Surely playwriting is the most difficult of the arts and its successful achievement is among the world's miracles. It does not matter how hard the tidy mind of man applies itself to the formulation of rules for the making of a 'good play', the kernel of truth eludes definition. What makes both Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire good theatre? Is it because they both convey a heightened sense of reality—a poet's projection of the core of experience in terms of the spoken word, the human presence? Tennessee Williams' lost souls in a sordid basement flat in New Orleans are as palpitatingly alive as Shakespeare's royal lovers whose downfall shook the world. In both cases—so widely divergent, so utterly unlike—the artists' profound understanding illuminates as by lightning flashes the dark regions of the human heart.

A Streetcar Named Desire, as...