A Streetcar Named Desire: a harrowing journey of empathy
9 Oct 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!

A Streetcar Named Desire is more quoted, parodied and referenced than it is presented on stage. It is impossible to attend a production without some preconceptions that involve Marlon Brando, The Simpsons, Bloolips, and/or Tennesse Williams' life and legacy. Soulpepper's artistic director and the director of this A Streetcar Named Desire, Weyni Mengesha, wisely tackle the classic with reverence and energy. It is electrifying with great cascades of Williams' gorgeous poetry framed in an overbearing institutional metal that throbs with intrusions of life and colour. A simple and effective metaphor that enhances some extraordinary performances honed to the bone of human existence.

The basic plot should be familiar to all, but it is amazing how much tension this production creates. There are few theatrical embellishments, the focus is on the actors and the words, but when they occur they are explosive without calling attention to themselves. Except for one. And it is a necessary and brutally shocking one.

Amy Rutherford (A Beautiful View, Boblo) is the fragile Blanche DuBois and from her first entrance it is obvious that she is not as she presents herself. If Rutherford were not so charismatic and comedically tragic, Blanche would play as a snob in alcoholic denial come to disrupt a happy home. She sorely tests the patience of her hosts, the entire neighbourhood, but she also treats them and us to wonderful flights of fancy and fantasy. 

Williams gives Blanche/Rutherford magnificent words to work with. The monologue where Blanche/Rutherford talks of her marriage is, while cringingly coy by today's standards, is stunning and heartbreaking. The sound effects, subtle but intrusive, weren't necessary, the power of Rutherford's voice and demeanour is shattering enough, but it is needed for a later reference that is even more shattering. Rutherford riding and flying on Williams' text is reason enough to see this Streetcar.

Mac Fyfe (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream) has the sexual magnetism to embody Stanley Kowalski, but also imbues the man Blanche calls "a brute" with a vulnerability and intelligence frustrated by his station in life. He appears to initially really want to befriend Blanche and is stymied by her airs and putdowns. The electric heat between Fyfe and Leah Doz as Stella Kowalski not only contrasts with Blanche's calculating approach to sexuality, it upends the assumptions of gender power with the cry of "Stella!" becoming a broken plea of need.

Doz has a tricky role as it is mostly reactive, an attempt to reconcile her desire for Stanley with her need to protect what is left of her sister. This Stella is mostly blissful and determined to keep the peace, until her brutal betrayal and subsequent grief when Doz gets to explode. And that is the problematic part of Streetcar in 2019. While we understand the characters and their motivations clearly, it is unclear why we are embarking on this harrowing journey of empathy. The production is set in a vaguely contemporary, vaguely 1950s, New Orleans. Blanche has clearly arrived from a genteel past that exists only in her head, and she is the only one who maintains a drifting southern accent.

As a metaphor it works and it only pulled me out of my absorption when the characters used an anachronistic phone that fit neither period. But we are still left with the problem of Streetcar chronicling the destruction of a woman with obvious mental health issues. And that is before factoring in Williams' homophobic self-loathing, the disturbing #MeToo connotations (amplified by this being Soulpepper), and the, again from Williams but amplified by Fyfe, dangerous and arousing appeal of a bad boy man in a wifebeater.

It is as if Williams and the cast and crew are wrestling with so many issues that the only conceivable result is to be carted off to an asylum. Nowhere is this more evident than in Blanche's attempted seduction of Mitch. Or is that Mitch's attempted seduction of Blanche? It is initially odd to see Gregory Prest (Little Menace, Rose, Bed and Breakfast, La Bete) playing milquetoast, and much of his time on stage is spent superficially passive but actually simmering. His tragedy is as great as Blanche's but far less dramatic or flamboyant and all the more disturbing for it.

It is always agonizing to see anyone punished for their sexuality, and Blanche's fate is worse because this Streetcar celebrates sexuality not only with Stanley and Stellas' bond, but with the New Orleans setting. Akosua Amo-Adem, Sebastian Marziali (Blood Weddings, BoylesqueTO), SATE (Rumours), Lindsay Owen Pierre (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), Oliver Dennis (Rose, La Bete, Animal Farm) and Kaleb Horn, play multiple roles, dramatic and musical. Collectively they envelop us in a seething, hot and sexy New Orleans until we are again focussed on the confines of the apartment where the drama occurs. Blanche sees the music and revelry as noise, until she too is swallowed up in it, contributes to it, in the most horrible way. 

A Streetcar Named Desire has, as well as an incredibly evocative title and opening line, one of the best concluding lines ever written, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." If there had been a blackout following that utterance of Blanche's, this Streetcar would have been devastating and moving. That her hellish interpretation of New Orleans and her personal agony - as the fantasies collapse around her in the same way that the audience's theatrical distance and the fourth wall are shattered - stretches on, makes this Streetcar almost traumatizing. Erasing all previous versions and becoming indelible. Magic.