Ottawa Little Theatre’s Streetcar yields some outstanding moments

 

 

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Directed by Sarah Hearn. OLTplays to April 7

In some ways, A Streetcar Named Desire is more of a minefield than it was when playwright Tennessee Williams unveiled it to the world 71 years ago.

Back then it jolted audiences wth its sexual candour and revelation of unsettling undercurrents in the way human beings treat each other. But today, we may be uncomfortably conscious that the play also seems to be telling us to be more accepting of the relationship between Stanley Kowalski and pregnant wife Stella — a relationship prone to outbursts of domestic violence.

On balance, it’s a good relationship, the play suggests, until it’s disrupted by the arrival on the scene of Stella’s emotionally fragile sister, Blanche DuBois, who clings to her pretensions of Southern gentility even as what remains of her inner life is collapsing.

There’s a telling moment in Ottawa Little Theatre’s revival of this stage classic when Laura Hall’s Blanche, her refined facade no longer able to withstand the oafish behaviour and animal presence of Stanley, tells her sister that she’s married to a monster. To which Stella, perceptively played by Megan LeMarquand, replies: “I wish you’d stop taking for granted that I’m in something I want to get rid of.”

Blanche’s shuddering response is that her sister is simply talking about desire — “brutal desire.” And in saying this, Blanche’s own sexual neuroses are rising to the surface.

This exchange is one of the most powerful in Sarah Hearn’s production, reminding us that this is a play in which raw nerve endings are painfully exposed and psychological complexities unfold in unsettling and often unpredictable ways.

It is a solid production, and sometimes an outstanding one. The sense of atmosphere is palpable. Music is an important factor here with a sort of bluesy melancholy running counterpoint to the play’s smouldering promise of physical and emotional violence. And Robin Riddihough’s masterful set design, further enhanced by David Magladry’s judicious lighting, evokes the seediness of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the humble Kowalski apartment.

There’s no denying the ongoing psychological tension triggered by Blanche’s presence in a household that up to now, has established its own rough-hewn equilibrium. What exists now is an explosive triangle — a power game that will have no comfortable ending. When Dan DeMarbre, in an impressively nuanced performance as Stanley, angrily reminds the two women now occupying his space that he is king, it may seem no more than an arrogant macho outburst — but really it’s a statement of defiance, revealing a deep-seated insecurity about how to deal with this fluttery sister-in-law who defies him with her phoney pretensions, her lies and evasions, her class assumptions, her ostentatious wardrobe and her need to have long hot baths because it soothes her nerves.

For all his readiness to push against traditional boundaries of theatrical expression, Tennessee Williams was always a compassionate playwright with a particular sympathy for the spiritually maimed. So essentially he gives Blanche — who will be raped, shorn of her pathetic lies, and reduced to total mental collapse by play’s end — the final word. As Laura Hall’s Blanche is led away by officialdom to a new kind of doom, there is a sense of ravaged nobility when she tells us  — in one of the most haunting speeches in the Williams canon — that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

It took courage for this actress to tackle the role of Blanche. And it’s full of good things. although Hall may be flinching somewhat from the need to convey Blanche’s full devastating disintegration, she has nonetheless responded with a psychologically observant performance that manages to give us the self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, self-deceiving household irritant on the one hand and an affecting and painfully vulnerable human being on the other

But Hall’s comparative youth presents her with the ongoing challenge of conveying to us the fading Southern belle of the text. This challenge proves unsurmountable in the powerfully acted scene in which Mitch, the shy suitor who has represented Blanche’s last pathetic hope for emotional security, learns of her sordid past, turns against her, and submits her to the harshness of an overhead light to expose every facial sag and wrinkle of a pretend life. Kurt Shantz is splendid here as Mitch, and Laura Hall brings all her formidable talents to the fore to make the sequence work. But, no fault of theirs, it doesn’t quite make it.

Is there enough sexual menace in Dan DeMarbre’s performance as Stanley? Anyone taking on this role is competing with the sexual swagger of the Brando portrayal, forever preserved on celluloid, and with the freely admitted belief of the play’s original director, Elia Kazan, that the play really belongs to Stanley, not Stella.  The balanced approach of OLT director Sarah Hearn works to challenge this theory, but there is no doubt that that DeMarbre’s contribution to the evening’s success is substantial. He is, for example, able to use silence aggressively, even frighteningly: witness that deftly staged poker game in which Stanley can no longer control his anger at the chattering presence of Blanche in the next room. Williams’s biographer John Lahr once wrote of “a ruthless man-child with reservoirs of tenderness and violence.” That sums up DeMarbre’s portrayal admirably.

As a director, Sarah Hearn has also been attentive to the smaller roles, ensuring that they have definition whenever possible. So you remember Amy Kennedy’s tough presence as an upstairs neighbour, and the way Philippe Gagnond approaches the tiny but sensitive role of of a sanitarium doctor at the play’c conclusion. In brief a production that will give legitimate satisfaction to a great many playgoers.

 

Director: Sarah Hearn

Set Design: Robin Riddihough

Lighting: David Magladry

Sound: David King

Costumes: Peggy Laverty

 

Isabelle, a woman of the Quarter: Lesley Hammil

Eunice Hubbell: Amy Kennedy

Stanley Kowalski: Dan DeMarbre

Stella Kowalski: Megan LeMarquand

Steve Hubbell: Ryan Tapping

Mitch: Kurt Shantz

Mexican woman: Carolyn Cote

Blanche Dubois: Laura Hall

Sailor: Jack Guigue

Pablo Gonzales: Newman Charles

Delivery man/man of the Quarter: Boyd Drake

Thug/street vendor: Michael Clarke

Woman of the Quarter: Marlene Spatuk

Collector: Amanuel Abebe

Nurse: Susanna Doherty

Doctor: Philippe Gagnond