A Streetcar Named Desire
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by David Cromer
At 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, Illinois
Produced by Writers' Theatre
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on July 30, 2010
Theatre absolves us of the sin of voyeurism. The current production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire by Writers' Theatre proves this with its intimate configuration of stage and seating, so intimate that the actors' spittle is impossible for the audience to ignore. Although the play is in and of itself a challenge intellectually and psychologically, this theater's intimacy closes the distance between observer and actor, intensifying the emotion and firing up the Streetcar experience.
Blanche DuBois is a fading Southern belle from Laurel, Mississippi, who arrives in New Orleans at "Elysian Fields", the very modest apartment of her married sister, Stella. Blanche claims to have lost their family home after their remaining relatives died, and that in order to calm her nerves she's taken a leave of absence from her job as a schoolteacher. She looks down her nose on their cramped apartment and its working-class neighborhood, earning the immediate mistrust of Stella's husband, Stanley, who accuses Blanche of shutting Stella out of the family inheritance. Stella long ago renounced her quasi-aristocratic heritage for the sake of sexual gratification, despite the unhappiness of her marriage due in no small part to Stanley's volcanic temper. What unfolds in the story is Blanche's gradual but steady mental deterioration, in parallel with, and as a result of, lies, embarrassing personal revelations, and the victory of illusion over reality.
Blanche is a cultural anachronism, lost and confused in a world that she increasingly fails to recognize, both because that world itself is changing and because her interpretation of it is blurring. Blanche's response to the world is a melange of lying, fantasy, and wishful thinking. She lies about taking a leave of absence from her job in Laurel as an English teacher, but later composes a telegram to her suitor called "Shep", in an air of delusion, reality, and false hope, all undifferentiated from each other. Romanticism, obviously, is a large element of her professional life as a teacher of literature and poetry, but her habit of prevarication has become a lifestyle so well-practiced that perhaps she can no longer distinguish fact from fiction.
Natasha Lowe brought an authenticity to Blanche's character, teetering on the edge of sanity (in the layman's sense of the word, anyway): nervous but controlled, proud but ashamed, confident but frightened, lucid but incoherent. Lowe lowered the bar for forgiving Blanche her transgressions, given her loss of the family estate, the deaths of several relatives, her husband's suicide, and the recurring hallucinations. Lowe's Blanche showed the callowness of an innocent victim as well as the cunning of an opportunist. It would have been easy for Lowe to alternate between these two personalities or to frame Blanche as a sociopath, but she went instead for an interesting complexity that was both believable and compelling. Lowe had Blanche embodying Williams' view of Southern romanticism as respect for idealism and beauty. With almost every drawn-out Mississippi syllable, her character was trying to reconcile what she wished were real with what actually was real. Lowe's delivery felt spontaneous, as though she were hearing the dialogue afresh.
Director Cromer energized the symbolism in this play by exploiting the intimacy of the seating configuration. And none of Williams' metaphors received more attention in this production than did that of light. Although light represents love to Blanche, her husband's death doused the light, and now Blanche struggles at all times to stay out of bright light because illusion has become a large part of her psychology. The paper lantern with which she covers the bare light bulb hanging in the bedroom dims her own aging face and, it's easy to argue, keeps her from seeing the reality around her. Cromer arranged the set such that the hanging bulb, nonfrosted and incandescent, was bright enough to be irritating (to get our attention), to reveal the apartment as being even shabbier than it seems in subdued lighting, and to expose the growing imperfections in Blanche's face. So close were we in proximity that whenever the naked light came on, we saw her heavy make-up clearly and registered the sudden fear in her eyes, as though we were present in the room with her.
Although Blanche can't move herself forward out of a past forever gone, she ironically urges Stella to move forward away from her volatile brutish husband, Stanley. And once Blanche accuses Stanley of having raped her, Stella adopts the same escape mechanism that has nearly destroyed her sister, retreating into illusion by denying Blanche's claim. The rape pushes Blanche into insanity because she can no longer face reality, quite ironic inasmuch as Stella is now doing likewise. Throughout the story, Stella moderates the relationship between Blanche and Stanley, defending her sister from her husband and her husband from her sister. Stacy Stoltz brought meekness to the role, though sometimes she called up more strength to support Stella's function as peacemaker. Given the occasional violence in her marriage, Stoltz' interpretation was properly aggravating in her obvious suppression of Stella's instinct for self-defense.
Stanley is simplistic. He's stereotypical. And he's dominant, an example of this being his explosion when Stella tells him to eat more neatly. It's his nature to turn in an instant, from violence to gentleness, from screaming to sobbing, from bravado to shame. Clearly, Blanche has ruined his comfortable routine, demeaning him, drinking his liquor, disrupting his card games, and trying to persuade Stella to leave him. Who can fault him for resenting her? Not only did Matt Hawkins have the body type for this role, but he also mastered Stanley's emotional combustibility. And no less impressive than his oscillation between emotional extremes was the genuineness of his momentary state of mind, whether Stanley was furious, ecstatic, or only sanguine. Hawkins (and Cromer) exploited the theater's intimacy further in the fact that Stanley's every barrage of verbal projectiles resonated like thunder in that small space and produced an angry aerosol that stamped the brutality on his outburst.
Blanche's suitor through the summer, Mitch, is an awkward, slow, but decent man whom Blanche easily manipulates until he learns of her past sexual indiscretions. At first, Danny McCarthy seemed to be delivering his lines mechanically -- stilted and over-rehearsed. But as Mitch's co-dependency with Blanche developed, McCarthy's interpretation began to feel calculated to stress his character's obtuseness, especially as Mitch used caution to keep from scaring away a woman who interested him. Despite all the effort, though, their relationship was doomed from the beginning because Blanche had founded it on lies.
Both Desire and desire brought Blanche to Elysian Fields: the streetcar in New Orleans and her sexual appetites back in Laurel. Desire leads to death, which leads to Elysian Fields (in Greek mythology, the final resting place of virtuous souls; Limbo in Dante's Inferno). For Blanche, in other words, sexual misbehavior leads to death and the final resting place. Fornication by their ancestors cost Blanche and Stella the family fortune, and sexual impropriety with a boy cost Blanche both her job and her good reputation. As she explains at the end, after descending into madness, Blanche "always depended on the kindness of strangers", that kindness in reality being nothing more than sex. In confessing her dalliances to Mitch, she says that she had "many intimacies with stangers", but she deludes herself into thinking they were all offering her kindness. Ironic again that Blanche denounces "brute desire", especially in Stella. The ending, therefore, is regrettably inevitable insofar as sex is the only medium through which Blanche relates to men and Stanley to women.
"I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley", admits Stella. She neither proclaims disbelief nor accuses Blanche of lying; she simply chooses to dismiss her story in order to maintain her life as she knows it. Is she deluding herself? Is she becoming Blanche? In either case, it's difficult to respect Stella at this point. But even worse is her neighbor's advice never to believe Blanche's accusation because life has to go on. In effect, Stella has done precisely the opposite of what Blanche pleaded with her to do: not to hang back with the brutes. Stella has decided in favor of survival over civility. She capitulates and surrenders to Stanley and the animal instincts he represents. But maybe she has no other option -- just as Blanche claimed to have no other option in defending her actions.