‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ @ WaterTower Theatre
Photos/graphics courtesy of Zoe Communications/Paris Marie Productions
—Ryan Maffei
Oh, Streetcar! Oblique as the title to Tennessee Williams’ most famous play is (it refers to both a literal streetcar and literal desire), the basic details are about as culturally indelible as Romeo and Juliet. We all know Stanley Kowalski, and the actor who blew apart stagier conceptions of acting itself (Marlon Brando, the original Johnny Depp in terms of ubiquity, eccentricity and abuse) with his career-making origination of the role. We all know Blanche DuBois—the name means “white woods”—who always depends on the kindness of strangers. We all know STELLAAAAAAAAAA, my favorite delivery of which is Elaine on muscle relaxers in the classic Seinfeld episode “The Pen”—another perfect script. The opening sentence of this review is from The Simpsons’ musical parody, which brilliantly skewers the original’s sincerity.
But as Rhonda Rose (the WaterTower Theatre’s front of house associate who gave opening remarks) told me and my companion during intermission for A Streetcar Named Desire, “I’m not sure some of our patrons are prepared for this show. They hear Streetcar and think, ‘classic’.” And as the old couple who sat next to us told us almost sheepishly when we returned, “We prefer musicals.” To be fair, though, they had tears in their eyes at curtain.
But Streetcar is a visceral experience, and director Terry Martin’s production pulls no punches. Between the hard knocks that throw Blanche off her orbit, Stanley’s sudden blackout turns (Stella’s price for loving her brutish Romeo), and the wince-inducing noises from the fractious couple upstairs, Streetcar is a show about abuse—one where no justice is meted out. Its hottest moments fill the theatre with a claustrophobic sense of danger.
The locus of this is Stanley, of course, the “bestial” man of the house who’s taken notorious Louisiana governor Huey Long’s “every man a king” philosophy to heart. Stanley’s repeated invocation of the “Napoleonic code” is an early laugh in a dark show, though the swaggering Stanley, whose allure and ugliness both lie in his aggression, has no physical deficiencies for which to compensate. Cracks at his lack of refinement or Polish heritage are his explosive temper’s hair triggers, even as Williams can’t help but put clever lines in his rough lout’s mouth. Unchained by a deep Southern dialect, Christopher Cassarino’s powerful portrayal has none of Brando’s subtle seduction; he’s all bludgeon, charming and calculated though he is. Every twitch and step is genuinely scary.
Stanley and his visiting (or as he might have it, intruding) sister-in-law Blanche are a duo as monumental, and combustible, as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s George and Martha. Cassarino’s intensity conceals his deft intuition, and the show wakes up when he arrives, and we permanently tense our nerves. But it’s inarguable that Blanche is the more difficult role, one Daniela Mastropietro sashays into without hesitation. It must be a challenge to crack Blanche’s otherworldly, “extra” demeanor—and in a fascinating choice, Mastropietro has been directed (or allowed) to repeatedly face the audience, underlining how Blanche is always performing. At times, her florid, melodious delivery owes its effectiveness to Williams’ fabulous language.
Friday’s opening night performance began a little shakily, with the disarming feel of a more amateur affair—though you really can’t praise Kae Styron’s scenic design enough, perfectly flattered by Bryant Yaeger’s moody lighting. New Orleans’ beauty comes caked in grit and decay, its air thick with ghosts; just a glance along the set’s iron-rod upper level, dotted with ferns, pulls you right into the city. Hope Cox’s costume design is also terrific (Blanche’s birthday outfit is wonderfully apt), and details by prop designer Ruby Pullum (like the rusted period fridge) drive home the squalor in which King Stanley has built a palace for himself and his wife. Add the bun in her oven, and the poker buds he crowds her out with—and all of it creates an authenticity the actors have to match—yet they struggled to a little at the top.
This gets to, I think, how much of the show falls on its Blanche’s shoulders. When we recall Blanche, we hear a woman who speaks and behaves in a deeply inauthentic way, someone who invites caricatured impressions. Yet when I put on the 1951 film, I was struck by Vivien Leigh’s subtlety, the quietness of her choices, the nuance across her face. When Blanche, in a fierce wig by Michael B. Moore, struts onto the stage—turning to us and not Lisa Young’s Eunice as she declares her presence—the actor’s drawl is so strong the adjective I’m stuck on is “accent-ass.” It doesn’t quite feel reconciled with anything like the real world. In that slow burn of an opening, occasional line stumbles (and even, in one case, a literal stumble) gave a sense of reality I would think Martin, as a Meisner teacher, would have insisted on.
