See America First - Southern Belles?
re modern New Orleans and, yes, includes an undershirted Stanley Kowalski who bellows "Stella!" It also turns upon the infamous Moon Lake Casino, apparently a real hotbed of Southern intrigue. Central to the story is the sensuous Blanche DuBois, who turns up at her married sister's home and criticizes it for being far less genteel than what they'd been brought up to expect. At first she is very mysterious about her recent past, except to describe with almost lavish cruelty how Belle Reve, the family home, was lost to the costs of illnesses and funerals. Stanley, her sister Stella's husband, becomes incensed when he discovers how suspiciously expensive her belongings are, and how a man named Shaw claims he met her at a hotel.
Eventually, we learn the shocking truth about Blanche's needful sexuality that causes her to come on to just about any male character right down to the door-to-door collector for the Evening Star. She had been married to a young man who turned out to be homosexual --had caught him, presumably in bed, with an older man. Her husband had killed himself shortly thereafter, because Blanche had told him he disgusted her. Stanley has word from other men he knows that Blanche proceeded to make up for lost time with anyone else in pants...including an underage boy. It is as if she is pathologically addicted to confirming her feminine charms.
Finally what makes her crack is when Mitch, one of Stanley's friends, drags her into the light and sees how much she has lied to him about her age. It seems inevitable that her intensified bickering with the virile Stanley, whose truthfulness about her confounds her purposes, concludes with Blanche's rape by him and...subsequent commitment to an asylum.
In each of these operas, a woman's too-assertive stab at looking out for her own self-interests (and we must feel some sympathy for each of their original circumstances - Regina manipulated by her brothers, Alma burdened with a shameful mother, Blanche convinced that her husband's homosexuality was somehow her fault) -- that is, acting in opposition to her ladylike upbringing -- proves not only fatal to someone else but self-destructive.
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