TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' THEATER is in one sense very like the ancient classical theater. It is essentially a religious act. Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and Baby Doll center on altar tables of beds; Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, and Camino Real revolve around ritual fountains of Eternity. Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer are ritual reenactments of events of salvationand damnation. The patio setting of Night of the Iguana is sanctuary-like, the characters making entrance from their isolated sacristry cells. A Streetcar Named Desire moves its people in a deftly choreographed ritual from the introit of scene one, played appropriately on the steps of the house, to Stella's offertory to Blanche, to Blanche's repetitious ritual cleansing in white tubs of water, to the ritual of The Poker Night played around an altar of a table by men whom Williams' stage directions place in ritual vestments of primary colors. Blanche; Host-white as a victim should traditionally be, knows Stanley to. be her executioner. Her words of consecration are her story to Mitch about her young first husband: she wins Mitch and "there's God-so quickly." This story next told by Stella does not convert Stanley-who by scene ten vests himself in the ritual silk pajamas of his wedding night and protrudes his tongue between his teeth to rape-consume Host-Blanche in an inverse ritual of communion become sexual cannibalization.