Theatre in Review: A Streetcar Named Desire (Broadhurst Theatre)

If you're going to get on that streetcar named Desire, you've got to ride it to the end of the line. Half-measures simply won't do. There are a great many fine things about Emily Mann's production of the Tennessee Williams classic, beginning with its design. Eugene Lee's set is the best realization I've ever seen of the cramped, grimy French Quarter flat, occupied by Stanley and Stella Kowalski and invaded by Stella's sister, Blanche. With its grimy walls, rattletrap furniture, and a tatty, diaphanous curtain that separates the bedroom from the kitchen, it's a detailed study in squalor. Edward Pierce's lighting suffuses the space with crepuscular sunsets and, in the nighttime scenes, with green and purple neon seeping in from nearby juke joints. Mann has staged the play with an eye to the street life of the neighborhood; we see the locals pass by, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding one flight up. The second act begins with a jazz funeral that neatly adumbrates Blanche's ultimate fate. (Terence Blanchard's original music strikes the right mournful, funky note.)

This Streetcar also carries a number of solid performances. Blair Underwood's Stanley Kowalski is a creature of sinew and nerve endings, with a hair-trigger temper and a need for Stella that borders on animal desperation. He is capable of startlingly crude behavior, sitting at the dinner table with one foot placed on an adjoining chair, helping himself to the food on Stella's plate, and brazenly interrogating Blanche about the loss of the family estate -- but, when Stella briefly runs off, there's the terror of a lost child in his cries for her return.

Of course, the measure in any Streetcar is its Blanche DuBois, and while Nicole Ari Parker does intelligent, scrupulous work in the role, she somehow fails to break our hearts. At first, she seems right on target. A well-dressed, fading beauty of a certain age, hanging onto her Southern belle manners by her fingernails, there's a weariness about her, a slight deadness in the eyes, that, combined with her almost reflexive dependence on liquor, hints at the harrowing experience she has just barely survived. She's particularly good at the little lies Blanche tells to paper over any hint of desperation. ("I spy - I spy," she exclaims, "finding" a whiskey bottle from which, a few minutes before, she poured herself a healthy slug.) She plays well against Underwood at first, unintentionally driving him crazy with her airs and graces as she spins fantasies of a graceful life that she left behind long, long ago.

But as Williams strips away the layers of illusion that Blanche has wrapped around herself to provide protection from a cruel world, Parker almost seems to be avoiding the terrible truth at her core. The scene in which Blanche, unnerved at the prospect of a date, makes a pass at a newsboy should reverberate with nervous strain and wistfulness over lost youth; here, it gets a couple of laughs and that's all. Similarly, Blanche's confession of complicity in the suicide of her young husband doesn't devastate as it should. When a birthday party for Blanche falls flat, thanks to the non-appearance of her suitor, Mitch, we should feel pity mixed with high anxiety for the impending destruction of her fragile dream of happiness. And when the sordid details of Blanche's life -- the terrible poverty and subsequent promiscuity that have made her a notorious character in her hometown -- are revealed, the moment doesn't pack the necessary knockout punch. It's not, I think, that Parker doesn't understand Blanche, but that somehow she is unable or unwilling to follow the character's journey to its bleak conclusion; even in her most vulnerable moments, her Blanche retains a hint of steel that obscures her more self-destructive tendencies.

Even so, there are striking moments -- when Mitch, feeling cheated by Blanche's lies, rips off a pink lampshade, exposing her face to a single lightbulb's clinical glare (one of Pierce's best lighting moments), and when, post-nervous breakdown, she huddles behind a bed, her face riven with fear, hiding from a nurse with a strait-jacket. We only see a few seconds of the climactic rape, but it is ugly enough -- Stanley bends Blanche over and pulls up her skirt to take her from behind -- for us to grasp its soul-destroying effects. And yet, because Parker can't quite reveal the frightened, played-out creature behind the coquette's smile, the pathetically sad woman who once believed that the so-called treasures in her heart would find her a loving home and who is now an outcast, this is a Streetcar that one watches with moderate interest rather than the terrible intensity that the best productions inspire.

As Stella, Daphne Rubin-Vega's tough, streetwise manner makes her a less-than-believable daughter of the plantation aristocracy, but her sparring with Stanley has a wildcat vitality that tells you plenty about their relationship; she is also good at delineating Stella's role as peacemaker in this troubled household. Wood Harris offers a fresh take on Mitch, endowing him with more sensuality than usual, a decision that adds additional power to his rejection of Blanche. There are also good contributions from Amelia Campbell and Matthew Saldivar as the upstairs neighbors and Carmen de Lavallade as a sinister Mexican flower peddler. Paul Tazewell's costumes, from the men's bowling shirts to Stella's casual housewear and Blanche's elaborate ensembles -- so inappropriate for this rundown corner of the French Quarter -- are acutely rendered. Mark Bennett's sound design combines solid reinforcement for Blanchard's score with a variety of effects including passing trains, aroused felines, offstage screams, and bits of jazz.

It may be that we're undergoing a bit of Streetcar fatigue; this is the third major revival in less than a decade, one of which -- the Cate Blanchett production at Brooklyn Academy of Music -- was one for the record books. And of course, there are several more actresses out there who could plausibly tackle the role and who will want the opportunity. Be warned, however; it's not a job for the faint of heart or the ambivalent. Unless you're willing to pursue Blanche's story to its ultimate soul-searing conclusion, the result will be a respectable, but unexciting, production -- just like this one.--David Barbour