 Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans during the restless years following World War Two, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is the story of Blanche DuBois, a fragile and neurotic woman on a desperate prowl for someplace in the world to call her own. After being exiled from her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche explains her unexpected appearance on Stanley and Stella s (Blanche s sister) doorstep as nervous exhaustion. This, she claims, is the result of a series of financial calamities which have recently claimed the family plantation, Belle Reve. Suspicious, Stanley points out that "under Louisiana s Napoleonic code what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband." Stanley, a sinewy and brutish man, is as territorial as a panther. He tells Blanche he doesn t like to be swindled and demands to see the bill of sale. This encounter defines Stanley and Blanche s relationship. They are opposing camps and Stella is caught in no-man s-land. But Stanley and Stella are deeply in love. Blanche s efforts to impose herself between them only enrages the animal inside Stanley. When Mitch -- a card-playing buddy of Stanley s -- arrives on the scene, Blanche begins to see a way out of her predicament. Mitch, himself alone in the world, reveres Blanche as a beautiful and refined woman. Yet, as rumors of Blanche s past in Laurel begin to catch up to her, her circumstances become unbearable.