Comparing For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls And A Streetcar Named Desire

Playwrights Christopher Durang and Neil Simon parody Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire in their respective plays, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and Brighton Beach Memoirs. The plays by Durang and Simon were transformed enough that they “pose little risk” to Williams’s plays (Preska). Durang’s play, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls transforms the characters of The Glass Menagerie; Durang changes the names and sexes of half of the characters while completely satirizing their traits. Laura, an anxious homebody who invokes pity in the audience, becomes Lawrence, a pathetic man living with his mother who does nothing but complain. When opening the door for a dinner guest, Laura nearly faints. Meanwhile, to avoid his dinner party, Lawrence merely complains, “I wasn’t feeling well. My leg

Williams’s Amanda wants her daughter to be married and healthily sociable while Durang’s Amanda wants her son to be self-sufficient. Suitors, Jim and Ginny, go to dinner at the family’s home and each has a girlfriend named Betty. Durang uses Ginny’s character to draw attention to and humorize each Tom’s homosexuality and Tennessee Williams’s own homosexuality. the importance of money is a common part of the plot between A Streetcar Named Desire and Brighton Beach Memoirs; Stanley Kowalski sees money as the key to happiness while his parodied counterpart works to support his large family, regarding money as a means of keeping everyone together. Stanley Jerome is fired and then loses his paycheck gambling. He apologizes to his father, “I’ll get the seventeen dollars back, Pop, I promise… I’m not afraid of hard work… hard work and principles. That’s the code I’m going to live by” (Simon). With his father out of work, Stanley has to support his family, which will only grow when their cousins fleeing Poland come to live with