The document discusses the structure of plays, noting that Aristotle established the classical unities of time, place and action. While these unities are now more flexible thanks to technology, playwrights must still consider the attention span of audiences and stamina of actors when dividing a play into scenes or acts. The document then analyzes how Tennessee Williams divided A Streetcar Named Desire into eleven scenes, suggesting that he did so to lead the story naturally to its climax in scene ten and allow for a living picture effect in the closing scene, and that he may have been influenced by film techniques from his time or struggled to maintain tension over multiple acts.

1. Structure of the play
The famous Greek critic and philosopher Aristotle provided
the rules that were regarded as essential in drama, these rules
were known as unities, and demanded unity of time, place
and action.
Nowadays these unities have become more flexible, and
thanks to the help of technology the use of different time or
place are possible. But, there are some practical
considerations in writing a play that cannot be ignored.
One practical consideration is the attention span of the
audience and another one is the physical stamina of the cast,
these two considerations are the ones that the playwright
takes into account to divide the play into scenes or acts.
Tennessee Williams divided A Streetcar named Desire into
eleven scenes, unfortunately he never revealed why he did so
but we can provide some possible reasons:
a) If we examine the eleven scenes carefully, we notice
that one leads naturally to the other and to the climax,

2. that takes place in scene ten and as we have said before
using the technique of downbeat coda, he gets an effect
in the closing scene with motionless players of poker
that is known as tableau vivant (a living picture, a group
of silent motionless actors representing a dramatic
event).
b) Williams grew up in the thirties, a time that represented
the golden age of Hollywood cinema, and maybe he
absorbed certain film techniques; his sequence of
scenes is similar to the way a camera witnessing one
incident and moving to another one. We should not
forget that fifteen of Williams plays were made into
films as they were easily adaptable for the screen.
c) Some literary critic suggested that Williams was
successful in writing one- act plays and he did not
know how to maintain tension if the play was divided
into acts.