A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Writers’ Theatre
Yet it also allows for resonances I’ve never encountered before in Tennessee Williams’s 1947 masterpiece. In Cromer’s version, the famous tale of Blanche DuBois’ sojourn with her sister, Stella, and Stella’s mechanic husband, Stanley Kowalski, becomes nothing less than a metaphor for squabbling America, awash in resentments and engaged in a death match over who gets to stay in Elysian Fields—which is not just the name of the rundown New Orleans street where the Kowalskis live but also, in Greek mythology, the ultimate destination of heroes.
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Most critical analysis of Streetcar has faded southern belle Blanche—who claims she “never was hard or self-sufficient enough”—getting crushed like a butterfly by crude, sensual Stanley. But it’s possible to feel enormous sympathy for Natasha Lowe’s embattled Blanche and still recognize that she’s a gigantic, self-absorbed pain in the ass, with prejudices spectacularly unsuited to the steamy, polyglot world of the French Quarter, where Stanley (or, as Blanche calls him, “the Polack”) plays poker with a Latino coworker and the neighbors joke about the “meat” he brings home to Stella.
Real-life couple Matt Hawkins and Stacy Stoltz play Stanley and Stella like horndog teenagers in the first throes of passion. Hawkins’s Stanley is a young man who’s still figuring out his place in the world. Nowhere near as self-assured as Brando, he’s almost naive enough to get the wool pulled over his eyes by Blanche’s flirtatious affectations. The choice doesn’t make Stanley’s “deliberate cruelty” any more forgivable, but it does make the battle royal between him and Blanche more equal. Stanley derides Blanche for not having a “goddamn thing but imagination,” but he, too, flirts with the easy allure of magical thinking. At the end of the play, when Blanche’s defeat is assured, he boasts, “To hold front position in this rat race you’ve got to believe you are lucky.” That’s the kind of hubris that keeps America’s financial titans humming.
