A Streetcar Named Desire is a dangerous venture for a theater company. Any revival inevitably competes with the 1951 film version’s definitive central performances, Vivien Leigh’s haunted, birdlike Blanche DuBois and Marlon Brando’s volcanic Stanley Kowalski. Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece also risks becoming a parody of itself, with its overheated dialogue and treacherous sexuality.
Although initially skeptical about the casting choices, I’m pleased to report that both Marin Mazzie and Christopher Innvar carve out effective performances that escape the prototypes, and Julianne Boyd’s production at Barrington Stage is convincing, if rather more leisurely and episodic than the play’s tragic impetus requires.
Mazzie’s background in musicals seems to have helped her create a Blanche who resolutely puts on a show—a tough, spirit-in-adversity exterior with an overlay of coquettish decorum—as she slowly crumbles into despair and confusion. Innvar’s leading-man looks and lighter touch make his Stanley less brutish than Brando’s, with a wily intelligence that doesn’t negate his smack first, yell “Stella!” later approach to marital disagreements. (That anguished cry, so famous that it’s the subject of an annual competition in New Orleans, drew a titter of recognition in the opening-night audience.)
Desire is the street name of the terminus for the trolley that brings Blanche DuBois to her sister Stella’s seedy apartment in the French Quarter. But it’s also, of course, the motivating passion for the four main characters. Blanche, craving safety and love, feels compelled to keep up the Southern-belle image nurtured in her family’s now-ruined Mississippi estate—a pose at odds with the sexual encounters that have gotten her run out of town. Stanley is a creature of instinct and appetite, equally passionate about his sex drive, his cold beers and his need to pee when Blanche’s prolonged toilettes are monopolizing the bathroom.
As Stanley’s wife, Stella, Kim Stauffer convincingly portrays the electric attraction that unites the couple, almost persuading us that it’s worth the insults and bruises she receives. Kevin Carolan is touching as Stanley’s friend Mitch, a homely bachelor who is first fascinated then repelled by Blanche’s breathless sexuality.
Summer is a good time to stage Streetcar. Coming into the theater from the August heat, it’s easy to imagine the sultry New Orleans neighborhood, and Brian Prather’s setting of cast-iron railings and battered shutters adds to the atmosphere. The play’s emotional landscape imitates the weather: steamy tension broken by sudden storms.
Boyd has added some vignettes of street life outside the claustrophobic Kowalski household. Shadowy passersby are seen periodically, including a pantomimed mugging of questionable relevance and a street musician played by Thom Rivera, who also accompanies singer Chavez Ravine in blues numbers between the scenes. These atmospheric interludes, however, are awkwardly staged and tend to interrupt the dramatic momentum.
Ghost story
I wasn’t surprised to learn, in the Streetcar program, that Tennessee Williams was inspired to write plays by seeing a performance of Ghosts. Williams is not often connected with Henrik Ibsen, the critic of 19th-century social structures and strictures. But both playwrights were absorbed by the ruinous consequences of deception and self-deception. The new adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Berkshire Theatre Festival turns an intense light on those themes.
In a career in which Ibsen’s plays regularly scandalized proper society, Ghosts was the most scandalous. Its subject matter is a parade of topics unheard of in the straitlaced theater of his time: adultery, venereal disease, spousal abuse, unmarried sex and above all, the religious hypocrisy that condemns “fallen women” but smiles at male peccadilloes.
Without updating Ibsen, director Anders Cato and his co-translator James Leverett have loosened the language and tightened the script. Lee Savage’s stark set is backed by a pair of high, white walls flanking glass panels that run with rainwater. In a couple of rather perfunctory moments, “ghosts” from the past are briefly personified, seen spectrally behind the windows.
If Streetcars animating emotion is desire, repressed and misdirected, Ghosts’ is repressed and misdirected anger. Helene Alving, widow of a philandering drunkard, has spent her life keeping up the fiction that he was a pillar of society. Her son, Osvald, an artist who has just returned home from bohemian Paris, hides the fear of his own mortality behind sardonic insolence. Pastor Manders rails against loose morals and “new ideas” while denying his own urges and ethical failings. Jacob Engstrand, a carpenter whose ambitions are constrained by class, manipulates his social superiors for his own ends. His daughter, Regina, chafes at her position as a maid in the Alving household and her bleak alternative prospects.
The play’s ghosts are the crimes and lies that haunt the characters, especially the “sins of the fathers” visited on their children. Though the word “syphilis” is never spoken, it’s at the heart of several terrible secrets. The disease’s inexorable progress of physical and mental degeneration is also a metaphor for the wages of deceit, when propriety silences the truth and shame suppresses “the joy of living.”
Cato has formed his five actors into an impressive ensemble in which each is memorably individual. As Mrs. Alving, Mia Dillon is every inch a lady, steely and ramrod-straight even as she reveals painful truths. Randy Harrison is just the opposite as Osvald, disheveled and impudent, his defining pose a surly smile. David Adkins is the model of conventional rectitude as Manders, precisely enunciating every self-righteous platitude. Tara Franklin is an almost scarily resentful Regina, a porcelain beauty whose impassivity masks her hopelessness. Jonathan Epstein, in a vigorous performance, supplies some comic relief as the wily, talkative Engstrand, a man with a deformed foot and a practical approach to ethics that mocks the hypocrisy of middle-class morality.
Summer theater is conventionally associated with easygoing entertainments, but neither of these plays is easy to watch. And though the stifling conventions they mirror no longer haunt us in the same way, both of these classics remind us that some uncomfortable truths of the past are still relevant, and do so with timeless artistry.
Ghosts: Through Aug. 29, Berkshire Theatre Festival, East St., Stockbridge, (413) 298-5576, berkshiretheatre.org.
A Streetcar Named Desire: Through Aug. 29, Barrington Stage Company, 30 Union St., Pittsfield, (413) 236-8888, barringtonstageco.org.