THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY
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In A Streetcar Named Desire, the crux of the action is again the betrayal of a sister: Blanche is committed to an asylum after her sister Stella refuses to acknowledge that Blanche was raped by Stella’s husband, Stanley. In the character of Blanche–with her penchant for illusion and her destructive sexual promiscuity, her unworldly innocence and her cynical, world-weary humor–Williams put elements of both his sister and himself. He also overtly addressed his terror of madness and incarceration, his inability to ask for help lest well-meaning society rob him of his freedom. Streetcar also reflects Williams’s horror of suicide, when Blanche describes how her homosexual husband shot himself.
In The Two-Character Play, Williams went a step further. The two characters of the title are a brother and sister–a playwright and an actress–but almost from the start one realizes that the play is an interior monologue, a long, anxious, sometimes loony soliloquy of self-examination. It is the work of an exhausted, fear-driven man. By the time The Two-Character Play premiered in London, in 1967, Williams’s best years–artistically, professionally, and personally–were irretrievably behind him. His longtime lover Frank Merlo had died, and critics and audiences both were responding to his newer, more experimental work with indifference or hostility. “I’m living on my nerves,” says one of the two characters. “Sometimes our fear is our private badge of courage,” says the other.
