Mac Fyfe, Amy Rutherford, and Shakura Dickson in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Photo by Dahlia Katz
“Sometimes, there’s God, so quickly.”
This is one many delicately resonant lines in Tennessee William’s lyrical scorcher, A Streetcar Named Desire. Less ubiquitously tossed around than “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” but circling around the same crucial aspect of the fragile Blanche DuBois (Amy Rutherford)—her desperate fixation on saviours. She always finds them, but they’re ephemeral. The iconic line also conveys my experience of director Weyni Mengesha’s highly textural Soulpepper production—a remount of their 2019 hit. Some moments hit so quickly, with staggering force—hilarious, transcendent or devastating. Like Blanche’s fantasy of gallant and noble rescuers, though, I found the authenticity of this world fleeting and inconsistent.
The story begins with Blanche’s sudden descent upon an apartment in New Orleans’ Latin Quarter. She’s cagey about her reasons for needing to shack up with her sister, Stella (Shakura Dickson) and her brutish, working class husband Stanley Kowalski (Mac Fyfe), a Polish immigrant with deep resentments and an axe to grind. Having lost the family’s Mississippi plantation under dubious circumstances, she’s brought all her creaky Southern pageantry with her. A lot humour and angst comes from her misfit eccentricity as her airs goad Stanley. Secrets about Blanche’s dire situation eventually come to light and tensions mount in the simmering heat.
Casting Stella’s upstairs neighbour and landlord, Eunace (Ordena Stephens-Thompson) as Black feels far from arbitrary. Before Stella arrives home, she lets Blanche into the apartment and the uncomfortable small talk about her fancy plantation feels particularly loaded and discomfiting, especially when Blanche, eager to be left alone, tells her to leave the property she owns. This saturates Blanche’s hauteur with a painful and ugly history both women feel yet don’t address directly.
Lorenzo Savoini’s set, with its backdrop of unrelenting corrugated metal, is a striking feature. The lived-in textures of the Kowalski’s apartment, with its worn down paint and rusted edges, are threadbare yet cozy, with that harsh steel looming as a constant reminder of the story’s ultimate bleakness—a world where pregnant wives stay with their abusive men and romantic dreamers are carted off to institutions.
Social mores have shifted considerably since the play first premiered; actual people, however, the individuals we connect to on an intimate level, have not really changed all that much. Class, race and familial tensions abound; the resentments and frustrations of people scrambling for purchase in a harsh world feel real and relevant.
As written, this was set in the late 1940s; Mengesha updates the era considerably, though it is hard to discern exactly when it takes place. Rachel Forbes’ highly evocative costumes don’t provide clarity here; their disparate aesthetics convey individual personality and remove these characters from any definitive time period—conjuring an effective timelessness that serves Williams’ text well.
An ensemble of jazz musicians have been inserted into the action, providing atmospheric accompaniment to the steamy drama. Appearing from behind a raised segment of corrugated metal and wandering through the theatre aisles and sidelines of the stage, they do provide a bohemian atmosphere that situates us in the specific neighbourhood, but their presence feels slightly contrived.
Despite mostly strong performances and provocative design, so much of the first act felt somewhat alienating, as if the humans and their environments were a spectacle to be observed rather than drawn into. Even the intense animalistic frenzy of the poker games with Stanley and his buddies—Pablo (Sebastian Marziali), Steve (Lindsay Owen Pierre) and Mitch (Gregory Prest)—bursting with primal yelping and leaping feels somehow removed.
By thrilling contrast, the second act, as Blanche develops an intimate attachment to Mitch, is fully absorbing. In many ways, Blanche is exasperating. With keen poetic insights skewering the unkindness she endures, her childlike insistence on pretending her life is a gauzy fairy tale is charming and insufferable in equal measure. As certain indelicate truths about her past come to light, her chances with Mitch are dashed.
Primed with copious amounts of liquor, she retreats further into her world of make believe. It is here that Rutherford’s portrait of this overwrought and insistently whimsical woman becomes a gloriously grotesque and heartbreaking centrepiece. One of my favourite moments occurs between her and a young paperboy (Kaleb Horn) who wanders in from the night as a tempting yet painful reminder of her lost youth. As she gently lusts after him, arousing his own manly ego, we see how utterly trapped in the past she’s become.
Where many productions lead into Stanley’s implied assault of the vulnerable and incapacitated Blanche with a blackout, Mengesha and lighting designer Kimberly Purtell blind the audience with direct, devastating light. It purposefully disorients us, the final scene unfolding in a traumatized stupor. Fyfe is also at his most compelling in the lead up to his attack, though I had problems buying his Stanley for most of the play. His mannerisms and delivery are too self-consciously performative. I could see and hear each acting choice, which diminished both Stanley’s carnal appeal and repugnant cruelty. He’s playing to us too blatantly.
There is a sound that has lodged itself firmly in the back of my head as a persuasive, motivic emblem. To give Blanche a modicum of privacy during her stay in cramped quarters, she stretches a flimsy sheet through the middle of the apartment. Hung from a pipe with rings, the clangour of metal against metal is viscerally jarring—a harsh reminder of the callous reality that threatens the gentle comfort Blanche yearns for.
A Streetcar Named Desire
running June 12 to July 7, 2024
Young Centre for the Performing Arts (50 Tank House Lane)
running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Amy Rutherford in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Photo by Dahlia Katz