Reaching for magic: Lindsey Angell stars as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, launching the Citadel season, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

“The world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. …We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” — Tennessee Williams, in correspondence

On the first day of rehearsal for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, launching the Citadel season (Saturday, in preview), director Daryl Cloran presented his 12-actor cast with the playwright’s remarkably poetic thoughts about love. And it’s resonated powerfully with Lindsey Angell, who stars as Blanche DuBois, the bruised but defiant Southern belle who’s been set adrift by the loss of the family plantation, and a way of life, to creditors.

Her arrival, suitcase in hand, at the crowded and chaotic New Orleans apartment of her younger sister Stella (Heidi Damayo) and rough-cut brother-in-law Stanley (Stafford Perry) sets this celebrated 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner on its fateful course.

With the Citadel production (in association with Theatre Calgary), the first Streetcar Cloran has directed, Angell inherits a role that comes with its own suitcase — a veritable who’s who of actors starting with Jessica Tandy in 1947 and Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, both opposite the young Marlon Brando.

Even in high school, Angell says, Blanche captured her imagination and, she says, “curiosity about this hyper-feminine character who’s trapped in a world that doesn’t have the capacity to hold her fragility any more…. I’ve always had a fascination with the dark beauty of Tennessee Williams’ characters, Blanche in particular.”

“I loved her then, and I think I love her even more now,” says the actor. Finding her own individual way “in” to a fascinating character who has invited a whole lineage of interpretations, Angell has found, is all about responding to the balance between Blanche’s vulnerability, and her strength. “Her  capacity to fight to stay standing in the circumstances that unfold around her.… It’s connecting with that resilience, especially as a woman now, and identifying with the strength of this fragile, delicate creature. And how that comes out, whether it’s choosing imagination and retreating into her mind or her memories, or reaching towards her sister Stella, trying to access love from the people around her.”   

“She’s in the midst of an attempted escape (from the past) … to re-group, try and move forward — with a new idea, a new dream, a new possibility,” Angell thinks. “And she’s resistant to acknowledging the harm and the trauma she carries, that she didn’t have the tools to process or deal with.”

There’s something child-like about Blanche, she’s found. “So womanly in some ways….” Angell is often struck by Blanche’s ability to act; she’s a performer.

When Blanche meets Stanley, the poster boy for a kind of primal sexual masculinity, she is meeting her doom, and at some level she knows it. “There’s a whole multiplicity of eventualities…. Her resistance is what’s exciting for an audience be part of,” says Angell.

She’s been in Cloran productions before, two that originated at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach. In Cloran’s much-travelled ‘60s era hit As You Like It, a romantic comedy in which Shakespeare teamed up with the Beatles, she was the witty, playful heroine Rosalind. In his production of  Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in the 1940’s and “a juicy fun time,” as she says, she was the breezy Princess of France. Both productions, incidentally, were full of music, and Angell is an actor who sings, and “adores musicals.”

In the production of Streetcar we’ll see, as Angell describes, “music really beings the time forward.” A live jazz trio plays. “It adds texture and immediacy; it’s exciting to feel the time and place. It feels so alive to have this heartbeat. Jameela McNeil (who plays Stella and Stanley’s upstairs neighbour Eunice) sings. … The craft of telling the story is supported by everyone onstage.”

The small-town kid from High River AB, who was Angell’s younger self, was drawn to theatre, she says “by the community theatre in my home town, how extraordinary it felt to make something with the people of my community — all ages, all social classes, all ethnicities. It felt like this special ritual that tied us all together. … I loved the unique experience of having it all come together, and it’s gone! And then there’s something new. I really cherished that.”

“And I found such a warmth in the Edmonton theatre community. ” Vancouver-based Angell went to theatre school at Mount Royal in Calgary, and then Vancouver’s Studio 58. “The impetus to study and grow more came from, being cast as the ingenue in Shakespeare plays, and feeling a bit of discontent playing women on the periphery, with very little to say,” she says.

Since then she and her husband, also an Albertan, are back and forth — to Vertigo, Theatre Calgary, the Citadel. This season, when Cloran’s As You Like It joins the Grand Theatre season in London, Ont., Angell won’t be in the cast. Parenting calls. When the show began to tour, Angell’s two young sons were very little; one was two, the other an infant. “Breast-feeding and all that, then a pandemic. Sometimes (in theatre), you have wonderful experiences, and then have to bid them adieu.”

In the meantime A Streetcar Named Desire is the first time Angell has worked away from her kids. “My husband is holding down the fort in Vancouver.” Hurray for Facetime. And she’s grateful “to take this time to fully step into my craft, make my own creative choices….”

Later this season she’ll join an all-star cast at the Vancouver Arts Club in Nick Green’s Casey and Diana — as Princess Diana, who visits an AIDS hospice and changes the course of social history. “A whole different accent,” Angell laughs.

Last weekend as the cast prepared to move onto the set and finalize all the lighting and sound cues, “the anticipation is tremendous,” says Angell. “This flower we’ve all been nurturing is about to bloom, and you want something really special for Edmonton audiences…. It’s a very spicy, sexy show!”

PREVIEW

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: Saturday (in preview) through Oct. 13

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com