A strong, soulful, wicked, frail city

In the opening scene of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche DuBois arrives at the New Orleans tenement home of her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in a state of anxious uncertainty. "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields," Blanche confides to a neighbor.

Williams' metaphor, with its evocation of sexual yearning and intimations of mortality, echoes through this essential American drama, set in what may be America's most singular metropolis. And in the wake of the devastation wrought, and the many questions raised, by Hurricane Katrina last week, some of the themes Williams touched on in "Streetcar" -- specifically about whether a fabulous invalid like Blanche and a shabby-genteel place like New Orleans could withstand the rigors of the modern world -- seem more relevant than ever.

For a city of only half a million people, New Orleans looms as large in our cultural imagination as L.A. or Chicago. Playwrights, novelists, poets, film directors, painters, chefs, dive-bar raconteurs and especially musicians all have drunk deeply of the city's heady brew of flamboyance and decadence, joie de vivre and fatalism, the sexy and the sinister.

From its prissy French Quarter architecture to its brawny riverfront, to the shotgun houses of the traditionally black and Creole 7th, 8th and 9th wards, it is a place whose swirling eddies of French, African American, Caribbean and Roman Catholic influence have proven irresistible to those with brooding souls and hungry hearts. As much as the tourists who flock there to cavort in weeklong bacchanals, artists have long been drawn to New Orleans. Like Blanche, the city has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Even people who've never set foot in Jackson Square may feel as if they know the Crescent City from poring over Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" or John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," or by glimpsing the Southern Gothic underworld of Anne Rice's vampire novels. Others may be transported there just by listening to a few bars of Jelly Roll Morton or the Marsalis brothers, Harry Connick Jr. or Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco or Master P.