Injecting a fresh vision into a theatrical warhorse is always a risky endeavor, both artistically and commercially. Some audiences want what they’ve seen before, and if the source material is as perfect as “A Streetcar Named Desire,” there’s an engrained tendency to just do it straight, leave well enough alone, and take the rapturous applause.
But for theatergoers who prefer the adventurous and the reimagined, New City Players’ “Streetcar,” currently churning and rumbling and haunting the Island City Stage space in Wilton Manors, shirks convention from the get-go, and only grows weirder. Despite its necessary intermission, this “Streetcar,” under novel direction from Stuart Meltzer, feels like an unbroken, two-hour-and-45-minute fever dream from the infected brain of Blanche DuBois, where the truth is as slippery to grasp onto as a New Orleans speckled trout. Tennessee Williams’ hothouse drama reaches such a pinnacle of psychological horror that we become as adrift as Blanche, questioning how much of what we’re seeing is really happening.
Right away, the production adopts a bespoke approach to design that suggests a dreamlike, unfinished quality. There is no proper “set” so much as an assembly of props (Jameelah Bailey is credited for both). A couple of chairs are upturned before the action begins, as if Stanley Kowalski has already made one of his tornadic sweeps of the apartment. There is no “kitchen” or “living room,” per se, just props on shelving units on the floor. There is no physical barrier, and almost no distinction, between the “outside” and “inside” of the Kowalskis’ tenement, just as a chair stands in for the dressing screen that supposedly affords Blanche DuBois a modicum of privacy. The effect is one of minimalism and transience—everything is makeshift, a major contrast from the world of faded opulence that Blanche has purportedly departed.
I’ll mostly dispense with plot for a play this established, but suffice it to say that Blanche (Elizabeth Price), a former schoolteacher from Mississippi who was supposedly let go from her job for “nerves,” has arrived for a summer stay with her pregnant younger sister Stella (Casey Sacco) and Stella’s brutish, abusive husband Stanley (Tim Mark Davis). She informs Stella that she has lost their family country home to creditors, and has nowhere else to turn. What at first seems like a fish-out-of-water tale of an imperious southern belle forced by fate or circumstance to live among the riffraff grows in depth and complexity as Stanley, in between his drunken, violent carousing, uncovers information that puts Blanche’s tidy narrative into question.
For a play that is ultimately suffused with death, Meltzer’s direction is full of life, even if the noises suggest a questionable provenance. The Kowalski apartment sits near the train tracks, and the sounds of barreling locomotives punctuate the action, their bells subdividing scenes like rounds in a boxing match—an apt metaphor for Williams’ linguistic rope-a-dopes. (Ernesto K. Gonzalez is responsible for the extraordinary and transportive sound design.) There is much to indicate a teeming city just outside the apartment’s walls: Jazz music wafts in and out of the soundscape; a flower vendor hawks his wares just offstage. The excellent supporting players, Sheena O. Murray and Inez Barlatier among them, function as a Greek chorus in interstitial scenes, singing finger-snapping standards and maintaining the play’s sense of constant, if illusory, movement.
Eventually, though, in a stroke of genius that feels unique to this production, the sounds that only exist in Blanche’s corroded mind—a nightmarish polka being the most chilling example—become indistinguishable from those in the real world, and by this time we’ve taken a tumble down the rabbit hole of memory and madness, complete with bracingly effective jump scares straight out of horror cinema.
Because this entire production feels like it could be a hallucination from Blanche, Elizabeth Price’s acting can make or break the show; not surprisingly, she is sensational. Both insecure and haughty, self-deprecating and bewitching, manipulative and fragile, her Blanche is the human equivalent of a Russian nesting doll, each layer a different personality curated to the person she’s addressing. There’s something meta about this performance, with its roles within roles, up until her ultimate, and terrifying, unraveling.
Price is complemented by excellent work from Sacco, playing Stella as a woman carrying not just a child but the burdens of everyone around her, and Davis, who portrays Stanley as a tetchy, wild-eyed greaser. Davis, distancing himself from Marlon Brando’s hard-to-shake embodiment of the part, conveys Stanley’s volcanic temper as a kind of O.B.E. or psychic break—fugue state of mind that, like Blanche’s, is diseased. It’s to Davis’ credit that Stanley’s signature call for Stella to return after he has beaten her is delivered with an anguish and desperation that transcends the familiarity of the scene. When Stella heeds his calls, she does so by walking atop a row of chairs, almost gliding, as a forgiving angel in white—a brilliant surrealist touch from Meltzer and his cast.
What remains piercingly clear in this visionary production is that everyone, from Blanche and Stella to Stanley and Blanche’s potential beau Harold (a moving Jesus Reyna), is a tragic character doomed for oblivion. Blanche’s climactic removal is like the surgical excision of one cancer cell in an already metastasized body. Like the jazz music that wails during Stanley’s implied rape of Blanche, this is a dissonant production for dissonant times.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” runs through Aug. 4 at Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Highway, Wilton Manors. Tickets cost $25-$40. Call 954/376-6114 or visit newcityplayers.org.
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