A Streetcar Named Desire

For their second offering of the season, the Group 20 Players have come up with an unusual production of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prizewinning play A Streetcar Named Desire. Feeling that twelve years have considerably changed the values of the play, Ellis Rabb, in a directorial note in the program, explains that he believes Streetcar to be a play about man's "procreative power" as represented by Stanley Kowalski rather than Blanche DuBois' "vulnerability." Unfortunately, this thesis does not play successfully throughout, and the result is an energetic but uneven production. "The total horror of Blanche's affliction" may be, as Mr. Rabb claims, "her incapability of surviving," but perhaps this statement explains why his production never bores but seldom moves one. The fall of Blanche DuBois should certainly evoke a greater reaction than horror. Otherwise she becomes grotesque, and her viewers cannot take her seriously. This was definitely the case Tuesday evening; and, as a result, some of Blanche's most lyric moments drew laughter from the audience.

This seems an unfair fate for what is perhaps Mr. Williams' major contribution to the theatre, the only reasonable competition being The Glass Menagerie. Sure it contains all the "sick" elements that have become so exhaustively familiar in his more recent work--the mendacity, the liquor, the sex-starved woman, the stud male, and so on. But the most distinctive characteristics of Williams' writing are his vivid and powerful command of language and his fascinating use of rhythmic speech patterns--sometimes lyric, sometimes syncopated like a primitive drum.

Cavada Humphrey, an excellent and versatile actress, gives us Blanche as Mr. Rabb describes her but hardly as Mr. Williams does. She is vulnerable all right, but there is no love or tenderness in this Blanche. A dimension has been omitted. What should be a woman desperate for love, protection, and security is merely a woman desperate for sex. As conceived by Mr. Rabb, it is difficult to imagine Blanche's remaining faithful even to Mitch, her Rosenkavalier, the man she wants so desperately to marry.

Towards the end of Act I Blanche says to her sister, "I want to rest! I want to breathe quietly again! But this line is delivered as though by a tired prostitute, and not by a woman with a sincere desire to escape from her past and begin life anew with the security of marriage. Likewise, the scene with the young bill collector is completely lacking in lyric quality and only the primitive element is played. The way in which Miss Humphrey delivers, "I've got to be good--and keep my hands off children," using her lower register and a drunken slur, is strongly reminiscent of Tallulah Bankhead. There is nothing gossamer here.

In his attempt to remove all traces of pity for Blanche because he feels "Pity is indecisive [and] today is an age of decision," Mr. Rabb has removed all traces of nobility from his heroine and thereby subjected here to some most undeserved laughter.

Blanche DuBois has been looking all of her life for a gentleman, in the most literal sense. Her first gentleman was a homosexual youth who needed her help, but because of her own needs she was unable to help him. She failed him, and in the end destroyed him. She has continued through life looking for an anachronism--a 19th-century gentleman in a hard, fast-moving 20th-century world where gentleness in a man has become synonymous with weakness and or effeminacy. Mitch is her saving grace, but Mr. Rabb gives little emphasis to Blanche's desire to marry Mitch. He emphasizes only her vulnerability, and to play only her incapability to survive is merely to play the result of the situation. One must not ignore her courage and her sincerity.

Miss Humphrey's performance, within the range of Mr. Rabb's interpretation, is carefully etched and compellingly played. Her drunk scene with Mitch towards the end of Act II is excellent. Standing in the middle of a large brass bed, she cries out her soul like an hysterical child, desperately pleading for magic magic, not realism. She can give you the virgin-like innocence of a child one minute and the drunken swagger of a two-bit slut the next. There is a fine Blanche latent here! There are some strang inflections and an unusual clipped speech that often give her voice an ingenuous quality, and seem wholly at odds with a New Orleans drawl; but it is to Miss Humphrey's credit as a concentrated performer that she is the only member of the company who has made any attempt to master the accent problem.

Robert Blackburn as Stanley is strong, masculine, and sincere, but there is little that is animal about him. He is no survivor of the Stone Age. Mr. Rabb would have us believe that Streetcar is "a study in survival." All that survives from this struggle is Stanley and his off-spring. Surely this sort of insensitive good-naturedness is not the emerging 20th-century man.

Chase Crosley makes a sweet and loving Stella. As a matter of fact, she seems to be the only character who is allowed to have any compassion for anything. Sydney Sturgess and Ralph Drischell provide some humorous moments, particularly in their raucous offstage fight, which is highlighted by Miss Humphrey's perfectly timed question, "Did he kill her?"

William Swetland as Mitch is gentle and loving, though one would wish that he had made even an attempt at the accent. In smaller parts, Samuel Waterson is sensitive and quite touching as the young collector, and Stanley Jay makes something truly spine-tingling out of a brief bit as a flower seller.

Between scenes, Gus Solomons and Joyce Daniels provide interesting primitive dances to some wildly orgiastic music. But they are unfortunately not worked into the script carefully enough, and on some of their Pied Piperesque entrances, leading a crowd of fascinated observers, one feels that one is suddenly in the midst of a scene from another play.

William Roberts' set is imaginative and functional, though the shutter effect is very reminiscent of the projections used in the Broadway production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. In both costumes and lighting there is a lack of warmth and color, which seem so essential to an author as color-conscious as Williams.

Mr. Rabb is an intelligent and imaginative director. But no matter what values he feels may have changed in Streetcar, I'm afraid the protagonist of the play has not. This is not Stanley's play nor ever will be, and to try and make it so by removing every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power" without some sort of intellectual substantiation does not make an exciting theatre, I'm afraid. Mr. Rabb has captured much of the fire, horror, an virility of Streetcar; but he has missed the tenderness, the beauty, and the love that give the play dimension and stature.

Tennessee Williams may present us with many moments that try our patience with their childlike cries of self-pity and loneliness, but when he touches on a nerve of human experience, as he most certainly can, something quite electric takes place and suddenly the stage is filled with light. In his attempt to depart as thoroughly as possible from the Broadway production, Mr. Rabb fails to let us see that light, and gives us instead something more like the gaudy, flashing neon signs that outline his production--occasionally bright, but seldom brilliant