speech is a crucial part of this.

Brown and Levinson’s concept of the face threatening act is incredibly useful to the close analysis of a play like Streetcar in which antagonism between characters is such a significant part of the narrative. The clearest explanation of their idea is found in Mick Short’s Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (pp.113–114), on which the following summary is based: 

Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) developed a framework around the concept of face, which they define as ‘your public self-image’. Face is built around two components:

• Positive face: the need for our actions and wants to be desirable to other people as well as ourselves (e.g. being told ‘well done’).
• Negative face: the wish that our actions should be unimpeded by others; e.g. our negative face is threatened when someone interrupts us because it impedes our desire to speak.

Politeness involves speakers showing an awareness of others’ face needs. When actions or speech acts threaten someone’s face, we denote these as face threatening acts (FTAs). It is virtually impossible to avoid FTAs so speakers minimise or mitigate the amount of threat by the way they say or do things. When visiting someone, people open the door gently not abruptly; they ask rather than order someone to do the washing up. Asking gives the interlocutor the option of saying ‘no’ without social disruption, but ordering makes saying ‘no’ much more difficult. 

For example, the phrase, ‘I know you’re really pushed for time, but could you help me with my homework, please?’, mitigates the FTA by a) taking account of the other person’s face needs in the first clause, b) apparently asking a question about his or her ability to offer help, and c) adding the politeness marker ‘please’.

Similarly, if trying to mitigate the threat to someone’s positive face, a speaker might need to take a more indirect tack (similar to Leech’s approbation maxim). When marking, a teacher might write, ‘There was a complete lack of detail in your essay’, which obviously threatens the essay-writer’s positive face. This could be mitigated by writing, ‘Perhaps interesting ideas might have been improved by a more detailed use of quotation.’

In Streetcar, the different ways the characters threaten each other’s positive and negative faces and the degree to which they try to mitigate their FTAs reveal a lot about Williams’ characterisation and the attitudes and values of the play. Stanley, ‘simple, straightforward and honest’, tends to be direct and rarely bothers with mitigation; Stella, an altogether more emollient character, takes great care of the face needs of others; Blanche can be just as direct and tactless as Stanley but, remembering the formalities of her aristocratic upbringing, is at other times much more polite and mitigates her FTAs with greater sensitivity.

The grid in Learner resource 2 could work as a classroom exercise exploring these ideas.

This activity is designed to get learners focusing on the exam question and the need to analyse the dramatic effect of features of spoken language and literary devices they identify. The grid in Learner resource 3 could be given to learners in several ways: a) with the first column left blank so they have to identify key quotations; b) with the second column left blank so they have to identify features of language and literary devices; or c) with the third column left blank so they have to think about the dramatic effect; or d) a combination of all three (which is probably the best method).

A similar grid could be used for other scenes or learners could be given blank grids and asked to choose an extract and then fill in each box.

This exercise assumes familiarity with Grice’s maxims and his notion of conversational implicature; Leech’s maxims of politeness or Lakoff’s politeness principle; and Howard Giles’ theory of accommodation. Anything with which learners are unfamiliar can be deleted or the scene can be used to teach these theoretical ideas.

Learner resource 4 cites extracts from reviews of two major recent productions of the play. 

Learners should work in groups on the quotations, deciding whether or not they agree with the views expressed or with the staging choices described (for example, updating to the present day in the case of the Young Vic production, physicalising Blanche’s dead husband in the Donmar production) and finding evidence from the play to support their opinions.

Learners should be given the five questions in Learner resource 5.

Learners should work in groups with the following prompts:

• Narrative context
• What does this extract tell you about the specified theme?
• Characterisation
• Dialogue/features of spoken language/features of literary language/politeness
• Other aspects of theatrical meaning-making: lighting, sound, proxemics, costume.

Teacher resource 1 contains a commentary on the extract specified in question 5.