Review: The Citadel’s A Streetcar Named Desire a powerful production

To sit just outside the kitchen of Stella and Stanley Kowalski’s cramped New Orleans apartment is to observe a potent snapshot of humanity. Its love and cruelty, its poetry and desperation.

It makes for a compelling viewpoint, and one not often made available in so seamless and intimate a fashion as with Daryl Cloran’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, running until Oct. 13 in The Citadel’s Shoctor Theatre.

Of course, Cloran is working with Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, with words that move through scenes like melted butter. Still, the director deserves a great deal of credit for the steady way he leads the audience through this up-close examination of the slow but certain disintegration of its central character, an aging southern belle named Blanche DuBois (Lindsey Angell).

“I don’t want reality, I want magic,” says Blanche in a line that encapsulates her struggle to survive amid the ugliness that has marked her life’s path, including the visceral and bloody experience of death, and the loss of the family home.

The story is no doubt familiar to many folks who either studied the play in high school, or witnessed its raging force in the 1951 film version starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Know that while the play is roughly 80 years old and the South it represents has long faded in many respects, the work still packs a wallop.

The story begins as Blanche arrives, bags in hand, outside the home of her sister Stella (played with loving commitment by Heidi Damayo) where she meets the neighbours and takes in the seedy surroundings. At this point, I draw your attention to the set by Brian Dudkiewicz, which is a marvel.

Constructed on two levels connected by a classic New Orleans spiral staircase, each level has its own backstory, evoking the past and present in haunting measure. The second tier of the set is a nightclub called the 4 Aces Lounge, complete with hot pink neon signs, and Cloran has chosen to include a live, three-piece jazz band in the production, fronted by local singer Jameela McNeil (who also plays the mercurial Eunice). Williams offered detailed advice on the use of music in the play, with popular tunes like Ain’t Misbehavin’ and It’s Only a Paper Moon adding dollops of atmosphere in just the right places.

The audience’s first glimpse of Blanche is head-to-toe cream, with gloves. You can almost feel her efforts to avoid being sullied as she meets Stella’s mate, Stanley (Stafford Perry). He is like a fresh piece of sandpaper — well-groomed, with striking abs — that scrapes Blanche’s tender exterior at every opportunity. Yet Perry manages to balance his character’s simmering aggression with his love for and sometimes child-like dependence on his wife. He is a brute; Blanche calls him “bestial” within his hearing. But Perry never overplays the animal card.

Later, Blanche meets a friend of Stanley’s, a bachelor gentleman named Harold Mitchell who cares for his sick mother. Deftly executed by Edmonton’s Sheldon Elter, “Mr. Mitchell” (as Blanche calls him) offers the possibility of a way out as tension mounts amongst family members in the sweltering apartment. That is, until Stanley unleashes his hatred for his sister-in-law in an act of surgical savagery.

Though Williams has crafted a selection of strong characters and the casting is note-perfect, the Shoctor stage belongs to Blanche, who is in virtually every scene. (Even when she’s closeted in the bathroom, she sings, requests extra towels). Blanche is a delicate scrap of lace, but there is also resilience and a determination to retain something beautiful through literature, music and the cache of silky gowns and glittering trinkets she uses as a shield. (Kudos to costume designer Jessica Oostergo; I wanted to run my hands through the feathers and furs in Blanche’s trunk, to feel the weight of their history.)

Angell is extraordinary in the role of this iconic character. As she moves, fluttering like a lost moth through her surroundings, we understand Blanche’s doomed efforts to escape, “hunting for some protection, here and there, in the most unlikely places.”

When, on the last night of previews, I realized that the first act was a full one hour and 40 minutes, I girded myself for the length of that journey. Yet I hardly felt the moments move, so engrossing was the nearly three-hour performance.

The production is a rare opportunity to experience Williams’ tragic prose, and to feel its power resonate confidently across the decades and into the future.

Playwright: Tennessee Williams Director: Daryl Cloran Featuring: Lindsey Angell, Heidi Damayo, Sheldon Elter, Jameela McNeil and Stafford Perry Where: The Citadel Theatre, 9828 101 A Ave. When: Until Oct. 13 Tickets: From $45 at citadeltheatre.com or through the box office at 780-420-1825

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