Spotlight on Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire

If you’re walking along St. Paul Street and you happen to hear a brutish cry of “Stella!” reverberating throughout the city, don’t be alarmed — it’s just Michael Leicht as Stanley Kowalski in the Aubrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Of course, that iconic yell contains a lot of power.

Sixty years ago, the Elia Kazan-directed Hollywood version of A Streetcar Named Desire made then-unknown Marlon Brando a star and catapulted Tennessee Williams’s play into the limelight.

In more modern times, it animates the Spotlighters’s intimate theater with an explosive rendition of the play, though no Marlon Brandos have emerged yet.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a classic story of the power struggle between a fading southern belle, Blanche Dubois, and a crude working class man, Stanley Kowalski.

Written by Williams in 1947, it is set in a steamy New Orleans summer during that same period.

Among the many subjects brought up in the play, A Streetcar Named Desire deals with the decline of the Old South, domestic abuse, mental illness, and the consequences of homosexuality in the mid-twentieth century.

It is a heartbreaking piece about the conflicts between illusion and reality, and the darker aspects of sexual love.

Though it was written seventy years prior, the issues discussed still plague the country today, raising the question of how much this society has progressed since then.

Mysteriously displaced from her family’s plantation and dismissed from her job as a school teacher, Blanche Dubois leaves home and seeks sanctuary with her sister, Stella.

She arrives in by a “streetcar named desire” to Stella’s residence in New Orleans’s Elysian Fields.

Stella, raised like Blanche in opulent Belle Reve, now lives in relative squalor with her Polish husband, Stanley Kowalski.

The main conflict emerges between the mentally unstable Blanche, and Stanley, her tormentor, who is unlike any man she has ever met.

Blanche, beautiful but aging, is painfully conscious of her fading charms.

Throughout the play, Stanley’s brutal physicality and crude habits slowly break her down.

Due to the structural layout of the Spotlighters Theatre (four sides of seats, each section with three rows, surrounding a slightly elevated stage), the characters and their intense personalities overwhelm the audience with their proximity.

Micheal Leicht prowls the stage as Stanley, the animalistic predator, and Nancy Murray flits about as Blanche, trying her various seductive advances and retreats on him.

Both of these actors give new life and power to these evocative and complex staples of American theater.

Leicht’s Stanley is appropriately terrifying and captivating, and provokes both disgust and fascination.

Murray manages to prevent Blanche from becoming too abrasive or melodramatic — traits written into the nature of her character that often threaten to undermine the performance.

In the first half of the play at least, she portrays a stronger and more held-together Blanche Dubois than one might expect.

Kate Volpe’s Stella is particularly interesting to one familiar with adaptations of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stella’s behavior is more subtle than Blanche’s or Stanley’s, but there is something haunting and endearing about a woman who earnestly proclaims, “I wish you’d stop taking it for granted that I’m in something I want to get out of!” especially considering when she is in a situation that — at least at first glance — appears to be something which anyone would want to get out of.

Although Stella’s story mostly surrounds Blanche’s emotional and intellectual decline as a subplot, in this production it is endlessly fascinating to watch her both fight with and cling to her barbaric husband. Kate Volpe does an especially good job with this difficult task.

While Stella could wind up seeming like a pathetic pushover or a deluded simpleton, Volpe manages to make her strange character charming; the audience sympathizes with her.

This production instills a feeling of inevitability — although Stella’s relationship with Stanley is horribly destructive, there is also something electrifying about it.

In addition to the performance quality, the scenery in the Spotlighters Theatre is elaborate and lovely.

According to the Executive Director James Roark, Tennessee Williams specifies the physical details of his play.

However difficult this may make the set design, the Spotlighters rise to the occasion.

Intricate details cover the stage and lights subtly change color with the mood of the scene.

The excellent use of a strategically placed mirror makes up for the times when characters face away from a particular section of the audience.

The limitations of the small theater do lend themselves to some visual problems, however.

For instance, it is impossible for some viewers to see the action that is happening in Stanley and Stella’s bedroom, as it is placed in a little alcove off the side of the main part of the stage.

However, most of the play remains visible, so this limitation does not detract too much from the overall performance.

Tennessee Williams’s groundbreaking play is given an intimate, moving treatment in this production.

It is worth a trip to the Spotlighters Theatre if only to see Stanley Kowalski stand despondently beneath a neighbor’s apartment and bellow, “Stella! Stellaaaa!”

The Spotlighters cast of A Streetcar Named Desire brings this story to life with sympathy and excitement while capturing the essence of this classic American play.