Tennessee Williams’ likely most well-known and Pulitzer Prize winning play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947 and ever since then has seduced audiences both here and globally. It has generated numerous revivals and spawned a somewhat sanitized film version in 1951. The stage version launched the careers of both Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando and some of the acting world’s most admired and prestigious actors have appeared in its many iterations since then including big names like Geraldine Page, Glenn Close, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin, John C. Reilly, and James Gandalfini.
It is here brought to Playcrafters Barn Theatre in a unique staging by director Mike Schulz. It is unique in the sense that Schulz has no set, there is only minimal furniture, minimal props, and the cast is mostly seated in the darkened proscenium area with the action largely taking place on the thrust stage. Accordingly, the audience is challenged to be its own set builder and prop master. The result is a stunning production focusing on the action and those missing elements simply don’t matter.
Briefly, the plot revolves around Southern Belle Blanche DuBois, a disgraced and ostracized former schoolteacher who has lost to creditors her ancestral plantation in Laurel, Mississippi. She is forced to move into the seedy New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella and husband Stanley. Stanley is crude and rough and Blanche cannot understand her sister’s attraction to him. The genteel Blanche has lost her home, lost her youthful beauty and, to an extent, lost her sanity resulting from overriding guilt concerning the circumstances leading to the suicide of her young husband many years earlier. As her past begins to catch up with her and she desperately seeks refuge in Stanley’s somewhat awkward friend, Mitch, her downward spiral accelerates and deepens.
Taking on the iconic role of Blanche is Kate Farence. She convincingly conveys Blanche’s fragility as she teeters along the tightrope of her masquerade ultimately falling into the abyss of her madness. Cole McFarren’s machismo as Stanley is visceral and Leslie Day’s Stella is the grounded counter balance to Blanche’s phantasm. I have always gravitated to characters like Mitch and Jeremy Mahr imbues him with endearing shyness until Blanche’s checkered past brings out another side of him.
Don’t pass up the chance to take in this superb production of a truly modern American classic. And don’t be put off by street construction going on outside the entry to the Barn. Follow the signage and you’ll be just fine.
A Streetcar Named Desire continues at Playcrafters Barn Theatre, 4950 – 35th Avenue in Moline, Friday and Saturday, September 20 and 21 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, September 22 at 3:00 p.m.
I’m Chris Hicks…break a leg.