STAGE WEST: Backyard Renaissance's "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Jessica John and Francis Gercke in "A Streetcar Named Desire."                              Photo by Daren Scott

            In one of many exigent moments in “A Streetcar Named Desire” the spiraling Blanche Dubois gasps “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”
            Backyard Renaissance Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ greatest work has both. 
            Under the bold direction of Rob Lutfy, Backyard has re-imagined a “Streetcar” that takes place simultaneously in 1947 (its original setting) and today. Not a snap proposition for a play or a story rooted in the steamy Deep South of nearly 80 years ago. Though remember that New Orleans, a city of charms and haunts, feels ever alive in both present and past.
            Contemporizing “Streetcar” as is done at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown is achieved on a practical level by having the characters in modern dress and having up-to-date phones, though it’s also about manifesting a universal sensibility: the Stanley (Francis Gercke) and Stella (Megan Carmitchel) who survive on grit and thrive on lust could be your own downstairs neighbors in a low-rent apartment; the boys’ boozy and boisterous poker nights are as close as the walls you share with whomever; the delusional and breakable Blanche Dubois (Jessica John) is your unwelcome but loved-just-the-same relation from another world than your own, misplaced and out of place.
            Williams himself must have recognized that his play would not be stuck in time. Yes, Blanche’s musings and entreaties, both pre- and post-breakdown, are florid and sometimes mannered but she is trapped in fraught relationships and only her breathy dramatizing can navigate them. Has no one a friend or lover or family member who relies on such drama when cornered?
            The longer you immerse yourself in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in particular this telling from Backyard, the less conscious you are of 1947 and the more you’re in the now. By the time the marathon production (more than three hours’ long) nears its violent climax and crushing denouement, time has stopped.
            And what of the magic the genteel Blanche begged for? It’s here, and for her profoundly unsettling: The ghost-in-person of the young man she loved and wed (William Huffaker) – her handsome beau, not yet the betrayer or he who put a gun in his mouth. Those cracks of thunder over Elysian Fields that sound like gunshots. The dark and faceless figure of La Llorona, hawking in whispered tones “Des fleurs pour les morts.”
            You could make a case that these staging choices are unnecessary, that by this juncture in the story the deterioration of her mind is sufficiently expressed in Blanche’s movement and words, in the presence of torment in her eyes. All this Jessica John, a remarkable actor who keeps topping herself performance after performance at Backyard Renaissance, brings to the fore.
            But these are choices of style from director Lutfy, as are having Faith Carrion singing from the second floor balcony an eerie “House of the Rising Sun, ” and transitional recorded music (maybe a little loud) in which a sultry sax sounds punishing. We expect, given where we are, a streetcar itself to come bursting through a wall, flattening everything and everyone in its way. Sound designers Evan Eason and Steven Leffue are up to the task.
            Yi-Chien Lee’s scenic design, reminiscent of the two-level set she crafted for Backyard’s “August: Osage County” in 2023, reflects the spare, downtrodden Kowalski flat, with no identifiable nod to any New Orleans motif. There’s a simple table for poker games, a door to a bathroom from which steam escapes  in foggy waves, a cot for unwanted Blanche to sleep on that an Army surplus store would reject. Upstairs the Hubbels, Eunice and Steve (Dianne Yvette and Layth Haddad) tromp around, making their own domestic noise to mirror that below.
            Whether the claustrophobia resides in these environs or in Blanche’s mind, or both, is worth a ponder.
            “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a physically and emotionally taxing undertaking for a cast – in the case of Blanche, the play is dense with language (Williams’ singular rhythm and rich allusions); for everyone “Streetcar” bobs and weaves and explodes with such physicality as to be jarring, even when you know what has to be coming.
            No one runs the gauntlet more exhaustively than John, Blanche being the center of this psycho-sexually charged tale. Her portrayal is of a Blanche who, at the outset, is delicate and evasive about her personal history but reasonably appalled by the crudeness of Stanley Kowalski and what she regards as the animalistic hold he has on her dear sister. John makes her more than the usual “faded Southern belle” of so many “Streetcars.” Sympathy for her doesn’t come right away – her arch disapproval is without understanding or any tolerance. And she is an interloper.
            But as Blanche’s residency with the Kowalski’s goes (for her) frighteningly on, she becomes less the judger and, in John’s interpretation, more a frazzled woman looking for light in the dark void. Who can begrudge her a friendship, and one that could promise more, with the awkward “Mitch” (MJ Sieber), the one civil member of Stanley’s raucous card games?
            The struggle for any actor taking on Blanche Dubois has to be presenting her as more than merely a victim of her own pretensions, deceptions and mental demons. To an extent this is the character as written, though John’s Blanche becomes not just a pitiful figure or the inevitable train wreck but a broken soul, perhaps unmendable. It’s a moving performance, admirable for its stamina and surrender to emotional release.
            Lutfy has called the play Blanche’s and Stanley’s fight for control and possession of Stella, and as this production reminds us she is a character of paramount importance to the play. I may be off, but I’m thinking she has more stage time than Stanley does, and it’s the Stella character that is most torn apart by Blanche’s anguish and vulnerability.
            Carmitchel’s layered Stella is one who will fight fiercely for her passionate if arguably abusive marriage but just as fiercely to protect her sister from all harms. The ambiguities of Williams’ character are no deterrent to a performance that is vital and deep-seated.
            Every time I see a production of “Streetcar” and then write about it I acknowledge that there is no Stanley Kowalski and there never will be one who is not Marlon Brando. If there’s an antagonist in American theater more associated with an actor who portrayed them that, name him, or her, because I couldn’t tell you.
            Lutfy has sought to defy archetypes and Francis Gercke does not attempt to mimic Brando or be anything like him in this modernized, to some degree against-the-grain, “Streetcar.” He’s simmering and predatory, aptly so, but not nearly as combustible. This Stanley’s gears seem to be turning in his head more than we usually sense, a Stanley not wired strictly for impulse. Gercke’s Stanley could never be the “ape” Blanche sees.
            Sieber’s become a Backyard Renaissance regular – this is his fourth production there. As in the company’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” last year, he’s playing a sincere suitor who’s destined to be disappointed, the outsider who longs for love. Then as here, Sieber’s chemistry with John is perceptible, and their scenes together are likely the most honest in the storytelling.
            “A Streetcar Named Desire” will wring you out, as it must its ensemble. They deserve medals as much as applause at curtain.
            Though let’s not forget Tennessee Williams, who in exorcising the pain inflicted upon his sister Rose and the pain he himself must have endured created a play, “Streetcar,” and a character, the tragic Blanche, that will live forever on stage and screen, and among the ghosts and shadows of the South at its deepest and most impenetrable.
            “A Streetcar Named Desire” runs through July 12 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown.