This confined space — realized in rich detail but no kitschy atmospheric excesses by the set designer Collette Pollard — cannot house both the damaged, delicate Blanche and the insensitive, egoistic Stanley without a decisive conflagration. Squirming as we are under the same eaves, with the screech of the streetcar lines in our ears, it is easy to understand how the small aggravations of cohabitation — Blanche’s daily monopolizing of that bathroom, for instance — could bring out the brute in even a gentler man than Stanley.”

—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times