In a letter to Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire’s first director, Tennessee Williams wrote that in the play “there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than by malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. …Nobody sees anything truly but through the flaws of their own egos.” This reading was central to my own approach to the play. The characters in Streetcar are flawed people trying desperately to seize or hold on to the things, people, and ideas they feel that they need to survive. In their work to see the world in their own images, however, they fail to see each other. Approaching the play as a series of misunderstandings—the consequences of which become increasingly dire as characters find themselves backed into corners—helped me to see Blanche and Stanley as complex, deeply human people who react violently when they find their values, families, and, eventually, their lives to be threatened. In turn, Stella is forced to confront the life she thought she’d left behind with Blanche, and the reality of the life she thought she’d built with Stanley.