Tennessee Williams was good at making monsters. In his 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, the movie star Alexandra Del Lago says to Chance Wayne, the man she's using while he uses her, "When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BE ME."
Sweet Bird of Youth fascinates due to the drama of monster meeting monster. Arguably, every character in the play is a monster to one degree or another. Certainly Del Lago, who is traveling under the name of Princess Kosmonopolis, is one. Aged past her prime and having given up on any chance of a comeback, she ends up in a hotel in St. Cloud, Florida, as reasonable an approximation of Hell as anywhere.
Chance Wayne is a monster, too. He grew up in St. Cloud, so of all people, he should know better than to return. (Williams's St. Cloud is on the Gulf, by the way, while the actually town of St. Cloud is right in the middle of the state, far from the coast.) His plan is to reunite with Heavenly, a young woman he loved as a teenager, though now both are falling apart physically as well as mentally.
Disease and surgery have rendered Heavenly a bit of a monster, though she's nothing compared to her father, the politician Boss Finley. Williams writes in a stage direction that Boss Finley's attitude toward his daughter should not be related "in terms of crudely conscious incestuous feeling" though the fact that Williams wrote that implies a certain level of incest to the desire.
The greatest monster in the play seems to be time, though, which ticks away relentlessly at each character. At the end of the final act, Chance doesn't ask for pity, or even understanding, but just for the recognition of time as the enemy of us all. The title, Sweet Bird of Youth, is after all painfully ironic.
The play, by the way, is referenced in the film Death Becomes Her (later turned into a stage musical) in which Meryl Streep's character stars in a musical version of Sweet Bird of Youth called Songbird! I can only imagine what that might have been like...
