A Streetcar Named Desire

When I was in college I wrote a play about about some college theater students (following the dictum that you should write about what you know) and a few of the characters were involved in a production of A Streetcar Name Desire. This was a joke of sorts on my part, because I had a hard time imagining any group of college-age amateurs taking on the play by Tennessee Williams. Consider the difficulty of tackling the two main characters. One of them is a faded Southern belle on the edge of madness. She's only about thirty, so age isn't a huge issue, but the depths of her spiraling insanity and the way she is crushed during the course of the play require depths that few twenty-year-old girls could fathom. And the other, though technically not difficult to play--a blue-collar ruffian who is almost entirely libido--will forever be identified with one actor. In fact, is there any other character in all of drama history who is linked to one performer more than Stanley Kowalski is with Marlon Brando? How does an actor today approach the scene in which he is called upon to yell "Stella!" at the top of his lungs without flashing back to Brando? His performance is in the DNA of all living actors today.

So I was surprised to see a flier for a production of Williams' great play to be put on by students at Princeton University, and I had to see it (I had never seen it before). I was additionally surprised to find that the actors admirably made the characters their own.

The production was directed by a professional, Tracy Bersley, and for the most part the core of the text is served well. The set, designed by Jeffrey Van Velsor, is terrific, with a great eye to detail as he has constructed the two rooms of the Kowalski flat in New Orleans. The only expressionistic touch is the panoply of naked light bulbs that hang above the action--of course Blanche DuBois hates a naked light bulb, as much as she hates a rude remark. But Van Velsor also includes the bathroom on stage, which makes this production go beyond kitchen-sink realism--it's toilet realism. I believe it's the first time I've ever seen a stage production that has a toilet on view (and the seat is frequently up, as Stanley is a typical man) and characters that use it. Beyond the novelty of the situation, I don't see how this was necessary, but it is sure focused on--during scene changes the brightest light is on the upstage bathroom, as characters slip in and out of costume.

Shannon Lee Clair was the student called on to play Blanche DuBois, and she was sensational. Occasionally she would get lost in some of her longer speeches, but she managed to create a fully realized character (she also resembles Vivien Leigh, but in her role as Scarlett O'Hara). Tyler Crosby played Stanley, and he carefully avoided a Brando impersonation. He was properly cocky and pugnacious, and also found the humor in some of the lines, particularly the sequence on the Napoleonic Code. In the supporting roles, Veronic Siverd was properly domestic as Stella, though she struggled with the accent, while Shawn Fennell struggled gamely with Mitch. Fennell is a very tall fellow, and Clair is petite, so their scenes had an unintentional Mutt and Jeff comedy.

In the spirit of the occasion, I reread the play and then watched the film version from 1951, both of which were pleasures to me because I consider Williams to be America's greatest playwright. When Blanche says "I don't want realism, I want magic!" we can consider this to be Williams speaking through his character (many have mentioned that there's more than a little of Williams in Blanche). His plays were both realistic and magical, and are as heartbreaking as anything that have ever been written. I personally favor The Glass Menagerie, but Streetcar is right behind it, as the power of a woman representing the genteel era of Southern society being crushed by the brutality of the new, post-war American ethnicity is undeniable.

I have the two-disc edition of Streetcar that has some interesting extras, especially a look at the problems of censorship. At first, even though Streetcar won a Pulitzer Prize, it solicited no interest from movie studios because it had plot points that would never pass the Production Code (Blanche's nymphomania, the fact that her husband killed himself because he was a homosexual, and of course her rape by Stanley that pushes over the edge). It's interesting to see how Williams and director Elia Kazan got around these things, which of course seem extraordinarily tame today. In 1993 about four minutes of trimmed scenes were found and put back into the movie, which is now readily available. But one of my favorite exchanges from the play remains absent. Blanche asks Stanley what sign he was born under, and she is told Capricorn. In the play, he then asks her what sign she is. She answers, "Virgo, the Virgin," to which he responds with a derisive "Ha!"