‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ @ Poor Yorick Productions
—Jan Farrington
Tennesse Williams’ 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire is always more than you remember.
It’s not just “Stella!” Not just a battle of the sexes. Not just a collision between refined, civilized folk and brutal, grab-what-you-want primitives. Not just a wary look at an America becoming something different in the watershed years after WWII, flexing its post-war muscle and rough power. And not just a study in hetero-and homo- sexuality, with all the masks, layers, game-playing and self-deceit that went along with it in this “closeted” time.
It’s all there, hiding in plain sight—plus some pretty thrilling face-offs among characters you’ll remember forever, if uneasily.
Poor Yorick Productions’ Streetcar, directed by Dustin Eastwood, and starring Emmalyn Miron as Blanche DuBois and Pete Thompson as Stanley Kowalski, took Williams’ full original script and ran with it, throwing some retrospective shade on the badly cut 1951 film version. The young company (Miron is its artistic director) has produced pop-up theater here in North Texas—this show was performed at Art Centre Theatre in Plano—but is also known for its ongoing theater/dance/community outreach work in Ireland.
The detailed set design does look like the shabby, swampy, down-at-the-heels New Orleans of the mid-century. Ornate balconies are overgrown with vines, and stairs and doorways lead to tiny apartments—stuffed into odd corners of what must have been a big house. It’s the 1940s, but you couldn’t tell that from the ancient stove in the kitchen.
Williams’ cast of characters has us by the collar right away: Blanche Dubois (Miron), a “belle” from a derelict plantation in Mississippi; her sister Stella (Savannah Toliver), married to (and crazy about) her manly Stanley Kowalski (Pete Thompson), a war vet and factory worker with muscles and a temper; Mitch (Shae Hardwick), Stanley’s co-worker and army buddy, a gentle, lonely guy who takes good care of his mother. Eunice (Mizani Washburn), who owns the run-down apartments; her husband Steve (Bo Benny), who—along with Pablo (James Jensen) and Mitch—is one of Stanley’s poker buddies.
In the garden and along the street, atmospheric passers-by and visitors come and go: Chris Kwon plays a bill collector and a doctor; Betty Henson is a street vendor, a few flirty or mysterious ladies, and a nurse (covering most of the occupations open to women back then—well, maybe teacher and nun could have been added).
Streetcar’s story and language are intense and over-heated. (They ought to give church fans to the audience.) What I admired about Poor Yorick’s production was its ability to keep both feet on the ground. They don’t hold back on what theater people like to call the “heightened reality” of the play, its over-the-top style. But at the same time, we never lose our sense of Blanche, Stella, Stanley, Mitch and everyone else as real humans—flawed, troubled, yearning, and very, very watchable.
Blanche and Stanley are spoiling for a fight—or something—the minute she arrives at their place, trailing cloueds of perfume and a suitcase of frilly clothes. Everything he says to her is challenging, aggressive; her nonstop high-society chatter is her way of pushing him away, and putting him down. She wonders to Mitch how her sister (expecting a baby) can go on living with Stanley—but we see how powerfully Stella and Stanley are drawn to each other.
Williams (and this cast) let us see and feel their vulnerabilities: Miron’s Blanche may have “lost” the family plantation, and her history with love is sad and traumatic. But like Mitch she’s lonely, and knows she could easily wind up broke and alone—and that’s one of the better options. Miron’s Blanche isn’t the middle-aged fading belle of many productions; she and Stella are still vibrant young women. Blanche is, however, terribly off-track and fragile, her mind full of half-true (or delusional) stories and versions of her past life and future prospects.
Thompson’s Stanley isn’t afraid to tear up a room or shout the house down. But in his rough way he loves Stella, looks forward to being a father, holds a steady job, and keeps his friends by him—though they’re wary of his explosive temper. He brutally attacks Blanche, no way around that in this dark version of the play. It’s sexual, it’s violent, it’s retribution for her invasion of their lives: “Wasn’t everything okay before she showed here?” he asks Stella.
Blanche’s early marriage to a “boy” (probably gay and “closeted”) who killed himself is her tragedy. Her budding romance with Mitch (he kisses her hand when they meet) comes to a bitter end when Stanley uses his guy-network to find out about Blanche’s driven sexual past—doings that basically got her escorted out of her home town of Laurel, Mississippi. In the end, is there a winner and a loser? Is Stan the Man? Has Stella’s mind moved permanently to her fantasy of Belle Reve, their “beautiful dream” of a home? With Blanche gone, can Stella be happy with the new baby and the “colored lights” going round again in their bedroom?
Earlier in the play, Blanche may have gotten to the heart of it, speaking dreamily about the “streetcar named Desire” she climbed aboard when she got to New Orleans. It’s the “clanging, rattle-trap” ride we all take, banging up and down—and around—on the paths of our lives.
“A line can be straight, or a street,” says Blanche, “but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.” And Tennessee Williams ought to know.
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