No last stop in sight for Streetcar

Winnipeg Free Press

a day ago

Stanley, Blanche and, of course, Stella!
Nearly 80 years since Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden and director Elia Kazan made A Streetcar Named Desire the stuff of theatre legend, the play that Tennessee Williams often said was the best work of his illustrious career refuses to slow down.
'I was reading in a book that before COVID, somewhere in the world, A Streetcar Named Desire was playing every hour,' says George Toles, who is directing the Pulitzer-winning drama for the independent theatre company the 28th Minute.
Arthur MacKinnon photo
From left: Kevin Ramberran, Heather Roberts, Justin Fry and Sophie George star in Tennessee Williams' most famous work.
'Kazan said that if it's cast properly, it always works, and that's because of its dramatic shape, its characterizations, its vitality, its humour.'
When the play debuted in 1947, it disinterred deeply rooted taboos, paving the way for a stream of theatre — sweaty, lurid, streetwise and feverishly realistic about the politics of sex — that forever changed the form, adds Toles, a longtime film and theatre professor at the University of Manitoba who has directed Williams' Confessional (2018) and Suddenly, Last Summer (2014) for the 28th Minute.
'The emotional challenges it brings up have in no sense been resolved, tamed or domesticated,' the director says.
Over the course of an hour-long roundtable, the director and his principal cast — Heather Roberts, Justin Fry, Sophie George and Kevin Ramberran — could hardly contain their enthusiasm for a piece of work Toles describes as having a 'primordial energy,' achieved by its mingling of poetry and realistic prose. In Williams' hands, the two were one in the same.
Roberts, who takes on the indelible role of Blanche DuBois, says there's no character she's encountered in her career more intricately layered and challenging to reconstruct than the southern educator.
'I think Blanche is always the smartest person in the room. I feel she's constantly speaking butterfly language to caterpillar people,' says Roberts.
It's a role that actors often dream of taking on — that is, until they're tasked with embodying DuBois' raw emotion on a nightly basis.
In Truly, Madly, Stephen Galloway's book on Vivian Leigh's tumultuous marriage to Laurence Olivier, he quotes Leigh as saying that playing DuBois 'tipped me into madness,'
Roberts has maintained her affection for DuBois. She says the character reveals Williams' intent to craft Streetcar as 'a plea for the understanding of delicate people.'
'I feel if there's a question in this play, it's how to stay soft in a hard world. How do you maintain the vision of beauty and wonder and not fall prey to those external, rocky influences?'
Fry, who plays Stanley Kowalski, a role immortalized by Brando, extends Roberts' thought by considering the play as an exploration of methods of survival.
'Stanley is very much about practicality,' says Fry, who has long yearned to portray the brutish young man. 'Being able to survive in this world means needing to be focused on the right things, and poetry is not one of them.'
'As much as Blanche lives for the hope of it all, she does fail at practicality,' says Roberts.
'I would say that the same question of survival emerges for Stella,' says Toles, who believes the character's method of self-preservation is in self-censorship and selective invisibility amid the chaos around her.
'One of the most challenging parts for me in playing her is living in the quiet. Stella says, 'I just got used to being quiet because he never gave me a chance to talk.' That's difficult as an actor to play, especially from the start. So being able to find the emotions Stella is feeling, not just what she's saying. The most helpful thing for me is approaching her without any judgment.'
The omnipresence of impending doom and the whims required to evade it suffuse the production, possibly because when he wrote Streetcar, Williams, who was 36, was under the impression that he was dying.
'Without that sense of fatigue and that idea of imminently approaching death, I doubt I could have created Blanche DuBois,' the writer, who wouldn't have a funeral until 1983, told Esquire's Rex Reed in 1971, on the occasion of the playwright's 60th birthday.
'Death haunts this play for sure,' agrees Toles.
The 28th Minute mounts one production every year, with each performance serving as a showcase for its cast and crew, who prepare in a basement studio at the University of Manitoba.
Under Toles' tutelage, each participant brings a studious approach to both character and craft, often remaining for hours after rehearsal finishes to fine-tune their performances.
By producing carefully selected works by playwrights such as Annie Baker, Kenneth Lonergan and Will Eno, the company sets its actors up for career-altering roles.
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Fry made his Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre debut earlier this season in the backcourt dramedy King James, parlaying years of success in indie settings to a starting role for the province's largest company.
For the actor, who is currently pursuing a master's degree in counselling psychology, the role of the intermittently stable Kowalski provides a professional opportunity for personal development.
'When you work with fictitious people written this well, what you have is really a study of human behaviour and understanding who we are,' Fry says.
For Toles, who calls it his favourite play, Streetcar comes as close as any work of modern theatre to answering that eternal question.
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Ben WaldmanReporter
Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University's (now Toronto Metropolitan University's) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.
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