But the show found its footing as it went, and Williams’ play is built with spaces to breathe in between its honey-on-the-ear monologues—though the bathroom-line patron who noted that it felt a little slow wasn’t entirely wrong. Before Cassarino pulls things into unsettling focus, we’re struck by the calm power of Willa Darian’s Stella. In the film, Stella is put-upon and plain, Stanley’s attention a prize she thinks she can’t afford to lose. Darian is nothing like plain, but her unglamorous outfits and unstylish bearing suggest someone who doesn’t know she could do better. Darian is heartbreaking – not just in her broken-staircase descent after the latest round of bruises, but in the Stockholm-Syndrome joy of the morning after, the cycle of abuse in devastating daylight. And her agony over her sister’s decline wrecks you.
It takes longer to understand the competitively strong work Mastropietro is doing, and at times the intensely presentational nature of her choices make you wonder how close you could bring Blanche down to earth before you lose the essence of the character. But I think what she intends is to lean into Blanche’s artifice, and you can tell in the little reveals she plants in between all that mellifluously unfurling verbiage: a rueful laugh, a break in her carefully crafted countenance. Mastropietro is deeply dialed into the intricacy of how this character is crafted, a vessel for Williams’ word-drunk impulses. But it’s at the end, her hair hanging down in a straight, wet drape, her face suddenly years younger (she looks just like Rachel Weisz, who played Blanche), when all those fireworks give way to choked, fading embers.
Blair Mitchell plays Mitch, the nominal nice guy in the main quartet, who takes Stanley’s verbal abuse as gamely as Stella takes his beatings, and whose valorizing love for his ailing mother edges ever so slightly into Norman Bates territory. Genial and even cute, yet itching with pent-up discomfort, Mitchell’s work is some of the best in the production. While Karl Malden, for example, played the character with an undercurrent of quiet dignity (which usefully counterposed Brando’s animal energy, and was also Malden’s specialty) there’s something darker and earthier about Mitchell’s work. You get the sense, as his courtship of Blanche flakes away into her instability and his toxicity, that Mitch would be a Stanley if he’d only managed to internalize the untoward confidence with which his best friend carries himself.
The rest of the cast is comparably strong. I don’t think it’s too unfair to say that the show’s Black characters feel regretfully marginalized, and while much of that is Williams’ fault, the show has been done with an all-Black cast, on Broadway in 2012. Still, Young makes for a great Eunice, garrulous and incendiary, and she brings out the best in Isaiah Gordon’s less distinct (or present) Steve. Michaela Baker, who if you caught her in Shakespeare Dallas’ Measure for Measure you know can do no wrong, makes herself felt in two fleeting and purely functional roles. The only truly thankless character is Pablo, played gamely by Luis Aleman Alvarez, who not only has to be called a greaseball in most of his interactions but is made to face upstage. However, Alvarez has a small, truly chilling cameo later on.
Michael Ledbetter is charming as two young men on whom Blanche can project her tragic, traumatized sense of safety—such a rare commodity in her life and in the play itself. The best moment of Martin’s staging comes at the coda, with Ledbetter and Baker coming to take Blanche away (no ha-ha in sight), the men and the women divided by a threadbare curtain and so much else. While Stanley calmly yet threateningly presides over yet another poker game, Stella and Blanche have parallel breakdowns in the bedroom, with Eunice nearly as rattled at their side. The divide in power and station between men and women in a society even more patriarchal than ours could not be starker or sadder. As Stella screams after her destroyed sister, her husband cradles her, and his embrace is indistinguishable from imprisonment.
Props must be given to the theatre artists who impactfully contribute to the show’s most uncomfortable parts. The first time that you truly understand how hard a watch this show will be is at Stanley’s first eruption—at a 2:30 AM game night, the women testing his patience in the other room with a radio not long for this world. While Jonah Gutierrez’ fight choreography showed a seam or two, he ably manages the moments when that pervasive sense of danger spills over. And intimacy coordinator Jamie Pringle handles some of the bigger challenges one in her profession might have to confront, and with great care and expertise. We fear for Stella, but never for the actors. While it’s impossible to tell how safe they each felt without asking them directly, the wild passion that connects Stanley and Stella was artfully, and stirringly, communicated. Finally, the secret MVP is sound designer Cameron Potts—the brittle underwater piano motif that represents Blanche’s madness is a stroke of genius.
At times I wished this Streetcar were less faithful, more outside the box, more respectful to its marginalized characters. But WaterTower, producing artistic director Shane Peterman, and director (and former WTT head) Martin have done us a service—showing us the play as it is, and doing a very good job of it to boot. Not only do we have the luxury of sharing a space with a classic, in all its verbal mastery and messy brutality, but it also gives us cause to contemplate how far we haven’t come in this increasingly regressive era.
This Streetcar hurts to look at head-on. But it always did.
WHEN: March 26–April 5, 2025
WHERE: 15650 Addison Rd., Addison TX (WTT Mainstage)
WEB: watertowertheatre.org
