‘Streetcar’s’ lust, fury belong to all of us
In the African-American Shakespeare Company’s take on Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” want is always the twin of fury, and both feelings sit in the New Orleans air like mugginess before a hurricane. Punching your wife doesn’t make you a bad person any more than pawing at her does. Both moves draw the same encouraging smiles from neighbors. (And boy, are they monitoring you; the wooden scaffolding that dominates Kevin August Landesman’s set design makes it seem as if eyes are always peering in through the cracks.)
But no smiles come from out-of-towner Blanche (Jemier Jenkins), who registers in her core every noxious atmospheric vapor as she creeps into the French Quarter apartment of her sister Stella (Santoya Fields) and her brother-in-law Stanley (Khary Moye). It’s a flat so sordid that “only Mr. Edgar
Allan Poe could do it justice,” Blanche says, but after her own plummet from grace in Laurel, Miss., it’s the only place left to go.
Of course, Blanche doesn’t just detect the peculiar chemistry of the city and the apartment. She explodes it, and one of the chief strengths of L. Peter Callender’s production, which opened Sunday, March 4, at Marines’ Memorial Theatre, is how necessary that explosion feels. It’s not merely that Blanche’s Southern belle affectations, whimsies and entitlements chafe at Stanley’s aversion to pretense, his brusqueness, his coarse manners. It’s more that they’re both accustomed to making the loud noises that others have to absorb, to having their wills expand to shape everything and everyone around them, to putting on a show that others must delight in or indulge.
Moye’s Stanley feels novel because he doesn’t drip with menace. No matter the role he plays, Moye exudes likability, and his Stanley is less irascible than curmudgeonly, like the neighborhood crab who charms because he grouses only to jest. That both complicates his character’s path to detonation and raises the show’s stakes. You can’t help but like Stella and Stanley’s marriage, despite his abuse of her, which means that when Blanche threatens their equilibrium, much more might be lost than just lust.
If Jenkins is at home in Blanche’s congenital tremulousness, she doesn’t mine a range that would fully express it, delivering line after line at the same catastrophic pitch — which means that, after a while, nothing feels catastrophic — and with such sloppy enunciation as to wash out much of Williams’ poetry.
From everyone in the ensemble, lines often pop out at arbitrary volumes, like the actors are trying to hit preordained peaks and troughs rather than listen to each other in the present moment. Everett Elton Bradman’s sound design is equally artificial, awkwardly piping in with Romantic piano to underscore a poignant monologue, just in case you didn’t know you were were supposed to feel sad.
Callender excises Blanche’s references to Stanley as a “Polack,” which make the show feel less about race than about class. That gives audiences treats that are rare at most companies outside of AfricanAmerican Shakespeare: to see a story told by black artists in which they’re not constantly required to talk about blackness; where black characters get to fight the cosmic fights — for love, home and family, for autonomy, imagination and artistry — that we still give mostly to white characters; and to reimagine our foundational dramatic literature and its titanic characters as speaking from and to all of humanity, not just one subset of it.