“When A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on December 3, 1947, Tennessee Williams was essentially known to the public for one other play, The Glass Menagerie, which had ended a 561-performance run at New York’s Playhouse Theater just 16 months earlier. The elegiac tone and coming-of-age crises of The Glass Menagerie did not prepare theatergoers for the searing adult drama of A Streetcar Named Desire, with its references to unspeakable aspects of sexuality. Indeed, one reviewer called it the product of an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind,” and another found it “not a play for the squeamish.” And yet, it was recognized as “an enormous advance over that minor-key and too wet-eyed work, The Glass Menagerie.” It fulfilled the promise of the earlier work and catapulted Williams to the front rank of American dramatists. A Streetcar Named Desire ran for 855 performances and became the first play ever to win all three major awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.”
–From Felicia Hardison Londré’s essay, “A streetcar running fifty years”
The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams

By Tennessee Williams, Directed by Bonnie J. Monte.

Ticketing and Show Information

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's Main Stage — the intimate F.M. Kirby Shakepeare Theatre — is located at 36 Madison Avenue at Lancaster Road, on the campus of Drew University in Madison.

Review
A Streetcar Named Desire
Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey/Drew University
Sept 19, 2008
VanLoan
vanloan@nyconstage

"I don't want reality. I want magic" a hysterical Blanche screams as Stanley rips down the paper Chinese lanterns she has decorated the squalid apartment with. The line could be read as a synopsis of the entire Tennessee Williams' canon. Sixty years after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Williams' masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire still has the raw primal power that shakes the foundations of the well made "realistic" play.

Looking for magic was Williams' lifelong quest as a dramatist. Trying to escape the memory of his beloved sister Rose being placed in a mental institution (and later partially lobotomized), trying to find love as a homosexual when the word was not even mentioned in polite society, Williams pored himself into his craft as a playwright with an all consuming passion. This sensitivity and compassion enabled him to write some of the best female characters in mid-century American drama. Of these, Blanche du Bois is his crowning achievement.

Streetcar opens with an exhausted Blanche arriving at her sister Stella's cramped New Orleans flat in the French Quarter looking for "some little place to rest my chapeau". In reality, she has been driven by shame, alcoholism and destitution from the family's genteel but decaying homestead Belle Rive. Stella (secretly pregnant) long ago fled the manor to marry ex-serviceman Stanley Kowalski. Stanley brutish, crude, at times homicidally violent yet possessing an all consuming sexual prowess provided Stella with the "magic" she needed to escape with. The 'primal' Stanley and the 'refined' Blanche prove to be combustible the minute they lay eyes on each other. Yet, despite Blanche's unrelenting criticisms of her sister's lifestyle and Stanley himself ("He's common, he acts like an animal, subhuman") and vice versa ("little Miss Hoity-toity" he sneers), they are drawn to each other like a moth to a flame. That this inevitable clash is fairly evident from the onset does nothing to take away from its fascination.

The play rises or falls on the strength of these two performances. We are not disappointed in Bonnie J. Monte's production. Her direction is clear-cut; servicing the work without any flashy gimmickry. The three hour work moves along at a rapid pace which at times proves to be a tad detrimental (we tend to get caught up in Stanley's rhythms rather than Blanche's). But Laila Robins is extraordinary as Blanche with Gregory Derelian is a close second as Stanley. Both bring subtle nuances to their performances to characters that in the past have become somewhat stock. Ms. Robins has always possessed a regal, aloof quality which at times can work against her (as in the recent Antony and Cleopatra). Here she strikes the right balance; her Southern aristocratic roots slowly disintegrate (initially caused by the tragic death of her young 'sensitive' husband) into a pool of neurotic desperation. Her painful breakdown is agonizing to watch. Derelian plays Stanley with a bit more intelligence than usual (albeit a gutturally innate one). It allows him to be more acutely aware of the class warfare at stake here. Yet, Derelian never sacrifices Stanley's vulgar childishness either. Rounding out the foursome, Nisi Sturgis' Stella is the perfect foil for both her sister and her husband knowing instinctively when to mother each of them. Robert Clohessy's Mitch conveys a fury mixed with poignancy when he finally acknowledges Blanche's background. But the ''magic'' is found in Blanche and Stanley's dance of death. Robins and Derelian make an enthralling, macabre couple.

...end