A Streetcar Named Desire
A pretty blonde actress sat behind me at a recent performance of Backyard Renaissance’s production of Tennessee Williams’ monster of a melodrama, chatting on her phone during the first intermission. “I plead the fifth,” she said. “I mean, I love the play. I’ve studied the play. It’s just… We should have done it. But we were too young. Also, Rutgers…”
Ah, to be too young to play Blanche DuBois, the faded southern flower who knows how a gentleman ought to woo a lady but whose losing battle with time and happenstance has demanded…other considerations. By the time she steps off the titular streetcar and arrives at her sister Stella’s two-room apartment, Blanche has lost nearly everything; her stately family manse is merely the most symbolic. Really, her life has been a string of losses, starting with the sensitive young man she married so long ago, the one who tragically shared the playwright’s predilections for dramatic action and unconventional romance…
On the one hand, I sympathize with that nonplussed Rutgers alum. Opening the second act of Streetcar with an a capella rendering of The Animals’ hit “House of the Rising Sun” is both stingingly on the nose, and completely of a piece with the show. There is a house in New Orleans… The wailing saxophone, the haunted whispers, the slo-mo fight scenes, the slo mo sex scenes, the thundering rumble and clang of the streetcar, the desperate howls of desperation from one character after another — it’s more than a bit much. It’s very much much. And there’s very much of it — the play definitely earns its second intermission.
Then again, if she’s studied the play, she ought to know that Williams wrote those desperate howls of desperation. That he wrote its wild exaggerations of masculine animal savagery and feminine delight in same. Just listen to Stella swoon over those “things that happen in the dark that make nothing else matter” — not art, not poetry, not music, not humanity’s tenderer feelings, and certainly not a black eye or bloody lip. A lover of Streetcar ought to know that Williams is tilting full-bore at the ruinous effect that Stanley Kowalski’s wolflike cunning, sinewed strength, and oh yes, reproductive prowess must have on Blanche’s ruined refinement, her fragile fantasy, and oh yes, her precious connection to her own sister. These worlds ought not to have collided, but now that they have, it’s straight sex for the brutal win!
As for me, I need not plead the fifth. I’m glad I saw this Streetcar; I think Streetcar needs seeing more than reading, relying as it does so heavily on felt life. But you do have to give yourself to it — buy the ticket and take the ride, ding ding! The actors certainly do: Jessica John, Megan Carmitchel, and Francis Gercke hurl themselves into Blanche, Stella, and Stanley with the kind of leave-it-all-on-the-boards enormity that the characters invite. (Maybe not demand, but definitely invite.) And if anybody in San Diego is doing shattered sorrow better than MJ Sieber right now, I’ve missed it.