🧩 Process & Reflection
Working with Streetcar reframed my understanding of resilience. Blanche’s rituals—bathing, liquor, paper lanterns—look like coping until the play reveals them as avoidance mechanisms that can’t bear the pressure of truth (e.g., Mitch tearing down the lantern, Scene 9). Conversely, Stella’s calm reads as stability, but through a gender lens it risks becoming complicity in a cycle of harm (Scenes 3–4, 8, 11). The soundscape taught me to “listen” as I read: the Varsouviana presses traumatic memory into the present (Scenes 1, 6, 9, 10), while the blue piano scores the city’s pull toward appetite and immediacy (Scenes 1–3).
Drafting with lenses forced precise claims: socio‑economic power around the poker table bleeds into the bedroom (Scene 3), and archetypal rebirth collapses in the final institutional exit (Scene 11). My biggest shift was moving from “who is right?” to “what structures trap these characters?” That lens makes resilience less about personal grit and more about conditions—class, gender, and history—that shape what survival can mean in the first place.