TN Shakespeare Co. Brings Groundbreaking, Poetic Expressionism Of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE To Its Tabor Stage

Tennessee Shakespeare Company (TSC) brings 1947 New Orleans to the Tabor Stage for its first production of Tennessee Williams' ground-breaking, poetic drama A Streetcar Named Desire from February 1-18.

Streetcar is directed by Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary (The Tempest, Ada and the Engine, The Glass Menagerie) and is generously sponsored by Nancy R. Copp and the Sims Family Charitable Trust. 

Williams' second Broadway play is set in post-WWII New Orleans as Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle with a harrowing past, moves in with her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley. As the delicate veneer of Blanche's upper-class facade cracks, the play explores desire, deception, and the brutal clash between the seeming gentility of the Old South and the raw realities of the present. With its hauntingly beautiful dialogue and exploration of complex human relationships, Williams' masterpiece has endured as a staple of American theatre since its premiere.

While most post-war plays and films during this period presented the heroic image of American victors happily reintegrating into home life, Williams explores the physiological trauma of both men and women who endured loss at home and abroad.  His introduction of a “plastic theatre” (as he called it) endures the test of time as his elegant effort to get at a reality often unarticulated in art and life: a theatre of expression and the senses, activated by sense memory, music, touch, art, poetry, and the beauty humans create in an effort to co-habitate with their darkest realities.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, MS in 1911. He studied in Missouri and visited Memphis, but he felt at home in New Orleans, where he sets Streetcar. Two years earlier, he had written The Glass Menagerie. He rapidly became one of the towering playwrights in America – and remains so. A Streetcar Named Desire was only the second play in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. As a sickly boy, Tom spent some early years in Clarksdale, MS, with his mother and his sister Rose. When his traveling salesman father moved the family to St. Louis, the children were ill-prepared for the cultural shock from rural to metropolitan. Rose retreated into her imagination, and Tom loathed the city. His relationships with his mother and sister remain thematic throughout his career. Tom's poetic vision for American theatre was a defense of, as he said, “elegance, a love of the beautiful, a romantic attitude toward life” and “a violent protest against those things that defeat it.”

Williams had been working on Streetcar and his character of Blanche in a short one-act play years earlier titled Portrait of a Madonna.  And even once he penned Streetcar, he worked his way through other titles before landing on the one we know today:  The Primary Colors, Poker Night, The Moth, and Blanche's Chair in the Moon among them — each giving hints of his new theatre of expressionism.

“Not unlike Shakespeare's King Lear, Streetcar's familial fierceness, imagination, and proximity to war can make its story cosmic – transcending its time and place,” says McCleary. “One of the luxuries of Lear, though, is its relative anonymity of time and place. It is distant, mythic, more a state of knowing than of place. With Streetcar, it is close to us physically, geographically, and in time, emotionally, psychologically. These are southern ghosts many of us know. Our production certainly will not strip it of its language or place. We will honor them. Like Shakespeare's, Williams' poetry has cosmic passage through our generations, and it haunts. Poetry and beauty, whether in harsh light or deep shadows, often enjoy the longest life.”

The cast of A Streetcar Named Desire features TSC veterans Lauren Gunn as Blanche DuBois, Michael Khanlarian as Mitch, and Nicolas Dureaux Picou as Stanley Kowalski, as well as TSC newcomer Eliza Pagelle as Stella Kowalski. The ensemble also returns to the TSC stage Marquis Dijon Archuleta, Carleigh Boyle, Elijah Eliakim Hernandez, Logan McCarty, Hadley Evans Nash, Cheleen Sugar-Ducksworth, and Allison Teegarden.

The design team includes Jeremy Allen Fisher (Lighting), Melanie Mulder (Props), Roger Hanna (Scenic), and Ali Flip (Costumes/Wigs/Makeup). The production stage manager is Jasmine Simmers, and the assistant stage manager is Irene Keeney.

A Streetcar Named Desire's discounted ($22 tickets) Preview performance is Thursday, February 1 at 7:30 pm. Opening night is Friday, February 2 at 7:30 pm, with the price of tickets including a post-show reception with the actors. Subsequent performances are on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, and on Sundays at 3:00 pm through February 18.

A Streetcar Named Desire is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com.  Streetcar is presented by special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

Patron advisory: Per the playwright's direction, this production includes occasional mature language as well as domestic/sexual violence (largely unseen) of 1947.  The full script may be found online free of charge for review.

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