NOW, THERE’S OH SO MUCH MORE TO DESIRE
Since struggle for power among the classes is one of the main themes in Tennessee Williams’ still-shocking A Streetcar Named Desire, it makes perfect sense that director and co-creator Nick Westrate would choose to update the Pulitzer Prize winner for modern times. But wait til you hear how he did it. Using only four actors inside a warehouse, Westrate strips-down what may be one of the best plays ever written into a completely new experience. The script positively crackles in this visiting production from New York. This is, above all, a celebration of a genius who could write dialogue that is pure poetry, creating vivid characters who have now become iconic.
I witnessed this once-in-a-lifetime event in East L.A., but you can see it in a warehouse in Venice Beach (2100 Zeno Place) from November 1–3, 2024. Sorry, it only plays two weekends before heading back from The Big Easy to The Big Apple.
No longer is schoolteacher, Blanche DuBois, a Southern Belle. Co-creator Lucy Owen eschews that easily startled, crazy-from-the-start Blanche, delivering dialogue as if it were any woman at any time who has just had a shitload of bad luck when she arrives in New Orleans needing the aegis of her sister and brutish brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski. Yes, she needs relief from the loss of her childhood home and all the small-town secrets and gossip, and Stella (Mallory Portnoy) and Stanley (Brad Koed) still have a volatile relationship, and Blanche’s arrival only serves to pour gas on that already existing flame, but Owen arrives without that fragile façade — without refinement or insanity — so there’s no crumbling as she meets her match in the rough-hewn, working-class Stanley: It’s a cockfight.
Even within the tiny chilly airplane hangar in which a theatre-loving crowd gathered for 2 and 1/2 hours on folding metal chairs. we feel the hot, sultry New Orleans summer and the cramped quarters — even when actors in the same scene are dozens of feet away from each other (a tiny side room behind the action is used for a poker party, so we almost feel like we’re eavesdropping). With no sets or props, not a word of dialogue has been changed, yet Williams’ characters could be existing at any place, any time. Occasionally, the actors would sit on a chair in the audience; other times they are outside of the hangar’s large doors. The fourth actor, James Russell, plays Harold Mitchell, a poker-playing friend of Stanley’s who lives with his ailing mother. In this production, it’s not so much that he has never met anyone quite like Blanche — he’s just looking for someone to fill that soon-to-be void in his life. Indeed, all of the actors, especially Portnoy’s Stella, deliver lines so matter-of-factly that the characters become much more relatable than ever.
The fifth performer isn’t human. It’s the extraordinary soundtrack developed to be inconspicuously timed with the action. I swear that one time I heard a streetcar rumbling by, but then it was helicopters. The music (which I MUST get one day) is mostly jazz, played at a rather high level sometimes. Characters even have their own theme songs: “Be My Love”, the 1950 Sammy Cahn/Nicholas Brodszky song from The Toast of New Orleans may have been written for Mario Lanza, but the gentle non-vocal jazz version we hear for scenes between Mitch and Blanche added a pathos to underscore the fact that we are all just looking for someone to love. In this version, the song — in a spooky way — really drives home that Blanche already found and lost the love of her life, a gay man from her youth.
There’s a few avant-garde moments that I found unnecessary (Blanche grabbing her nostrils as if she’s going underwater, for example), but I loved when Blanche makes a move on a young paper-delivery boy, and we only hear his voice in a reverb way. It becomes starkly clear that she’s seeing her erstwhile husband from her teens, something I never noticed before. I just thought she was a trollop.
Listen, a thesis could be written about this stunning revival, but all I can say is thank you to this company which believes in theater down to their core, reminding me why I’m still addicted to this art form.
“Sometimes — there’s God — so quickly.”
photos by trimblenator
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Streetcar Project
played by the LA River in Frogtown Oct 28-30, 2024
then plays Venice Beach, 2100 Zeno Place, Nov1-3
for tickets ($69-$125), visit Streetcar Project