A BALLET NAMED STREETCAR
National Ballet of Canada kicks off spring season with adaptation of Tennessee Williams classic,
The National Ballet of Canada is poised to ride the world’s most famous streetcar; destination “Desire.”
The company is launching its spring season with the Canadian premiere of a dance adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ emotionally searing, adults-only drama, A Streetcar Named Desire.
Williams’s 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a nymphomaniacal and superannuated Southern belle, Blanche Du-Bois, has been a mainstay for theatre companies. It’s also been much adapted.
The sanitized 1951 movie version starred Vivien Leigh and a young and irresistibly sexy Marlon Brando reprising his original stage role as Blanche’s brutish brother-in-law and nemesis, Stanley Kowalski. The first ballet adaptation, by American choreographer Valerie Bettis, debuted in Montreal the following year. Since then there have been at least five ballet versions, including a 2006 production for Ballet BC by then artistic director John Alleyne.
In settling on a dance version of a play with such potent title-recognition, National Ballet artistic director Karen Kain has turned to an old friend, Americanborn choreographer John Neumeier and the two-act adaptation he made in1983 at Stuttgart Ballet as a vehicle for its then reigning star, Marcia Haydée.
Neumeier, 75, is no stranger to literary adaptation, from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann. The National Ballet has performed Neumeier’s 2002 version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull but in some respects A Streetcar Named Desire shares more in common with Neumeier’s historically based dance-drama of 2000, Nijinsky.
Nijinsky is about the legendary early 19th-century ballet star with the same name. The National Ballet first performed Nijinsky to great acclaim four years ago and will be touring it internationally next season.
The real-life Nijinsky’s career was cut short by severe mental illness. Neumeier brilliantly evokes that descent into hallucination and madness as if through the eyes of Nijinsky himself. Similarly, in his Streetcar adaptation, Neumeier presents the story primarily as it unfolds in the experiences and delusions of Blanche DuBois. It is emphatically not a literal transcription of the play into dance, which in the case of a drama as layered, nuanced and psychologically complex as A Streetcar Named Desire would anyway be impossible.
Says Sonia Rodriguez, who will dance as Blanche on opening night: “This really is John’s version of the play, an impression of what he took from it, of how he sees the characters.”
“There cannot be a one-to-one translation,” Neumeier explains.
“You have to discover a central concept or purpose in the piece, and look behind the words to find the emotions that caused the artist to write. What I find remarkable, especially in the earlier writings of Tennessee Williams, is this sense of levels. There’s the level of realistic drama but also this poetic, dreamlike level that makes possible the play’s transformation into ballet.”
Williams’s play begins with the arrival of an emotionally frazzled Blanche at the rundown, two-room New Orleans tenement her sister Stella shares with her husband, Stanley. Scene by scene, Williams paints the backstory of why Blanche has come to New Orleans, dropping bits of information like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Meanwhile Stanley and his buddies are off bowling or playing poker in the parlour. None of these elements adapt well to a wordless medium.
Neumeier’s solution — followed by choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa in a 2012 version for Scottish Ballet — is to turn Williams on his head, starting where the play ends, with Blanche consigned to a mental asylum.
Here Blanche recalls her privileged, socially refined life at Belle Reve, the family plantation mansion that ultimately succumbs to the debt collectors. We learn of her early marriage to a sensitive young man who turns out to be gay and who, in an unhinging moment for Blanche, puts a bullet through his head. As relatives die off and the family property is lost, we see Blanche seeking comfort in the arms of strangers until her scandalous behaviour forces her to flee to the only place she thinks she can find help.
With the backstory established, Neumeier can move on to a second act that follows the play more closely, with the notable alteration of making Stanley’s favourite pastime boxing — something really physical — instead of a static poker game.
“I’m a very physical choreographer,” says Neumeier; something his National Ballet cast would never dispute.
“I have lots of dancing,” Rodriguez says.
“I’m more or less carrying every scene. It’s physically and emotionally draining. There’s no holding back. You have to give it your all.”
“It’s a marathon,” says Guillaume Côté, opening night’s Stanley.
“It’s very physical stuff but you have to find all the dramatic subtleties, to make the character authentic and real. And the boxing; it’s ridiculously difficult.”
Côté’s sparring partner is Evan McKie, playing Stanley’s lonely and ill-fated friend, Mitch, the man who is drawn to Blanche until Stanley uncovers her disreputable past.
McKie was a young dancer in Stuttgart, Germany when Neumeier came to revive the ballet. He never imagined, after moving to Toronto, that he’d end up playing a principal role in it.
“John is very particular about whom he chooses,” McKie says. “Frankly, I didn’t think I’d be cast. What I like is that Mitch’s character is really developed. Initially, with Blanche, he falls for the illusion. When that is shattered, Mitch is devastated.”
Neumeier explains that over the ballet’s 34-year history and multiple revivals he has made revisions in order to keep it fresh.
“You look at a particular cast to see what works,” he explains. “The intention and the steps remain the same but as you mature you see your own vision more clearly. It’s about the defining of characters, a process of intensification.” A Streetcar Named Desire is at the Four Season Centre, 145 Queen St. W., Saturday — June 10; national.ballet.ca or 416-345-9595 or 1-866-345-9595.