Endstation Sehnsucht | A Streetcar Named Desire | von Tennessee Williams | Deutsch von Helmar Harald Fischer

In the organizer's words:

with English surtitles

Blanche DuBois, a refined, no longer very young southern belle from a good family, has to leave her hometown of Laurel. One family member after another has died. Belle Rêve, the estate of her once wealthy family, has been foreclosed on. She has also lost her job as a teacher. Blanche now seeks shelter with her younger sister Stella in New Orleans. Blanche is horrified as soon as she arrives. The sister lives with her husband Stanley Kowalski in a small two-room apartment in a run-down tenement building. Blanche makes no effort to suppress her arrogance and makes disparaging remarks about Stella's living conditions. Nevertheless, the younger woman is prepared to take her sister in when she is in need.
Blanche is downright shocked when she meets Stanley, a man bursting with muscles and flaunted virility, with coarse manners and a pronounced penchant for alcohol. Blanche makes it all too clear that he is beneath her. Her sister, however, seems to be almost in thrall to him. A strong aversion develops between the rather blasé Blanche and the animalistic, proletarian macho Stanley. The sophisticated woman compares him and his poker friends, with whom he shuffles cards and drinks the night away, to a "monkey round". When Blanche witnesses that Stanley does not shy away from violence against his wife, she tries to convince Stella to leave her husband. Stanley secretly overhears the conversation. From then on, he searches for compromising facts in Blanche's past, and he finds them. For the image of the morally upright, cultivated lady that Blanche paints of herself has little to do with reality. Blanche's ethereal nature turns out to be the mask of a wounded woman who cannot bear reality and is broken by it.

"Endstation Sehnsucht" by Tennessee Williams was first performed in New York in 1947 and later made into a film. Tennessee Williams received the Pulitzer Prize for this masterpiece. In a psychologically finely crafted and excitingly constructed experimental set-up, he deals with complex and timeless themes such as the battle of the sexes or the nostalgia of the educated elite, who feel superior and have nothing to counter the vehement will to assert themselves of the supposedly inferior working class. By his own admission, Tennessee Williams refrained from taking sides in the conflicts of his characters.