As the arguments continue over what and who went wrong in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it's useful to revisit "Streetcar" for a little poetic understanding. Tennessee Williams's insights into New Orleans are little less than prophetic. There's the poverty, the growing acceptance of thuggish behavior and the wishful thinking that accompanies confusion.
Blanche can never find enough tinted paper to soften the naked light of the electric bulb that exposes the ravages to her aging beauty. Neither can she salvage Belle Reve, her antebellum home in Mississippi, no more than New Orleans could rely on the levees to save its endearing decadence. Blanche retreats into madness. The refugees from the storm retreat into outrage. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, abandon New Orleans, like Blanche, were left to be "dependent on the kindness of strangers," and there were lots of them, too.
Stanley Kowalski's rape of Blanche Du Bois exposes brutality in sharp juxtaposition to a fading aristocracy of manners. A contemporary brutal thuggery survives in the vicious looters of the flood, out only for themselves to take whatever they can find. Stanley Kowalski expressed a will to live and thrive, symbolized by his sexuality and fatherhood. Raw and brutal, it's part of the fighting will that must rebuild New Orleans.
Blanche brought magic to the city, but it was magic dependent on illusion. If Blanche had found herself in a hurricane, she would probably have continued to sing the romantic lyrics that expressed a yearning for art and idealism over the raw power of man and nature: "Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea . . . "
Finally she would go off on the arm of a doctor repeating her pitiful plea for those kind strangers. Stella would sob for the loss of her sister, but take consolation in the reality that she and Stanley survived to hear once more the tinny notes of the "blue piano" just around the corner.