Gamm Opens Season with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Now thru 10/18

The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm (The Gamm) opens Season 31 (2015-2016) with a timeless American classic, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by the author of The Glass Menagerie (Gamm 2010) and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof(Gamm 2002) is an undisputed masterpiece and a landmark of 20th-century theater. Gamm Artistic Director Tony Estrella directs, featuring Marianna Bassham (Hedda Tesman in Hedda Gabler, 2014) as Blanche DuBois, the former southern beauty whose fragile world is crumbling; resident actor Karen Carpenter (Thea Elvsted in Hedda Gabler, 2014) as Blanche's sister, StellaKowalski; and Anthony Goes (Barnabas in Paul, 2010) as her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

A Streetcar Named Desire runs from tonight, September 17 through October 18 at The Gamm Theatre, 172 Exchange St., Pawtucket, RI. Tickets are $41 and $49(depending on day/time); preview performances (September 17-20) just $30. Call 401-723-4266 or order online at gammtheatre.org.

"Arthur Miller famously proclaimed, 'What Streetcar's first production did was to plant the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater.' It is a gorgeous, sublime, vulgar, terrifying beauty and arguably the defining masterpiece of the 20th-century American stage. Like Miller's Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams' Streetcar is a neo-classical tragedy, at once contemporary and universal, and proudly and distinctly American," said Gamm Artistic Director Tony Estrella, adding, "In Blanche Dubois, he created the indelible tragic heroine of the American canon, a fathomless complexity worthy of Hamlet, Lear, and Hedda Gabler. I am humbled and excited to start rehearsals with a terrifically talented company and looking forward to opening season 31 with this exquisite, impossibly beautiful masterwork."

Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly on the doorstep of her sister, Stella, searching for solace from romantic delusions and the vicissitudes of life. But the sultry New Orleans summer proves too much for the former beauty whose brutish brother-in-law, Stanley, cruelly exposes Blanche's genteel façade and brings her last grasp at meaning to a tragic end.Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and a landmark of 20th-century theater,Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire remains an undisputed masterpiece and one of the most remarkable plays of our time.