It’s a pleasure to sit in the company of such a thematically, artistically, and emotionally large and ambitious work of art. Director Chris Lam’s mounting of A Streetcar Named Desire for the Ensemble Theatre Company isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly rich enough to warrant your time.
If you’re not familiar with the Tennessee Williams classic, here’s an outline. Having lost Belle Reve, the family’s plantation mansion in Mississippi, Blanche DuBois shows up, impoverished and unravelling, at the tiny New Orleans flat her sister Stella shares with her husband Stanley Kowalski, a former Master Sergeant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and current factory parts salesman. From this starting point, the play explores the relationship between Eros and Thanatos (life, including sexual vivacity, and death) — in the context of gender, notably the masculine abuse and suppression of the feminine, broadly speaking, and, more specifically, the physical and emotional violence inflicted on female characters by the males, and the entrapped complicity of those women.
Let me get my biggest criticism out of the way right off the top: Lam has miscast Terrell Clarricoates as Stanley. It’s the guy’s first stage gig, for God’s sake: Lam’s choice is like casting somebody as Hamlet on their first time out. The result is not a complete wash: you can hear Clarricoates, he’s not embarrassed to be onstage, and he makes basic sense of the lines. But Stanley is a magnificent creation, and you don’t begin to do the character justice by making basic sense of the lines. Clarricoates is trained in acting for film and TV, which requires a more restrained approach; lacking the requisite power and complexity, his performance here is flat. After the first few minutes on opening night, he didn’t even bother with the accent.
Brynna Drummond’s portrait of Stella, on the other hand, is a revelation. Although Drummond is too young for the play’s backstory to make literal sense, her youth and the youthfulness with which she infuses her interpretation resonate. Drummond’s Stella is a very young woman drunk on love — notably love spiked with a heavy dose of hot, hot sex. She giggles away Blanche’s concerns, insisting that, when Stanley assaulted her, “He didn’t know what he was doing” and that he was “as sweet as a lamb” when he apologized later. But there’s a steely side to this Stella as well that comes out, forcefully, when she defends her sister.
I bought this Stella — one hundred percent — as a human being.
I was also mightily persuaded by Connor Riopel’s Mitch. A friend of Stanley’s, the character is presented in the play as Blanche’s last chance at marriage and mental stability. Mitch is often interpreted as a good-hearted, vulnerable, and physically unattractive doofus — Karl Malden played him in the 1951 film — but Riopel, who is young and handsome, brings enough intelligence and committed compassion to the role that I couldn’t help but agree with Blanche’s assessment of Mitch’s superior sensibilities. And I didn’t fear for Mitch as I sometimes do because, in the dynamics of this production, Blanche’s assessment doesn’t feel like a condescending ploy in a predatory plot.
I appreciate the freshness and emotional thoroughness of Riopel’s take. As with Drummond’s Stella, I completely believed in this guy.
Blanche: the character is a monster of a role, a mountain to climb — all the clichés about acting challenges — and, in this production, Cat Smith proves herself up to the task. Trapped in a sexist paradigm that’s rigged against her, Blanche nonetheless accepts its terms, believing it’s her role as a woman to entertain men, and trying to instrumentalize her sexuality to gain agency, or at least win security, while simultaneously appearing chaste, which she is not. The systematic distortion of female sexuality is a huge part of what A Streetcar Named Desire is about. Smith gets all that: flirting, lying, cowering, boozing, trying to tell the truth but more dedicated to illusion, her Stella becomes an ouroboros, a snake that eats its own tail.
There are some odd production choices. Rick Colhoun’s sound design leans towards cliché: “Summertime”; Really? Starlynn Chen’s costume design slams periods together: Blanche’s perfect, late-forties traveling suit bumps up against Stella’s contemporary denim shorts and mini-dress. If the intention is to comment on the timeless nature of the story, fair enough, but there’s no matching sensibility in Emily Dotson’s set.
Speaking of timelessness, our own period is drinking thirstily from the poisoned cup of masculinism. Sexism and homophobia, which is a variant of sexism and a forceful driver in A Streetcar Named Desire, are reimposing themselves.
Culturally, we may always need this play. Fortunately, it will always be a great and moving work of art.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Chris Lam. An Ensemble Theatre production running in rep at the Jericho Arts Centre until July 18. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: Detail of the poster.
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