Illusion and delusion: A Streetcar Named Desire at the Citadel. A review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

One of American theatre’s greatest plays about illusion and delusion — and the power and limitations of both — is the season-opener at the Citadel. And in Daryl Cloran’s beautifully acted production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it comes wrapped onstage in all its contradictions — with weight to its enduring ambiguities.

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The centre of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 Pulitzer Prize winner is the memorable figure of the outsider — the solitary, white-gloved, pastel-hued Southern Belle, fleeing, in high heels, her own history. After the loss of the family plantation, Blanche DuBois (Lindsey Angell, in a finely tuned and magnetic performance) comes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella (Heidi Damayo) and husband Stanley (Stafford Perry).

Blanche’s visible shudder of distaste, the clear signal that the repertoire’s most celebrated fantasist feels herself slumming, is the catalyst for a valiant, if doomed, struggle for survival, space, and power. In this she is up against a new world, and on an individual level, the brutal carnal energy and masculine earthiness of her realist brother-in-law. And she says as much to her sister, cornered by Blanche’s arrival into the role of intermediary. “Don’t hang back with the brutes.”

The beauty of Angell’s performance is a certain steel, an unexpected fierceness in the increasingly desperate way she pitches her coyness and fall-back girlish flirtatiousness against something a lot more visceral and primal, in the person of Stanley. She poses teasingly, she semaphores with her hands; it’s a kind of Blanche ballet of physical closed captioning.  “A woman’s charm is 50 per cent illusion,” she tells Stanley, in response to his “don’t play dumb.”

In her way, as Angell conveys, Blanche is formidable. But she has the weight of reality resisting her ‘performance pieces’. These are not without cruelty, and as things chez Kowalski deteriorate they have an increasing harshness and vintage brittleness about them.

Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo in A Streecar Named Desire, Citadel Theatre/ Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

It’s not easy to play Stanley the brute in 2024. And at first I couldn’t help thinking Perry, buff, and organized in both his physicality and the rejoinders that sometimes rise to acid wit, seemed an unusual choice for a character capable of Stanley’s kind of violence and physical brutality.  But in the course of the show I grew to appreciate that Perry’s performance doesn’t stack the deck to extremes in favour of sympathy for Blanche.

Andrés F Moreno, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Stafford Perry, A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel/Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

His Stanley is capable of exasperation, not just raw anger. Witness his reaction to Blanche’s continual casual taunts that he’s an animal, a thug.“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks…. I am one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest county on earth….” The line has a very different ring, ominously populist but also not without dignity, in our time than it did in 1947. And Perry’s performance takes that into consideration.

Damayo negotiates the difficulties of being Stella, in a household full of volatile personalities and close-quarter tensions. “I am not in anything I want to get out of,” she says, standing up to the disapproval of her sister. And Sheldon Elter is simply terrific as Mitch, decent, awkward, a civilized fellow who, under the circumstances in a rough-house circle of the poker guys, is brave about holding his own. He has a heart available for the breaking, and succumbs to Blanche’s relentless campaign of charm because he recognizes a fellow solo traveller. It’s to Mitch that she finally reveals her guilt about the past, in a finely executed scene.     

Director Cloran frames the arrival of Blanche in the Kowalskis’ cramped two-room apartment in Elysian Fields (an irony not lost on Blanche), intermittently, with a kind of stylized swirl and buzz, the jostle of communal vitality. Music from a club with a live jazz trio (led by rich-voiced Jameela McNeil), neon, the odd passing vendor, the metallic din of the streetcar, the noise of voices from fractious upstair neighbours who bicker, and have sex, at top volume … they all stand in contrast to the tragic aloneness of the Southern belle in her last stand, on foreign soil, so to speak.

This Citadel/ Theatre Calgary co-production is your chance to savour the delights of a classic to which the resources and budget of a big theatre have been devoted, in a fulsome and atmospheric way. It is an absorbing evening in the theatre. And the time (two and three-quarters hours) flies by.

Blanche, who says “clothes are my passion,” finds an ally in designer Jessica Oostergo,  whose costumes are a treat to look at.

Heidi Damayo and Lindsey Angell in A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel Theatre/ Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

Brian Dudkiewicz’s multi-level set sandwiches the Kowalski apartment between the singers above and the street life below, against a moody urban backdrop. It’s atmospheric, but the downside of the design is that the pitched battle that sets Streetcar in motion is pretty far upstage and removed from us, happening in a series of long-shots and tableaux. And in the back half of the theatre, lighter ‘Southern-style’ timbres like Stella’s, in contrast to Stanley’s vibrant bellows or Eunice’s hollers at her wayward husband, don’t always reach. Williams’ poetic text, after all, isn’t something you want to miss.

Jameela McNeil and Eric Wigston in A Streetcar Named Design, Citadel/ Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

The music, by sound designer and composer Joelysa Pankanea, has impact. In addition to the urban soundscape of people living at close quarters, the production enfolds jazz standards like It’s Only A Paper Moon (“it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believe in me”) for their uncanny aptness. And McNeil (who also plays feisty upstairs Eunice) attacks them with gusto.

Bonnie Beecher’s outstanding lighting animates the drama and the storytelling wonderfully. And Streetcar is, in a sense, about lighting, and its transformational magic. One of the first orders Blanche has for her little sister is to turn off the light; “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare.” She puts a paper lantern over the bulb: lighting is part of the package deal in denial and self-delusion. “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”

It can’t help but end tragically, of course, in a world that is hard about softness. But in the end, via a flawed and fascinating heroine, Williams and this handsome production have made a case for art, poetry, creativity, love over bare-bones desire.  “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” Blanche cries in her own defence. “I don’t tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth.” And you can’t help admiring that human impulse.

REVIEW

A Streetcar Named Desire

Theatre: Citadel Theatre in association with Theatre Calgary

Written by: Tennessee Williams

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Lindsey Angell, Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo, Sheldon Elter, Jameela McNeil, Emily Howard, Elisa Marina Mair-Sanchez, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Daniel Briere, Ahmed Mokdad, Andrés F. Moreno, Eric Wigston

Running: through Oct. 13

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.