Hey! If you don't mind me asking, what's your favorite play and why?
Hello! Of course I donât mind, I love getting questions!Â
I have a few that I really like, my favorite Shakespeare ones are Hamlet and Othello. My favorite Henrik Ibsen play is A Dolls House or Hedda Gabler. The plays by Tennessee Williams that I adore are A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth. My all time favorite play though is Tennessee Williamsâ A Streetcar Named Desire.Â
I love Streetcar for a lot of reasons. First of all, the play is written beautifully. Secondly, Williams has a way of making you all in love with his characters so easily. The play focuses on four characters, Blanche Dubois, Harold âMitchâ Mitchell, and Stanley and Stella Kowalski. The main character is Blanche, an affluent woman who left her home town to live with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley in a derelict (derelict to Blanche anyway) community. Blanche represents a lot of different feelings, tropes and ideals from the time period that the play was written in. Sheâs Stanleyâs character foil, with herself representing the affluent society of the past, and his representation of the lower class working South of the future. The play follows Stanley and Blancheâs growing discomfort and strong dislike of each other, eventually culminating in tragedy.Â
Blanche is a majorly sympathetic character as the viewer gets to know her through out the play. In the iconic, âI donât want realism. I want magic!â monologue, Blanche reveals her true, hopelessly lost, utterly deluded core of herself, which ends up being her down fall. Blanche is definitely one of my all time favorite characters. Sheâs sassy, sarcastic, more than a little shallow and extremely funny. In 2014, The Young Vic put on a performance of Streetcar, starring Vanessa Kirby, Ben Foster and Gillian Anderson. That was the best thing Iâve ever watched. Seriously. If you ever get the chance to see it do (Itâs playing in New York this May!!). If anyone wants a link to the show, message me!
I could go on and on about this play, itâs definitely amazing!