The opening scene of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' prepares the audience well for what is to come in the play, as much as can be expected without giving the whole story away. It introduces all the main themes and characters - if only through other characters

        In Scene One we meet Stanley Kowalski, the son of Polish immigrants, and his friend Mitch, two ordinary working class men who are dressed “roughly” in “blue denim work clothes”. The first impression we get of Stanley is that he is full of lust for life, heartiness and primitivism. He hurls a package of meat at his adoring wife Stella, “Catch!” This is seen as a sexual innuendo, and the action sets Eunice and a Negro woman into uncontrollable laughter. In hurling the meat at Stella, Stanley states the sexual proprietorship he holds over her, and Stella’s delight in catching Stanley’s meat signifies her sexual infatuation with him – this, in a nutshell, defines the sexual, passionate nature of their relationship. It shows us the intense bond the couple share, and prepares us somewhat to find out the true nature of their relationship later on – passionate but violent, physical, sexual and very intense. Stanley is portrayed as the provider who sexually satisfies the grateful, crazily in love Stella.

Stanley represents the new, heterogeneous America; he comes across as a social leveller who wants to destroy Blanche’s pretensions. From the very start of the play Stanley and Blanche are established as polar opposites, with Stella as the link between them. Stanley is described in stage directions as having “animal joy in his being” which is “implicit in all his movements and attitudes”. Stanley is a virulent character, to whom “pleasure with women” has been important since “earliest manhood”, in the “powerful” and proud way of a “richly feathered male bird among hens”. Stanley is loyal to his friends, passionate to his wife and heartlessly cruel towards Blanche. He “bears the emblem” of a “gaudy seed-bearer”, he is a sexual predator who bends women to his will and conforms to a certain stereotype of man.

In contrast to Stanley, Blanche is the epitome of all that is genteel; she is the representation of the old America, the dying Southern aristocracy. Her appearance is “incongruous to the setting” of Elysian Fields, she is “daintily dressed” out of place in the busy, bustling New Orleans. Her delicate beauty “must avoid a strong light”, and there is “something that suggests a moth” in her “uncertain manner” and her white clothes. The comparison of Blanche to a moth suggests that she is very fragile and delicate, that she is vulnerable and can easily be harmed. Blanche’s arrival to Elysian Fields on the “streetcar named Desire” and then the “transfer to one called Cemeteries” symbolizes her life. Through this we are told that Blanche has lived her life governed by her desires for men, and it is hinted that this will lead her to “Cemeteries” and her eventual downfall – this prepares us for the ruin of Blanche, which will come later on in the play. Blanche is fragile and destitute, she is the picture of loneliness – she has no one but Stella in the world after she “lost” Belle Reve, their childhood home, after the deaths of the older generation of the DuBois family. She is destitute and seeks help from Stella, as she is her last chance.