first night review: A streetcar named desire @ Marigny opera house

Hot ticket: A Streetcar Named Desire at the Marigny Opera House (photo by Brittney Werner)

​Stella Performances: A Streetcar Named Desire @ The Marigny Opera House
Review by Dorian Hatchett

Generations of high school students in the English speaking world have been made to read what is arguably the most famous work of Tennessee Williams. Most of them, however, won’t understand it, no matter how apt their teachers are at dissecting symbolism and idiom. They won’t truly understand A Streetcar Named Desire because the main character of this play is heat.  

Summer in New Orleans is about heat. Heat here is this palpable thing.  Tactile and heavy, you can feel it slide down your spine like condensation on a glass of whiskey. The heat here changes a person. In the space of a single step between the airline cabin and the jetway, angels become devils and teetotalers become drunks. 

Which brings us back to A Streetcar Named Desire, a glimpse into a world of typically flawed individuals. Histrionic Blanche (Charlie Carr), an empress deposed of her throne, imagines a world of what-if. Stella (Elizabeth McCoy), her sister, is practical even to the point of her own detriment.  Stanley (Sean Richmond) is a tough man, driven to desperation and to his darkest instincts. Mitch (Robinson J. Cyprian) is a simple man who feels pangs of true loneliness creeping into the edges of his life.

They’re crammed into a one bedroom apartment in a typical creole townhouse and the heat mounts. Every interaction is fraught with subtext, and every character talks endlessly about the small ways the heat impacts them while notably leaving out the fact that every one of them is anguished by the inescapable slog of our seemingly endless summer. 

You can hear it in their voices, the wavering ache of slippery discomfort that goes on forever no matter how many drinks one shares with trauma-bonded friends and enemies. This cast (both principal and supporting) approaches the material, suffering through the lens of circumstance, with compassion and a visceral understanding of heat.  

There is no company better poised to do proper justice to this show than the New Orleans-based Tennessee Williams Theatre Company. In their ninth season of reimagining the seminal works of the legendary playwright, they have consistently achieved greater heights of mastery of these works. 

Streetcar is a uniquely challenging show to stage, and they have once again outdone themselves.  The simultaneously grand and decrepit backdrop of the Marigny Opera House (located in the deconsecrated Trinity Church, built 1853) is exactly right for the smoky, voluminous jazz soundscapes and a detailed set that maximizes the small but functional performance space. In a summer schedule packed with great shows, this production one not to be missed.

A Streetcar named Desire Runs at the Marigny Opera House through August 4th. For more information and ticketing, click here.