EVEN MORE TO DESIRE

A stripped-down Streetcar that proves
Tennessee Williams needs no scenery.

Since struggle for power among the classes is one of the central themes in Tennessee Williams’ still-shocking A Streetcar Named Desire, it makes perfect sense that director and co-creator Nick Westrate would strip the Pulitzer Prize winner down to its rawest essentials. But the way he does it—using just four actors, no sets, no props, and unconventional spaces—is what turns this Streetcar into something bracingly new.

James Russell and Heather LindLucy Owen and Brad Koed

Created by Westrate and Lucy Owen under the banner of The Streetcar Project, this touring production has played nontraditional venues—churches, warehouses, airplane hangars—and will soon appear in an abandoned subway station in Washington, D.C. At A.C.T.’s Tony Rembe Theatre through February 1, Westrate reimagines Williams’ classic for the first time at an actual theatre, with patrons seated in the house and on the stage, which has been stripped to bare walls. Actors move freely through the unadorned theatre, sometimes sitting among the audience, sometimes shouting lines across great distances (the infamous “Stella” screamed by Stanley is particularly effective).

Heather Lind and Brad Koed

The effect takes a moment to adjust to—neck craning is occasionally required—but it ultimately reinforces the emotional exposure baked into the play. Startlingly, this production also reinforces the claustrophobia of the tiny New Orleans flat where the Kowalski’s live. The result is a version of Streetcar that proves how little the play actually needs beyond language, bodies, and tension. Williams’ dialogue crackles, his characters feel startlingly contemporary, and the lack of theatrical ornamentation only sharpens the blows.

Brad Koed and James RussellLucy Owen and Heather Lind

Casting, of course, is everything in Streetcar, and this quartet delivers. Lucy Owen’s Blanche DuBois is a particularly bold reimagining. Gone is the fluttery, fragile Southern belle telegraphing madness from her first entrance. Instead, Owen presents the high-strung and vulnerable old maid former school teacher who’s barely hanging on to reality as a woman who has simply endured far too much bad luck and loss. Owen, with a look of quiet desperation on her face has us rooting for her and pitying her at the same time.  She’s torn between illusion versus reality and acts with desire to cover up her loneliness. She arrives in New Orleans without affectation or hysteria, making her collision with Stanley Kowalski feel less like inevitability and more like combat. It’s a cockfight.

James Russell and Lucy OwenLucy Owen

Brad Koed’s Stanley is rough-hewn, perceptive, and unrelenting—street-smart enough to see through Blanche’s gentility immediately, and cruel enough to enjoy dismantling it. His Stanley wears masculinity like armor, and Koed’s performance makes clear that dominance is not merely Stanley’s nature but his language; his no-nonsense existence does not suffer fools gladly. Heather Lind’s Stella grounds the production beautifully, delivering her lines with such matter-of-fact calm that her compromises feel painfully recognizable rather than tragic abstractions. James Russell plays Harold Mitchell—Mitch—Stanley’s poker-playing friend who lives with his ailing mother. In this version, Mitch’s connection to Blanche feels less like romantic novelty than mutual need: two damaged people grasping for stability where they can find it.

Lucy Owen

The fifth performer here isn’t human. It’s the meticulously timed soundscape—mostly jazz—that pulses beneath the action. At one point, a streetcar seems to rumble past; at another, helicopters hover ominously. Characters even acquire their own musical signatures. A gentle instrumental version of “Be My Love” (the 1950 Sammy Cahn/Nicholas Brodszky song) underscores scenes between Mitch and Blanche, quietly reinforcing the haunting truth that Blanche already found—and lost—the love of her life years ago.

Heather Lind and Lucy Owen

A few avant-garde flourishes are revelatory. A scene involving Blanche and a young paper-delivery boy—heard but not seen—suddenly clarifies her fixation on her long-dead husband in a way I’d never noticed before. What once read as tawdry becomes devastating.

Listen, a thesis could be written about this Streetcar. But what matters most is that The Streetcar Project believes in theatre at its most elemental—actors, text, sound, and audience sharing air and risk. This production doesn’t just revisit Williams’ masterpiece; it reminds us why it still hurts.

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photos by Kevin Berne

A Streetcar Named Desire
The Streetcar Project
in San Francisco at A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theatre
ends on February 1, 2026
two hours and fifty minutes, one intermission
then plays Washington, D.C. in the Dupont Underground April 20-May 4, 2026
for future dates and cities, visit Streetcar Project

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