Walnut's "Streetcar Named Desire' (1st review)

My therapist maintains that a woman needs a man she can look up to, and a man needs a woman who looks up to him. In that respect, Stanley and Stella Kowalski seem to have devised a relationship that, for all its tensions, works for them (and also, apparently, for most other denizens of New Orleans's French Quarter): Stanley may be a primitive brute, but he gives Stella "things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that make everything else irrelevant," as she puts it. Stella, for her part, functions as Stanley's enabler, endowing him with unconditional fealty and feeding his masculine ego, notwithstanding his Neanderthal outbursts.

This fragile balance crumbles upon the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois, a delicate woman who survives by artifice and illusion. Although her lineage is French, Blanche has no use for the "noble savage" model celebrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and personified here by Stanley; instead she favors the English concept of civility, defined by such outward manifestations as substantial permanent housing and ample clothing, both of which require sustained intellectual and physical effort. (Blanche spends hours in the bathtub.) "I don't want realism," she insists. "I want magic."

The law of the jungle

To be sure, most of us temper life's harsh realities with self-deception to some degree; and when Blanche refers to "the law of nature— the one that says the lady must entertain the gentleman," she is merely repeating what has long been acknowledged by anyone who studies animals in the jungle.

But Blanche is an extreme example of self-deception, and in any case it's always easier to perceive the faults in others that we overlook in ourselves. Thus Blanche quickly zeroes in on the jungle animal in Stanley— as she points out to Stella, "There's something downright bestial about him"— and Stanley soon returns the compliment by shattering Blanche's ludicrous illusion that she is somehow a higher specimen of human creature than he.

A basket of pretensions

Blanche and Stanley have been going at it for more than 60 years now— long enough to become permanent theatrical fixtures, long enough to be parodied by the likes of Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Mike Nichols and Benny Hill. And for good reason, as the Walnut's riveting revival of A Streetcar Named Desire reminded me: Even at three hours (including two intermissions), even with barely a moment of peace or sanity, Streetcar is such compelling theater that you can't take your eyes off the stage. Given the human capacity for self-delusion, few of us are likely to recognize ourselves in Blanche, Stanley and Stella— but we'll surely recognize other folks we know.

This Walnut revival has served Tennessee Williams especially well. Susan Riley Stevens's hyper-dramatic Blanche is an utterly credible basket of pretensions and desires (even if she's not quite credible as a woman supposedly past her prime). Jeffrey Coon made Stanley something more credibly human than the caricature Marlon Brando original who prowled this very stage at Streetcar's first Broadway tryout in 1947. Sandra Struthers was appropriately mousey as the put-upon Stella.

With whom did Williams identify?

Director Malcolm Black managed a large cast capably (although some of the characters were inevitably obscured from view during the scenes of Stanley and his buddies playing cards). The Walnut's forte— elaborate set design— was once again on display, courtesy of Paul Wonsek, whose movable wall transported the audience back and forth between the Kowalski apartment and the sultry street outside (even if the Walnut itself was freezing through most of the opening night performance).

I used to wonder what impelled Williams to write Streetcar, since he didn't seem to empathize with any of its characters. At this performance I realized that Williams did indeed identify with one character, albeit one who never appears on stage. That would be Blanche's young husband of years earlier, who blew his brains out after Blanche caught him engaging in a homosexual act and denounced him as a "degenerate." Realism has its virtues, Williams seems to say; but so does our ability to gently tolerate each other's illusions and imperfections.



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